Britannica Book of the Year 2008 9781593394943

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ENCYCLOP/EDIA

Britannica

2008 BOOK OF THE YEAR’

ENCYCLOPADIA

Britannica

2008 BOOK OF THE YEAR

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Chicago «+London * New Delhi * Paris * Seoul * Sydney + Taipei » Tokyo

ENCYCLOPADIA

Britannica

EDITOR

MANAGER, MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT

Karen Jacobs Sparks

HEAD

LIBRARIAN

Henry Bolzon

Jeannine Deubel SENIOR

EDITOR

CURATOR/GEOGRAPHY

Melinda C. Shepherd

EDITORIAL

MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT

Lars Mahinske STAFF

Kurt Heintz

STAFF

ASSISTANT

Robert M. Lewis

Patricia Bauer

David C. Hayes Sherman Hollar Nola Lynch MANAGER,

MAP

STATISTICAL

STAFF

Sylvia Wallace

COPY

RESBARCH EDITOR, o ATISTICAL STAFF

ACQUISITION

EDITORS

Kimberly L. Cleary Nicole Digiacomo

DEPARTMENT

SUPERVISORS

Carmen-Maria INDEX

SUPERVISOR,

COMPOSITION

Hetrea

SUPERVISOR

Edward Paul Moragne

Carol A. Gaines CONTENT

Cate Nichols

O 2008 ENCYCLOP/EDIA

ANALYSTS

John Higgins Stephen S. Seddon

COMPOSITOR

BRITANNICA,

Kim Gerber

Sue Schumer Dennis Skord Diana Solomon Katie Wilson

DIRECTOR, INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND RETRIEVAL

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STAFF

TECHNOLOGIES

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EDITORS

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EDITORIAL

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DIRECTOR, ART AND COMPOSITION

STAFF

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ADMINISTRATIVE

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COPY

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CARTOGRAPHY

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MANAGER,

EDITOR,

LIBRARIAN

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Britannica, and the Thistle logo are registered trademarks of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 38-12082 International Standard Book Number: 978-1-59339-494-3 International Standard Serial Number: 0068-1156 No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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BRITANNICA,

Foreword n 2007 the future of planet Earth loomed large. Climate change was a worldwide concern; biofuels became an increasingly important alternative to fossil fuels; and greater attention was being focused on designing buildings to be "green." The war in Iraq raged on, as sectarian violence between the Sunni and Shi'ite population reached new heights. Meanwhile, advances were made in military medicine on the battlefield. China continued its explosive growth; a third wave in feminism reached a new generation; libraries further adapted to the digital age; outsider art found a presence in the mainstream art world; Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister of the U.K; and the U.S. commemorated the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony. In addition, activist Jody Williams,

winner

of the

1997

Nobel

Prize

for Peace,

completed

a review

of the

progress in eradicating land mines in the past 10 years. All of these stories are featured in the new Special Report section in the 2008 Britannica Book of the Year. In the realm of sports, mixed martial arts became

a hot ticket, Australia won

its

third straight cricket World Cup, and synthetic track surfaces proved popular for horse racing. While the U.S. and other countries felt the sting of the subprime mortgage debacle, the Persian Gulf states experienced a phenomenal building boom. On the world stage, France and Australia held elections for new leaders. In cyberspace the number of social-networking sites exploded, but in the real world so did the incidence of diabetes. These topics are covered in Sidebars. We congratulate Africa analyst Kenneth Ingham, who reached the impressive milestone of having written for the Book of the Year for 50 years, and we say farewell to David Farr, who retired after 42 years as our ace reporter on Canada. Sadly, we lost three other yearbook contributors who died during the year—Italy correspondent Derek Wilson, longtime ice hockey and ice skating expert Ron Reid, and Siobhan Dowd, who from 1996 to 2003 penned the United Kingdom Literature article and later wrote biographies. Losses in the world at large included film directors Ingmar Bergman of Sweden and Michelangelo Antonioni of Italy, American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Russian politician Boris Yeltsin, American fashion icon Liz Claiborne, Cana-

dian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, American entertainment mogul Merv Griffin, Italian tenor Luciano

Pavarotti,

French

mime

Marcel

Marceau,

and former

Pakistan

prime minister Benazir Bhutto. A number of figures made headlines during the year. In Britain Princes William and Harry, now in their 20s, commemorated

the 10th an-

niversary of the death of their mother, Diana, princess of Wales; Army Gen. David Petraeus took over the U.S. command in Iraq; and several politicians rose to the highest office in their respective countries—Gordon Brown (U.K.), Abdullah Gul (Turkey), Yasuo Fukuda (Japan), Kevin Rudd (Australia), Umaru Yar'Adua (Nigeria), Cristina

Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina), and Lee Myung-bak (South Korea). In sports and entertainment a number of personalities captured the spotlight, including Mexican golfer Lorena Ochoa, actor Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame), Banksy (the British “graffiti artist”), and Khaled Hosseini, the author of the best-selling novels Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. All these luminaries have entries in Biographies. After conducting a survey of some of our readers, we found that they especially liked the Special Reports, and we have therefore created a new section to highlight them. The Biographies section was also expanded. In the World Data portion of the book, a statistical page has been added for the Cayman Islands. We hope that you enjoy the new arrangement and the many engaging stories to be found within the covers of the 2008 Britannica Book of the Year.

Karen Sparks, Editor

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Contents

Sports and Games ............ 302

DATES OF 2007

EVENTS OF 2007

Calendar...

Anthropology and Archaeology .. 202

Automobile Racing; Baseball; Basketball; Bobsleigh, Skeleton, and Luge; MIXED

Architecture and

MARTIAL

... 0. cc cece eee eee 8

Disasters ...... cc eee eee a 56

Civil Engineering

PEOPLE OF 2007

............ 206

Art and Art Exhibitions ........ 211

Nobel Prizes ..........0 0000s 64 Biographies ..............006. 69 Obituaries ......... 00. eee

113

SPECIAL REPORTS Climate Change—The Global Effects. este dr eh aren 170 By John Streicker

Biofuels—The Next Great Source

of Energy? issu hr hc de 174 By Clarence Lehman

Advances in Battlefield Medicine ......... elles

176

By Peter Saracino

The Sunni-Shi‘ite Division Within Islam ................

178

By R. Scott Appleby

The Perils of China’s Explosive Growth «4iiehilereoue seem ah 180 By Dorothy-Grace Guerrero

Remembering the Jamestown Colony After 400 Years ........ 182 By David A. Price

Ten Years of Progress Toward a World Free of Land Mines ...... 186 By Jody Williams

Redefining the Library in the Digital Age ............ 188 By George M. Eberhart

Art, Art Exhibitions, Photography

Business Overview..........-.- 216

Computers and Information Systems .......... 220 SOCIAL NETWORKING—MAKING CONNECTIONS ON THE WEB Earth Sciences .........ec eee 227 Geology and Geochemistry, Geophysics, Meteorology and Climate

Education ........... eere

231

............ 234

............. eese

Health and Disease

239

........... 242

TYPE 2 DIABETES: A LONG-IGNORED EPIDEMIC Life Sciences 2.2.2... cece eee 248 Zoology, Botany, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Paleontology Literature 2.0... cece eee eee 254 English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Persian, Arabic,

Chinese, Japanese

Military Affairs .............. 270

from the Margins

WMD, Arms Control, and Disarmament; Conflicts; Military Technology; Military and Society

By Colin Rhodes

Green Architecture: Building

for the 21st Century .......... 192 By James Wines

Feminism Reimagined: The Third NMUAVe sees e deeb aes Sara eles 196 By Laura Brunell

Tony Blair: A 10-Year

Retrospective ........0. 20000. 198 By Tom Gallagher

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts

............. 272

Music, Dance, Theatre, Motion Pictures

Physical Sciences ............. 289 Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Space Exploration

Religion

n

—Á

Equestrian Sports; HORSE RACING’S REVOLUTIONARY RUNNING SURFACES; Football; Golf; Gymnastics; Ice Hockey; Ice Skating; Sailing (Yachting); Skiing; Squash; Swimming; Tennis; Track and Field Sports (Athletics); Volleyball; Weightlifting; Wrestling; Sporting Record

THE WORLD IN 2007 ..........0000. 354

United Nations, European Union,

Multinational and Regional

Countries of the World

........ 363

AUSTRALIA'S 2007 ELECTION: THE END OF AN ERA, THE FRENCH ELECTION OF 2007, THE GULF STATES’ CONSTRUCTION BOOM, SUBPRIME MORTGAGES: A CATALYST FOR GLOBAL CHAOS

CONTRIBUTORS ........... 493

Outsider Art: Moving in

............ 190

ITS MARK;

Organizations, Dependent States, Antarctica, Arctic Regions

International Activities, National Developments, Environmental Issues, Wildlife Conservation

Fashions

MAKES

Boxing: Cricket; THE 2007 CRICKET WORLD Cup; Curling; Cycling;

World Affairs

Primary and Secondary Education, Higher Education

The Environment

ARTS

296

WORLD DATA ......... 497 INDEX pA tohe cursed eeadaes 857

Iraqi children peer out from a tent in a camp housing Shi‘ites who had fled sectarian violence near Al-Najaf. rN

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Dates M ES 0 "d

S^

i

Ste

A firefighter in Malibu, Calif.,

battles raging flames as a deadly wildfire moves across Rambla Pacifico in the Santa Monica Mountains on October 22. AP

edia _—

Britannica, z Pape

a

he

o

January Ladies and gentlemen: on this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory. USS. Pres. George W. Bush, asking for support for his planned troop “surge” in the Iraq war in his state of the union address, January 23

With the beginning of the new year, Chancellor Angela Merkel of

.

À new constitution comes

Germany assumes the presi-

into effect in the British dependency of Gibraltar; it

dency of the European

grants more powers to the

Union.

residents and fewer to the government of the U.K.

.

Bulgaria and Romania officially accede to the European Union, bringing the number of member states to a total of 27. .

Slovenia becomes the 13th member of the European Union to adopt the euro as its official currency. .

Belarus achieves a lastminute agreement with the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom to pay $100 per thousand cubic metres of gas, up from $46 but still well below market prices, to avert a cutoff of gas supplies. e

The name of the Indian state of Uttaranchal officially changes to Uttarakhand. The annual Hajj to 2

Mecca, Saudi Arabia,

concludes without incident. 8

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

.

In Australia, the Aboriginal Githabul tribe reaches an agreement with the state government of New South Wales that gives the Githabul joint ownership with the government over an area of 6,000 sq km (2,300 sq mi),

including national parks and forests. .

American television per-

sonality Oprah Winfrey officially opens the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley-onKlip, S.Af., with an initial

class of 152 11- and 12year-old girls; the eventual enrollment will be 450. (Photo right.) The U.S. government 3 announces that John D. Negroponte will resign as director of national intelligence in order to

become deputy secretary of state, filling a post that has been vacant since the resig-

nation for the action against the latter.

nation of Robert B. Zoellick.

Kenya closes its border with Somalia in an attempt to prevent Islamist militia members from entering the

.

Pres. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela dismisses his interior minister and his

e

country.

vice president, citing un-

acceptably high levels of violent crime and prison violence in the case of the former but giving no expla-

e

Robert L. Nardelli resigns as chairman and CEO of homeimprovement company Home Depot.

January

In Fiji, coup leader Frank Bainimarama restores Ratu Josefa Iloilo as president and dismisses Jona Senilagakali, whom Bainimarama had appointed interim prime

minister after the coup; the following day Bainimarama is sworn in as interim prime minister.

e

On the occasion that he was to be enthroned as Roman Catholic archbishop of Warsaw, Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus instead resigns after having admitted collaboration with the Polish secret police during the communist era; Jozef Cardinal Glemp is reappointed archbishop.

the postponement of elections takes place in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Cal Ripken, Jr., who played in 2,632 consecutive games,

and slugger Tony Gwynn are elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame; former

home-run king Mark McGwire is rejected.

other European countries;

Atthe Macworld Expo trade show in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs introduces the novel touch-screen based iPhone, combining music player, camera, Web functions, and phone with

the cutoff affects supplies in

other innovations; he also

U.S. Pres. George W.

Ukraine, Germany, Poland,

5 Bush names Zalmay Khalilzad, currently U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as his choice to become UN ambassador.

Hungary, the Czech Repub-

announces a change to his companys name, from Apple Computer to Apple Inc.

.

A bomb on a bus in Nittambuwa, Sri Lanka, in a usually

peaceful area, kills at least 5 people and injures 30; the following day a bomb on a passenger bus near Hikkaduwa kills some 11 people.

Russia shuts down its

8

oil pipeline that runs through Belarus, accusing Belarus of siphoning off fuel intended for

lic, and Slovakia.

Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez announces plans to nationalize CANTV, the

country’s main telecommunications company, as well as the rest of the telecommunications industry and the electricity industry; the Caracas and U.S. stock markets react sharply negatively. .

Government officials

in India say that a 6 series of attacks by the United Liberation Front of Assam over the past two days have left at least 55 people dead in that state.

Daniyal Akhmetov resigns as the prime minister of Kazakhstan. LJ

For a second consecutive

day, in the midst of India's Ardh Kumbh Mela celebrations that involve pilgrims' ritual bathing in the Ganges

Rioting breaks out in

River, Hindu holy men, or

Mogadishu, Somalia, in protest against Ethiopian

sadhus, protest the pollution of the river, saying it is too dirty to wash away sins.

troops and against a government disarmament program that protesters were

unaware had already been canceled.

e

The University of Florida defeats Ohio State University 41-14 in college football's Bowl Championship Series title game in Glendale, Ariz.,

At an enormous

Fatah rally in Gaza City, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas reiterates his demand

for early elections. e

The U.S. Air Force conducts a raid in southern Somalia, using a gunship against sus-

pected al-Qaeda operatives.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

taker prime minister. .

The Los Angeles Galaxy announces that it has signed Real Madrid star David Beckham to play Major League Soccer in the U.S. starting in the summer.

.

Democratic Rep. Nancy

post.

tions, and resigns as care-

.

.

Pelosi of California becomes speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; she is the first woman to hold the

emergency, postpones elec-

to win the national Division I-A championship.

In a televised

10

speech to the country, U.S.

Pres. George W. Bush acknowledges difficulties in Iraq and announces that he will send 20,000 more U.S.

troops to Iraq in what he calls a "surge" to end the violence in Baghdad. China reports a record trade surplus for 2006 totaling

Ukraine's

Supreme Council I 2 (legislature) passes a law that removes the right of the president to reject a prime minister chosen by the council as well as the right to choose the foreign and defense ministers, and it

limits presidential decrees. .

Mexico's minister of the economy, Eduardo Sojo, announces plans to suspend tariffs on corn products to relieve pressure on the price of tortillas, which has risen

2596 in a week. .

Pres. Iajuddin Ahmed of Bangladesh names Fakhruddin Ahmed head of the interim government ahead of elections and relaxes some controls imposed under the state of emergency.

$177.47 billion. .

Pres. Omar Hassan al-Bashir of The Sudan and leaders of several rebel groups in Darfur agree to a 60-day ceasefire in a truce brokered by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. .

The Sudan begins circulating a new currency, to be known as the sudani, to supplant the dinar, in circulation since 1992; the dinar

will not be accepted as currency after July 1.

Meeting at Cebu, Phil., the members of the Asso-

ciation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agree to create a free-trade zone in the region by 2015 and approve the outline of a governing charter. e

Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran makes his second visit in five months to Venezuela to meet with that country’s president, Hugo Chavez.

Alfred Gusenbauer Hundreds of American and Iraqi troops

fight insurgents in a daylong battle in Baghdad. LJ

A third day of violent protests intended to force

is sworn in as

1 1 chancellor of Aus-

tria at the head of a grand coalition government. .

Bangladeshi Pres. Iajuddin Ahmed declares a state of

14

Nicolas Sarkozy, French minister of the interior, is

chosen as the presidential candidate of the ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement Party.

January

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets with Palestinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in the West Bank; she

will spend the next two days shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian officials in an attempt to bring them to an agreement.

A temporary con-

l15 stitution that makes the prime minister, rather than the

king, head of state is approved in Nepal, and 83 Maoist rebels take the seats in the interim legislature that the document grants them. .

Rafael Correa is sworn in as president of Ecuador; he orders that a referendum be held on March 18 on amending the constitution to decrease the power of traditional parties.

EU constitution and com-

pleting the Doha round of trade talks.

. .

On the eighth day of a general strike intended to force the resignation of Pres. Lansana Conté of Guinea,

Two car bombs

and a suicide 16

bomber kill at

least 70 people at Mustansiriyah University in Bagh-

security forces and demonstrators clash in Conakry, and street protests begin taking place in other cities.

dad, and other assorted acts

In Burundi the High Court clears former president Domitien Ndayizeye and former vice president Alphonse Kadege of charges that they plotted the overthrow of the current government.

U.S. government

officials reveal 18 that China carried out a successful test of

an antisatellite weapon some days earlier, destroying an old weather satellite; it was the first antisatellite test since the U.S. tests in the mid-1980s.

e

Blizzard Entertainment releases Burning Crusade, the first full retail expansion of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, which has more than eight million subscribers. In a speech to the European Parlia1 ; ment as president of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel states her goals of reviving the drive to pass the 10

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The newly appointed government of Czech Republic Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek wins a vote of confidence.

In China the People’s Daily reports that dams, overfishing, and pollution have resulted in the extinction of one-third of all fish species in the Huang Ho (Yellow River).

After reports that United Nations Development Programme money may be being misused in North Korea, UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon calls

.

The innovative Olympic Sculpture Park opens in Seattle on the site of a former fuel-storage depot. (Photo above.)

The National Art

e

Center, a large

Prominent ethnic-Armenian

journalist Hrant Dink is shot to death outside his office in Istanbul. e

of violence kill 15 others throughout the city. .

for systemwide outside auditing of all UN activities.

In a change in policy, Mexico extradites to the U.S. four people believed to be major drug traffickers as well as seven lower-level drug dealers. A U.S. helicopter crashes— possibly shot down—north of Baghdad, killing all 13 aboard, and five American soldiers are killed in battle in Karbala’.

2

1

museum

designed by Kisho Kurokawa, opens in Tokyo with a collection on loan from several museums,

including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the National Art Center has no permanent collection. e

Winners of the 29th annual Dakar Rally are French driver Stéphane Peterhansel in a Mitsubishi, Frenchman Cyril Despres on a KTM motorcycle, and Dutch driver Hans

Stacey in a MAN truck.

Two car bombs

.

Philippine officials report that DNA tests have confirmed that a man killed in battle with Philippine troops in September 2006 is Khadaffy Janjalani, leader of the militant Islamic group

new

22

in a market in

Baghdad

explode at noon, a very busy time, and kill at least 88

people. In fighting between anti-

Abu Sayyaf; Abu Sulaiman,

government protesters and

Janjalani’s apparent succes-

security forces in Conakry,

sor, had been killed a few

Guinea, some 20 people are

days previously.

killed.

January

Sheikh Hassan In the field of children’s lit-

erature, the Newbery Medal is awarded to Susan Patron

for The Higher Power of Lucky, a somewhat controversial book, and David Wiesner wins the Caldecott Medal for illustration for his book Flotsam. .

In Thoroughbred horse racings 2006 Eclipse Awards, Invasor is named Horse of the Year.

Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah,

declares that the opposition has decided not to bring down Lebanon’s government. LJ

For the second time this month, U.S. military forces conduct an air strike in Somalia.

Charles Rabemananjara is d 5 sworn into

U.S. Pres.

2 3 George W. Bush delivers his sixth

office as prime minister of Madagascar. LJ

À committee of the Israeli

for the Shi'ite holy day of ‘Ashura’; at least 15 people are killed. .

À suicide bomber kills 14 people, mostly police officers, just before a planned religious procession in Peshawar, Pak. .

American Serena Williams defeats Mariya Sharapova of Russia to win her second Australian Open women's tennis championship; the following day Roger Federer of Switzerland defeats Chilean Fernando González to win the men’s title for the third time.

state of the union address;

Knesset (parliament)

he asks for support for his strategy in Iraq and makes modest health care proposals and plans to reduce gasoline consumption.

approves the request of Pres. Moshe Katsav to be suspend-

A battle takes

ed from duties; Dalia Itzik is

place in an

.

named acting president. e

The Ford Motor Co.

presidency, rebuffing The Sudan for the second consecutive year because of worsening violence in Darfur.

In violence con-

nected with the 30 observance of ‘Ashura’ in Iraq, some 50 peo-

ple are killed, at least 23 of them by a bomb in Karbala’. e

Lord Levy, the top Labour Party fund-raiser in the U.K., is arrested for the sec-

ond time whether of Lords available

in an inquiry into seats in the House had been made in exchange for

financial considerations. .

2 8

orchard outside

Al-Najaf, Iraq, between Iraqi and American forces and a group of militants apparently intent on disrupting observations of the holy day ‘Ashura’; at least 250 people are killed.

Supporters of Pres. Rafael Correa of Ecuador try to storm the National Congress, which has been at odds with the president; violent clashes with the police ensue.

From today, U.S. citizens returning by air from any country in the Western Hemisphere must show a

billion for 2006, its largest single-year loss ever.

passport to reenter their

Composer Steve Reich and

home country; citizens of Canada and countries of the West Indies are also now required to show a passport when arriving in the U.S. by air.

jazz saxophonist Sonny

The Roman Catholic party

accused of having hired hit

Rollins are named winners of the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Sinn Fein agrees to endorse

men to assassinate Pres.

the Northern Ireland police force, which is to change over the next 15 years from being mostly Protestant to being proportionately representative of both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic communities.

Bingu wa Mutharika.

announces a loss of $12.7

.

e

Ethiopian troops begin pulling out of Somalia. .

Fighting breaks out on the streets of Beirut between supporters of Hezbollah and partisans of the government; at the end of a full day of conflict, at least three people have been killed. e

The Ministry of Justice of Israel announces that the attorney general intends to indict Pres. Moshe Katsav on charges of rape, sexual harassment, abuse of power,

and obstruction of justice. .

Government figures show that by 2006 the Chinese territory of Macau had become the world's biggest gambling centre, with gaming revenue exceeding that in Las Vegas.

UN mediator

2 6 Martti Ahtisaari presents his proposals for the future of the region of Kosovo in Serbia; the plan would allow Kosovo to declare independence but envisions international supervision to protect

the rights of the Serbian minority there. LJ

first global agreement on a plan to protect the declining numbers of tuna in the world's oceans.

LJ

The automobile endurance race 24 Hours of Daytona in

Florida is won by the team consisting of former Formula 1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya of Colombia, Scott Pruett of the U.S., and Sal-

vador Duran of Mexico.

China

2 9 announces a plan to lend $3 billion in preferential credit to countries in Africa without political or other conditions. .

Two car bombs

go off at a busy 2 market in Baghdad where crowds had gathered for a preparatory ritual

Vice Pres. Cassim

Chilumpha of Malawi goes on trial for treason; he is

À gathering of representatives from 60 countries in Kobe, Japan, reaches the

.

Meeting in Addis Ababa, Eth., the African Union

chooses Pres. John Kufuor of Ghana to assume the organization's rotating

.

Vista, Microsoft's new Windows operating system goes

on sale. e

Archaeologists in England report the discovery at Durrington Walls on Salisbury Plain of what seems to be ruins of the largest Neolithic village ever found in Great Britain.

Venezuela’s

3 l1 National Assembly grants Pres. Hugo Chávez the power to govern by decree for the next year and a half. e

After two weeks of ethnic unrest in the Terai region of Nepal, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala says in a televised address that he will press for Nepal's new system of government to be a federal one, a key demand of the Madhesi people of Terai. 11

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

February Our lips are full ofpraise but our hearts are far removed from the prophets we all claim. Thats why the world is in the shape that it’s in. Louis Farrakhan, in his last public address as head of the Nation of Islam, in Detroit, February 25

Two suicide bombers 1 kill at least 60 people in a crowded market in

and Hamas, and Fatah members attack Islamic University in Gaza City.

National Football League’s Super Bowl XLI.

Al-Hillah, Iraq, while at least

46 people die in assorted violent incidents in Baghdad. e

Taliban forces sack the town of Musa Qala, Afg., which

had been turned over to local control by British forces in October 2006 in an effort to end fighting. .

The winner of the annual Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, which honours out-

A suicide truck bomber detonates an estimated one ton of

explosives in a crowded Shi'ite market in Baghdad, killing at least 130 people. e

British officials confirm that H5N1 avian flu has been

found on a poultry farm in eastern England.

standing achievement in Several former gov-

announced; the prize will be presented to British composer Brian Ferneyhough in

ernment ministers

4 from both major political parties are arrested in a crackdown on corruption in Bangladesh; also, a

new head of the election The Intergovernmen-

2

tal Panel on Climate Change releases the first section of its four-part report; it says that global warming is "unequivocal" and that human activity is almost certainly the cause and cites the scientific evidence for these conclusions. .

In the Gaza Strip, 17 people are killed in fighting between adherents of Fatah 12

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

5 South Korean car-

maker Hyundai Motor Co., is sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling corporate funds, but he is allowed to remain free on appeal and to remain in his

commission is appointed. e

Two days after a police officer was killed in rioting following an association football (soccer) match between

Catania and Palermo in Sicily, the Italian Olympic Committee suspends all further matches. e

In Miami the Indianapolis Colts defeat the Chicago Bears 29-17 to win the

will be established by Sept. 30, 2008; responsibility for Africa is now divided between three commands. In Acapulco, Mex., gunmen

dressed in khakis and red berets and carrying machine guns invade two police stations, gunning down seven

officers.

position.

.

The computer company Apple Inc. and Apple Corps Ltd., which licenses Beatles

contemporary music, is

May.

Chung Mong-koo, chairman of the

United States Africa Command, to oversee U.S. military operations in Africa,

music and related products, announce a new agreement whereby Apple Inc. will own all trademarks but license some of them back to Apple Corps; a dispute arose when Apple Computer began selling music through iTunes in

For the second time in two days in England, a letter bomb explodes in a motoring-related company, this one in the offices of an accounting firm in Wokingham; the first was in a

building near Scotland Yard headquarters in London.

A Marine transport

2003. .

Astronaut Lisa Nowak is arrested in Orlando, Fla.,

after a bizarre attempted attack on a perceived rival in a romantic triangle.

helicopter is shot down near Baghdad; it is the sixth helicopter to crash in combat in three weeks. .

A letter bomb explodes at the main British motor vehiU.S. Pres. George W.

Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates announce that the

cle agency in Swansea, Wales; it seems to be of an incendiary nature, as were

the ones that preceded it.

February Jeff Spicer—Alpha/Landov

Acting president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov wins the presidential election in Turkmenistan.

British author Stef Penney wins the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the

Year Award for her first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves. (Photo right.)

.

Harvard University names

Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, university president; she will be the first woman to serve in the

e

Despite a loss in the final game to the host team, the

C Awards

Carolina Giants (Gigantes) of Puerto Rico, the Cibao

Eagles (Águilas) from the Dominican Republic win baseball’s Caribbean Series with a tournament record of

post. LJ

At the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, the top winner is the country music trio the

5-1.

Dixie Chicks, who win five

.

Sweden' Ministry of Agriculture gives the country's

awards, including album of the year, for Taking the Long Way, and both record of the year and song of the year, for "Not Ready to Make

reindeer herders some $5.3

million in emergency aid to keep their animals from starving; thick ice has made it impossible for the reindeer to eat the lichen that is their usual diet. À paper published in 8

Nature magazine

describes an experiment by a team of researchers led by Lene Vestergaard Hau that used Bose-Einstein clouds to stop a pulse of light and reconstitute it in another loca-

Nice"; the best new artist is country music singer Carrie

developed countries and commit to purchasing the vaccine for those countries, is introduced in Rome; the first initiative is a vaccine against pneumonia. LJ

association football (soccer)

in Boston.

Rioting breaks out in Jerusalem on the fourth day of Palestinian protests against an Israeli renovation project at

the site that is known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. .

The Advance Market Commitment, a program in

which wealthy countries support the development of vaccines for children in less-

Four bombs at two markets in

Baghdad leave at least 67 people dead and scores more injured.

Jim Samples resigns as gen-

Officials in Italy decree that matches may resume but no spectators will be allowed in most of the country’s stadiums because of fears of violence.

2006 reached $763.3 billion, a 6.5% increase over the pre-

vious year and a new record for the sixth consecutive year. .

Seven bombs, at least five

of them car or truck bombs, destroy police stations in six towns in Alge-

ria, killing six people; a group that says it is a local affiliate of al-Qaeda claims responsibility. LJ

Felicitys Diamond Jim, an English springer spaniel, wins Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club's 131st dog show.

Underwood.

eral manager of the cable television Cartoon Network after a guerrilla marketing campaign involving electronic advertisements placed in unexpected places in several major cities caused a bomb scare on January 31

tion, where it continued on its way.

The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that the country’s trade deficit in

.

countries in Essen, Ger,

members agree to devote serious attention to the hedge fund industry. LJ

Gen. David H. Petraeus assumes responsibility for U.S. troops in Iraq, replacing Gen. George W. Casey, Jr.

the forces implement a new security plan for the city. Stephen Curtis resigns as

approves a vaccine against rotavirus, which causes

head of the UN police force in the Kosovo enclave of

diarrhea and kills some

Serbia; on February 10, UN

600,000 children a year; the approval means UN agencies can use it in mass-vaccination campaigns.

police in Pristina had fired rubber bullets at demon-

After days of rioting, martial law is declared in Guinea and a 20-hour curfew is imposed. .

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe was reported to have reached 1,593%.

straters who were protesting

terms of the UN plan for the enclave, and two protesters were killed. e

In Zahedan, Iran, a car

bomb explodes in front of a bus carrying Revolutionary Guard members; at least 11

people are killed. .

At the Brit Awards for popular music, the Arctic Mon-

.

At the meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized

resistance is encountered as

The World Health Organization for the first time

e

Violent protests break out throughout Guinea the day after Pres. Lansana Conté named his ally Eugéne Camara prime minister; at least eight people are killed.

In the first major sweep by U.S. 14 and Iraqi forces through several Baghdad neighbourhoods, very little

In the six-country talks about North Korea’s nuclear program, an agreement is reached that will give North Korea fuel oil and financial aid in exchange for starting to dismantle its nuclear facilities and for allowing UN inspectors back into the country.

keys win for best British group and best British album, and the Killers win

best international group and best international album. The Hamas-led government of the Palestinian 13

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

February

Authority resigns, and Pres. Mahmoud Abbas immediately asks the prime minis-

planned doubling in size of the U.S. military base in the area.

ter, Ismail Haniya, to form a new government. .

The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts grants its inaugural International Literature Awards to Archipelago Books of Brooklyn, which is to publish Amaia Gabantxo’s translation of Vredaman by Basque writer Unai Elorriaga; to Dalkey Archive Press of Champaign, Ill., which is to publish Karen Emmerich’s translation of the short-story collection I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou of Greece; and to Etruscan Press of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which is

to publish Diane Thiel’s translation of Amerikaniki Fouga by Greek writer Alexis

.

In Quetta, Pak., a suicide

bomber detonates his weapon in a small district courtroom, killing 15 people, including a senior judge. The Chinese film Tuya de hun shi (Tuya'sMarriage), directed by Wang Quanan, wins the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Two bombs

18

explode shortly before midnight

on the Attari Express train

traveling from Delhi to the border between India and Pakistan just outside Diwana, India; at least 66

people are killed.

Stamatis. e

France’s TGV high-speed train reaches a speed of 538 km/h (334 mph) in a test run

between Paris and Strasbourg, setting a new speed record for the train; the previous record was 515 km/h

e

Shortly after a U.S. and Iraqi military patrol has passed through, two car bombs go off in rapid succession in a market in Baghdad; at least 60 people are killed.

(320 mph), established in In Daytona Beach, Fla.,

1990.

16

À court in Italy brings indict-

ments against 26 Americans, most of them CIA officers, as well as the

former head of Italy’s spy agency, in connection with

Kevin Harvick wins the 49th Daytona 500, the premier NASCAR race, by an exceptionally close 0.02 second, while behind him a multicar crash occurs. e

In London, Sunday in the Park With George wins five

the disappearance of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, who says he was kidnapped and sent to Egypt, where he was tor-

Laurence Olivier Awards— outstanding musical produc-

tured; this is the first case

best lighting design, and best set design.

ordered to trial involving the U.S. program of “extraordinary renditions.” .

The first Internet cafés in

Turkmenistan open in Ashgabat.

tion, best actor in a musical (Daniel Evans), best actress in a musical (Jenna Russell),

At the Anglican church gathering in Dar es Salaam,

Tanz., the Anglican Communion directs the Episcopal

concerns of conservative

province destroys some

American congregations.

5,000 tons of rubber.

e

The rival satellite radio companies XM and Sirius announce a merger; the combined company, with a total of 14 million subscribers, will be headed by Mel Karmazin of Sirius as CEO and will be called Project Big Sky by XM.

sands of people 1 ,

march in Vicen-

za, Italy, to protest a 14

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

blessing of same-sex unions within eight months and establishes a council and vicar to address the

The $100,000 A.M. Turing

Award for excellence in computer science is granted to

Frances E. Allen for her work on optimizing compiler performance at IBM; she is the first woman to win the prize, which has been awarded since 1966.

e

e

JetBlue Airways announces

During a performance by a

that it will pay financial penalties to customers who were stranded because of mistakes made by the airline; the previous weekend bad weather compounded by bad decisions had left hundreds of passengers stuck for up to eight hours on planes on the tarmac at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

traveling circus in Cúcuta,

Colom., a gunman kills two clowns in front of a small crowd of children and adults, shocking the country’s populace.

The Internation-

al Atomic Ener22

gy Agency

reports that Iran is steadily and quickly increasing its ability to enrich uranium, defying the United Nations.

.

María Consuelo Araüjo resigns as Colombia's foreign minister in the midst of a scandal involving financial ties between the government and drug-trafficking paramilitaries. Nigeria’s Court of Appeal rules

that the fact that Vice Pres. Atiku Abubakar is a presidential candidate for a political party not in

A federal jury orders Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion in royalties to AlcatelLucent for patents involved in the development of the MP3 audio file format. e

Executives of the All England Club announce that henceforth the prize money for men and women competing at the Wimbledon tennis tournament will be equal.

power is not an adequate

reason for Pres. Olusegun Obasanjo to dismiss him. e

Malcolm Turnbull, Aus-

tralia’s minister of the environment, announces a plan to phase out the use of traditional incandescent light bulbs within the next three years in favour of far more energy-efficient bulbs, including compact fluorescent bulbs.

Church USA, to ban the Tens of thou-

e

An arsonist’s fire

at the biggest 2 1 rubber warehouse in Thailand’s Yala

The Supreme 2 3 Court of Canada strikes down a law permitting the indefinite detention of foreign-born terrorism suspects; the ruling is suspended for a year so that Parliament may draft a law consistent with the ruling. e

The British medical journal The Lancet publishes data from trials operated by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Kenya and Uganda that suggest that a circumcised mans risk of contracting HIV/AIDS is only

February

about 6596 of that of an uncircumcised man. e

Margaret M. Chiara is dismissed as U.S. attorney in Grand Rapids, Mich.; she is

the eighth U.S. attorney to be removed by the U.S. Department of Justice in the past few months in what is becoming a political scandal. A truck bomb goes off near a Sunni mosque,

a school, an Iraqi police station, and a public market in Habbaniyah, Iraq, killing at least 36 people; in addition, U.S. forces briefly detain

countries to learn as much as possible by studying at the North and South poles; the last such international scientific study took place in 1957-58. .

e

Three days after Romano Prodi resigned as prime minister of Italy, Pres. Giorgio Napolitano asks him to form a new government.

to the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 by artist Louise Bourgeois, is unveiled in Hat Nopparat National Park in Thailand. e

Iraq's cabinet approves a draft law that will allow oil revenues to be distributed to regions on the basis of population and that will permit foreign companies to

develop oilfields. .

Pres. Lansana Conté of Guinea appoints Lansana Kouyaté prime minister;

Kouyaté was on alist of candidates deemed acceptable by union leaders. .

The private investment

2 5 elections are held in Senegal; voters reelect Pres.

Abdoulaye Wade, who bests 14 challengers. .

At the 79th Academy Awards presentation, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, Oscars are

won by, among others, The Departed (best picture) and its director, Martin Scorsese,

and actors Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Alan Arkin, and Jennifer Hudson. .

Louis Farrakhan, leader of

the Nation of Islam, gives what he intends to be his final major address, in Detroit.

26

Opening ceremonies are held

in Washington, D.C., London, and Strasbourg, France, for the International Polar Year, a two-

year project undertaken by scientists from more than 60

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2015-20 and curtailed to one-third of that level by the end of the century.

In Indian-

administered

time. 2 8 A sudden selloff of stocks in

the Shanghai market triggers a worldwide landslide in stock markets;

in the U.S. the Dow Jones industrial average suffers its biggest one-day point loss

Kashmir, seven

policemen are charged with killing a Kashmiri carpenter whom they claimed was an Islamic militant; the accused

were implicated in a larger plot to kill civilians for material gain. .

The NASA spacecraft New

since 2001, the S&P 500 its

Horizons, launched in Janu-

largest drop in nearly four years, and the Nasdaq its biggest slide since 2002.

ary 2006, reaches Jupiter; the craft will gather data on the planet and four of its

e

moons until June, when it

A suicide bomber explodes his weapon outside the main

will continue on to Pluto.

gate of Bagram Air Base in

At the CERN facilities in

Afghanistan, killing some 23 people; U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney is inside the base at the time.

Switzerland, the centre-

.

A UN-convened panel made up of 18 scientists from 11

.

piece of the Large Hadron Collider, the Yoke Barrel 0,

which is the largest segment (weighing some 2,000 tons) of what will be

their $45 billion purchase of the Texas energy company

forecasting drastic climate changes and recommending that carbon dioxide emis-

the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is lowered into its underground man-made cavern amid much fanfare. (Photo

TXU.

sions remain static in

below.)

groups Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and the Texas Presidential

The PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction is granted to Philip Roth for his novel Everyman; Roth has won the award for a record third

Hold Me Close, a memorial

Amar al-Hakim, son of a

Shi'ite leader, provoking an international furor.

.

Pacific Group announce

countries issues a report

March In short, European unification must be striven for and secured time and time again. That is our guiding mission for the future. German Chancellor and EU Pres. Angela Merkel,

observing the 50th anniversary of the union, March 25

Russian Pres. Vladimir 1 Putin appoints

Ramzan À. Kadyrov president of the republic of Chechnya; Kadyrov heads a security force that is believed to have been responsible for a number of atrocities.

hospital by Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker. .

Negotiators for the U.S. and the European Union reach a preliminary agreement on a

ians; also, in response to a

Timorese Pres. Xanana Gus-

rocket attack, American

mao declares a state of

forces in Afghanistan carry

emergency.

out an air strike on a com-

pound near Kabul, reportedly killing 9 civilians, all members of a single family.

In various incidents

so-called "open skies" treaty that would eliminate almost all restrictions on cross-

Bruce S. Gordon announces

6 in Iraq, at least 113 Shiite pilgrims preparing for the celebration

Japanese Prime Minister

Atlantic air travel routes; full

his resignation as president

of Arbaeen are killed,

Shinzo Abe declares that there is no evidence to show that the country's military forced foreign women into sexual servitude during

agreement is reached on March 22.

of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after

including at least 77 killed by back-to-back suicide bombers in Al-Hillah.

.

World War II; this contra-

dicts the position held by the government since 1993. e

Police in Copenhagen evict squatters from a vacant

An unusually large 3 preelection rally led by Russian opposition leader and former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in St. Petersburg leads to a crackdown by riot police

building—known as the “youth house”—that for decades has been a centre of

and a brief melee; more than

international counterculture;

At the 20th Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco) in

the action triggers two days of rioting.

100 people are arrested. e

Burkina Faso, Africa’s

2

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates dismisses Fran-

biggest film festival, the Golden Stallion goes to Nigerian director Newton I.

Aduaka for his film Ezra.

*

only 19 months on the job; his vision for the organization differed from that of its board. .

Members of the Cherokee Nation in the U.S. vote to

deny membership in the tribe to African American descendants of slaves once

owned by Cherokee.

Medical Center, and Lieut.

Gen. Kevin Kiley is replaced as temporary head of the 16

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

After the publication in The Guardian newspaper of a report on developments in the scandal over accusations that seats in the House of Lords were sold for campaign contributions, the British High Court lifts the ban imposed on March 2 that prevented the BBC from reporting on the matter. e

A car bomb goes off 5 in Baghdad’s historic literary quarter, destroying buildings and leaving at least 20 people dead.

cis J. Harvey as army secre-

tary over Harvey's response to revelations of poor care of soldiers at Walter Reed Army

.

Abu Dhabi signs an agreement with France to pay $520 million for use of the

name of the Louvre Museum and $747 million more for

art loans and management advice; the Louvre Abu

After a suicide car

4

bombing near Jalalabad, Afg., American

troops open fire on a highway, killing at least 16 civil-

The day after Australian forces struck at the stronghold of rebel leader Alfredo Reinado in East Timor, trig-

Dhabi, designed by architect

gering massive demonstra-

Fireworks and dancing in the streets as well as a

tions in support of Reinado,

Jean Nouvel, is scheduled to

open after 2012. e

March

recitation of the speech made in 1957 by Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first leader, marks the celebration

(criticism); John Leonard is

granted the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

of the 50th anniversary of independence for Ghana. At least 70 people are killed in assorted incidents in Iraq, 30 of them by a suicide bombing at a café in Baqubah. LJ

À scandal involving the murders of four Guatemalan police officers results in the resignation of the interior minister and police chief; the police officers, themselves in custody for the killing on February 19 of three Salvadoran lawmakers and their driver, were suspected of having ties to drug gangs. e

In comic books that arrive in stores today, the Marvel Entertainment superhero

Captain America, who first appeared in 1941, is killed.

8

The winners of the annual $100,000 TED

Prize announce the projects that they intend to use the money for: former U.S. president Bill Clinton has a foundation that is building a rural health care system in Rwanda; biologist Edward O. Wilson is creating an Internet database to catalog all species of living things; and photographer

Juana Chaos, a leader of the Basque militant organization

ETA who had been in prison.

.

The European Union approves an agreement to

reduce greenhouse gases by

1 l1Chirac of France announces that he will not seek reelection as president and will retire from politics at the end of his term in May; he does not endorse another candidate at this time. e

2096 from 1990 levels,

The energy services compa-

obtain one-fifth of its energy

ny Halliburton announces that it is moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai, though it will maintain its incorporation in the U.S.

from renewable resources,

and run 10% of its vehicles on biofuels by 2020.

UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari declares that those

involved in negotiations between Serbia and ethnic Albanians in the enclave of Kosovo have failed to find a compromise solution to the question of the enclave’s status and that he will send his proposal for its independence to the UN Security Council. .

Hundreds of thousands of people gather in Madrid to protest the granting of house arrest to José Ignacio de

the first hip-hop act to be inducted. .

Pres. Jacques

Pakistan's government suspends Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry; the reasons are unclear.

Furious Five; the latter is

In Lahore, Pak.,

a group of 1 2 lawyers marching to show their displeasure over the suspension and apparent house arrest of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry are beaten by police and respond by throwing stones. .

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland inducts

singer Patti Smith and the groups Van Halen, the Ronettes, R.E.M., and Grandmaster Flash and the

Lieut. Gen. Kevin Kiley is removed as army surgeon general in the furor surrounding the poor outpatient treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The UN Observer Mission in Georgia opens an investigation into missile

attacks that took place in three villages in the Kodori Gorge area of the separatist region of Abkhazia. e

Pres. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed of Somalia moves for the first time to Mogadishu, the capital, from the government stronghold of Baidoa; within hours

a mortar attack is made on the presidential palace. .

Lance Mackey wins the 1,820-km (1,131-mi) Iditar-

od Trail Sled Dog race, crossing the Burled Arch in Nome after a journey of 9 days 5 hours 8 minutes 41 seconds; Mackey’s father and brother are previous winners of the race. (Photo below.)

James Nachtwey is creating

a display of photographs about an unknown “big story.” .

In New York City the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards are announced as Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (fiction), Simon

Schama for Rough Crossings (nonfiction), Julie Phillips

for James Tiptree, Jr. (biography), Daniel Mendelsohn for The Lost (autobiography), Troy Jollimore for Tom Thomson in Purgatory (poet-

ry), and Lawrence Weschler for Everything That Rises Bob Hallinen—MCT/Landov

17

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

March

The fruit company Chiquita Brands International agrees to pay a $25 million settlement in a case in which it was accused of having illegally paid a rightwing militia to protect banana plantations in Colombia.

e

A new law permitting samesex civil unions goes into

that after four years of work they have succeeded in map-

effect in Mexico City.

ping Lie group E,, a Lie

.

The inaugural Jackson Poetry Prize is awarded to Elizabeth Alexander.

or Discoveries About Spiri-

tual Realities.

government com-

posed of a unity coalition of Hamas and Fatah ministers is announced; led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, it fails to recognize Israel's right to exist or to promise not to use or support vio-

lence against Israel. e

In Athens the heads of state of Russia, Greece, and Bulgaria sign an agreement to

1 )

Several brands of

Replacements

gravy-style pet

for 21 of the 57 members of

food are recalled

by manufacturer Menu Foods after the foods are linked to deaths from kidney failure of a number of dogs and cats.

are sworn in.

Nations Rugby Union championship, having achieved a

Pakistani officials report that fighting in the South Waziristan region between foreign al-Qaeda adherents and local tribesmen has killed some 58 people in the past few days; by the following day the death toll has risen to 110.

won-lost record of 4-1.

The coach of Pakistan's cricket 1 8 team, Bob Woolmer, is found dead in

his hotel room in Kingston, Jam., the day after Pakistan’s ignominious defeat by Ireland in World Cup play; on March 22 the police report that he was murdered.

to Alexandroupolis, Greece,

In his first race driving for

bypassing the Bosporus strait in Turkey.

Ferrari, Kimi Ràikkónen of Finland wins the Australian

In Bijapur in India's Chhattisgarh state, Maoist rebels attack a remote police post staffed largely by anti-Maoist counterinsurgents, slaughtering 49 police officers.

.

Grand Prix, the inaugural event of the Formula One auto-racing season.

km (2.3 mi) thick at Mars's

e

that a radar instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express

south pole. A five-year 1 6 rebuilding plan for Iraq, called the International Compact with Iraq, is launched by Iraqi Vice Pres. Adil ‘Abd alMahdi at the United Nations. 18

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Bishops of the 2 1 Episcopal Church USA,

meeting reject an Anglican accept a

outside Houston, order from the Communion to parallel leadership

to serve conservative congre-

gations who object to the Episcopal Church’s stand on homosexuality. e

Administration (FDA)

spacecraft has indicated huge ice deposits some 3.7

NASA scientists announce

e

The U.S. Food and Drug U.S. and Iranian officials report that Russia has told Iran that it must suspend uranium enrichment as demanded by the UN before Russia will deliver nuclear fuel for the nuclear power plant being built at Bushehr.

.

Ecuador's National Congress who had been dismissed by the Electoral Tribunal because of their opposition to Pres. Rafael Correa’s planned new constitution

With its 46-19 defeat of Scotland, France wins the Six

build an oil pipeline that will run from Burgas, Bulg.,

.

.

News Corp. and NBC Universal announce a new venture in which they will distribute videos, such as AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and

e

À new Palestinian

group with 248 dimensions that was theorized in 1887 and considered impossible to solve.

to North Korea have not been transferred into the appropriate bank account.

episodes of TV shows, on

.

Charles Taylor, à Canadian professor of law and philosophy, is named the winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research

puter scientists announces

Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Pres. Robert Kocharyan of Armenia ceremonially open the first section of a natural gas pipeline that will deliver gas from

announces new rules that will prevent advisers who receive substantial money from drug manufacturers from voting on whether to approve products made by those manufacturers. .

Musician Paul McCartney announces that he will be the first artist to sign with Hear

An international team of mathematicians and com-

.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awards its annual Abel Prize for outstanding work in mathematics to American mathemati-

cian Srinivasa Varadhan for his work on calculating the probability of rare events.

Fifteen British

sailors and 2 3

Marines on

patrol in the Persian Gulf are seized by Iranian sailors, who say that the British personnel were in Iranian national waters; British

authorities maintain that their naval forces were in Iraqi territory. .

At the Berlin Zoo, the baby polar bear Knut, abandoned by his mother and handraised by zoo staff despite demands by animal rights groups that he be left to die, makes his public debut before a large international crowd of reporters and photographers.

A truck bomb kills at least 20

people at a police compound in Baghdad; another suicide truck

Music, the record label of the

bomber in Haswah destroys a Shiite mosque and kills at least 11 people; three suicide car bombers kill 8 people in

coffee chain Starbucks.

Al-Shuhada’; and a further 8

people are killed by a suicide bomber in Tal Afar. China ends six-

nation talks on

Tran as far as Yerevan, Arm. e

MySpace as well as on a new video site that the companies plan to launch.

2 2

North Korea’s

nuclear program because funds that all agree are due

25

In a runoff presidential election, Sidi Mohammad

March

Ould Cheikh Abdallahi wins 5396 of the vote over Ahmed Ould Daddah to become Mauritania' first elected president. .

A suicide truck bomb at a Shi'ite market in Tal Afar, Iraq, kills some

152 people. .

The European Union celebrates the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty

Pres. Laurent Gbagbo of Cóte d'Ivoire agrees to appoint rebel leader Guil-

of Rome, which created the European Economic Com-

laume Soro prime minister

munity, the forerunner of the EU. e

Ozeki Hakuho defeats yokozuna Asashoryu in a stunning upset at the spring grand sumo tournament in

Osaka to win his second Emperor's Cup. e

Canada defeats Denmark to win the 2007 women’s world curling championship in Japan.

David Hicks, an

2 6 Australian citizen who has been incarcerated in the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, is the first detainee

to appear before a military tribunal under a law passed by the U.S. Congress in fall 2006; after the military judge disallows two of his lawyers, he pleads guilty to having provided material support to

as part of a new reunification plan. LJ

A riot is touched off when police try to arrest a subway turnstile jumper in Paris; hundreds of youths rampage for the next seven hours. LJ

The president of Tajikistan orders that all babies born to Tajik parents be registered with Tajik names, leaving off the Slavic endings most Tajik surnames now have; he changed his own surname from Rakhmonov to Rakhmon the previous week. Portugal inau2 8 gurates a solar power plant in Serpa believed to be the world's most powerful one at 11 MW with 52,000 photovoltaic modules expected to produce 20 gigawatt hours annually; it eclipses the previous most powerful solar plant opened in Benejama, Spain, on March 22.

Ethiopian troops enter

central Mogadishu, Somalia, provoking a violent reaction; more than 30 people, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire, are killed. e

Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the embattled president of Kyrgyzstan, names opposition

tariffs on imports from China, starting with highgloss paper; the U.S. maintains that China illegally subsidizes some exports. .

Fighting between Uzbek militants and local tribesmen in Pakistan's South Waziristan region begins anew; some 52

people are killed. .

figure Almazbek Atambayev

In response to a violent

prime minister.

brawl between fans of rival womens volleyball teams in Greece in which one person is killed, the government suspends all team sports matches for two weeks.

.

The journal Nature publishes the result of a study of molecular and fossil data that indicates that the ancestors of most mammal groups exist-

ed before the mass extinction of dinosaurs at the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary periods and that the great diversification did not begin for another 10 million years after the event. LJ

British architect Richard Rogers is named winner of the 2007 Pritzker Architec-

U.S. Pres.

George W. Bush 3 I meets with Pres.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil at Camp David to discuss world trade negotiations and cooperation in

ethanol development. .

ture Prize; he is best known

At the swimming world championships in Mel-

for his work on the Pompi-

bourne, American swimmer

dou Centre in Paris, com-

Michael Phelps breaks his own world record in the 400m individual medley to win a record seventh gold medal.

pleted in 1977.

3 0

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos M.

Gutierrez announces that

the U.S. will begin imposing

e

Invasor, 2006 Horse of the Year, wins the Dubai World

Cup, the world’s richest horse race.

a terrorist organization. e

In their first-ever direct talks, Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party

and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein agree to form a power-sharing government for Northern Ireland in a move that will return selfrule to the province for the first time since 2002. (Photo right.) .

Researchers report that heart patients who have been implanted with stents to improve blood flow to the heart were no better off than patients treated only with statins and similar heart drugs in a five-year trial; the results are unexpected. Paul Faith—AFP/Getty Images

19

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

April He didnt say, “Get down. He didnt say anything. He just came in and started shooting. Virginia Tech sophomore Trey Perkins,

describing the campus attack on a classroom Perkins was in, April 16

In an unusually brazen and deadly

In a complex financial trans-

ambush, Sudanese

action, real-estate tycoon

.

.

rebels attack an African

Sam Zell becomes the owner

Union peacekeeping contin-

of the Tribune Co., a firm

gent that was traveling to provide a guard for a water source in Darfur; five peacekeepers are killed.

that includes several newspapers, more than 20 televi-

The National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in men's basketball is won for the second consecutive year by the University of Florida

sion stations, and the Chica-

Gators, who defeat the

go Cubs baseball team.

Ohio State University Buckeyes 84—75 (photo below); the following day the University of Tennessee Lady Vols defeat the Rut-

e

Negotiators for the U.S. and South Korea reach a bilateral free-trade agreement that will eliminate tariffs on more than 90% of the categories of goods traded between the countries. .

With his win at the Professional Bowlers Association Tournament of Champions in Uncasville, Conn.,

Tommy Jones breaks the record (2 years 6 months 11 days) by four days that was held for 45 years by bowling great Dick Weber for shortest time between capturing his first and 10th PBA titles.

2

The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Environmental Pro-

tection Agency is required

by the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases in automobile emissions unless the agency can prove that such gases do not contribute to global warming. 20

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The music company EMI announces that it will begin offering songs on Apple Inc.’s iTunes online music store that are free of copyright-protection software.

The cabinet of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor

Yanukovich commands government agencies to disre-

gard the decree issued the previous day by Pres. Viktor Yushchenko ordering the legislature dissolved, with elections to be held on May 27. .

gers University Scarlet

The French TGV bullet train, running three double-

Knights 59-46 to win the women’s NCAA title.

decker cars, reaches 574.8 km/hr (357.2 mph) ina

April

demonstration of its capabilities, setting a new world speed record for conven-

Israel makes its third military strike in the Gaza Strip in two

weeks, this one against militants believed to be planting

tional trains.

a bomb; one of the militants Reanne Evans of

4

Sadr rally to demand that the U.S. military leave Iraq.

dies in the air strike.

England wins her

third consecutive womens world snooker

championship in Cambridge, Eng.

e

Martin Strel of Slovenia becomes the first person to swim the length of the Amazon River when he reaches Belem, Braz., after

The European Com5 mission announces

that it will investigate whether the interim government of Somalia and the government of Ethiopia committed war crimes in

fighting in which more than 300 civilians died in Somalia the previous week.

having taken 66 days to complete an exceptionally challenging swim of 5,265

km (3,272 mi).

.

Cambridge defeats Oxford in the 153rd University Boat Race; Cambridge now leads the series 79-73.

.

An attempt to

arrest several men suspected of involvement in the March 11 bombing of an Internet café in Casablanca, Mor., results

in three of them blowing themselves up; a total of four suspects and one policeman die. À raid of a mosque in Baghdad by the Iraqi army triggers a fierce daylong battle between the Iraqi army backed by U.S. soldiers and Sunni militants supported by neighbourhood residents.

The 15 members of the British Royal Navy who had been held captive in Iran since they were seized in the Persian Gulf on March 23

down and demands a new

The U.S. files two official complaints against China with the World Trade Organization, saying China tolerates trademark and copyright violation and unfairly limits the importation of

are released; Iranian Pres.

constitution.

books, films, and music.

The Roman Catholic

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad characterizes the move as a “sift” to the U.K.

8

bishops of Zimbabwe issue an Easter mes-

sage that calls on Pres. Robert Mugabe to step

by a roadside bomb near Kandahar, Afg. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases the second of its four reports; this one details the effects of global warming, describing changes already occurring and warning that action to cope with future changes, which will have a disproportionate impact on

Zach Johnson wins the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Ga., by two strokes in his second

Cruise Lines ship, which was evacuated after hitting rocks while trying to dock at the island of Thera (Santorini) in Greece, sinks; two

of the passengers remain missing.

tion announce that fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics that includes Cipro, should no longer be used to treat gonorrhea, which has mutated to become resistant to drugs of that class; in the 1980s the disease became resistant to penicillin, which necessitated the move to fluoroquinolones. .

bassist DaXun Zhang, and the Borromeo String

American baby food market.

Quartet.

The U.S. Postal Service begins selling the "forever" stamp at the new rate of 41 cents per stamp; unlike any

Pak Pong Ju is

LJ

previous stamp, this one

Presidential elections are held in East

minister of North Korea; he

will still be valid in the event of future postal rate

is replaced by Kim Yong Il,

increases.

Timor; there is a

who had been minister of

turnout, and a runoff contest between Francisco Guterres and José Ramos-

The Sea Diamond, a Louis

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preven-

ber; Gerber dominates the

office as prime

is imperative.

.

itous racial insult of the women’s basketball team of Rutgers University; the following day CBS cancels the show altogether.

linist Yura Lee, double

Avery Fisher Career Grants

1 1 removed from

larger-than-expected

A suicide truck bomber driving a fuel tanker loaded with chlorine gas detonates in a residential area of AlRamadi, Iraq, killing some 30 people.

outrage over Imus’s gratu-

are announced; they are vio-

The winners of the annual

PGA Tour victory.

the world’s poorest regions, e

News cancels its simulof shock jock and host Don Imus' talk in response to public

The world's largest food company, Nestlé SA, announces its purchase of the baby food company Ger-

e

.

Six NATO soldiers, all of them Canadian, are killed

NBC casts radio show

e

.

.

Afghanistan and Iraq will be extended by 3 months, to 15 months.

Horta is required. .

Donald Tsang is officially appointed to a second term as Hong Kong’s chief executive by China after winning the first election that has been held for the post since Hong Kong came under Chinese rule. e

In Al-Najaf, Iraq, tens of thousands of supporters of Shi‘ite cleric Muqtada al-

transport.

A suicide car bomb severely damages the Governmental Palace in Algiers, and a second car bomb destroys a police station in the suburb

The computer search company Google reaches an agreement to acquire the

online advertising company DoubleClick.

of Bab Ezzouar, Alg.; at least

23 people are killed in the two explosions, for which an al-Qaeda-affiliated organization is responsible. .

e

Opening ceremonies for the Museo Alameda, a new museum

to showcase Latino

culture, take place in San Antonio, Texas.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announces

that tours of duty for most active-duty members of the U.S. Army serving in

14

In a market near a bus station in Karbala’, Iraq, a 21

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

April

suicide car bomber kills at least 37 people in the worst single event of the day's car-

bloc to withdraw from the

Shanghai to Suzhou in just

government.

39 minutes.

nage in Iraq.

In New York City the winners of the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes are announced: the top journalistic award goes

.

As many as 300,000 people turn out in Ankara, Tur., to

protest growing official Islamization in the country. .

e

to The Wall Street Journal,

which also wins for international reporting; winners in

Long-shot jumper Silver Birch wins the Grand National steeplechase horse

letters include Cormac McCarthy in fiction and Lawrence Wright in nonfic-

race at the Aintree course in

tion, while Ornette Coleman wins in music.

Liverpool, Eng.

.

Voters in

Ecuador overwhelmingly approve a plan to hold a constitutional convention to create a new constitution to

replace the one that has been in place since 1998.

On a stormy day the 111th Boston Marathon is won for the second consecutive year by Robert K. Cheruiyot of Kenya, with a time of 2 hr 14 min 13 sec; the top woman finisher is Lidiya Grigoryeva of Russia, with a time of 2 hr 29 min 18 sec.

e

In Karachi, a rally of tens of thousands of people takes place to protest a radical cleric who has started an antivice campaign. e

The U.S. closes its consulate

Iccho Ito, the

mayor of Nagasaki, Japan, is

gunned down and killed by an organized crime figure in broad daylight.

in Morocco, citing security

fears. .

The 60th anniversary of the first major league baseball game that Jackie Robinson played in, introducing racial integration to the league, is observed by players throughout the league wearing Robinson's number, 42,

on their uniforms, including the entire roster of the Los Angeles Dodgers; Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

.

For the first time the UN Security Council takes up the issue of global warming. .

A technical glitch discon-

tal assistants from e-mail;

service is restored after 10 rather frantic hours. e

The pound sterling reaches highest rate against the U.S. dollar since 1992.

dent, well-armed,

of them in classrooms, at

Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Va., before

killing himself. Shi'ite cleric Muqtada alSadr orders the six ministers in the Iraqi government who are members of his political 22

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

sis, melamine is found in rice protein concentrate that

has been imported from China, expanding the list of pet foods that must be recalled to some 100 brands in all; previously the toxic ingredient had been found only in wheat gluten from China. e

carrying to the International Space Station new crew

members Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, both from Russia,

to replace Mikhail Tyurin (left) of Russia and

Michael López-Alegría (centre) of the U.S.; space

tourist Charles Simonyi (right) rides round-trip. (Photo right.)

Officials in the U.S. state of Georgia report that two

wildfires are threatening the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and have necessitated the evacuation of more than 1,000 people.

Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi is sworn into office as Maurita-

nia’s first democratically elected president; the following day he names Zeine Ould Zeidane prime minister. e

Romania's legislature suspends Pres. Traian Basescu

in a political dispute; Nicolae Vacaroiu is named acting president the following day. .

Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communica-

First-round

presidential elections take place in France: conserva-

tive Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate Ségoléne Royal take the lead and will face each other in a runoff in May. .

À car bomb kills 18 people in Baghdad; Sunni Arabs in Mosul, Iraq, execute 23

members of the Yazidi religious sect; and Iraqi Prime

Minister Nuri Kamal alMaliki orders a halt to construction on the wall being built by the U.S. military in Baghdad. .

Martin Lel of Kenya wins the London Marathon with a time of 2 hr 7 min 41 sec,

tions International, is con-

and Zhou Chunxiu of China is the fastest woman in the

victed on 19 out of 42 counts of insider trading in

race, with a time of 2 hr 20 min 38 sec.

Denver.

I8

The Dutch banking giant ABN

A powerful car bomb in Bagh-

Bollywood 2 0 superstars Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan marry in a Hindu ceremony in

AMRO reaches an agreement to be acquired by Barclays of Great Britain and to sell LaSalle Bank to

dad near the

Mumbai (Bombay); thou-

Bank of America.

Sadr City neighbourhood kills at least 140 people; four other explosions in the city bring the death toll to 171.

sands of fans outside strain for a glimpse of the couple.

China inaugurates highspeed train service with 280 such trains making their first runs; one train travels 112 km (70 mi) from

2 3

.

A suicide car bomb in Iraq's Diyala province kills nine U.S. soldiers, and a suicide

Chaotic and .

e

In the ongoing pet food cri-

craft returns to Earth after

an exchange rate of $2, its

A deranged stumethodically guns down 32 people, most

e

nects more than 5,000 users

of Blackberry personal digi-

A Russian Soyuz space-

bomber kills several people

2 1 clearly flawed presidential elections take place in Nigeria; the ruling party's candidate,

in a popular restaurant in

Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, is

The U.S. Department of Vet-

later declared the winner.

erans Affairs, faced with a

the International Zone (Green Zone) in Baghdad. e

April Sergei Ilnitsky—AFP/Getty Images

because of a boycott of the vote by members of secular parties. .

The euro reaches a record high against the U.S. dollar, with an exchange rate of $1.3682 to the euro.

In the contro-

versial final of 2 S

the cricket

World Cup in Barbados, Australia dominates Sri Lanka to win its third successive title; bowler Glenn McGrath, with a record 26 wickets in the final match of

his career, is named Player of the Tournament.

After a raid by U.S. and Afghan lawsuit, agrees to add the pentacle, which symbolizes the Wiccan religion, to the list of symbols that may be engraved on the headstones of veterans.

Geneva Observatory say that a planet has been found orbiting the dim red star Gliese 581 about 20 lightyears away in the constellation Libra; the new planet is within a distance from its sun called the habitable

Rebel gunmen 24 attack a Chinese-run oil field in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, killing more than 70 people, 9 of whom are Chinese, and kidnapping 7 Chinese and 2 African workers.

zone, which means that con-

Newmont Mining Corp., an American company that is

one of the world's largest mining concerns, after a 21-

month trial in Indonesia is acquitted of criminal charges that its method of disposing of tailings from a gold mine in an underwater pipe caused toxic pollution in Buyat Bay.

ditions on the planet could be such that life is possible.

Banco San-

tander Central Hispano of Spain and Fortis of Belgium make an unsolicited bid to buy ABN AMRO that is larger than the previously agreed-to offer from Barclays.

World War II

troops on a sus-

pected bomb-making compound in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province in which six people are killed, local residents demonstrate against the U.S. presence for five hours. .

In the Nascar Nextel Cup race series, Jeff Gordon wins

the Aaron' 499 in Talladega, Ala., passing the late Dale Earnhardt’s career victory total on the anniversary of his birth, to the displeasure of Earnhardt loyalists among the fans.

memorial, the Bronze Sol-

dier, from the square in downtown Tallinn, Est., to

Pres. Hugo

an international military

Chavez

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 13,000

Russian-speaking nationalists saw the statue as a sym-

membership in both the

for the first time; the follow-

bol of the Red Army’s liberation of Estonia in 1944 from Nazi occupation, but Estonians viewed it as a painful reminder of the country’s absorption in 1939 into the

World Bank and the Interna-

ing day the index of 30 stocks posts a new record high of 13,111.19.

overtakes the American company General Motors to 2 6

Pres. Vladimir Putin of Russia in his annual

in the world, with sales of 2,348,000 vehicles in the

address to the legislature

first quarter of 2007.

suspending its compliance with the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed by

A team of astronomers led by Stéphane Udry of the

2

The removal of / a Soviet-era

2°

3 0 announces the formal end of Venezuela's

.

Japanese carmaker Toyota

e

Canada announces a plan by which industries are required to reduce their rate of production of greenhouse gases by 18% over the next three years, a rate well short of the goals of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change but one that industries say they will be hard put to meet.

The Royal Bank 2 5 of Scotland with

.

become the largest carmaker

members of NATO and of the Warsaw Pact.

announces that Russia is

cemetery results in rioting;

Soviet Union. .

tional Monetary Fund. Morocco and the Polisario Front agree to hold direct talks on the future of Western Sahara. .

In the first round of presidential voting in Turkey's legislature, the sole candi-

Deutsche Bórse, operator of the stock exchange in Frank-

date, Abdullah Gul, who is

based International Securities Exchange, the world's second largest options exchange.

associated with political Islam, fails to win enough votes to be confirmed

furt, Ger., acquires the U.S.-

23

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

May We cannot undo our sad and turbulent past. And none of us can forget the many victims of the Troubles. But we can, and are, shaping our future in a new and better way. Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, on the inauguration of a new power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, May 8

It is reported that Rupert Murdoch, head of the international media empire the News Corp., has made an unsolicited offer to buy Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. e

Saint Lucia restores diplo-

aerial bombardment by U.S. military forces of a valley in western Afghanistan finds that the action left at least 42 civilians dead. .

Austria's legislature lowers the voting age to 16; people as young as 18 may run for most offices.

matic relations with Taiwan, which it broke in 1997, and

ends relations with China. .

At the National Magazine Awards in New York City, the big winner is New York magazine, which wins five awards, including one for general excellence; other winners include National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Bulletin of the Atomic Scien-

The China National Petroleum Corp. announces that the oil field recently discovered in Bohai Bay has a reserve the largest oil deposit found in the country in more than 40 years. e

online category, Belief.net.

released; Amadou Toumani

Touré was reelected. .

An Afghan government investigation into the recent 24

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Hubert Ingraham is sworn in as prime minister of The Bahamas, replacing Perry Christie, two days after the opposition Free National

A large tornado all but destroys the small town of Greensburg, Kan., killing at least 10 people and injuring at least 63. Over the objections of Rowan Williams,

the archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Peter J. Akinola of Nigeria installs Martyn Minns as bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a branch of the conser-

Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom begins a six-day visit to the United

vative Nigerian church, in

States, her first since 1991.

In Las Vegas challenger Floyd Mayweather defeats fellow American Oscar De La Hoya to become the World Boxing Council super welterweight (junior middleweight) champion.

4

In Ukraine, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich and Pres. Viktor Yushchenko reach an

.

Street Sense wins the Ken-

tucky Derby, the first race of Thoroughbred horse racing's U.S. Triple Crown, before a crowd that includes Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

Movement won legislative elections.

of some 7.35 billion bbl; it is

tists, Wired, and, in the

e

e

e

Results of the April 29 presidential election in Mali are

The day after 2 Turkey's highest court annulled the Grand National Assembly's vote for president, the assembly votes to hold national elections on July 22.

agreement to hold early elections.

Nicolas Sarkozy is elected president of France in a runoff election against Ségoléne Royal. .

Thousands of supporters turn out as suspended chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry gives a speech in Lahore, Pak.; thousands

more had greeted him on his trip from Islamabad to Lahore. .

Islamic politician Abdullah Gul withdraws as a candidate for president of Turkey.

Virginia. e

Two car bombs kill some 25 people near

Al-Ramadi, Iraq. e

Astronomers report having

observed an extremely massive star explode in the

May

constellation Perseus in what may have been an example of a "pair instability" explosion, theorized but never observed.

to allow the direct popular election of the president, presently chosen by the assembly; Pres. Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoes the legislation on May 25. LJ

Ian Paisley of the

The European Commission

Democratic Unionists

in as leader and deputy

announces that its deal to produce a large satellite navigation system called Galileo in partnership with a con-

leader of Northern Ireland's

sortium of private compa-

new executive government.

nies is off after the consortium misses the last of a number of important deadlines for management of the

S

and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein are sworn

e

André Boisclair resigns as leader of the separatist Parti Québécois in the Canadian province of Quebec after the party's disappointing thirdplace showing in provincial elections in March. .

Findings by geneticists that suggest that there was a single human migration to Australia and Papua New

project. LJ

hardt, Jr., announces that he

will leave his late father’s team, Dale Earnhardt Inc.,

at the end of the stock-car racing season.

In Brazil, Pope l1 1 Benedict XVI canonizes Friar

Parties constituting a progovernment coalition win

the majority of seats in legislative elections in Armenia,

which for the first time are said to largely meet international standards. Rangin Dadfar Spanta is ousted as Afghanistan’s foreign minister by a no-confidence vote in the legislature, as was the minister of refugees earlier in the week; this is in response to the forcible repatriation of some 50,000 Afghans by Iran in the past three weeks. .

making him Brazil' first

In Helsinki the Serbian

native-born saint.

singer Marija Serifovic wins the Eurovision Song

.

Former Nobel Peace

In state elections in India's Uttar Pradesh, the opposition Dalit-led Bahujan

Prize winner José

Samaj Party wins a majority

of seats; the party leader, Mayawati, becomes chief minister.

report that the leading Taliban military commander, Mullah Dadullah, was killed

in a joint operation by Afghan, U.S., and NATO

forces in Helmand province. e

Nigeria launches Africa's first communications satellite; both satellite and

launch service are provided by China. e

Canada defeats Finland 4-2 to win the gold medal in the ice hockey men’s world championship tournament in Moscow.

.

Antônio Galvão (1739-1822),

Sciences.

Ramos-Horta easily wins the runoff elections for president of East Timor; he takes office on May 20.

.

NASCAR driver Dale Earn-

Guinea some 50,000 years

ago and that that population remained in isolation until recent times are published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of

Competing rallies in Karachi held by supporters of the Pakistani government and supporters of the suspended chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, on the occasion of a planned speech by Chaudhry, result in violence in which at least 39 people die.

Contest with her rendition of “Molitva.” (Photo below.)

Government

1

;officials in Afghanistan

14

Japan's legislature passes a law

that calls for a national referendum on amendments to the coun-

trys pacifist constitution, an instrument that dates from 1946 and was

imposed on the country in the wake of World War II

by the U.S. The automobile company DaimlerChrysler AG announces that the private equity company Cerberus

Capital Management will buy Chrysler (including its health and pension obligations) from what will

become Daimler AG.

.

The first pages of the Encyclopedia of Life, a Webbased compilation of all that is known about all the world's species of living things, are shown in Washington, D.C.; it is expected to take 10 years to create the database. .

Officials in Afghanistan say that U.S. air strikes during a battle against Taliban fighters in the village of Sarban Qala the previous day killed 21 civilians.

Turkey's Grand National Assem-

10

bly approves a

constitutional amendment Joerg Carstensen—dpa/Corbis

25

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

May Getty Images

Serbia's legislature approves a

new power-sharing government headed by Vojislav Kostunica as prime

minister four months after inconclusive elections. e

Pres. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson of Iceland awards Helgi Tomasson, the Icelandic-

born artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, the

Order of the Falcon at the Highest Order, Iceland’s top honour; a member of the

arts was last so rewarded in 1957. e

A suicide bomber kills at least 22 people in a crowded restaurant in Peshawar, Pak. .

Officials in Nigeria say that protesters have taken over an oil hub in the Niger Delta, contributing to a 3096 reduction in Nigeria's output in the wake of its recent election.

At least 19 Pales-

16

tinians are killed in Gaza on the fourth day of renewed violence between gunmen loyal to Fatah and those attached to Hamas.

in as first minister of Scotland after his party's victory in May 3 elections for the Scottish Parliament. Estonian Minister of Defense Jaak Aaviksoo declares that the devastating cyberattacks on the country's government and corporate Web sites over the past two weeks seem to have originated with the government of Russia.

The Spanish association football (soccer) club Sevilla

FC defeats RCD Espanyol of Barcelona to win the Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA) Cup in Glasgow, Scot.; Sevilla is only the second side in the cup's history to have won the trophy in two consecutive years.

.

In legislative elections in Algeria, the ruling National Liberation Front wins a majority of seats in spite of losing 67 of the seats it had held. .

For the first time since 1950, two passenger trains

cross the border between North and South Korea,

Paul D. Wolfowitz resigns as presi1 7 dent of the World Bank; his controversial

tenure had been capped by a furor over a promotion package he arranged for his partner, Shaha Ali Riza, who also

worked for the World Bank. Alex Salmond of the separatist and opposition Scot-

tish National Party is sworn 26

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

one traveling in each direction. (Photo above shows North Korean train going south.)

Officials in Pana-

18

ma say that some 6,000 tubes of

toothpaste recently found to contain the poison diethylene glycol appear to have originated in China; in 2006 mislabeled diethylene glycol

from China that was mixed into cough medicine killed at least 100 people in Panama. .

Kazakhstan's legislature votes to amend the constitution and allow Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev to serve

Thoroughbred horse racing's Triple Crown. .

In Durban, S.Af., the Bulls (Pretoria) defeat the Sharks (Durban) 20-19 to win the

Super 14 rugby union tournament.

more than the two-term limit. e

A bomb kills 11 people when it explodes in the historic Mecca Masjid mosque in Hyderabad, India; in later

fighting between Muslims and government security

forces, 5 more people die.

Voters in Roma-

nia resoundingly vote against the impeachment of Pres. Traian Basescu on grounds of having overstepped his authority. .

In the Iraqi village of Hamid Shifi, men in Iraqi army uniforms, after having been waved through a checkpoint, pull 15 Shiite Kurds onto the street and kill them. LJ

Curlin noses out Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense to win the Preakness Stakes,

the second event in U.S.

Violence between Lebanese securi-

ty forces and members of the Islamist group Fatah alIslam breaks out in the vicinity of a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, Leb.; 22 Lebanese soldiers and 17 militants die on the first day, and the death toll increases over the following days. .

Jozsef Petretei resigns as

Hungarys minister of justice and police; the previous day five policemen were arrested in a rape case, and a number of other policemen have been charged with crimes in recent months.

The conglomer2 1 ate General Elec-

tric agrees to sell its large plastics division to the Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (Sabic).

May

e

The tea clipper Cutty Sark, which had its maiden voyage in 1869 and has been undergoing restoration in

London, is badly damaged by fire.

The inaugural Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song is awarded to Paul Simon at a gala in Washington, D.C. e

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is presented in Chicago to A bomb goes off ) ) in Ankara, the

heavily guarded capital of Turkey, killing at least six people.

Lucille Clifton; Clifton is the

first African American winner of the prize. Parliamentary

Omaha, Neb., in 2001 to an

isolated female has been found to be the result of a form of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis, which had not previously been seen in sharks. .

Invitations to the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference scheduled for 2008 are sent out; neither openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson nor conservative Martyn Minns, who was installed as

bishop by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, is invited. .

elections are held in Ireland;

the party of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern retains its

After days of jockeying for control of security forces, Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich agree to the holding of early elections on September 30. Pres. Bashar al-Assad of Syria is elected to a second seven-year term with 97.6% of the vote; he is the only candidate on the ballot.

LJ

In Fallujah, Iraq, a Sunni tribal leader who was working in opposition to al-Qaeda is assassinated, and hours

later a car bomb kills at least 27 people when it explodes in a crowd of mourners for the slain leader. .

The U.S. Congress passes a

law raising the minimum hourly wage from $5.15 to $7.25 in three stages over two years; the wage was last increased in 1997.

Shi'ite cleric

The broadcasting license of Venezuela's oldest television network, RCTV, is permitted

to expire; the popular station had been critical of government policies. e

The 91st Indianapolis 500 auto race, delayed and shortened by 34 laps because of rain, is won by Dario Franchitti of Scotland.

tournament victory, ozeki

as have her lawyers and her family members.

exhorts Iraqis to stop fighting each other to concentrate on driving out U.S. forces.

Hakuho wins sumo's Natsu Basho with an undefeated record; on May 30 the 22year-old Mongolian is promoted to the rank of yokozuna.

The world governing organization of association foot-

.

In his second consecutive

ball (soccer), the Fédération

tion of U.S. forces in the

Internationale de Football

country and to pay $6 bil-

Association (FIFA), insti-

lion toward the move of 8,000 U.S. Marines from Okinawa to the U.S. territo-

tutes a ban on games to be played at altitudes higher than 2,500 m (8,200 ft)

Matsuoka commits suicide;

ry of Guam; the U.S. will

above sea level, igniting

contribute $4 billion for the transfer.

anger in many Latin Ameri-

he has been under investigation in scandals involving expense padding and bid

pool to win the UEFA Champions League championship in Athens.

can countries that have stadiums at high elevations.

Japanese Minis-

2

A ter of Agriculture Toshikatsu

rigging.

.

Zheng Xiaoyu, who was head of China's food and drug safety agency from its inception in 1998 to 2005, is sen-

tenced to death after pleading guilty to corruption.

À constitutional

Israel bombs several Hamas

buildings and

court in Thai3 0

land bans Thai

Rak Thai, the political party founded by deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and bans Thaksin and

110 other party members from participating in politics for the next five years. .

e

The Standard & Poor's 500 index closes at a record high of 1,530.23, eclipsing its former record, set on March 24, 2000, of 1,527.36; in addition, the Dow Jones Industrial Average sets a new

record close of 13,633.08.

The government 3 l1 of Niger falls after losing a noconfidence vote occasioned

by an embezzlement scandal. e

Latvia's parliament chooses Valdis Zatlers to be the country’s next president. .

.

26

president of Nigeria.

patients.

Mungiu’s film 4 luni, 3 sapt-

Kufah, Iraq, in which he

.

sworn in as

goes to Japanese director

At the Cannes Film Festival, Romanian director Cristian

er, have been denied access,

In association football (soccer), AC Milan defeats Liver-

2 c

amini, si 2 zite wins the Palme d'Or; the Grand Prix

.

who was arrested in Iran while on a visit to her moth-

.

Yar'Adua is

The World Health Organization issues guidelines calling for far more aggressive testing for HIV in countries in which the infection is a major problem and asking health workers to recommend the testing for all

Naomi Kawase's Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest).

À law is passed in Japan to fund 2 3 the reorganiza-

Umaru Musa

.

2 5 Muqtada al-Sadr makes his first public appearance in a few months, making a speech in

attempting to visit one of its directors, Haleh Esfandiari,

that they had been unable to civil war in the region.

majority.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars reports that diplomats

south of The Sudan, an area

access until the end of the

e

e

Researchers report that a hammerhead shark born at the Henry Doorly Zoo in

camps in Gaza; at least five Palestinians are killed.

Wildlife experts report that they have found a population of hundreds of wild elephants on an island in the

Voreque Bainimarama, Fiji's

acting head of state, lifts the state of emergency that he imposed after he seized power in December 2006. 27

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

unc This is the beginning of the separation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is the lowest point in our struggle. We Palestinians are writing the final chapters of our national enterprise. Mkhaimar Abusada, Palestinian political scientist, on the Hamas takeover of Gaza, June 14

The Lebanese army 1 attacks Fatah al-Islam positions outside the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp for most of the day; at least 18 people are killed.

ing day Dettori wins the French Derby (Prix du Jockey Club) in Chantilly, France, aboard Lawman.

A suicide truck-bomb

3 attack on the Mogadishu residence of Somalia’s transitional prime minister, Ali Muham-

.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that it has found the poison diethylene glycol in several brands of toothpaste made in China and warns con-

mad Ghedi, kills six of his

bodyguards anda civilian. .

Legislative elections in Senegal are boycotted by the opposition, which leads to a low turnout.

sumers not to use Chinese-

made toothpaste. e

British artist Damien Hirst unveils For the Love of God, an 18th-century human skull cast in platinum and encased in diamonds and

e

An enormous landslide destroys much of the Valley of the Geysers, a tourist area in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula that contains

valued at $100 million, as

part of a solo exhibition at London’s White Cube gallery. (Photo right.)

2

some 90 geysers and many

thermal springs.

The Sarha bridge, which connects

On the 16th day of 4 the siege at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon near Tripoli, skirmishes between Lebanese forces and Islamist militants also break out at the Ain alHilwe refugee camp near Sidon in the south; four people die.

Kirkuk, Iraq, to a

highway to Baghdad, is destroyed by bombing. The Derby, in its 228th year at Epsom Downs in Surrey,

Eng., is won by favourite Authorized, ridden by Frankie Dettori; the followPrudence Cuming Associates—Reuters/Landov

28

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

June

e

e

China issues a national plan for addressing global warming; it sets a target of a 20% increase in efficiency by

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wins the Orange Broadband written by women and pub-

2010, which would slow but

lished in the U.K., for her

not reverse the increase of

novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

Prize, an award for fiction

5 separatist organization ETA announces

the end of the “permanent cease-fire” declared in March 2006.

Police in Nairobi crack down on the Mungiki, a murderous Kikuyu sect inspired by the Mau Mau movement of the 1950s,

killing 22 and arresting 100. .

I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby,

former chief of staff to U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, is sentenced to 30 months in prison for having lied to investigators looking into the exposure of the name of

It is reported that / over the past three days close to 400 ethnic Tamils have been expelled from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka; the following day Sri Lanka's Supreme Court orders that the expulsions stop and those already removed be allowed to return. e

At the Group of Eight summit meeting, Pres. Vladimir Putin of Russia proposes a joint U.S.-Russian missile defense system based in Azerbaijan in place of the systems that the U.S. planned to place in the Czech Republic and Poland to the great displeasure of Russia.

a covert CIA operative.

After a city inspector roughs up a female student for operating an illegal street vending stall in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, hundreds of students go on a rampage. .

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration calls for the makers of the diabetes drugs Avandia and Actos to place black-box warnings onto packaging about the heart risks associated with the drugs. .

The Group of Eight industrialized countries' summit meeting begins in Heiligendamm, Ger., as thousands of people stage protests against

U.S. policy and against globalization. .

The Anaheim Ducks defeat the Ottawa Senators 6-2 to win the franchises first Stanley Cup, the National Hockey League championship trophy.

e

The 2007 winners of the

greenhouse-gas emissions.

In Spain the Basque

land Security departments suspend new rules requiring passports for Americans returning to the U.S. by air from other countries in the Western Hemisphere.

.

The organizers of the Tour de France bicycle race announce that Bjarne Riis of Denmark is no longer the winner of the 1996 race,

which is now considered to have had no winner; Riis

has admitted that he used performance-enhancing drugs during that race.

Kyoto Prize are announced: Hiroo Inokuchi (advanced

technology), Hiroo Kanamori (basic sciences), and the

choreographer Pina Bausch (arts and philosophy). In a daylong battle between Lebanese military forces and those of the militant group Fatah al-Islam at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, 11 Lebanese soldiers are killed. The Boeing Co. announces

that it has signed a cooperation agreement with Russia's state-owned Unified Aircraft Corp. and that Aeroflot has purchased 22 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, with delivery scheduled to begin in 2014. .

Justine Henin of Belgium defeats Ana Ivanovic of Serbia to win her third consecutive women's French Open tennis title; the following day Rafael Nadal of Spain defeats Roger Federer of Switzerland for the third men's championship.

Kanaan.

e

After stumbling out of the gate, Rags to Riches wins the event in Thoroughbred horse racing's U.S. Triple Crown, by a head; she is the first filly

.

À report from an investiga-

LJ

In light of the U.S. governments inability to issue great numbers of passports quickly, the State and Home-

and Christine Ebersole. .

The 52nd Venice Biennale opens and for the first time features a pavilion for African art and another for Roma (Gypsy) art; the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé is awarded the festival's Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. e

Suzann Pettersen of Nor-

way wins the Ladies Professional Golf Association championship.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court 1 I rules that sus-

pended chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry may contest his removal before the entire court. e

Guy Verhofstadt resigns as prime minister of Belgium the day after his party lost in legislative elections.

Pres. Omar Has-

san al-Bashir of 1 2 The Sudan agrees to allow a combined United Nations and African Union force of some 20,000 troops to be deployed in the Darfur region.

Belmont Stakes, the last

to win the race in 102 years.

tion for the Council of Europe is released; it gives detailed descriptions of secret prisons run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Poland and Romania.

White, David Hyde Pierce,

.

year in a row to capture the

In Iraq suicide bomb & attacks kill at least 19 people in Daquq and at least 15 people in Al-Qurnah, while 14 people are killed in an attack on the home of a police chief in

include the productions The Coast of Utopia (which wins seven Tonys), Spring Awakening (with eight), Journey's End, and Company and the actors Frank Langella, Julie

U.S. Pres. George

W. Bush is greeted effusively in Albania as he becomes the first American president to visit the country since the fall of communism there. e

The 61st annual Tony Awards are presented in New York City; winners

.

Police in Jamaica announce

that independent autopsies have determined that Bob Woolmer, the coach of the Pakistani cricket team who

was found dead during the Cricket World Cup, was not murdered, contrary to the medical examiner initial

report in March. .

Chinua Achebe of Nigeria is named winner of the Man Booker International Prize,

which is awarded once every two years for a body of fictional work. 29

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

June

Hamas takes control of most of

is the longest rail tunnel built through land.

Gaza. .

Bombs destroy the golden minarets of the Askariya shrine in Samarra’, Iraq,

known as the Golden Mosque and revered by Shi‘ites; an attack that destroyed the shrine’s dome in February 2006 had set off greatly increased levels of violence.

e

The San Antonio Spurs defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers 83-82 in game four of the best-of-seven tournament to secure the team's fourth National Basketball Association championship. Samoa’s legislature elects former

e

Walid Eido, a prominent anti-Syrian member of Lebanons legislature, is assassinated in Beirut by a bomb that kills nine other people as well. e

The completion of the 100volume catalog of all the works of Johann Sebastian Bach is reported; the first volume appeared in 1953.

prime minister

Tuiatua Tupua Tamasese Efi head of state to replace Malietoa Tanumafili I, who

died on May 11. e

Bob Barker makes his final appearance as host of the CBS television game show The Price Is Right; he hosted the show for 35 years.

Green Zone during the time Swimmer Kate Ziegler sets a

new world record for the 1,500-m race of 15 min

42.54 sec, eclipsing the record 15 min 52.10 sec set in 1988 by fellow American

The Netherlands Environmental

Janet Evans.

Assessment

Agency finds that China has surpassed the U.S. in carbon The U.S. drops its 1 8 embargo of the Palestinian Authority, freeing up financial aid for the new Fatah government in the West

Bank, and the European Union announces that it will resume direct aid to the Palestinian Authority. The Japanese Geographical Survey Institute changes the official name of the island of Iwo Jima to Iwo To, its .

As Hamas consol-

14

l16 in downtown

idates its control

Basra, Iraq, is

over Gaza, Pales-

blown up; it is the second

tinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas dissolves the

Sunni mosque in the area

Minister Ismail Haniya, and declares a state of emergency. .

The Audobon Society releases a report showing that the numbers of 20 common meadow birds, including the Northern bobwhite and the Eastern meadowlark, have

declined to less than half of their populations of 40 years ago; suburban sprawl and large-scale farming are believed to have contributed to the change. The journal Nature reports the discovery in the Inner Mongolia region of China of a birdlike dinosaur that lived 70 million years ago, was some 7.5 m (25 ft) long,

and weighed about 1,360 kg (3,000 Ib); named Gigantoraptor erlianensis, it is con-

siderably bigger than other birdlike dinosaurs. e

Police in China arrest Heng Tinghan after a nationwide manhunt; he is believed to

have held workers in effective slavery in a brick-making kiln in Shanxi province, from which police rescued 31 workers after one man was beaten to death.

1

In Ramallah in ] the West Bank,

Palestinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas swears in an emergency government headed by Salam Fayad as prime minister; Hamas declares

the new government illegal. e

e

Pres. Nursultan A. Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan dissolves the Assembly, the lower house of Parliament,

and calls for elections in August; the next election place in 2009.

A U.S. federal

2 l1judge finds that three major pharmaceutical companies illegally inflated wholesale prices of their drugs paid for by Medicare, insurers,

and patients and must pay damages. e

À suicide truck bomb is detonated in a large Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad; at least 87 people are killed. .

The government of Nicaragua files criminal charges against Enrique

The World Health Organization releases a plan for a global campaign against drug-resistant tuberculosis. e

A rebel attack on a remote army base in Niger kills 13 soldiers; the rebels take at

least 47 soldiers prisoner.

Bolafios, accusing him of having covered up human trafficking during his presi-

In a battle between Taliban militants and

dency (2002-07) of the country. e

Àt a fire at a furniture warehouse in Charleston, S.C.,

NATO forces in Kunjak, Afg., some 30 Taliban and at least 25 civilians are killed.

the roof collapses; nine firefighters are killed in the deadliest event for firefight-

The European

ers in more than 30 years,

Council, meet-

A bomb destroys a police bus in Kabul, killing at least 24 people, 22 of them police

aside from the events of

instructors.

The Samuel Johnson Prize,

Sept. 11, 2001.

2 3 ing in Brussels, agrees to begin negotiations

the most important award

on a reform treaty to replace the European Union’s unsuccessful proposed

Ángel Cabrera of Argentina

for nonfiction in the U.K.,

constitution.

bests Americans Tiger

goes to Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chan-

.

Woods and Jim Furyk to win the U.S. Open golf tourna-

the Alps; at 35 km (21 mi), it

ment in Oakmont, Pa.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas.

.

Switzerland opens the Lötschberg rail tunnel under 30

The computer company Yahoo! announces that Terry S. Semel has been replaced as CEO by one of the companys founders, Jerry Yang.

destroyed in as many days.

government, dismisses Prime

dioxide emissions; carbon

had been scheduled to take

name before World War II. A Sunni mosque

of the Coalition Provisional Authority (2003-04).

.

e

drasekaran; the book

Drew Weaver becomes the first American to win the

describes life in Baghdad's

British amateur golf cham-

June Eugene Hoshiko/AP

pionship since 1979 when he finishes ahead of Tim Stewart of Australia at Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club in Lancashire, Eng.

In southern

24

Lebanon near the border with Israel, an apparent car bombing kills six UN peacekeepers. e

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” because of his guidance of poison gas attacks against Kurds in northern Iraq during the late 1980s, is found guilty of genocide in an Iraqi court-

Robert Zoellick is confirmed

room and is sentenced to be hanged.

as president of the World Bank by that organization’s

.

found in 1903 in Tomb 60 as being that of the long-sought 15th-century-BC Egyptian queen Hatshepsut.

executive board.

In Chicago the U.S. defeats Mexico 2-1 to win the 2007 CONCACAF

Pres. Alvaro

The oil compa-

Gold Cup in

association football (soccer). .

In the 148th running of the Queen's Plate Thoroughbred horse race in Toronto, Emma-Jayne Wilson becomes the first female jockey to win the race when her mount, long shot Mike Fox, wins by half a length.

North Korea

promises to shut 2 5 down its main

nuclear plant now that it has received the money pledged in the agreement made with

nies Conoco-

2 G Phillips and Exxon Mobil decline to cede control of their oil-production enterprises in Venezuela

to the country’s government. .

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency releases to the public 702 pages of documents detailing illegal activities engaged in by the agency during the 1960s and ’70s; these documents have long been known as the “family jewels.” .

the U.S., South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan on

The Hangzhou Bay Bridge from Jiaxing to Cixi in China receives its final

February 13.

link; at about 36 km (22.5

In a hotel in Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonates his weapon in the lobby, killing 12 people, among them 4 Sunni sheikhs from Anbar province who were fighting against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and 2 Shi‘ite sheikhs who were meeting with them; also, the leader

of the U.S. offensive to establish security in the Iraqi town of Ba‘qubah says that more than half of the insurgents there have eluded U.S. forces.

mi), the cable-stayed bridge is believed to be the world's longest transoceanic span. (Photo above.) Tony Blair steps down as British 2

prime minister;

he is replaced by former chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. .

The Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo

announces that it has identified a mummy originally

Uribe of ColomA 8 bia says that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) killed

11 legislators the guerrilla group kidnapped in 2002; FARC had claimed that the hostages died in the cross fire during a rescue attempt, but Uribe says no attempt was made. e

Two Mercedes sedans that had been packed with explosives to make them into car bombs are discovered in London and defused by police; the populace is shocked. .

As a plane carrying Prime

Minister Guillaume Soro of Cóte d'Ivoire lands in Bouaké, it is attacked by heavy gunfire; three people are killed, but Soro escapes unharmed. .

The new Apple iPhone goes on sale throughout the U.S.,

The U.S. Supreme Court rules that a manufacturer

to the elation of customers,

may dictate minimum prices

for hours or, in some cases,

that dealers must charge for

days to make sure they were able to acquire the new gadget.

its products, overturning a

1911 ruling forbidding such

many of whom stood in line

a practice; in addition, it

rules that public school sysTwo men drive

tems may not consider race

in admission policies, which have attempted to ensure diversity. .

Rodrigo de Rato of Spain announces that he will step down from his post as managing director of the IMF in October, two years before the end of his term.

3 fy a burning SUV through the doors of the Glasgow, Scot.,

airport; the men are arrested and no one at the airport is injured, but it is assumed that this incident is connected with the discovery the day before of car bombs in London. .

e

The U.S. Department of the Interior announces that the bald eagle is no longer considered an endangered species; there are now nearly 10,000 mating pairs in the

À spokesman for the Lord's

U.S.

crimes.

Resistance Army says that

the militant group has reached an agreement with the government of Uganda over how to deal with war 31

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

July Everyone thinks that theres no justice in the country, that only generals get to decide everything. But the court today was very brave. Ali Ahmed Kurd, an attorney for

Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, on a Pakistani Supreme Court ruling reinstating his client as chief justice, July 20

Officials in Afghanistan say that NATO air strikes in a battle two days earlier in Helmand province killed 62 insurgents and 45 civilians.

to I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby,

former chief of staff to the vice president, for perjury and obstruction of justice. e

Police and government

The Coles Group, which owns supermarkets, liquor stores, and office-supply

inspectors raid stores in

retailers in Australia, encour-

Zimbabwe to force the store owners to obey a decree from Pres. Robert Mugabe to cut the prices of basic

ages its shareholders to approve a proposed buyout by the home-improvement conglomerate Wesfarmers.

.

which sails across the finish line near Valencia, Spain,

ation of a new Youth Olympics, for athletes aged

just one second ahead of

14-18; the first event is

Team New Zealand's vessel in race seven to take the title

planned for summer 2010, with the venue to be decided in February 2008.

by a score of 5-2.

.

The International

4

Olympic Committee awards the 2014

Winter Games to Sochi,

though the most seats (2996)

Russia, turning down

were won by the ruling party, Fretilin.

commodities in half; chaos

Salzburg, Austria, and

had resulted.

Pyeongchang, S.Kor. e

The presidency of the European Union rotates to the

prime minister of Portugal, José Sócrates. .

Violence erupts 3 between Pakistani security forces, who have taken up positions surrounding the Islamist Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in

In Southern Pines, N.C.,

Islamabad, and students of

American golfer Cristie Kerr wins the U.S. Women's Open; itis her first victory in one of the major golf tournaments.

two madrassas affiliated

Fumio Kyuma resigns as A suicide car bomber

) plows into a convoy of Spanish tourists in Yemen before detonating his weapon; seven Spaniards

and two Yemenis are killed. e

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush commutes the 30-month prison sentence meted out

32

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

BEC reporter Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped on March 12 by a small Palestinian militant group in the Gaza Strip, is released to Hamas officials and then freed.

with the establishment; at

least 10 people are killed. Japan’s minister of defense in the face of a furor in response to a remark of his that seemed to support the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in World War II.

.

At the 92nd annual Nathan's Famous hot-dog-eating contest, held at New York City's Coney Island, Joey Chestnut of the U.S. outeats six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, consuming a record 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

e

The 32nd America’s Cup yacht competition is won for the second consecutive time by Switzerland’s Alinghi,

Results of the June 30 legislative election in East Timor are released; no party won a legislative majority,

5

The International

Olympic Committee decides on the cre-

.

The Swiss banking giant UBS unexpectedly announces that its CEO, Peter A. Wuffli, has

been replaced by his deputy, Marcel Rohner. UN health officials report that the number of people infected with HIV in India is 2.5 mil-

lion, not 5.7 million as previously believed, and that India therefore ranks third in the world, not first, in number of infections, behind South Africa and

Nigeria; the new tally was gleaned from a new and more accurate survey. .

William J.S. Elliot is named the new commissioner of

July the troubled Royal Canadian Mounted Police; he is the

first person to serve in the position without any previous police experience.

À powerful truck bomb kills as many as 150 people in the Iraqi village of Amerli, a town of Turkmen Shi‘ites;

many are crushed to death by collapsing houses. e

American Venus Williams defeats Marion Bartoli of France to take the All-England (Wimbledon) women’s

tennis championship; the following day Roger Federer of Switzerland wins the mens title for a fifth consecutive year when he defeats Spaniard Rafael Nadal. .

Israel's cabinet approves the early release of 250 Palestinian prisoners, most

belonging to the Fatah party. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces that the country will buy patrol ships to assert the country’s claim to the Northwest Passage; many believe that continued global warming could make possible its being turned into a major shipping channel. Near the village of Maraiguda in India's Chhattisgarh state, 24 policemen are

killed in a gun battle with Maoist rebels. .

The Chicago Board of Trade

certs to promote environ-

Exchange, for $11.9 billion;

mental awareness in an effort to combat global warming, is broadcast on

the combined exchange will be one of the world's largest.

television, satellite radio, and the Internet; the con-

X. William Proenza steps down as director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center after having aroused the enmity of the staff, who asked for his resignation.

Washington, D.C. (North America).

Islamabad, Pak., govern-

screenings alone and goes on to set a single-day record for a Wednesday release.

ment forces storm the mosque compound; in a daylong battle, 8 members of the security forces and some 73 militants, including Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the

mosques leader, are killed. .

Mexican Pres. Felipe Calderón responds to a series of bomb attacks against gas pipelines in Guanajuato state by increasing

security along the pipelines. .

The Vatican issues a document that states that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church established by Jesus Christ and that other denominations "suffer from defects."

agrees to merge with its

rival, the Chicago Mercantile

(Asia), Hamburg and London (Europe), Rothera research station (Antarctica), Johannesburg (Africa), Rio de Janeiro (South America), and East Rutherford, N.J., and

the film takes in a record

.

Live Earth, a series of con-

certs take place in Sydney (Australia; photo below), Tokyo and Shanghai

militants inside the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in

e

Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's food and drug regulatory agency, is executed.

$12 million from these

The annual Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland take place without incident and without the need for heavy policing to prevent violence between the Protestant marchers and Roman Catholics who disliked the processions that were taking place near their neighbourhoods. The International Atomic Energy Agency

announces that Iran has agreed to allow the agency to inspect its heavy-water

reactor in Arak; the inspection is to take place before the end of the month.

.

.

An Iraqi govern-

l1l1ment official reports that guards at the Dar Es Salaam bank in Baghdad have stolen $282 million in U.S.

Unable to achieve a quorum in the Palestinian legislature because of a Hamas boycott, Palestinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas names Salam Fayad, head of the

dollars from the private

30-day emergency government, prime minister of a

bank.

caretaker government. .

After seven days of fighting and a failed attempt to negotiate peace with the

The movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opens at midnight in theatres throughout the U.S.;

.

Canadian-born media baron Conrad Black is convicted by a jury in Chicago on three charges of fraud against his newspaper com-

pany, Hollinger International, and one charge of obstructing justice.

North Korea , |

informs the U.S. 14

Skt Wo TO NUCLEAT

ENERG:

~~... E

that it has shut

down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and has admitted a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin announces that in 150

days the country will suspend its participation in the 1990 Conventional Forces in

33

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

July Europe Treaty; the move is in response to U.S. plans to

deploy missile-defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. .

Pete Sampras of the U.S., Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario of Spain, Sven Davidson of Sweden, and American

sports photographer Russ Adams are inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in a ceremony in Newport, R.I.

In Islamabad, Pak., a suicide

bomb attack kills at least 14 people at a rally just a half hour before a planned speech by Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the suspended chief justice. e

A Brazilian TAM Airlines Airbus A320 airplane attempting to land at Sao Paulo's Congonhas Airport skids off a runway and into a building; 199 people are killed. .

Two suicide bombings in Pakistan's NorthWest Frontier Province, one

aimed at a police recruiting centre and the other at a military convoy, leave at least 49 people dead.

Libya's High Judicial Council commutes to life in prison the sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who twice had been sentenced to death on charges of having injected hundreds of children with HIV.

e

The opening of a reconciliation conference to which 18

in Somalia were invited is postponed when opposition leaders among them fail to attend.

announce that they have found an immense underground lake in the impoverished Darfur region of The Sudan; they

In Venezuela, Brazil defeats Argentina 3-0 to win its

eighth Copa América, the South American championship in association football (soccer).

16

bomber kills at least 85 people in

recommend that 1,000 wells

be dug. Former South African president Nelson Mandela announces the formation of tional alliance backed by British entrepreneur Richard Branson, among others, that will examine

remote village in Diyala

and offer solutions to intractable world problems;

province, men in Iraqi army

members include Mandela,

uniforms round up and massacre 29 people.

former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Kirkuk, Iraq, and in a

Pres. Evo Morales of Bolivia announces plans to renationalize the country’s railroads, which were sold to private companies in the

1990s.

.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 14,000 for the first time; also, the

Standard & Poor's 500 closes at a record high of 1,553.08.

.

.

À magnitude-6.6 earthquake

Laotian-born American psy-

occurs in rural Niigata pre-

chologist Jerry Yang uses his aggressive playing style to capture the 38th Annual World Series of Poker and

fecture in Japan, killing at least 10 people and causing tremendous destruction,

notably at the world's biggest nuclear power plant. 34

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Pres. Idriss Déby of Chad agrees to allow a European Union force to help contain violence that has spread into the eastern part of the country from the Darfur region of The Sudan. .

Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan seize 23 South Korean church-group volun-

earn $8,250,000 in prize

money.

India’s next president; she is the first woman named to the largely ceremonial position. .

The much-anticipated final volume of the Harry Potter saga, Harry Potter and the

Deathly Hallows, is released worldwide at midnight, breaking book sales records over the next 24 hours in the U.K. (some 2.7 million

copies). .

New Zealand wins the rugby union Tri-Nations trophy, defeating Australia 26-12 in the final.

teers, mostly women, from a

bus on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar; the

following day a Taliban spokesman says the captives will be killed unless South Korea withdraws its troops from Afghanistan.

Boston University

the Elders, a new internaA suicide truck

.

Geologists from

more than 1,300 clan elders

.

Some 115 wildfires are reported in southern Greece in the midst of a heat wave that is baking southern Europe.

2 Q

Pakistan’s Supreme Court rules that Pres.

Pervez Musharraf’s suspension of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as chief justice was illegal and reinstates Chaudhry, dismissing all charges against him. e

A spokesman for the World Bank says the organization has found that global warming is causing rainfall to mountain lakes and wetlands in the Andes to lessen,

threatening the water supply to many South American cities.

A U.S. court of appeals rules that the government must make available to the court and to lawyers its informa-

Legislative elec22 tions in Turkey result in an increase in the number of seats for the ruling Justice and Development Party, which wins 46.796 of the vote. .

An exhibit of Chinese artworks comes to a close at the Hong Kong Museum of Art; the works were loaned

in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China and featured the storied and rarely seen 12th-century scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan. .

Padraig Harrington wins the British Open golf tournament at the Carnoustie Golf Club in Carnoustie, Scot.,

defeating Sergio García of Spain in a four-hole play-off; Harrington is the first Irishman to win the tournament

since Fred Daly in 1947.

tion on detainees at Guantá-

namo Bay, Cuba, who are challenging decisions by military tribunals that they continue to be held, saying that meaningful review of the tribunals requires that information.

21

Legislators in

The UN reports 2 3 that over the past week some 10,000 people have fled from Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, as part of a continuing exodus that has reduced the city’s population by more than one-fifth since the defeat of the

India choose Pratibha Patil as

Islamic Courts Union in late December 2006.

July Getty Images

the UN meeting in Amman, Jordan, to find ways to deal with the influx of some two million Iraqi refugees in the Middle East fail to arrive at solutions. .

The overall leader of the Tour de France, Michael Rasmussen of Denmark, is

removed from the race by his team because of questions regarding the location of his training and because he missed drug tests; two days earlier another

Japan almost without interruption since 1955. e

The New England Journal of Medicine publishes online reports from three separate groups of researchers who have identified the same gene, one that makes the interleukin-7 receptor, as being linked to multiple sclerosis; this pinpoints the area in which research might find a solution to the disease. .

favourite, Aleksandr Vinokurov of Kazakhstan,

Iraq defeats Saudi Arabia 1-0 to win the Asian Cup in

withdrew after failing a drug test.

association football (soccer)

for the first time in tournament history. e

Hundreds of

2

The U.S. House of Representa-

/ Islamists try to reoccupy the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in

tives passes a

Islamabad, Pak., when the

Flooding of the Thames River in central England after a month of heavy rains causes widespread destruction and hardship; the area

resolution asking Indiana to

government reopens it for

reconsider a permit it grant-

is experiencing its worst

pany to increase the amount

flooding in 60 years.

of pollutants its plant in

prayers, and a suicide bomber kills at least 13 people; the government regains control of the mosque and closes it indefinitely.

ed to allow the BP oil com-

Whiting, Ind., releases into

After visits to

Libyan leader Muammar al-

Qaddafi by Cécilia Sarkozy, wife of French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy, and a complex agreement in which several European countries will provide money for Libya, the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who have been in a Libyan prison for the past eight years are freed and flown to Bulgaria. .

In the U.S. the minimum hourly wage is increased for the first time since September 1997, from $5.15 to $5.85; an additional raise is

scheduled to take place each of the next two summers. e

At the end of two days of playing poker, professionals Phil Laak and Ali Eslami eke out a victory by winning two

of three rounds in a matchup with Polaris, a software program developed at the University of Alberta.

Lake Michigan in conjunction with an expansion; the plans have angered officials and residents of Chicago. LJ

After Iraqs association football (soccer) team

.

The U.S. stock market falls sharply for the second day in a row; it has been nearly five years since the market lost this much value in a single week.

defeats South Korea in a penalty shoot-out to win a semifinal match in the

(photo above); car bombs

that explode among the revelers in Baghdad leave 50 dead.

of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh wins the beach volleyball world championship for the third consecutive year; the following day the U.S. men’s team of Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser also takes gold.

A car bomb in Baghdad destroys nine

also, a car bomb kills at

least 6 people in Kirkuk, and a suicide bomber near Mosul kills 7 people. LJ

Delegates from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, the Arab League, and

3 0

of Iran’s Assembly of Experts,

Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, dies;

the Assembly's powers include choosing and monitoring the supreme leader. .

Legendary filmmakers Ingmar Bergman of Sweden and Michelangelo Antonioni of Italy both die.

The Bancroft

family, owners of 3 I

Dow Jones &

Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, agrees to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $5 billion. .

Bollywood matinee idol Sanjay Dutt is sentenced in Mumbai (Bombay) to six

In elections for

the House of

cars, sets a building on fire,

and kills at least 25 people;

The chairman

In Gstaad, Switz., the U.S. women’s team

Asian Cup competition,

jubilant Iraqis take to the streets in cities throughout the country in celebration

Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador wins the Tour de France, completing the race only 23 seconds faster than Cadel Evans of Australia.

2 c

Councillors, the

upper house of Japan's legislature, the opposition Democratic Party wins a

substantial majority of votes, taking control from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has run

years in prison for the illegal possession of weapons; the pistol and automatic rifle were given to him by the masterminds of a terrorist bombing in the city in 1993.

The price of oil closes at a record-high $78.21 a barrel. 35

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

August The first principle ofArctic sovereignty is use it or lose it. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper,

announcing new military bases in the Arctic to guard the Northwest Passage, August 10

Iraqi cabinet members belonging to the main Sunni political faction resign from the government; meanwhile, in Baghdad a fuel tanker is blown up, killing some 50 people, and a car bomb outside an ice cream shop kills 20 others. e

Industry analysis shows that in July for the first time, sales of cars in the U.S. made by foreign manufacturers overtook sales of cars from American automakers. e

gress, names Charles Simic the country's 15th poet laureate; Simic succeeds Don-

ald Hall.

Gallery of Australia and for the past 70 years attributed to Vincent van Gogh, is in fact not his and instead is probably the work of one of his contemporaries.

The mortgage lender 3 American Home Mortgage Investment

goes out of business, citing difficulties in the secondarymortgage market as well as the housing market. .

Experts determine that the painting Head of a Man, owned by the National

.

NASA launches the Phoenix Mars Lander; it is expected to land on May 25, 2008, in the

north polar region of Mars, where it will collect and analyze soil samples.

Police in Oakland, Calif., raid

the Your Black Muslim Bakery and arrest seven people in connection with the murder of the editor of a weekly newspaper; the victim had been working on an article about the possible connection of the bakery with a number of other murders.

.

British authorities burn the bodies of 60 cattle and impose a cordon around a farm in Guildford, Surrey, where foot-and-mouth disease was discovered two days earlier. .

Ron Pierce, driving trotter

The American toy maker

Donato Hanover, wins the

Mattel recalls 967,000

Hambletonian harness race

Chinese-manufactured toys that had been painted with lead-based paint.

in New Jersey. .

The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio,

e

An eight-lane bridge over the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota collapses during the evening rush hour, dropping dozens of vehicles into the river and leaving 13 people dead. (Photo right.)

inducts tight end Charlie Sanders, wide receiver

Michael Irvin, running back Thurman Thomas, offensive lineman Bruce Matthews,

cornerback Roger Wehrli, and guard Gene Hickerson.

U.S. Pres. George W.

S Bush signs into law legislation that increases the government's authority to eavesdrop on

Russian explorers in

2

minisubmarines plant a Russian flag made of titanium on the seafloor beneath the North Pole to underscore Russia’s claim to the Arctic region.

electronic communications

between Americans and people in other countries. e

Mexican golfer Lorena Ochoa wins the women’s British Open golf tourna-

e

James H. Billington, the American librarian of ConMorry Gash/AP

36

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

August

ment by four shots over Lee Jee Young of South Korea and Maria Hjorth of Sweden in the first women's professional golf tournament to be played at the St. Andrews Old Course in Scotland.

works are all said to be in

clashed with the health min-

good condition.

ister, Manto Tshabalala-Msi-

LJ

Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hits his 756th home run off Wash-

ington Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik at AT&T Park in San Francisco to take

Pres. José Ramos-

Horta of East Timor names former president Xanana Gusmáo prime minister.

over the Major League Baseball record of most career home runs from Hank Aaron, who had held the

record since 1974.

mang, who recommended the use of garlic and vitamins against the disease. .

À UN spokesman warns that if the main crossings to the Gaza Strip remain closed, preventing trade, the economy of the area is likely to collapse; the crossings have been shut since the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

e

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel meets with Palestinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Jericho; it is the first time since 2000 that an Israeli prime minister has been in Palestinian territory. .

Police officials in Zimbabwe report that 7,660 business owners and managers have been arrested since late June for failing to cut the prices of their goods as ordered by the government. e

Robert L. Nardelli, former

CEO of Home Depot, is publicly announced as the new head of Chrysler at a celebration of the car company’s return to American owner-

ship; the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management finalized its purchase of Chrysler on August 3.

The baiji, or Yangtze 8 River dolphin, is officially declared extinct in a report by a scientific expedition that engaged in an intensive and fruitless six-week search for the animal, which is considered the first cetacean species extin-

guished by human activity; however, an unconfirmed

sighting is reported in the Chinese media on August 29. .

The space shuttle Endeavour takes off on a mission to work on the building of the International Space Station; its mission specialist, Bar-

bara R. Morgan, is also a schoolteacher who trained for the teacher-in-space program in 1986, before the Challenger disaster, and who plans to teach classes from space.

LJ

A shaft in the Crandall Canyon deep coal mine in Utah collapses with enough force to register as an earthquake, trapping six miners.

Gela Bezhuashvili,

the foreign minister of Georgia, contends that the previous day Russia fired a missile at the Georgian town of Tsitelubani; Russia denies the accusation. .

Police in France recover

two paintings and a drawing by Pablo Picasso that were stolen in February from the apartment of the artist's granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso; the

À spokesman for the African Union says that the organization is looking into reports of an outbreak of fierce fighting in the Darfur region of The Sudan between rebel militias and government troops in which the deaths of more than 100 soldiers have been rumoured. e

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces that the country will build two new military bases in

were built in 1591, 1854, and 1934) across the Grand

Canal in Venice is put in place; the new bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is scheduled to open in December. At the final ceremony of a fourday Peace Jirga convened by Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai and attended by hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani tribal leaders in Kabul, Pakistani Pres. Per-

vez Musharraf for the first time admits that there has been support for Islamist militants in Pakistan and recognizes that this has been a source of difficulty for Afghanistan. .

À team of Danish scientists begins an expedition to the Arctic region in an effort to

map the underwater Lomonosov Ridge, seeking evidence that it is attached

Nunavut, one in Nanisivik

to Greenland, which could give Denmark sovereignty

and one in Resolute Bay, in order to protect its claims to the Northwest Passage.

over the North Pole, together with possibly lucrative mineral and shipping rights.

.

The UN Security Council

e

ing the scope of its mission

Tiger Woods defeats Woody Austin by two strokes to win the Professional Golfers’

in Iraq to promote reconcili-

Association of America

ation and consensus and to assist in border disputes.

championship at the Southern Hills Country Club in

passes a resolution increas-

Tulsa, Okla., and Maria

Nature magazine publishes a study by anthropologists who found evidence that Homo habilis and H. erectus coexisted for some half a million

years, which suggests that H. erectus did not descend from H. habilis, as has been believed, but that both evolved from a common

Sierra Leone holds

1 1 its own presidential and legislative elections for the first time since 1996; the opposition All People’s Congress wins a majority of legislative seats, but a presidential runoff is required. The governor of Al-Qadisiyah

ancestor. e

The government of South Africa confirms that it has fired Nozizwe Madlala-Rout-

ledge, the deputy health minister, who had been interna-

tionally praised for her work to combat the AIDS pandemic in the country; she had

province in Iraq, together

Uribe of Colombia defeats Amanda Blumenherst of the U.S. by one stroke in the women’s amateur golf championship in Carmel, Ind. e

The 48th Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts is awarded to American documentary filmmaker Les Blank at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H.

with the police chief and three bodyguards, is killed by a roadside bomb; the area is

known to be a battleground between Shi'ite factions. e

The centre span of the fourth bridge (the first three

For the second time, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party nomi-

nates Abdullah Gul as its candidate for president. 37

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

August

Karl Rove, the closest aide of

pectedly doubles the price of rationed fuel.

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush, announces his resignation as

deputy chief of staff. .

À passenger train traveling

between Moscow and St. Petersburg is derailed by a bomb explosion; dozens of people are injured, and rail service is suspended.

14

In the Iraqi villages of Qahtaniya and

Jazeera, located in the Kur-

dish-speaking region near Syria, four truck bombs kill at least 500 people; most people in the area are members of the Yazidi religious sect. .

Government officials in Peru say that they have captured 21 people believed to be members of the Maoist insur-

50 Africans, many of whom are believed to be refugees from the Darfur region of The Sudan, to Egypt.

The U.S. and

assessment was due in 2004

16

Israel agree to a plan in which the U.S. will give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next 10 years. .

Jose Padilla, who was arrest-

ed as an enemy combatant in 2002 and then transferred to the civilian criminal court system in 2006, is found guilty by a U.S. federal jury on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

A referendum is held in Thailand on a new consti-

tution that weakens the power of the executive and shifts power to the military; as expected, the document is approved. .

Hurricane Dean roars

through the Caribbean, leaving a trail of destruction in

A further collapse of the walls of the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah in which six miners were trapped kills two rescue workers and a mine inspector, and efforts to find and rescue the six are temporarily suspended.

Dominican Republic, and Jamaica; at least eight people die in the region. .

Lin Dan of China wins the men’s badminton world championship, defeating Sony Dwi Kuncoro of Indonesia.

National Snow An earthquake

1 :

measuring mag-

Center report that the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has reached the lowest

made homeless. .

Pres. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela unveils proposed changes to the constitution, in particular a provision that would allow him to be reelected to an unlimited number of terms of office.

point ever measured, at 5.26

million sq km (2.02 million sq mi), and that the melt season is expected to continue for another month; melt-

ing is reportedly occurring more quickly than predicted by computer models.

2 2 Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma),

to protest the large increase in the price of fuel imposed by the government; the demonstration is promptly squashed. The government of Bangladesh closes universities and colleges and imposes a curfew in six major cities.

province is killed by a roadside bomb; he was a mem-

ber of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a Shi'ite political party that had clashed with the Mahdi Army, a Shi'ite militia loyal to the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter crashes in northern Iraq, killing all 14 soldiers aboard; mechanical failure

is blamed for the crash.

Inmates take over a prison in

.

takes place in

forest fires in three forests, saying that present conditions the resources to be against the fires.

then burned to death.

regions.

The ruling party in Kazakhstan wins all the contested seats in legislative elections that international observers describe as unfair.

a

over a parliamentary one. e

.

The military government of

Israel implements a controversial new rule to immediately deport all migrants who cross the border from Egypt

Myanmar (Burma) unex-

into Israel, returning some

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ple march in

one gang are locked up and

strong presidential system

38

2 0 Muthanna

Some 300 peo-

on attempting to extinguish

causes the deadly blue-ear pig disease has spread to 25 of China's 33 provinces and

e

that has been in place since January, students at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, engage in a second day of rioting, and violence spreads to other universities in the country.

A referendum

tution; voters choose

authorities in Italy believe the killings are related to a feud between two families involved in organized crime.

itary presence on campus

Braz., and 25 members of

contagious swine virus that

In Duisburg, Ger., six Italian men are shot to death;

In objection to the large mil-

Gov. C.L. Otter of Idaho declares a state of emergency as firefighters give up

It is reported that a highly

e

The governor of Traq’s Al-

and Ice Data

1 8 Maldives on the framework of a new consti-

e

e

Dominica, Haiti, the

e

Scientists at the

killed, and some 200,000 are

and a research plan in 2006, and the judge requires a summary report by March 2008.

St. Lucia, Martinique,

gent organization Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).

nitude 8.0 strikes off the coast of southern Peru, destroying the city of Pisco; at least 540 people are

has violated the federal law that mandates periodic studies by Washington on the impact of global warming; an

national under they lack effective

.

Michael Vick, quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons,

agrees to plead guilty to felony charges related to dogfighting; on August 24 he is suspended indefinitely by the National Football League.

2 3

Pakistan’s Supreme Court rules that Nawaz Sharif,

whom Pres. Pervez Musharraf deposed as prime minister in 1999, has the legal right to return to the country and run for office.

The families of

the Islamist mil2 4

21

A U.S. federal judge rules that the government

Ponte Nova,

itants in the

Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon leave under a truce worked out with the Lebanese army,

August

which has been engaged in a standoff with the militants

throughout Chile, with violent clashes between protesters and police occurring in

since May.

Santiago.

.

À bomb explodes outside a police barracks during the night in Durango, Spain; police believe it to be the work of the Basque sepa-

China's official news source says that sandstorms are reducing to piles of dirt

ratist organization ETA.

of the Great Wall in Gansu

.

more than 59.5 km (37 mi) province.

Two bombs, one

at a laser show

The Interna-

3 0

2 5 at an open-air

auditorium and one at a popular restaurant, kill at least 42 people in Hyder-

Energy Agency

releases a report saying that Iran has been cooperative and forthcoming and that, though Tehran continues to expand its nuclear program, it is doing so at a much slower rate than had been expected.

abad, India. e

AÀ national state of emergency is declared in Greece as the death toll from relentless wildfires that are fueled by strong winds and high tem-

The six-week-long reconciliation talks intended to bring peace between Somalia's

peratures rises to at least 46. Xinhua/Landov

The head of

2 6

Iran's central bank resigns; earlier in the month the ministers of oil and of industry had both resigned, and Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had dissolved the monetary policy-making Money and Credit Council.

and Julie Foudy, veteran Bobby Smith, and executive Alan Rothenberg.

Minister Shinzo 2 Abe replaces a cabinet made up largely of friends and supporters with one consisting of political veterans, among them

announces

Nobutaka Machimura as foreign minister and Masahiko Komura as minister of defense.

ment has been reached to allow former members of the Ba'th Party to hold government posts; Ba'thists

were banned from the government in 2003. .

The Warner Robins American team from Warner Robins, Ga., defeats the

Tokyo Kitasuna team from Japan 3-2 with a walk-off solo home run by Dalton Carriker to win baseball’s 61st Little League World Series.

in Samarkand, Uzbekistan,

to celebrate the fabled city's 2,750th anniversary.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unexpectedly announces his resignation. e

Paul Barker, the director of

programs in The Sudan for the international charity CARE, says that the organization has been told to leave the country.

Armed violence

2 & breaks out during a religious festival in Karbala’, Iraq,

The National Soccer Hall of

between the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army,

Fame in Oneonta, N.Y.,

both Shi‘ite militias; at least

inducts players Mia Hamm

50 people are killed.

LJ

On the third ballot, Turkey's legislature elects the controversial politician Abdullah Gul president.

various clans conclude;

agreement has been reached on a truce, the sharing of natural resources, and the

holding of elections in 2009.

.

In Afghanistan the Taliban agrees to release the remaining 19 South Korean hostages that the organization seized on July 19; two hostages had been killed and two released earlier.

In Iraq the Shi'ite cleric

e

LJ

Official ceremonies are held

.

Japanese Prime

The government of Iraq that an agree-

tional Atomic

2 C

Muqtada al-

.

Italian police carry out a raid in San Luca, arresting

32 people in an effort to stop a feud between rival families in the 'Ndrangheta crime organization. .

The television company NBC Universal notifies the computer company Apple that it will not renew its contract to sell digital downloads of its

Sadr announces, to the sur-

TV shows on iTunes; the

prise of observers, that the Mahdi Army’s operations will be suspended for six months.

contract expires at the end of the calendar year.

e

As a Muslim religious festival is celebrated in Agra, India, home of the Taj

Zimbabwe imposes a six3 I month freeze on

Mahal, a truck runs over

increases in wages, rents,

and kills four men on a motorcycle, and violent rioting ensues; by afternoon the police have imposed a curfew, confining residents and tourists to their domiciles.

and fees in an attempt to stop

LJ

Protests against the econom-

ic and social policies of the government take place

runaway inflation; price controls have so far resulted in a

burgeoning black market. .

Ceremonies are held in Kuala Lumpur to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysia's independence. (Photo above.) 39

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

September The clergy boycotts the violent, mean, cruel, ruthless, pitiless kings, the great thieves who live by stealing from the national treasury, Public statement issued by Buddhist monks in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma), September 20

Iraq's Interior Ministry releases figures showing that the civilian death toll since July has risen by some 20% throughout the country but that the number of deaths in Baghdad, where the U.S. troop increase is focused, has

dropped markedly. .

Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho announces his intention to

resign in the wake of the revelation that he had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge after he was accused of having solicited an undercover police officer for sex

Fatah al-Islam militants who had taken over the camp. .

The Ogaden National Liberation Front declares a temporary cease-fire so that a UN fact-finding tour can safely enter the troubled Ogaden region of Ethiopia. .

China declares its intention to release information about its burgeoning military budget and to resume submitting data to the UN on its trade in conventional weapons; it had stopped sending such infor-

diers have been captured and held hostage for the past four days by Islamist militants in South Waziristan, near the

A high-speed train makes the inaugural HS1 trip from Paris to London, through

border with Afghanistan.

the Channel Tunnel, in 123

e

The ceremonial ground breaking of the project to expand the Panama Canal takes place at Paradise Hill in Panama; the project, which is expected to more than double the canal's capacity, is scheduled for completion in 2014. (Photo below.)

minutes, a new record; it

will start commercial operation on November 14. .

Aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett disappears in west-

ern Nevada after taking off in a single-engine plane; he was said to be looking for areas to practice driving his jet-powered race car.

mation in 1996.

in a men's restroom in an

airport; he later rescinds the

3 the constitutional

resignation. .

In college football the lowerdivision Appalachian State Mountaineers

In Myanmar (Burma)

of Boone,

N.C., defeat the number-five-

ranked University of Michigan Wolverines 34-32 in what is believed to be one of the sport's biggest upsets.

The Lebanese armed

2

forces storm and seize control of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp after a standoff that started in May with

convention, the dele-

gates to which were appointed by the government, releases guidelines for a constitution that would allow the military to remain in power. e

Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister of Bangladesh, is arrested on charges of corruption in Dhaka a few weeks after the arrest of another former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed. e

The government of Pakistan reveals that some 270 solSusana Gonzales—AFP/Getty Images

40

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

September

Two coordinated suicide bombings,

the USA PATRIOT Act that permits the government to

occurring 20 minutes and less than 1.6 km (1 mi)

demand customer records

apart, kill at least 25 people in Rawalpindi, Pak.

panies and forbid the companies to reveal the exis-

e

In Iran former president Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected to head the Assembly of Experts, which monitors the supreme leader. .

Opposing factions of the recently bifurcated National

from communications

com-

tence of the demands; the

section also limits judicial review of the demands.

Poland’s legislature votes to end its term two years early, forcing an early general election.

Liberation Force engage in

.

ra, Burundi; at least 26 peo-

Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. envoy to North Korea,

ple are killed.

announces

fierce fighting in Bujumbu-

The government of 5 Germany announces that it has arrested three people who were in advanced stages of planning a major terrorist attack in Germany against American

and German targets. .

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri

Kamal al-Maliki travels to Al-Najaf to hold talks with Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

6

Israel conducts air strikes against a target

in Syria for the first time since 2003; the action is

tional delegation of nuclear experts from the U.S., Russia, and China is to inspect nuclear sites that North Korea has agreed to shut down. e

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., inducts as members National Basketball Association coach Phil Jackson, Women’s National

Basketball Association coach Van Chancellor, international

coaches Pedro Ferrándiz and Mirko Novosel, college coach Roy Williams, referee Marvin (“Mendy”) Rudolph, and the 1966 Texas Western (now

University of Texas at El Paso) Miners college team.

confirmed by the U.S. government on September 11

after Israel fails to respond to complaints by Syria.

that an interna-

Police in Kate and suspects pearance

Portugal name Gerry McCann in the May 3 disapof their four-year-

old daughter, Madeleine,

weapon in a crowd waiting in

from the British family's vacation rental in Praia da Luz; the highly publicized search for the child has engrossed the public in both Great Britain and Portugal.

Pres. Abdelaziz Bouteflika; at

least 22 people are killed. .

The online edition of the journal Science publishes research suggesting that a virus may be a major cause

of the colony collapse disorder that has been afflicting honeybees in the U.S.; about a quarter of American beekeepers have reported mass die-offs in their hives. e

A U.S. federal judge rules unconstitutional a section of

women’s U.S. Open tennis

championship; the following day Roger Federer of Switzerland defeats Novak Djokovic of Serbia to win the men’s title for the fourth straight year. A report is published in the journal Nature Genetics describing the finding that early humans with extra copies of the amylase gene, which

8

A runoff presidential election takes place in Sierra Leone; the

winner is opposition leader Ernest Bai Koroma. e

A van packed with explosives detonates in Dellys, Alg., killing 34 coast guard officers.

e

Diego Montoya, leader of what is believed to be the most dangerous drug cartel in Colombia, is arrested in

Valle del Cauca department.

Pius Ncube 1 1 resigns as Roman

Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, Zimb., after having been accused of adultery; Ncube was an outspoken critic of Pres. Robert Mugabe.

creates an enzyme to con-

Bruce Golding is sworn in as

vert complex carbohydrates to glucose, seem to have evolved in response to

prime minister of Jamaica.

an increasing amount of

complex carbohydrates in the diet. e

At the IAAF Grand Prix in Rieti, Italy, Asafa Powell of Jamaica sets a new 100-m

record of 9.74 sec; the previous record of 9.77 sec was first achieved by Powell in Athens in 2005. .

With his win over Scott Dixon of New Zealand in the Indy 300 race in Joliet, Ill.,

Scottish driver Dario Franchitti wins the overall IndyCar championship.

.

À suicide bomber detonates a Batna, Alg., to greet Algerian

Justine Henin of Belgium defeats Svetlana Kuznetsova of Russia to win the

of 2007 increased by 69% over the same period in 2006.

10

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif returns to

Pakistan after seven years in exile, arriving in Islamabad with a plan to challenge Pres. Pervez Musharraf; he

12

Shinzo Abe resigns as prime

minister of Japan. e

Mikhail Fradkov resigns as Russia's prime minister, and Pres. Vladimir Putin surprises observers by naming little-known Viktor A. Zubkov as Fradkov's replacement. .

A magnitude-8.4 earthquake with its epicentre undersea near Bengkulu on the Indonesian island of Sumatra leaves at least 10 people dead; a second earthquake,

with a magnitude of 7.8, strikes early the next morning about 320 km (200 mi) northwest of the first, and a

third major earthquake occurs later that day. .

The euro reaches a new high of $1.3908 in trading against the U.S. dollar.

is deported within hours. .

Bombs set at six points along four natural-gas pipelines and one oil pipeline in Mexico go off, creating major

service disruptions; it is the third attack in three months against pipelines of the state oil company Pemex. LJ

AUN report is released saying that the number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan in the first eight months

Sheikh Abdul l13 Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, the

most prominent Sunni leader in Iraq fighting against jihadist insurgents, is assassinated in Anbar province. .

Off Hammerfest, Nor., the

first liquefied-natural-gas plant in Europe begins production at the Snghvit oil field. 4l

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

September

Minister Kostas Karamanlis,

UNICEF releases figures showing that worldwide mortality for children under the age of five has dropped to 9.7 million; it is the first

time since records began in 1960 that the figure has dropped below 10 million.

is victorious in parliamentary elections in Greece. .

The Emmy Awards are presented in Los Angeles; winners include the television shows 30 Rock and The Sopranos and the actors Ricky Gervais, James Spader, America Ferrera, Sally

The European 14

Space Agency

reports that satellite images have revealed that for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage briefly became open to navigation because of the record low amount of

Field, Jeremy Piven, Terry O'Quinn, Jaime Pressly, and Katherine Heigl. e

Tiger Woods wins the inaugural professional golf FedEx Cup by an astonishing eight strokes in the final game of the play-off series in Atlanta.

Arctic sea ice.

e .

Kyrgyzstan's Constitutional Court rules that changes to the constitution made during mass protests in 2006

The Phoenix Mercury defeats the Detroit Shock 108-92 to win its first Women’s National Basketball Association championship.

are not legal.

.

The U.S. Federal Reserve cuts its key interest rate by a half point, lowering it to 4.7596; this is a deeper cut than had been expected and is the first rate reduction in four years. e

The giant retailer Wal-Mart announces plans to greatly improve the employee health care plan, mollifying many who had been critical of the company’s parsimonious benefits.

The BBC reports that The Better Half, an unpublished play by Sir Noël Coward that was last performed in 1922, by the Grand Guignol Company of London, has been rediscovered by people researching the theatre company.

Israel declares the Gaza Strip a “hostile entity.” The NBC Universal Televi-

Legislators allied with Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announce their pullout from the United Iraqi Alliance political bloc. .

The 2007 Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards are presented; winners are Ralph Steinman for his discovery of dendritic cells and their important role in the immune system, Alain Car-

pentier and Albert Starr for their development of prosthetic mitral and aortic heart valves, and Anthony Fauci for his role as architect of U.S. AIDS and biodefense programs. The ruling New Democracy party,

headed by Prime

42

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The government of Iraq announces that it has banned the American private security contractor Blackwater USA (now Blackwater Worldwide) from

operating in the country the day after an incident in which Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians. e

Robert B. Zoellick, president of the World Bank, and UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon

announce the creation

of a program to help lessdeveloped countries recover national assets stolen by corrupt leaders and hidden in foreign banks. e

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush nominates Michael Mukasey to succeed Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. e

The dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade is presented with the 2007 Capezio Dance Award in a ceremony in New York City.

18

In response to the government's failure to make

the Dmanisi, Georgia, site of

four skeletons that seem to show features of both Homo erectus and H. habilis and are expected to shed light on the transition from Australopithecus to Homo and on the hominin migration out of Africa. .

Buddhist monks pray at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in the country, and hundreds of them march through the streets of Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma), for the third day in a row in protest

against the country's military government. .

Some 10,000 protesters march in Jena, La., to

e e

16

progress on the goal of abolishing the monarchy, Maoist members of Nepal's interim cabinet withdraw from the body.

sion Group announces that,

beginning in November, it plans to make some popular TV programs available for free downloads to personal computers for one week after they are broadcast.

protest unduly harsh measures taken against six

black local high-school students in a racial incident that took place in 2006. (Photo right.) .

Floyd Landis is stripped of his title as winner of the 2006 Tour de France cycling race, and the Union Cycliste Internationale declares Oscar Pereiro, the second-place finisher, the official winner.

The UN International Tribunal on the Law of

the Sea rules that the maritime boundary between Guyana and Suriname should be equidistant from the two countries, giving

Guyana the lion’s share of the coastal waters, including an area where oil and gas exploration had been halted pending the tribunal's decision. e

Borse Dubai, the Dubai

stock market, acquires a 20% stake in Nasdaq and becomes the largest shareholder in the London Stock Exchange (LSE), with a 28%

stake; by the next day, the rival Qatar Investment

Authority, though outmaneuvered by Dubai, has acquired 23.8% of the LSE. e

The journal Nature publishes a report on the finding at

e

In Paris the Japan Art Association announces the win-

ners of the Praemium Imperiale awards: Daniel Buren of France (in painting), Tony Cragg of Britain (in sculpture), Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland (in architecture), Daniel Barenboim (in music), and Ellen Stewart, founder of the

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City (in theatre/film).

The stage-two trials of a vaccine 2 1 against HIV that had been seen as promising are halted after it has become clear that the vaccination program is ineffective. e

Chiles Supreme Court agrees to the extradition of former Peruvian president

September Ann Heisenfelt/AP

ian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserts that his country would disregard any UN resolutions regarding its nuclear program but would work with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and

Brazilian Pres. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva addresses the Assembly with a vigorous promotion of ethanol and biofuels as a solution for global warming. e

A boycott by Hezbollah legislators prevents the Lebanese National Assembly from reaching a quorum, forcing it to postpone its

selection of a new president. e

Halo 3, the much-anticipated third game in the popular Microsoft video-game series, goes on sale in much of the world.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court

dismisses two cases that challenge the constitutionality of Pres. Pervez Musharrafs candidacy for reelection as president while he is still head of the armed forces. .

Dominique Strauss-Kahn of France is named managing director of the IMF; he

replaces Rodrigo de Rato of Spain.

À rebel group 2 9 invades a camp of African Union peacekeeping troops

in the Darfur region of The Sudan, killing 10 of the peacekeepers; it is believed that the rebels may have kidnapped others and stolen weapons. e

The manageAlberto Fujimori to Peru, where he is wanted on charges of human rights abuses and corruption. A delegation from Syria is 2 2 received by a high-ranking government official in Pyongyang, N.Kor.

intends to resume attacks on oil installations.

ment of the carmaker General Motors and the United Auto Workers union reach a ten-

A one-day meeting on climate 24 change takes place ahead of the meeting of the UN General Assembly;

tative agreement on a con-

approximately 150 countries

take part. .

Yasuo Fukuda is

elected to the 2 3 presidency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in Japan; he is installed as prime minister of Japan on September 26. The protests in Myanmar (Burma) grow as some

10,000 monks are joined by thousands of citizens marching side by side with them in Yangon (Rangoon) and some 10,000 people, including

Teachers at more than 6096 of the schools in Bulgaria go on strike, demanding that their salaries be doubled. .

tract that will shift the costs of health care for retirees to

the union, ending a two-day strike. e

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of

.

In the Australian Football League Grand Final in Melbourne, the Geelong Cats defeat the Port Adelaide Power 24.19 (163) to 6.8 (44), a record-breaking mar-

gin of victory in the event.

African American History

and Culture opens as an In legislative elections in

interactive Web site; the

physical museum is expected to open in eight years.

30

Ukraine, the

After having failed to reach

ruling Party of Regions wins

a labour agreement, 73,000

34.4% of the vote, and the

members of the United Auto Workers union go on strike against General Motors; it is

the first strike against the manufacturer since 1970. .

4,000 monks, are reported to

In Johannesburg, India defeats Pakistan by five runs to capture the inaugural World Twenty20 cricket

be marching in Mandalay.

tournament.

.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta declares an end to its four-month cease-fire in Nigeria, saying that it

2 G

A bomb goes off at the main gate of the central park in Male, the capital of Maldives; 12 foreign tourists are injured.

At the opening of the 62nd

2 5 meeting of the UN General Assembly, Iran-

The military government of 2 Myanmar (Burma) concludes two days

Bloc of Yuliya Tymoshenko wins 30.7%. e

Elections take place in

of brutal suppression aimed at putting an end to anti-

Ecuador for members of an

government demonstrations;

constitution.

assembly to write a new

several people have been killed, among them a Japanese press photographer.

Haile Gebrselassie of

Researchers in France

Marathon with a time of 2 hr 4 min 26 sec, a new world record for marathons,

report that they have decoded the genome of the pinot noir graps; it is the first time that a fruit has been genetically mapped.

e

Ethiopia wins the Berlin

while his countrywoman Gete Wami is the fastest woman, with a time of 2 hr 23 min 17 sec.

43

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

October The house went up like a Roman candle. . . . Ifwe werent here the whole neighborhood would go up. San Diego resident Tom Sollie, who ignored evacuation orders to help in attempts to save neighbourhood houses from California wildfires, October 22

Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratkalin resigns as head of the Council for National Security, the military council at the head of Thailand’s government, and accepts the position of deputy prime minister. .

After a heavy-handed police response to a demonstration

in Islamabad, Pak., by

lawyers opposed to Pres. Pervez Musharraf's candidacy for reelection, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry orders the city’s police chief and two other officials suspended; also, in the town of Bannu, a fe-

male suicide bomber kills 14 people.

with North Korea for a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il; he is the first South Korean president to walk into North

4

Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf announces an

amnesty for those charged with corruption in 1988-99, including former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, which

he says is part of a larger package to ensure fair elections; he also promises that he will resign as chief of army staff on November 15.

Korea. e

A suicide bomber in Kabul detonates his weapon on a bus carrying police officers and employees of the Ministry of the Interior, killing at least 12 people.

.

The 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, is observed

e

The 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Mas-

with, among other things, the unveiling of a monu-

ters are named; recipients include Candido Camero, Andrew Hill, Joe Wilder, and

ment in Korolev, Russia;

the launch kicked off the space race and led to the formation of NASA in the U.S. (Photo left.)

Quincy Jones, while Gunther Schuller wins the award for jazz advocacy.

.

Syria closes its borders to refugees from Iraq and imposes stringent visa rules

on Iraqis already in Syria. .

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at an all-time high of 14,087.55 points, while the Nasdaq composite index closes at 2740.99, its

highest point since February 2001.

2

A U.S. air strike on

3 Beijing that North Korea has agreed to

Gizani al-Imam, Iraq,

kills at least 25 Iraqis; the U.S. military describes the dead as insurgents, while residents of the town say they were civilians.

disable all its nuclear facilities in return for 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil or other economic aid.

e

e

A broken water pipe damages an elevator and traps some 3,200 miners in a gold mine in South Africa; by the following day all have been

South Korean Pres.

rescued, and the mine is

Roh Moo Hyun steps

closed for an investigation into the cause.

across the border

5 the Shi'ite town of

It is announced in

One of the largest makers of frozen beef patties in the U.S., Topps Meat Co., announces that it is going

out of business in the wake of the recall of more than 9.8 million kg (21.7 million Ib) of frozen beef products Mashkov Yuri—ITAR-TASS/Landov

44

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

October

because of possible E. coli

Xbox 360 games, the Ameri-

contamination.

can team, with three gold, two silver, and one bronze medal, wins the overall

e

American track star Marion

Jones pleads guilty to having lied to federal agents when she denied having used performance-enhancing steroids; three days later she relinquishes the three gold and two bronze medals she won at the Olympic Games in 2000.

championship.

The International

Court of Justice 8 awards four islands to Honduras as the result of a new maritime border between Honduras and

Nicaragua in the Caribbean The presidential election in Pakistan, held

in the national and provincial legislative assemblies, takes place in spite of an opposition boycott and results in a landslide victory for Pres. Pervez Musharraf. .

In Iraq rival Shi'ite leaders Muqtada al-Sadr and ‘Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim forge a peace agreement.

Sea drawn to the satisfaction of both countries. .

À consortium composed of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Fortis wins control of Dutch banking giant ABN AMRO Holding, defeating a competing bid from the British bank Barclays. e

.

The Chicago Marathon is run on a day of unseasonable and extremely high heat and humidity, causing hundreds to become ill and helping contribute to the death of one runner; the organizers

.

The band Radiohead releases its first album since 2003, In Rainbows, on a Web site without a record label and for any price its customers want to pay.

Members of The

1 l1Sudan’s national from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of southern Sudan suspend their A U.S. military attack aimed at al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia leaders northwest of Baghdad kills 19 insurgents and

e

Physics is awarded to Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany for their discovery of giant magnetoresistance, which was instrumental in the development of modern computer hard drives.

cide car bomber kills 9 people in Kirkuk and another kills 8 people at an Internet café in Baghdad. e

writer Doris Lessing. .

The 10th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

is presented to comic Billy Crystal in a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

cancel the run, but not before

Patrick Ivuti of Kenya has won it by 0.05 sec with a time of2 hr 11 min 11 sec and Berhane Adere of Ethiopia has crossed the finish line as the womens victor with a time of 2 hr 33 min 49 sec. .

At the World Cyber Games Grand Final in Seattle,

attended by more than 700 players from 74 countries who competed in PC and

car; the event ignites popu-

lar anger throughout the country. e

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to American politician and environmentalist Al Gore and to the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand is hospitalized and diagnosed with cerebral ischemia. .

Norway defeats the USA 1 team to win the Bermuda Bowl, the world championship in men's team contract bridge, at the 38th world team championships in Shanghai; in the women's Venice Cup competition,

USA 1 beats Germany.

15 civilians, while one sui-

The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to British In Stockholm the Nobel Prize for

sive police practice of making traffic stops in order to collect bribes—is arrested and severely beaten when he attempts to register his

unity government

to Americans Mario Capec-

a Lasker Award, in 2001.

into the Musée d'Orsay, and one punches a hole into the 1874 painting The Argenteuil Bridge by Impressionist Claude Monet.

solid surfaces.

participation.

tival in Paris, revelers break

.

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry is awarded to Gerhard Ertl of Germany for his work elucidating chemical reactions that occur when gas molecules meet with

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine is awarded

During an all-night arts fes-

killed by Kurdish rebel fighters.

.

Group, Banco Santander,

chi and Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin Evans for their development of genetargeting technology, in which particular genes in mice are silenced in order to learn the function of the gene; the trio previously won

On the Turkish bor/ der with Iraq, 13 Turkish soldiers are

of the current ISS crew members, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, on October 21.

For the first time,

14

a group of Shi‘ite tribal and politi-

cal leaders travel to AlRamadi, Iraq, to meet with leaders of the Sunni tribal

coalition that is fighting against al-Qaeda. e

In Palm Desert, Calif., Lorena Ochoa of Mexico outscores Mi Hyun Kim of South Korea to secure the title of Ladies Professional Golf Association Player of the Year.

The state media

in China report

A Russian Soyuz

spacecraft blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying Yury I.

Malenchenko, Peggy A. Whitson, who will become the first woman commander of a crew in the International

12

that concerns

over environmental damage, including the danger of landslides, in the area around the

Three Gorges Dam have led to plans to relocate as many as four million people. e

Space Station, and Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the first Malaysian astronaut; Shukor

In Yekaterinburg, Russia, Kirill Formanchuk—a leader of a movement of

will return to Earth with two

motorists fighting the perva-

Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yushchenkos political party, Our Ukraine, reaches a coalition agreement with the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc, which would enable Tymoshenko to take office as prime minister. e

Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America announce a new plan devel45

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

October

oped with the help of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that is intended to calm markets and prevent a recession from resulting from the turmoil in the housing market.

all public transportation in Paris and its suburbs as well as the vast majority of the country’s 600 train lines; train drivers in Germany also begin measured walkouts.

e

e

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences goes

to Americans Leonid Hurwicz, Roger B. Myerson, and

Eric S. Maskin for their development of and work using mechanism design theory, which explains inter-

of Tibet is awarded a U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in Washington, D.C. e

ing of the five

The Journal of the American Medical Association publishes a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that in 2005 some 19,000 people in the U.S. died after infection with invasive methicillin-

countries that

resistant Staphylococcus

actions between individuals, markets, and institutions.

À summit meet-

16

Despite strong objections from China, the Dalai Lama

border the Caspian Sea—

aureus (MRSA) bacteria, a

Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turk-

much higher rate of infection than had been expected;

menistan—takes place in Tehran; they agree not to allow military strikes launched from any member

most transmission was asso-

ciated with hospitals and nursing homes.

member country. .

which $26 million of Costa

Rica's debt will be retired and the same amount of money will be dedicated to the protection of Costa Rica's tropical forests. .

18

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto

returns to Pakistan after eight years in exile, greeted by joyous crowds, but two bombs go off near the procession carrying her through Karachi, killing at least 140 people. .

Libya, Vietnam, Burkina

The euro trades at $1.4294

Faso, Costa Rica, and Croatia

as the U.S. dollar reaches a new record low.

are chosen to replace the Republic of the Congo, Qatar, Ghana, Peru, and Slovakia as

nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council. e

e

South African reggae star Lucky Dube is murdered in an attempted carjacking in Johannesburg.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction goes to Irish writer

Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering.

Residents of Bolivia's wealthy Santa Cruz

The Turkish Grand National

Assembly overwhelmingly agrees to authorize the ordering of troops to cross the border into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish rebels. .

A 24-hour transit strike begins in France, stopping

46

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

defeats England 15-6 in Paris to

province retake control of Viru Viru International Airport, the country's busiest airport, a day after federal troops seized the airport from workers who were said to be demanding that landing fees and other payments be made to local officials rather than to the national airport authority.

Grand Prix and with it the Formula 1 automobile racing drivers’ championship.

win the rugby union World Cup. .

In the Caulfield Cup Thoroughbred horse race in Melbourne, a sudden panic overtakes contenders Maldivian and Eskimo Queen in the starting gates, and both have to be scratched because of injuries; the eventual winner is Master O'Reilly. In legislative elections in 2 1 Switzerland, the largest number of seats (62)

go to the nationalist Swiss People’s Party, which claims the highest vote percentage (29%) ever won by a single party in the country since the introduction of proportional representation in 1919. .

country against any other

The U.S. reaches an agreement with Costa Rica in

South Africa

The Law and Justice party of Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski is decisively defeated in legislative

The legislature ) ) of Montenegro formally adopts the country's new constitution, and it goes into effect. .

À pitched battle between insurgents and Afghan and NATO forces in Afghanistan's Wardak province results in the deaths of some 20 insurgents and several civilians. .

As massive wildfires driven by Santa Ana winds burn throughout southern California for a second day, some 250,000 residents of

San Diego county are told to evacuate. e

Joaquim Chissano, who was president of Mozambique in 1986-2005, wins the first Mo

Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership.

elections; the Civic Platform

A protest in

wins the most seats.

Caracas by

.

A referendum on proposed changes to the constitution takes place in Kyrgyzstan; the voters approve, and the following day Pres. Kurmanbek Bakiyev dissolves the legislature. e

At the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing, Chinese Vice Pres. Zeng Qinghong and two other members of the Political Bureau Standing Committee retire from their positions. .

23

thousands of

people against constitutional changes proposed by Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez is thwarted by police. The space shuttle Discovery lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to

install a module of living space onto the International Space Station and to help the station crew relocate a solar array. e

The government of Somalia releases Idris Osman, the

head of World Food Pro-

Voters in Turkey approve

gramme operations in

several changes to the constitution, including one that would make the presidential term five years instead of seven and another that would require the popular rather than legislative election of the president.

Mogadishu, a week after he was seized in an attack on a UN compound.

e

Finnish driver Kimi Räikkönen wins the Brazilian

UN officials

report that 24

fighting

between two militias and government troops who were trying to restore peace

October Gurinder Osan/AP

Darfur region in The Sudan get under way in Sirte, Libya, in spite of the boycott by many rebel leaders, the Sudanese government negotiator declares a unilateral cease-fire. e

Some 40 Maoist rebels surround an association football (soccer) field during a

festival in the Indian village of Giridih in Jharkhand state and open fire, killing 17 people. .

The Breeders' Cup Classic Thoroughbred horse race is won by Curlin in exceptionally sloppy conditions at Monmouth Park Racetrack

.

China launches the satellite Chang'e-1, which is expected to orbit the Moon for a year,

e

A suicide bomber on a bicycle detonates his weapon at a police training exercise in

Ba'qubah, Iraq, killing at least 29 policemen. e

Authorities in Chad say that nine French workers with the aid organization Zoé's Ark will be charged with kidnapping after they were arrested in Abeche while trying to fly 103 children to Europe to be adopted.

Cristina Fernán-

dez de Kirchner

Kandahar, Afg.; Taliban

blown up; 17 soldiers and 3 civilians are killed. e

national government.

À major battle between Afghan 3 0 and NATO forces and hundreds of Taliban fighters begins in the Arghandab district outside

in Oceanport, N.J.

has in the past few days brought the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo into a chaotic and catastrophic state.

Somalia' transitional

Philippine Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo pardons former president Joseph

A 8 handily wins election as president of

forces had been ousted from

Estrada, who had been sen-

Argentina.

was their first reappearance.

tenced in September to 40 years in prison for financial chicanery.

.

Thousands of peasants who have marched for the past 26 days from Gwalior,

the area in 2001, and this .

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush visits southern California to view the devastation from

India, arrive in New Delhi

The departure of E. Stanley O'Neal as CEO of financial powerhouse Merrill Lynch is announced.

seeking enforceable rights

.

Richard J. Griffin, the

wildfires, which have

Department of State official who oversaw security for U.S. ambassadors and facilities in other countries and thus was responsible for hir-

destroyed 1,800 homes and

Indian farmland is in small plots, and increasing industrialization has displaced growing numbers of peasants from their land); the following day the gov-

returning images; it is

Chinas first lunar probe and follows one launched by Japan in September. .

e

202,000 ha (500,000 ac); at least seven deaths have resulted as well.

ing private security contractors in Iraq, resigns in the

wake of revelations of misbehaviour by Blackwater

The price of oil briefly passes 2 6

before closing at a new record high of $91.86.

U.S. Secretary of 2 5 State Condoleezza Rice and

Officials in Jiangsu province,

Paulson announce new sanctions specifically targeting Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite Quds Force. .

Near the town of Mingora in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, a truck carrying paramilitary troops sent

because of a recent outbreak of extremist Islamism is

China, announce their inten-

tion to undertake the cleanup of Lake Tai, the third largest freshwater lake in the country, which has become so badly polluted that it became

The chimpanzee Washoe, famed as the first nonhuman to have acquired human language, dies at a research institution in Ellensburg, Wash., at about the age of 42; Washoe was said to have

ernment sets up a panel to

had a vocabulary of some

address the problem. (Photo above.)

250 words, all in American

$92 a barrel

USA security personnel.

Treasury Secretary Henry

to their land (much of

.

The Boston Red Sox defeat the Colorado Rockies 4-3 in Denver in the fourth game of the World Series to win the Major League Baseball championship in a sweep.

Egyptian Pres.

Sign Language, though some scientists doubted that she had true language skills.

Russia invites

3 l1 only 70 of the usual 400 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe election observers to monitor

Hosni Mubarak announces that the country will build

the legislative elections scheduled for December 2.

several nuclear reactors, reinstating a program that

Milton Zuanazzi resigns as head of Brazil's National

was halted some 20 years earlier.

Civil Aviation Agency; the country’s aviation industry

alded peace

Ali Muhammad Ghedi

talks for the

resigns as prime minister of

has been in a state of constant crisis for several months.

necessary at one point to

shut off drinking water for the 2.3 million people whose water comes from the lake.

29

As much-her-

47

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

November This was an extraordinary circumstance, ladies and gentlemen; it needed extraordinary measures to control. No half-hearted measures could have delivered. Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf in a speech explaining his emergency rule, as he promises to lift it, November 29

killed in an attack by Sri

Lankan troops near Kilinochchi.

Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf declares a 3

state of emergency,

suspending the constitution and in effect imposing martial law; he fires Chief Jus-

tice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and the rest of the Supreme Court. .

Astronaut Scott Parazynski

undertakes a risky space walk quite a distance from the International Space Station to repair a tear in a

solar array that helps power the station. (Photo left.) Some 30 guerrillas attack a police station in Ocobamba, Peru,

killing the police chief. .

UN officials report that most of the 103 children that French aid organization Zoé's Ark was attempting to fly to Europe to be adopted were not orphans from The Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region as Zoé’s Ark had said but rather children from Chad who were living with their families. 48

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

e

In Nagoya, Japan, Chunichi Dragons pitcher Daisuke Yamai throws eight perfect innings in his team's 1-0 defeat of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in game

five of the best-of-seven Japan Series; it is the first baseball championship since 1954 for the Dragons.

2

the constitution, some of

which would greatly increase the power of the president; the amendments must be approved in a

runoff presidential election in Guatemala; he pledged to fight

national referendum as well.

poverty in his campaign.

e

Tens of thousands of people rally in Tbilisi, Georgia, in opposition to some of the policies of Pres. Mikheil Saakashvili. e

Venezuela's National

Assembly approves 69 amendments to

S.P. Tamilselvan, the political leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, is

Alvaro Colom wins a

4

e

The face of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen is revealed for the first time since his death in 1323 BC as linen windings are removed from his mummified remains, which will

be preserved in a climatecontrolled case at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

November

e

Martin Lel of Kenya wins the New York City Marathon with a time of 2 hr 9 min 4 sec, while Britain’s Paula Radcliffe is the fastest woman, with a time of 2 hr 23 min 9 sec.

December 23, although he is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. .

Belgium passes its 149th day without a government following elections on June 10, breaking a record set in

Pres. Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia unexpectedly calls for a presidential election and a referendum on the timing of legislative elections, both to be held on Jan. 5, 2008.

1988; tension between lead-

In a meeting in the 5 White House with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush promises American coopera-

tion in intelligence in Turkey fight against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). e

The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, go

on strike against the movie

ers of the Flemish and the Walloon communities has caused the deadlock. e

Queen Elizabeth II of the U.K. cuts the ribbon at the unveiling of the magnificently restored St. Pancras train station in London; beginning on November 14 the station will serve as the London terminus of the Eurostar, a high-speed train that connects London to continental Europe through the Channel Tunnel.

and television industries,

demanding a greater share of revenue from TV shows and movies distributed by DVD and online. .

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Americans Gary S. Becker, Francis

S. Collins, Benjamin L. Hooks, Henry J. Hyde, Brian Lamb, and Harper Lee and to Oscar Elías Biscet of Cuba and Ellen JohnsonSirleaf of Liberia. .

Robert K. Cheruiyot of Kenya and Gete Wami of Ethiopia are honoured in New York City as the inaugural winners of the World Marathon Majors championship. A suicide bomber attacks a delegation of legislators attending the opening of a sugar factory in Baghlan, Afg.; at least 72 people, including 6 legislators and 59 schoolchildren, are killed. .

riot police in Tbilisi, Georgia, Pres. Mikheil Saakashvili declares a state of emergency. .

Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu

meets with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi in Italy in an attempt to calm anger after the arrest of a Romanian immigrant in Italy

for the murder of an Italian woman a week earlier ignited anti-Romanian feelings. e

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission orders the recall of the Chinesemade toy Aqua Dots (called Bindeez in Europe and Australia); the toy consists of plastic beads that when wetted with water stick together to form toys but when ingested release a poisonous chemical related to GHB. e

The South Korean container ship Cosco Busan hits a stanchion of the Bay Bridge

The Liberal Democratic Party in Uzbekistan chooses

in San Francisco, causing an

Pres. Islam Karimov as its

spills 220,000 litres (58,000

candidate in the presidential election scheduled for

gal) of bunker oil in San

ecological disaster as it

Francisco Bay.

e

A storm in the Black Sea causes at least 11 ships to sink, with some loss of life,

and one tanker breaks apart in the Kerch Strait, spilling at least 1,000 tons of fuel oil

e

The government of Brazil declares that huge new reserves of recoverable light oil have been found in the offshore Tupi oil field; the national oil company, Petro-

and thus creating an environmental catastrophe. .

The drama series Quarterlife,

produced by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick,

bras, believes that the field

makes its debut on MySpace

contains five billion to eight billion barrels of oil.

TV; it is the first television-

style series to debut on the Internet.

e

Fighting between insurgents and Ethiopian supporters of Somalia’s transitional government breaks out in Mogadishu; at least 21 people are killed, and the bodies of Ethiopian soldiers are dragged through the streets.

After a day of violence between demonstrators and

presidential election in Slovenia.

e

In South Korea

12

the spokesmen for the former inhouse lawyer for embattled electronics giant Samsung

say that recipients of Samsung bribes included newly

At the Latin Grammy Awards in Las Vegas,

appointed Prosecutor Gener-

Dominican singer and songwriter Juan Luis Guerra

ruption investigators Lee

wins five awards, including album of the year for La llave de mi corazón and song of the year and record of the year for the albums title cut.

al Lim Chae Jin and top corJong Baek and Lee Gui Nam.

The World Food Pro-

The governing bloc narrowly wins a majority of seats in legislative elections in Denmark, allowing Prime Minister Anders Fogh Ras-

gramme

mussen to retain his position.

reports that

about half of the children living in Laos are chronically malnourished and that government policies are partially to blame.

e

German Vice-Chancellor Franz Müntefering unexpect-

edly resigns; Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is chosen to replace him. .

Stagehands in New York City go

An explosion in the south wing of the Philippines

on strike, and 27

House of Representatives

Broadway shows go dark. .

Police brutally break up a large demonstration in Kuala Lumpur, Malay.; the protesters were calling for electoral reforms.

Left-leaning independent candidate 1 1 Danilo Turk deci-

sively defeats conservative Lojze Peterle in a runoff

building kills three people, one of them Rep. Wahab Akbar of Basilan. e

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia holds a prayer vigil with state and church leaders in an attempt to find a solution to the persistent and devastating drought the state is suffering. e

The 2007 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize is awarded to 49

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

November

performance artist Laurie

Anderson.

emergency and appoints Lado Gurgenidze to replace Zurab Nogaideli as prime minister.

A bomb goes off near the presi14 dential palace in Dushanbe, Tajik.

.

Donald Tusk is sworn in as prime minister of Poland.

Exchange, is named chairman and CEO of the finan-

her under on November 12,

cial company Merrill Lynch.

and Pres. Pervez Musharraf swears in a caretaker government in advance of January elections.

John A. Thain, the head of the New York Stock

.

The U.S. National Medal of Arts is awarded to Morten Lauridsen, N. Scott Moma-

day, Roy R. Neuberger, Craig Noel, Les Paul, Henry Stein-

way, George Tooker, and Andrew Wyeth. Cyclone Sidr makes landfall on the southwestern coast of Bangladesh, devastating a large area and leaving at least 3,500 people dead.

eration Front on the cre-

ation of a homeland for Muslims on the southern island of Mindanao. .

Major League Baseball player Barry Bonds, holder of the record for most career home runs, is indicted in San Fran-

cisco for perjury and obstruction of justice in an inquiry into the use of performanceenhancing drugs in baseball.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its final report of 2007, synthesizing the information in the previous three reports; it indicates that urgent action is needed to avert global climate disaster, which is likely to occur sooner than was once thought. e

At the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo., the College Basketball Experience, which includes the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, celebrates its grand opening; the next day the Hall of Fame holds its first induction ceremony.

Co-operation in Europe says its election

monitors will not observe the Russian legislative election scheduled for December 2 because limits that Russia placed on the monitors will make it impossible to do its job well.

The U.S. military in Iraq releases 18 figures showing that the weekly number of attacks in the country has fallen to its lowest level A new pipeline that will carry natural gas originating in Azerbaijan to Greece

from Turkey, bypassing Russia, is ceremonially inaugurated by the prime ministers of Greece and Turkey. .

After the final NASCAR race of the season, Jimmie John-

Georgian Pres. Mikheil

son is crowned winner of the Nextel Cup championship for the second year

Saakashvili lifts the state of

in a row.

50

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

title with a 2-1 victory over the New England Revolution in the MLS Cup in Washington, D.C.

bridge—held up a political sign at an awards dinner, igniting a firestorm of controversy; in the end the team has agreed to keep politics out of awards ceremonies.

In Pakistan, Pres.

Pervez Musharrafs now-handpicked Supreme Court dismisses the primary challenges to his reelection; the previous Supreme Court had been expected to rule in favour of the challenges.

Israel allows the

2 l1export of some agricultural goods from Gaza for the first time since the Hamas takeover in June; it also

allows the transfer of 25 armoured personnel carriers from Russia to the Palestin-

ian Authority.

Jeff Bezos, head of the Internet bookseller Amazon,

introduces a promising electronic-book-reading device, Kindle, which can store up to 200 books and makes it possible to quickly download books without the use of a computer. Online reports are published from two independent science teams, one

in the U.S. and one in Japan, both of which have developed a technique to reprogram human skin cells to make them behave like embryonic stem cells. .

French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy asks transit workers

since January 2006.

The Organization 1 6 for Security and

the Major League Soccer

e

e

A Philippine government official reports that an agreement has been reached with the Moro Islamic Lib-

The Houston Dynamo wins

.

The Pakistani government releases former prime minister Benazir Bhutto from the house arrest it had placed

.

in women’s contract

The warship Shenzhen sails from China for the first port visit by the Chinese navy to Japan since World War II; the destroyer is to take part in military ceremonies with the Japanese navy.

2 2

Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the transitional

president of Somalia, nominates Nur Hassan Hussein to serve as prime minister in

the transitional government. e

After close to three months of negotiations, Pres. Álvaro Uribe of Colombia withdraws his support for the involvement of Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez in nego-

to end their strike, and civil servants in France go out on

tiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colom-

an unrelated strike.

bia (FARC) intended to lead

.

The British government reveals that in October unencrypted computer disks containing detailed personal and financial information on 25 million people, 4096 of the country's population, were

to the release of dozens of hostages that FARC has held for several years. e

lost; a government tax agency

Because of an ongoing dispute over rules and eligibility, the organizers of the America’s Cup yacht race announce that the next

sent the disks unregistered to

regatta, scheduled for 2009,

the National Audit Office, but

will be postponed.

they never arrived. .

Àn agreement is reached in a dispute in which the United States Bridge Federation had attempted to punish members of its team, which—

after winning the Venice Cup

As the presidency of Émile 2 3

Lahoud ends

and power passes to a caretaker government headed by Prime Minister Fouad

November Chilean Navy/AP

UN-sponsored negotiations in Austria between represen-

tatives of the government of Serbia and of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo over the future status of the enclave end without agreement. e

A settlement to the stagehand strike that has kept Broadway shows closed for 19 days is announced in New York City.

2 €

Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf, who

resigned his post as army chief the day before, is sworn in to a second term

Siniora, the Lebanese legislature postpones for a further week the vote on the next president. .

À bomb lays waste to the Ghazil pet bazaar in Baghdad, killing some 13 people. .

The cruise ship Explorer strikes an iceberg while traveling 96 km (60 mi) north of the Antarctic Peninsula and sinks; all 154 aboard are rescued, but the

ship poses an ecological threat. (Photo above.)

down the Democratic Society Party, which supports Kurdish autonomy, begin rioting when police try to stop them from marching in Diyarbakir, Tur. The Saskatchewan Roughriders capture the 95th Canadian Football League Grey Cup, defeating the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 23-19.

Iraq and the 2 6

Australia, the

ruling Liberal Party of Prime Minister John Howard loses to the Labor Party, whose leader, Kevin Rudd, becomes prime minister. .

Two suicide car bombings take place in Rawalpindi, Pak.; one of them involves a

bus carrying intelligence personnel, 15 of whom die in the attack.

At a peace conference in Annapolis, Md.,

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Pres. Mahmoud Abbas agree to negotiate a peace treaty by the end of 2008; the U.S. is to play a central role in negotiations.

U.S. sign an

negotiate a formal document that will define longterm relations between the two countries, including the legal status of U.S. troops in Iraq. .

Youths and riot police engage in a second night of

restricting liberty will remain in effect, however.

Some 30 Philippine army officers and soldiers on trial for having staged coup attempts leave the courthouse and take over the Peninsula Manila Hotel,

demanding that Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo be removed; after seven hours

security forces storm and retake the hotel.

.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia warns that he may invoke a law permitting lengthy detention without trial if necessary in order to stop

huge street protests that have been taking place in recent weeks.

Pres. Daniel

Ortega of 3 0

Nicaragua

promulgates a decree establishing a new national cabinet consisting of 272 repre-

sentatives and headed by Ortega; he also launches Citizen Power Councils, outrag-

ing many in the country.

battles in Villiers-le-Bel, France, a suburb of Paris;

the violence began after two teenagers on a motorbike were killed in a collision with a police car.

ber 16; several decrees

.

e

agreement to

In parliamentary elections in

her students to give the name Muhammad to a teddy bear that was used in a school project.

of office and shortly thereafter makes a speech in which he promises to end emergency rule on Decem-

Almazbek Atam-

bayev resigns as 2 8

prime minister

of Kyrgyzstan.

.

Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin suspends the country's participation in the NATO Conventional Armed Forces

teacher at a private school

An agreement is reached in Lebanon's legislature to amend the constitution so

Transportation workers in

Kurdish demon-

in The Sudan, is arrested

that Gen. Michel Suleiman,

Italy go on strike, halting

strators protest-

and charged with having insulted Islam after it is learned that she permitted

head of the country’s military, would be eligible for the presidency.

trains, buses, ferries, cable cars, and some airline

.

Gillian Gibbons, a British

2 5 ing attempts by state prosecutors to shut

in Europe treaty. .

flights. 51

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

December This is the saddest day in the history of democracy in this country. It is a coup d'état. Koki Muli, cochairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, as Pres. Mwai Kibaki begins a second term as president of Kenya, December 30

The Iraqi Accord Front, the largest Sunni bloc in Iraq's legislature, walks out to protest the detention of its

racing drivers’ title for

saptamani, si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) takes top honours at the European Film Awards in Berlin.

Britain, a meticulous re-

A man armed with a gun opens fire at a shopping

creation of the one-man

mall in Omaha, Neb., and

antiwar protest in Lon-

kills eight people before turning the gun on himself.

e

The Romanian film 4 luni, 3

addition, al-Oaeda gunmen attack the village of Dwelah in Diyala province, killing 13 people.

.

The annual Kennedy Center Honors are presented in 2

Voters go to the polls

Washington, D.C., to film

don's Parliament Square that Brian Haw began in

in Venezuela in a referendum on whether

director Martin Scorsese,

2001, and his exhibition

comedian Steve Martin, and musicians Leon Fleisher, Brian Wilson, and Diana Ross.

entry, Sleeper, a film in which Wallinger, dressed

to accept 69 amendments

to

the constitution, some of which would increase the

power of the president; in a major setback to Pres. Hugo Chávez, the amendments are defeated. .

Sergio Gómez, founder and lead singer of the popular Mexican grupero band K-Paz de la Sierra, is kidnapped, tortured, and killed after a concert in Michoacán state;

he is perhaps the most prominent of some

13 gru-

pero musicians murdered in the past year and a half, apparent victims of violence between drug gangs. .

A third-place finish in the Wales Rally GB secures a fourth successive world rally championship automobile52

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

After weeks of

Britain’s Turner Prize is presented in Liverpool, Eng., to installation artist Mark Wallinger by actor and director Dennis Hopper; the artist's best-known works include State

Sébastien Loeb of France.

leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi; in

e

as a bear, wanders around

a closed art gallery. (Photo right.)

la Spiric of Bosnia and Herzegovina signs an accord with the

weapons program in 2003,

enlargement commissioner

though the country is producing enough highly enriched uranium to be able to make a bomb in the next few years; this represents a dramatic reversal of a previ-

of the European Union in the first step toward the country’s joining the EU.

.

Kevin Rudd is sworn in as prime minister of Australia; his first official act is to sign documents ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

suspension of anticorruption investigator Aleksejs Loskutovs, Latvia's government resigns. e

.

A roadside bomb kills 16 people on a passenger bus in Sri Lanka; the Liberation

Tigers of Tamil Eelam are believed responsible. e

The Guennol Lioness, an 8.26-cm (3.25-in) 5,000-year-

À new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate is released that says that it is now believed that Iran stopped its nuclear

ous NIE assessment in 2005.

protests against its

Prime Minister Niko-

4

Renan Calheiros resigns as president of Brazil's Federal Senate; he has been implicated in a corruption scandal. .

Tens of thousands of gold, platinum, and coal miners go on a one-day strike in South Africa to protest unsafe working conditions.

old Mesopotamian limestone sculpture, is sold at auction in New York City for $57.1 million, a record price

for any sculpture.

In Washington, D.C.,

Director of Central Intelligence Michael V. Hayden informs employees that in 2005 the CIA destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of two alQaeda operatives; the revelation creates a furor. e

A package bomb delivered to a law office in downtown

December

Paris kills the legal secretary who opens it and seriously injures a lawyer. NATO forces begin 7 an offensive to retake Musa Qala, Afg.,

which fell under the control of Taliban insurgents in February; they succeed in forcing the Taliban to abandon the town on December 10. .

Off the west coast of South Korea, a barge carrying a construction crane comes

loose from its tugboat in heavy seas and hits the anchored oil tanker Hebei Spirit, punching three holes in the tanker’s hull and causing a massive and disastrous oil spill; later, the captains of the tug and the barge are arrested. The Right Livelihood Awards are presented in Stockholm to Sri Lankan legal scholar Christopher Weeramantry, to Dekha Ibrahim Abdi of Kenya for her work in conflict resolution, to Percy and Louise Schmeiser of Canada for their work defending agricultural biodiversity, and to the Bangladeshi solar-energy company Grameen Shakti.

The conservative diocese of San Joaquin in California votes to secede from the Episcopal

Sharif announce that in spite of misgivings they will participate in legislative elections in Pakistan sched-

Church, USA; it is the first

uled for Jan. 8, 2008.

diocese to make the move. e

In Baiji, Iraq, a suicide truck bomber kills 11 people at a police station. .

University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow wins the Heisman Trophy for best college football player; he is the first sophomore to win the award.

.

Is He Dead?, a play written in 1898 by Mark Twain, receives its world premiere at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City in an adaptation by David Ives.

A car bomb goes off in front of a government building in Algiers, engulfing a bus carrying students to a university campus, and

another car bomb explodes shortly thereafter at a United Nations building, destroying it; a minimum of 37 people are killed, at least 17 of them UN staff members. e

The United States SentencRussian Pres.

tive to the World Bank, is inaugurated in a ceremony

Thousands of people take to the streets of Pristina, the

imously to reduce the punishment for some crimes involving crack cocaine, which have been punished far more harshly than those related to powder cocaine, and to make the change retroactive; the change will go into effect on March 3, 2008, and may affect some

in Buenos Aires attended by the presidents of Argentina,

capital of the UN-adminis-

19,500 prison inmates.

The Banco del Sur, a Latin American

regional-development bank intended as an alterna-

Vladimir Putin 1 0 endorses Dmitry Medvedev, a first deputy prime minister and the chairman of the oil monopoly Gazprom, to succeed him as president.

ing Commission votes unan-

.

Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador,

tered Serbian enclave of Kosovo, as the deadline for

Paraguay, and Venezuela.

an agreement on the

.

Rajko Kuzmanovic is elected president of the Serb Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a special election to replace Milan Jelic, who died in October. e

The opposition parties led by former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz

enclave'5 future expires with no progress made. .

e

Vikram Pandit is named CEO of financial services company Citigroup Inc.,

replacing Charles O. Prince, who resigned on November

The New York Philharmonic announces that it has accepted an invitation to play a concert in Pyongyang, N.Kor., scheduled for Feb. 26, 2008; it will be the first

4; Winfried Bischoff is

major cultural visit from the

car bomb kills Brig. Gen. François al-Hajj, who was considered a strong candidate for the position of Lebanon’s army chief.

U.S. to North Korea.

named chairman.

l1 2

In the Beirut suburb of Baabda, a

e

A nationwide strike against proposed changes to the social security system brings Greece to a halt. e

UNESCO reports that Cyclone Sidr, which killed some 3,500 people in Bangladesh in November, also devastated the Sundarbans, a large mangrove forest on the Ganges delta that is a World Heritage site and a tiger preserve.

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party pulls out of Switzerland’s governing coalition; the departure of Charlie Hopkinson—Tate Handout/epa/Corbis

53

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

December Bruce M. Beehler—AFP/Getty Images

Guy Verhofstadt agrees to stay in

office as prime minister of an interim gov-

ernment in Belgium pending the formation of a permanent government, which the country has lacked since elections in June; the inter-

im government is formed on December 19. .

In the town of Kohat in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, 12 Pakistani sol-

diers leaving an association football (soccer) match are

killed by a suicide bomber. .

Researchers from the Indonesian Institute of Science and Conservation

International report that two new species, one a very large rat and the other a tiny opossum, have been discovered in the remote Foja area of Papua province in Indonesia.

Switzerland's largest party ends a power-sharing system that had held since 1959. e

Leaders of the member countries of the European Union sign the Lisbon Treaty, a new document delineating the governance of the organization; it includes a permanent president with a twoand-a-half-year term of office and provisions for decisions to be made by majority, rather than unani-

report names 89 Major

League Baseball players as having used illegal performance-enhancing substances.

The World Bank

14

Steer roper Trevor Brazile of Texas wins his fifth allaround cowboy world championship at the 49th annual Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

reports that it has raised a record

tion; for the first time, the

in Kyrgyzstan;

ratified by all 27 members. Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf lifts the state of

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne signs an agreement between the federal government and the state governments of Cali-

emergency and restores the

fornia, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah,

that leave his hand-picked Supreme Court in place.

constitution but with amendments and decrees

the ruling Ak Zhol party wins the majority of seats, though both the conduct of the election and the vote count seem dubious. .

British forces formally relinquish control of Basra province to Iraq's government; it is the most important province to have been handed back to Iraq. .

Wyoming, and Nevada on the allocation of water from the Colorado River in the event that climate change

At the emotional and raucous final session of global

League game against the St. Louis Rams, Green Bay

climate talks in Bali,

causes water shortages.

Indon., that began on

Packers quarterback Brett Favre sets a new all-time record as a 44-yd touchdown pass followed by a 7yd pass brings his career total to 61,405 passing yards; the previous record was Dan Marinos 61,361 yd.

.

The long-awaited report on steroid abuse in professional baseball is released by its author, former senator

George J. Mitchell; the 54

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

.

December 3, the member countries agree to negotiate

a new climate treaty by 2009 that will lead to the halving of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

.

The diversified conglomerate Loews Corp. announces that it will divest itself of Lorillard Tobacco, maker of Kent, Newport, True, and lard will become an inde-

tional Development AssociaU.K. passed the U.S. to become the organization’s biggest donor.

(Photos left.)

Maverick cigarettes; LorilLegislative elections take place

$25.1 billion for its Interna-

mous, vote; it must now be .

.

In a National Football

pendent company.

In South Africa

the African 18

National Con-

gress party votes to replace

Pres. Thabo Mbeki as its leader, electing Zulu politician Jacob Zuma in his place. The legislature of Ukraine approves the nomination of Yuliya Tymoshenko as prime minister. e

The U.S. Congress passes

legislation mandating higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks for the first time in 22 years, the production of renewable fuels, and

higher efficiency requirements for household appliances and government buildings.

December

A conservative

politician, Lee Myung-bak, wins election as president of South Korea in a landslide;

voters think he will be able to improve the country’s economy. e

In a no-confidence vote in the legislature, Ludwig Scotty is removed as president of Nauru and replaced by Marcus Stephen.

China’s new 22 National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, designed by French architect Paul Andreu, holds its first public concert; the building, a glass dome over a shallow lake, is

entered via a passageway under the lake. About 300,000 fans watch

Argentine ballet star Julio Bocca give his farewell performance on an open-air

Ivars Godmanis takes office as prime minister

The People

of Latvia.

Power Party,

2 3 which supports

Thieves steal a painting by Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (1904), and a painting by Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, The Cof-

former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, takes

fee Worker (1939), from the

Pres. Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan is overwhelmingly elected to a third term of

Museum of Art in São Paulo; police come to believe the theft was ordered by a wealthy art collector. .

The Campbell Soup Co. announces that it will sell Godiva Chocolatier to a Turkish company; Godiva will become part of Yildiz Holding's consumer-goods arm, the Ulker Group. A bomb goes off in a mosque dur2 1 ing Friday prayers and the celebration of ‘Id al-Adha in Sherpao in northwestern Pakistan; at

least 48 people are killed. Japan agrees, after being pressed by the U.S. and Australia, to suspend its plans to kill 50 humpback whales this season. e

The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland,

Slovakia, and Slovenia join the European Union’s Schengen zone, the members of which do not require passports for travel within the zone.

.

At the San Francisco Zoo, a

Siberian tiger escapes from its enclosure and attacks three people, killing one. The Serbian leg26 islature overwhelmingly passes a resolution opposing independence for Kosovo and warning of international repercussions if the enclave should declare independence and other countries recognize it as inde-

pendent.

the most seats in legislative Former prime

elections in Thailand.

minister

.

office (one more than the constitution allows) in elec-

tions that fail to be recognized as free or fair. .

Two 1,500-year-old terracotta statues of the Hindu god Vishnu disappear from the cargo area of the international airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the statues had been en route to the Guimet Museum in Paris for an exhibition.

2

Benazir Bhutto

is assassinated after leaving a political rally in Rawalpindi, Pak., apparently shot by a gunman;

moments

later a

suicide bomber detonates his weapon, killing at least 20 people in the crowd.

Kibaki against Raila Odinga; the turnout is unusually large. .

Pres. Omar Hassan al-Bashir of The Sudan swears in a new .

picnicking on the side of a road are shot and killed, and

area of Mexico City may

a fifth is injured; law

have been built as early as

enforcement

1100, some 200 years

A 4

comes

to

believe that the attack was connected to al-Qaeda. .

before Aztec civilization in the area was thought to have begun.

Rap star Jay-Z announces

that he will give up his position as president of the record label Def Jam Recordings.

25

A suicide truck bomber rams his vehicle into

The election of the president in Lebanons legislature is delayed for an 11th time, this time until Jan. 12, 2008. e

in Australia; it is the third

consecutive win for the yacht.

Government

2 9

officials in China announce that the first election in which Hong Kong voters may directly elect their leader will not take place until at least 2017; previously it had been thought that the elections in 2012 might be held democratically. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, says that the number of violent attacks in the country has fallen dramatically since June. In spite of clear evidence of

Kenya, pitting Pres. Mwai

Archaeologists report that an Aztec pyramid found in November in the Tlatelolco

ritania, four French tourists

e

A closely contested presidential election takes place in

national unity government.

Near Aleg, Mau-

gress leader Jacob Zuma in South Africa.

Wild Oats XI wins the 2007 Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race

.

stage in Buenos Aires.

e

a group of people waiting in line for cooking gas in Baiji, Iraq; at least 25 people are killed.

3 0 fraud in the vote counts in an election

that Raila Odinga seemed to be winning, Kenya' election commission declares that Mwai Kibaki has narrowly won reelection as president of Kenya, and he is immediately sworn in; the country erupts in violence. e

The U.S. says that North Korea has failed to fulfill the commitment it made in a disarmament treaty to make a full accounting of its nuclear activities by the end of 2007.

Nepal's legislature overwhelm-

2 8 ingly votes to abolish the monarchy. Corruption charges are

brought against newly elected African National Con-

The first legisla3 1 tive elections in Bhutan’s history take place as voters choose members of the National Council, the legislature’s future upper house. 55

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Disasters Listed here are MAJOR disasters that occurred in 2007. The list includes NATURAL and NONMILITARY mechanical disasters that claimed more than 15 lives and/or resulted in

significant damage to PROPERTY.

Aviation January 1, Indonesia. An Adam SkyConnection Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Java island to Sulawesi with 102 people aboard disappears from radar screens; Indonesia initially reports that the plane’s wreckage and some survivors have been found but the next day denies the report, and weeks later flotsam and jetsam from the plane begin to surface on the ocean. January 9, Near Balad, Iraq. A chartered Moldovan Antonov-26 airplane carrying 35 people from Adana, Tur, crashes while attempting to land in the fog; at least 30 people aboard are killed. March 7, Yogyakarta, Indon. A Garuda Air Boeing 737 crashes upon landing and slides off the runway, breaking apart; at least 22 of the passengers are killed.

May 5, Cameroon.

A Kenya Airways

Boeing 737 en route to Nairobi crashes near the village of Mbanga Pongo shortly after takeoff from Douala; 114 people were on board, and no survivors are found. June 3, Sierra Leone. A helicopter carrying Togolese sports officials and journalists to Lungi International Airport outside Freetown after an association football (soccer) game crashes; 22 people, among them Togo’s minister of sports, are killed. June 25, Southern Cambodia. A PMT

Air An-24 airplane flying from Siem Reap to Sihanoukville crashes in the mountains; all 22 aboard lose their lives.

July 5, Culiacán, Mex. A small cargo plane blows a tire during takeoff and crashes into a highway; three people aboard the plane, two soldiers guarding

Residents regard the wreckage of an AN-26 cargo plane that crashed in a residential neighbourhood of Kinshasa, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, on October 4, killing at least 51 people.

the airstrip, and four people in a car on the highway are killed. July 17, S&o Paulo. As a TAM Airlines A320 attempts to land at Congonhas Airport in the midst of a rainstorm, it skids off a runway, slides across a highway, and crashes into a building; at least 200 people, some not on the plane, are killed. August 10, French Polynesia. A twinengine turboprop Twin Otter plane carrying

passengers

on

a seven-minute

flight from the island of Moorea to the main island of Tahiti goes down in the ocean; all 20 passengers aboard perish. August 22, Northern Iraq. A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter crashes, killing all 14 soldiers aboard; mechanical failure is blamed for the accident. August 26, Democratic Republic of the Congo. A cargo plane carrying tin ore crashes shortly after takeoff from Kongolo; 13 of the 15 people aboard are killed. September 16, Thailand. A passenger airliner crashes while attempting to land in heavy rain on the resort island of Phuket; at least 89 of those aboard, most of them tourists, are killed.

October 4, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

An

Antonov-26

cargo

plane

crashes into the Kingasani neighbourhood of Kinshasa, killing at least 51 people. November 30, Turkey. An Atlasjet MD83 jetliner en route from Istanbul to Isparta crashes shortly before its destination; all 57 on board die.

Fires and Explosions February 23, Alsunga, Latvia. A large fire, possibly caused by faulty wiring, destroys a home for the disabled; 25 people are dead or missing. March 5, Chittagong, Bangladesh. A fire guts dozens of huts in a slum and leaves at least 21 people, mostly women and children, dead.

March 20, Kamyshevatskaya, Russia. A fire at a home for the elderly and disJohn Bompengo/AP

56

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Disasters

abled kills at least 62 people; numerous safety violations contribute to the high death toll. March

22,

Maputo,

Mozam.

Intense

heat causes an old Soviet-built arms depot to catch fire, igniting rockets and ammunition

in a massive

explosion

that kills at least 117 people, many of them nearby residents. March 26, Katugal, Nigeria. After an oil tanker rolls over while attempting to park, people rush to loot the truck’s cargo; it explodes, killing at least 89 people. July 4, Liaoning province, China. A karaoke bar full of university students is destroyed by an explosion; there are at least 25 fatalities. July 26, Northern Syria. High temperatures cause a weapons depot near Aleppo to explode; at least 15 people are killed. August 11, Indian-administered Kashmir. A fire breaks out at an ammunitions depot, causing explosions that continue for close to two days; at least 20 people, mostly firemen and soldiers, are killed. September 9, Mexico. In Coahuila state a truck loaded with mining explosives collides with another vehicle, and after the arrival of emergency personnel and reporters, the truck explodes; at least 37 people are incinerated. October 13, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukr. A natural gas explosion all but levels a 10story apartment building; at least 23 people perish. October 22, Fujian province, China. In Putian a fire, reportedly caused by faulty wiring, incinerates at least 34 workers in a shoe factory. November 4, Argentina. A fire at a maximum

security

prison

in

the

province of Santiago del Estero leaves at least 29 inmates dead. November 4, Russia. A fire breaks out

at a substandard nursing home in the Tula region; at least 31 people are killed. November

Workers pipeline plosion least 28

18, Eastern

Saudi Arabia.

are attempting to link a new to an oil pipeline when an exand subsequent fire occur; at people are killed.

December 12, Wenzhou,

China. A fire

in a 28-story apartment building leaves 21 people dead; it takes some 200 firefighters three hours to extinguish the blaze. December 20, Sierra Leone. An explosion, probably caused by a gas leak, kills at least 17 people in downtown Freetown.

Rescuers attempt to extinguish flames and rescue passengers from a ferry that caught fire off Jakarta on February 22. At least 42 passengers died in the tragedy, and at least 4 other people perished days later when the wreckage sank. December 26, Nigeria. As people attempt to siphon gas from a buried pipeline outside Lagos, the pipeline catches fire, incinerating at least 45 people. Marine January

18, Andhra

Pradesh,

India.

Àn overcrowded ferry carrying people to a religious festival capsizes on the Krishna River; at least 60 people are feared drowned. February 12, Off the coast of Yemen. A boat carrying refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia capsizes, and at least 112 migrants drown. February 22, Jakarta, Indon. A passenger ferry catches fire, killing at least 42 of those aboard; days later the wreckage sinks, killing as many as four investigators and journalists. February 23, Mediterranean Sea. The Italian news agency ANSA reports that people rescued from a rubber dinghy carrying African migrants from Tunisia to Sicily say that 19 people died on the trip.

February 28, Off the coast of Haiti. A sail-powered freighter catches fire and sinks; some 52 people are feared dead. March 26, Gulf of Aden. After smugglers taking illegal migrants from Somalia to Yemen force them overboard in order to evade security forces, 31 bodies

are

found,

with

a further

90

people reported missing. March 29, Guinea. An open boat trav-

eling from Forecariah capsizes off the

coast near Conakry; at least 60 people drown. April 14, Yemen. Officials report that at least 62 migrants from Somalia are believed to have drowned when the boat they were being smuggled on overturned; survivors say they were forced to jump into the sea when the smugglers saw the Yemeni coast guard. May 4, Off the Turks and Caicos Islands. A boat full of Haitian migrants capsizes under disputed circumstances; some 90 people drown. June 22, Off Malta. The captain of an Italian fishing trawler reports that a dinghy carrying African migrants capsized and 24 of its occupants drowned; on June 1 at least 15 decomposing bodies were found in the same area. June 24, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. A Bougainville Health Department boat carrying 15 people on a return trip to Buka from Nissan Island disappears. July 19, Canary Islands. Off the coast of Tenerife, Spanish rescue crews spot a foundering wooden boat carrying African migrants; 48 migrants are saved, but some 50 more are feared

drowned. July 19, Off the coast of northern Angola. A canoe overloaded with illegal immigrants capsizes in bad weather; at least 26 of those aboard drown. August 3, Sierra Leone. A boat traveling from Freetown to Rokupr capsizes in heavy rain at the mouth of the Great Scarcies River; the vast majority of the 57

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Disasters

estimated 120 people aboard are believed to have drowned. August 13, Off the shore of Mayotte. Officials in Mayotte, a French dependency in the Indian Ocean, report that a boat carrying migrants from Comoros capsized and at least 17 of the passengers drowned. August 19, Western Mexico. The wa-

ters of the Cuiztla River suddenly rise, sweeping away 15 members of the Universal Christian Church who were camping in Rancho Ixcamilpa. October

18, Off Sulawesi,

Indon.

As

the passenger ferry Acita 003 nears shore, passengers climb to the upper deck in search of cell phone signals, causing the boat to capsize; at least 31 of the passengers drown. October

19, Near

San

Francisco

del

Mar, Mex. The bodies of 24 people wash ashore; it is believed that they were

attempting to migrate from Cen-

tral America in a boat that capsized. October 26, Senegal. A Spanish hospital ship returns a man to Dakar; the man was the only survivor of a group of African migrants who had set out by boat for the Canary Islands three weeks previously; some 50 others had perished. November

6, Atlantic Ocean.

A Mau-

ritanian patrol boat finds a boat that had left Senegal three weeks earlier loaded with African migrants attempting to reach the Canary Islands; some 100 survivors are on board, and they say that some 50 people perished on the journey and most were thrown overboard.

and in Zhouzhou in Hunan province, 12 miners are trapped in a flooded pit. May 23, Tirapur, India. A dividing wall for a factory under construction collapses into an adjacent bar, crushing 27 bar patrons, mostly labourers. May 24, Siberia. In the Yubileinaya

built over the Hau River in the southern Mekong delta collapses, killing at least 50 construction workers.

coal mine in the town of Novokuznetsk,

21 people lose their lives.

Russia, a methane least 38 miners.

explosion

kills at

August 13, Hunan province, China. As

workers are removing the scaffolding from a bridge that is being built across the Tuo River, the bridge collapses; at least 41 workers are killed. August 17, Xintai, Shandong province, China. Excessive rainfall causes flash flooding from rivers into two coal mines, where

181 miners are

trapped and drowned. August

29,

Azerbaijan.

A

16-story

building under construction in Baku collapses, killing at least 19 people; the head of the construction company is arrested, September 26, Vietnam. A 90-m (295ft) section of the Can Tho Bridge being Rescuers search for survivors after the collapse on September 26 of the Can Tho Bridge being built over Vietnam's Hau River. At least 50 construction workers were killed.

As resi-

dents are digging for gold that is rumoured to be in a makeshift open-pit mine, a landslide takes place; at least November

18,

Donetsk,

Ukr

A

methane explosion at the Zasyadko deep coal mine leaves at least 101 miners dead, with a further 11 missing. December

5, Shanxi province,

China.

An explosion in the Xinyao coal mine in Linfen kills at least 105 miners.

Natural January 4, Bangladesh. Government officials report that 40 deaths in poor areas during a cold snap bring the death toll for the week to at least 56. January

down

15, U.S. An ice storm shuts

large parts of Oklahoma,

Mis-

souri, Texas, Iowa, and New York and

is responsible for the deaths of at least 39 people, including an accident in Elk City, Okla., in which 12 migrant workers in a van were killed. January 15, Sri Lanka. Landslides resulting from heavy rains kill at least 16 people. January

17, Australia.

Steve

Bracks,

the premier of the state of Victoria, warns that the state is experiencing its

January 18, Europe. A ferocious storm, with winds in excess of 61 km/hr

(100 mph), sweeps through the British Isles and northern Europe; there are at least 47 storm-related deaths. January 22, Central Peru. Flooding and mud slides after days of heavy rainfall leave at least 16 people dead and thousands homeless. January 25, Angola. The minister of the interior reports that a weeklong storm in the country has resulted in at least 71

15, Near Al-Irqah, Yemen.

Doctors Without Borders finds the bodies of 56 Africans who drowned when their boat capsized; they had been trying to escape from Somalia and Ethiopia; later a Somali diplomat in Yemen says that the death toll is believed to be about 180.

deaths, 65 of them in Luanda; thousands

have been rendered homeless. February 2, Central Florida. Thunderstorms and tornadoes leave at least 19 people dead and hundreds of homes destroyed. February 4, Indonesia. Flooding from heavy rain in the southern hills traps hundreds of people in Jakarta, leaving at least 44 people dead as some 340,000 are forced to flee the floodwaters that inundate 40-70% of the city. February 13, Mozambique. Relief officials report that unusually catastrophic flooding of the Zambezi River has forced more than 68,000 people to

Mining and Construction

March 19, Siberia. A methane explosion at the Ulyanovskaya coal mine in Novokuznetsk kills at least 108 workers, including the mine’s chief engineer, who was checking a hazard-monitoring system at the time; it later emerges that a device to detect methane had been deliberately disabled. April 16, China. An explosion at the Wangzhuang coal mine in Henan province traps 33 miners underground, Pham Thi Binh—Vietnam News Agency/AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Colom.

have been burned.

in Yemen report that a boat had attempted to carry 126 refugees from Somalia across the Gulf of Aden and that 80 of them had drowned.

58

13, Suárez,

worst fire conditions ever; thus far close to 1 million ha (2.5 million ac)

November 30, Gulf of Aden. Officials

December

October

Disasters Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP

evacuate and has left at least 20 people dead. February 25, Bolivia. It is reported that the worst flooding in 25 years has left at least 35 people dead and thousands of homes as well as crops and roads destroyed. March

1, U.S. A large storm

system

spawns tornadoes that leave at least 20 people in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida dead, among them 8 students at a high school in Enterprise, Ala., who are killed when the roof collapses. March 6, Indonesia. Two earthquakes,

the first of magnitude 6.3 and the second, two hours later, of magnitude 6.1, occur near Solok, on Sumatra; at least

52 people perish. March

20,

Kashmir. landslides killed at vivors of 2005 live

Pakistani-administered

Pakistani officials report that caused by heavy rains have least 16 people; many surthe earthquake of October in temporary shelters in the

region.

April 2, Solomon Islands. An earthquake of magnitude 8.1 occurs well below the seafloor, triggering a tsunami that damages property in the towns of Gizo and Munda and inundates several villages; at least 52 people lose their lives. May 4, Greensburg, Kan. The town is demolished by an exceptionally large tornado; 10 people die, and at least 63 are injured. May 11, Uttar Pradesh, India. A storm

causes the collapse of buildings in the town of Sultanpur, crushing 24 people, while 3 others are killed by lightning in Pratapgarh. June 6, Oman.

Cyclone Gonu passes

down the coast, forcing evacuations and shutting down oil installations; at least 32 people are killed, and some 30 are missing. June 10, Southern China. Officials in

China report that days of torrential rain produced flooding in which at least 66 people died. June 11, Bangladesh. Mud slides caused by heavy rains leave some 119 people dead in Chittagong; elsewhere in the area rain and lightning kill about 16 people. June

24, Karachi,

Pak.

A provincial

health minister reports that unusually strong monsoon storms have caused the deaths of 228 people as well as flooding and extensive power failures. June 25, India. On the third day of monsoon rains, at least 147 people have lost their lives: some 41 in Andhra Pradesh, 52 in Kerala, 39 in Karnataka,

and 15 in Maharashtra.

A man sells guavas in the flooded village of Balrampur in northern India, where August monsoon rains left hundreds dead. June 26, Europe. It is reported that a heat wave with temperatures as high as 46 °C (115 °F) has caused the deaths of

23 people in Romania, 7 people in Serbia, and 5 people in Greece; numerous wildfires in Greece and Italy are also blamed

on the heat; later a death toll

of 42 people in Italy and the Balkans is reported. July 8, India. Government officials say the death toll from monsoon rains throughout the country has reached 660; hardest hit has been Maharashtra state.

July 20, Northwestern Pakistan. Landslides resulting from heavy rains leave more than 80 people dead in Dirbala district. July 23, Indonesia. Officials say flash floods and landslides that have inundated villages have left at least 30 people dead. July 25, Romania. Authorities report that an unremitting heat wave in southeastern Europe has killed 33 people in the country. July 30, China. The Xinhua news agency reports that unusually bad flooding from rain over the past few weeks has left some 650 people dead, including 17 in the past two days. July 30, South Africa. The government reports that wildfires in the grasslands have killed at least 19 people, 5 of them firefighters. August 3, Northern India and Bangladesh. The death toll from flood-

ing in monsoon rains in the past few days rises to 186. August 8, India. Flooding in Gujarat state reaches such a state that army personnel and helicopters are pressed into service to rescue and relocate people; so far this season some 290 people have died in flooding in the state. August 15, Pisco, Peru. The city is destroyed by an offshore earthquake of magnitude 8.0 that leaves at least 540 people dead and some 85,000 in need of shelter. August 16, North Korea. After receiving permission from North Korea to examine flood-stricken regions after torrential rains, UN officials report 83 people dead and 60 missing as well as the destruction of 58,000 homes and 90,000 ha (222,400 ac) of farmland. August 16, Japan. The temperature in

the cities

of Tajimi

and

Kumagaya

reaches 40.9 °C (105.6 °F), the highest

temperature ever recorded in Japan; at least 13 people have died because of the heat wave. August 17, Nepal. The Nepal Red Cross Society reports that recent flooding and landslides in several districts have left at least 143 people dead and 19,353 families displaced. August 20, U.S. Authorities report that two violent storm systems, one in the upper Mississippi River states and one in

Texas, have left at least 20 people dead. August 23, Mexico. The remnants of Hurricane Dean cause 8 deaths, bring59

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Disasters

ing the death toll from the storm in the Caribbean and Mexico to 25. August 24, Greece. With high winds and high temperatures fueling them, dozens of wildfires have killed at least 15 people; by the time firefighters gain control over the flames on August 29, the death toll has risen to at least 64. August 28, China. The minister of water resources reports that in spite of unusual extremes of weather in the country, the death toll (1,138) this year from floods is lower than last year's by nearly half because of better handling of disasters. September

Felix Cabezas

4, Nicaragua.

makes as

landfall

a category

Hurricane

near 5 storm;

Puerto more

than 100 people are killed, and a further 150 are missing, with incalculable damage to buildings and farmland in both Nicaragua and Honduras. September 6, Southern California. A week of unusually high temperatures comes to an end; some 20 people are believed to have perished in the heat wave. September 26, Southern Asia. Health officials say that since July more than 2,000 people have died in northeastern and eastern India and Bangladesh as a result of flooding. October 3, Vietnam. Typhoon Lekima makes landfall, causing flooding and damage and leaving at least 32 people dead. October 9, Africa. Agence FrancePresse reports that over the past two months, flooding in much of the continent from unusually heavy summer rains has left at least 300 people dead. November

1, Caribbean.

killing some 30 people; a few additional people are also killed by the landslide. December 11, Dominican Republic. Tropical Storm Olga makes landfall, causing flooding and leaving at least 25 people dead, most killed by a release of water from a dam on the Yaque River that officials feared would otherwise collapse. December 11, U.S. Freezing rain from a storm that began as an ice storm in Oklahoma and Kansas hits Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois; a total of 20 deaths, most in Oklahoma and Kansas, are attributed to the weather

conditions. December

24, U.S.

port that a storm

State

officials re-

involving

past two days left many holiday travelers stranded throughout the Midwest; at least 19 people died in weatherrelated

traffic

accidents

Kansas,

Minnesota,

Texas,

in Indiana, Wisconsin,

and Wyoming. French firemen study the wreckage of a bus that went off the road and caught fire near Vizille, France, on July 22. The bus was carrying Polish pilgrims, 26 of whom died, from a visit to a shrine.

of

Australia.

A truck

crashes into a Melbourne-bound passenger train at a crossing near Kerang; at least 11 train passengers are killed. July 16, Near Lviv, Ukr. A train carrying phosphorous from Kazakhstan to

October 6, Cuba.

A bus

and a

train

collide in a small town in Granma province; at least 28 people are killed. December 18, Pakistan. An express train traveling from Karachi to Lahore derails near Mehrabpur; at least 50 people lose their lives.

games in Florida misses a turn on an elevated exit ramp and drives off an overpass onto the highway below; two bus drivers and four baseball players are killed. March 6, Zimbabwe.

A bus is struck

by a freight train at a crossing; 27 people on the bus, including the driver, perish. March 12, Uttarakhand state, India. A

road caves in after heavy rains, plunging a bus carrying wedding guests some

in

180 m (60 ft) into a ravine; at least 18

people aboard are killed. Jean-Pierre Clatot—AFP/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

5, Victoria,

Bluffton (Ohio) University to a series of

the region of the Three Gorges Dam in China sweeps away a passenger bus, 60

June

at least 40 of the passengers die. March 2, Atlanta. A bus carrying members of the baseball team of

of thousands of residents have been displaced by the flooding. November 6, Vietnam. Officials report that flooding in the past week in the central region has left at least 67 people dead. November 15, Bangladesh. Cyclone Sidr lays waste to much of the southwestern coastal area of Bangladesh; some 5,000 people perish. A landslide

Railroad February 14, Mokambo, Dem. Rep. of the Congo. A train accident in Katanga province leaves 22 people dead, 7 of them Zambian.

market, and the truck goes into a ditch;

as much as 2.13 m (7 ft) of water; tens

21, China.

Karanganyar district.

Traffic January 6, Comilla, Bangladesh. A speeding bus attempting to pass another vehicle goes off the road and catches fire; at least 40 passengers are burned to death. February 2, Indian-administered Kashmir. A minibus falls into a gorge near Dabhar, killing at least 18 people. February 25, Northwestern Nigeria. A tire bursts on a truck carrying traders and domestic animals from a local

Tabasco suffers flooding, with some 80% of the city of Villahermosa under

November

after heavy rains on the island of Java bury 80 or more people, at least 61 of them attending a dinner party in the

sultant cloud of toxic gas poisons at least 20 people and requires the evacuation of some 800 nearby residents. August 1, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The brakes fail on a freight train near Benaleka, and eight cars derail; about 100 people are reported to have perished.

After devas-

of the state

Landslides

rain, snow, and high winds has over the

from the storm reaches 124. November 3, Mexico. After five days of much

Indonesia.

Poland derails and catches fire; the re-

hamas and Cuba; the overall death toll

rainfall,

26,

freezing

tating the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Tropical Storm Noel brings torrential rains and flooding to The Ba-

record

December

Disasters

March 20, Koudou,

Guinea.

A

swerves to try to avoid an accident, and the vehicle falls into a

truck carrying traders to a market goes off a bridge into a lake; 65 passengers die. April 18, Egypt. On the highway between Cairo and Assuit, a truck trying to pass another vehicle collides head-on with a

canal that runs alongside the Nile River; 17 passengers and the drivers of both vehicles are killed.

Miscellaneous February 26, Punjab province, Pakistan. At the end of the annual two-day kite festival, 11 people have been killed—2 of them cut by sharpened kite strings, 5 hit by celebratory gunfire, 2 electrocuted by kites tangled in power lines, and 2 fallen off roofs.

school bus; at least 18 students

are killed. April 24, Indian-administered Kashmir. An overloaded minibus goes off the road at a curve near Kalai and falls down

a hillside;

at least 30 of the passengers die. May 2, Himachal Pradesh state,

India. A bus leaves the road and tumbles into a deep gorge near Kothkhai, possibly because of mechanical

failure;

at least

April

22

buses

are

in-

volved in a traffic accident, and one of them catches fire; at least

25 people are killed. May

21,

China.

Liaoning

province,

A three-wheeled

vehicle

towing a trailer carrying women

returning home after a day spent picking herbs overturns on a mountain

road;

20

women

Rescuers look for victims and survivors in the debris of a 12-story apartment building that collapsed in Alexandria, Egypt, on December 24, killing at least 26 residents.

Eloxochitlán, killing all aboard; 32 bod-

ies are recovered, but it is thought that the number killed is between 40 and 50. July 22, France. Near the village of Vizille, a bus carrying Polish pilgrims from the shrine of Notre-Dame-de-laSalette in the French Alps goes off the road, hitting a river bank and catching fire; 26 passengers are killed. 1, Minnesota.

During

the

evening rush hour, the I-35 W bridge over the Mississippi River between St. Paul and Minneapolis suddenly collapses; at least 50 vehicles fall into the river, and 13 people are killed. August 27, Uganda. In the village of Kapchogo, a truck transporting army members and their families veers into a concrete barrier on the side of the road; 72 people perish. September 7, Rajasthan state, India. Near the village of Desuri Ki Naal, a truck loaded with pilgrims falls from the road into a gorge; at least 72 of those aboard perish.

workers die. July 19, Mumbai (Bombay), India. A seven-story residential building that also houses stores and a clinic collapses; at least 26 people are crushed, and several others are believed to be trapped in the rubble. August 19, Shandong province, China. At an aluminum plant a container spills molten aluminum, blowing the roof off the factory and killing at least 14 workers. September 21, Karachi, Pak. Po-

September 15, Mexico. A bus carrying tourists from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara goes off a mountain road into a ravine, killing at least 18 of the 35 passengers; most of the passengers had arrived on a flight from Phoenix that had been deflected to Puerto Vallarta from Guadalajara. September 24, Afghanistan. In Ghazni province, two passenger buses collide head-on; at least 40 people are killed. October 10, Brazil. A truck attempting to pass another truck on a mountainous curve hits a bus head-on, killing six passengers and the truck driver; after

lice report that at least 22 people have died and many more made ill as a result of drinking illegally brewed alcoholic beverages. October 3, India. Two trains carrying thousands of women on a pilgrimage to Varanasi arrive at the railway station in Mughalsarai, where confusion results in a stampede in which at least 15 women are trampled to death. October 23, Gulf of Mexico. During a storm, high winds and large waves throw the Usumacinta drilling rig belonging to Pemex, the Mexican state oil company, into an adjacent oil platform, causing leaks of crude oil and natural gas; workers take to the sea in lifeboats

rescue

truck

to avoid suffocation, but at least 21 are

going down the hill plows into the accident scene, killing at least 21 of those

killed. December 24, Alexandria, Egypt. A 12story apartment building collapses, killing at least 26 residents; the structure had been built more than 25 years earlier without a permit. December 26, Nepal. A footbridge over the Bheri River collapses as hundreds of people cross on their way to a fair; some 100 people are believed to have fallen into the icy river.

are

killed. July 4, Mexico. An avalanche of mud and rocks buries a bus traveling near

August

province,

steel across the floor; at least 32

May 13, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

passenger

Liaoning

China. In a metal factory, a huge ladle breaks, spilling molten

passengers perish. May 7, Lesotho. Near the village of Haramarupi, a speeding bus carrying workers from a textile factory collides with a truck; at least 45 people are killed. Three

18,

workers

arrive,

another

present.

October 29, Ogun state, Nigeria. A fuel truck overturns and ignites; three commuter buses and four cars are engulfed in the flames, and at least 30 people are incinerated. December 31, Beni Mzar, Egypt. When the driver of a pickup truck tries to pass a passenger bus, the bus driver

61

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

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Nobel Prizes Nobels in 2007 were AWARDED to a former U.S. VICE PRESIDENT (and a UN agency); to a British writer whose works

CHRONICLED the social and political UPHEAVALS of the 20th century; to scientists for work on surface chemical REACTIONS, electrical RESISTANCE related to MAGNETISM, and targeted genetic ALTERATIONS in mice; and to economists who

formulated mechanism design theory.

PRIZE FOR PEACE he Nobel Prize for Peace was shared in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an in-

ternational some

organization

of

2,000 scientists, and by Al Gore,

in which the emission of greenhouse gases and other harmful activities might be controlled. In addition, the IPCC maintained the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. The IPCC regularly published reports, and it provided comprehensive assessments

former vice president of the U.S. and of its findings in 1990, 1995, 2001, and long an advocate for better stewardship 2007. of the environment. In announcing the Albert Arnold Gore, Jr, was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said that climate change could have the son of a U.S. representative and far-reaching consequences, including senator from Tennessee. He received a B.A. degree (1969) from Harvard Uni“increased danger of violent conflicts and wars.” The committee cited the reversity and from 1969 to 1971 served in cipients’ “efforts to build up and disthe U.S. Army in Vietnam as a military seminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, Al Gore and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations

Environment

reporter. From

reporter for the Nashville Tennessean and studied philosophy and law at Vanderbilt University. He was elected in 1976 to the first of four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was elected in 1984 to the Senate and reelected in 1990. During his years in Congress, he gained a reputation for knowledge of foreign affairs, technology, and environmental issues. His book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit was published in 1992. That same year he was chosen by Bill Clinton as his vice presidential running mate, and Gore served as vice president from 1993 to 2001. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 2000, and although he won a majority of the popular vote, he lost the election to George W. Bush in the electoral college. Following his defeat, Gore taught and renewed his attention to environmental problems. His 2006 film An

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Inconvenient

Truth

won

the 2007

Academy Award as the best featurelength documentary. In announcing the Nobel award, the committee

said that

Gore's "strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change." Although he was derided by the political right and sometimes criticized for his alarmist approach, the committee praised Gore as "probably the single individual who has

Pro-

gramme to study the science of climate change, along with the impact on humans and ways of reducing and coping with such change. The Nobel committee said that “the IPCC has created an everbroader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” The IPCC did not itself conduct research but rather reviewed the published work of scientists in the field. It had three sections—one to examine climate and climate change, another to study the social and economic effects of such change and methods of adapting to it, and a third to analyze ways 64

1971 to 1976 he was a

done

most

to

create

greater

worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." (ROBERT RAUCH)

PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS In 2007

the Nobel

Memorial

Prize in Economic Sciences was

awarded equally to Polish American Leonid Hurwicz and Americans Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson for the initiation and development of mechanism design theory a branch of game theory that allows people to distinguish those situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. The tools the three men developed enabled economists to determine which institutions, or allocation © Eric Lee/Paramount Classics, a division of Paramount Pictures; all rights reserved.

mechanisms,

are

most

Nobel Prizes

appropriate for minimizing the economic losses generated by private information. The theory also explained why there is often not a good market solution to the problem of providing public goods in situations in which the consumption by one person does not prejudice consumption by another (as in the case of television programs). Their work provided a better understanding of why centrally planned economic systems often fail. Mechanism design also was able to find, or create,

alternatives to a competitive market system when action was required for the greater public good. Hurwicz

originated

(1960)

mech-

anism design theory, defining it as a game in which the players send messages to each other or to a central

message

centre.

anism design theory frequently specifies the type of auction that will yield the most revenue for the seller. In 1979

bridge, he served on the economics faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977-84) and Harvard

Myerson, Maskin, and others extended

(1985-2000).

the revelation principle and pioneered its application to specific economic problems, including auctions. Hurwicz, the oldest person ever to receive a Nobel Prize, was born on Aug.

Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Ad-

21, 1917, in Moscow,

but in 1919 his

family returned to their native Poland. He was educated at the University of Warsaw (LL.M., 1938) and at the London School of Economics, where he at-

tended courses taught by Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor. In 1939 Hurwicz’s studies at the Graduate

AP

At

the same time, a previously specified rule to every collection of messages assigns an outcome, such as an allocation of goods and services. On the basis of assumptions about the participants’ preferences, each rule induces at least one predicted outcome

(equilibrium),

(direct

named

the

vanced Study, Princeton, N.J., in 2000.

Myerson

was

born

on

March

29,

1951, in Boston and met Maskin while attending Harvard (B.A., M.S., 1973; Ph.D, 1976). From 1976 to 2001 he was

on the faculty of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., in the Kellogg School's managerial economics and decision sciences department, where much of his Nobel-winning research was carried out. In 2001 he became professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where in 2007 he was made the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor. Myerson was the author of two books, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (1991) and Probability Models for Economic

PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

and this

mechanisms),

was

Decisions (2005). (JANET H. CLARK)

enables the outcomes of markets or marketlike institutions to be compared with those of alternative trading institutions. In 1972 Hurwicz introduced the concept of incentive compatibility, which was integral to fostering later developments. Maskin helped to broaden the scope of mechanism design by Doris developing (1977) a concept known as implementation theory. While the revelation principle (formulated in 1973 by philosopher Allan Gibbard) simplified the analysis of mechanism design by allowing the researcher to isolate small subclasses of mechanisms

Maskin

a

significant problem remained. In many cases one equilibrium might offer the best outcome within a mechanism, but

there could be other, inferior equilibria if, say, the parties involved were not totally honest about the information that they held. To overcome this, incentives could ensure that each party achieved its objective by being honest. Myerson discovered a fundamental connection between the allocation of resources to be implemented and the monetary transfers required to persuade participants to disclose their information honestly. His revenue equivalence theorem was adopted widely in the design of auctions, in which mech-

Lessing

Institute of International Studies in Geneva were aborted because of World War II, and a year later he immigrated to the U.S., where he completed his studies at the University of Chicago and at Harvard

University.

From

1942

to

1944 he taught meteorology at the University of Chicago; he also became a researcher there with the Cowles Commission. In addition, Hurwicz served as

a consultant Forces

to the U.S.

(1944-45)

and

Army

later

Air

to

the

RAND Corporation. He joined (1951) the School of Business at the University of Minnesota as a professor of economics and mathematics and in 1969 was awarded its highest faculty honour, Regents professor (emeritus from 1988). Maskin was born on Dec. 12, 1950, in

New

York City and was

educated

at

Harvard (B.A., 1972; M.A., 1974; Ph.D., 1976). After a year (1976-77) as a re-

search fellow at Jesus

College,

Cam-

The 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Doris Lessing, an author whose literary career of more than 50 years was marked by imaginative resilience and introspection. The Swedish Academy's citation extolled her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” Lessing became the 11th woman to be named a Nobel laureate in literature, and she earned the

distinction of becoming the first British woman to be so honoured. Emerging in the post-World War II era as a distinct and prophetic voice within contemporary fiction, Lessing gained an international reputation beginning in the mid1950s as a writer of vibrant reflection and inventiveness on a broad spectrum of thematic issues, ranging from racial tension and prejudice, left-wing politics, feminism, and sexuality to psychoanalytic theory, mysticism, fantasy, and global terrorism. Known primarily as a novelist and short-story writer, Lessing was also an accomplished dramatist, poet, librettist, and essayist.

In addition, she produced two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), which received the James Tate

Black Memorial Prize, and Walking in the Shade (1997). 65

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nobel Prizes

Lessing was born Doris May Tayler to British parents on Oct. 22, 1919, in Kermanshah, Persia (now Bakhtaran,

Iran). As a child she immigrated with her family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she lived an isolated

existence on a farm near the border with Mozambique. Largely self-educated, she attended a convent boarding school and later a school for girls in Salisbury (now Harare), ending her formal education at age 14. Determined to escape the loneliness and confinement of her upbringing, she left home while still a teenager to live on her own in Salisbury, earning her livelihood in various capacities as an office worker and typist. Her short-lived first marriage, which produced two children, ended in divorce, and in 1945 she married Gott-

fried

Lessing,

a German

émigré

to

Southern Rhodesia, with whom she had a son, Peter. In 1949, with the fail-

ure of her second marriage, she immigrated with Peter to England, and in the following year she made her debut as a novelist with the publication of The Grass Is Singing, which was praised for its vivid depiction of colonial Rhodesian society and as a candid exposé of apartheid. Throughout her career, Lessing was intensely committed to social and political responsibility, and she was a member

(1952-56)

of the

British

fiction with novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by the psychoanalytic theory of R.D. Laing; The Summer Before the Dark (1973); and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). During this time she also em-

braced the ideology of Sufism and especially the writings of the Indian-born mystic Idries Shah; the latter altered her worldview as well as her artistic sensibility. From 1979 to 1983 she produced a five-volume science-fiction series under the collective title Canopus in Argos; this was followed by The Diary ofa Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could. . . (1984), both written under the pseudonym Jane Somers. Later fiction included The Good Terrorist (1985), Love, Again (1996), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005), and The Cleft (2007). Notable works

tion included African Laughter (1992), a bittersweet account of revisiting independent Zimbabwe; A Small Personal Voice (1994); and Time Bites (2004).

(STEVEN R. SERAFIN)

Chiefs Country

(1951), was fol-

lowed by Martha Quest, the inau-

gural novel of a five-volume semiautobiographical sequence that came to be known as the Children of Violence series (1952-69). Less-

ing further enhanced her reputation with the publication in 1962 of her postmodern novel The Golden Notebook, a complex and disjointed narrative of analytic progression in which a female protagonist

endures

an

intense

psychological and emotional struggle to regain a sense of fulfillment and self-worth. In the 1970s and ’80s, Lessing turned to more-experimental 66

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Ertl was born Bad Cannstadt,

on Oct. 10, 1936, in Ger He received an

M.A. (1961) in physics at the Technical University of Stuttgart (now Stuttgart University) and a Ph.D. (1965) in physical chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. He was professor and director of the physical chemistry department at the Technical University of Hannover from 1968 to 1973 and at the Ludwig Maximilian University (University of Munich) from 1973 to 1986. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was also a visiting professor at several universities in the United States. In 1986 Ertl joined the Fritz Haber Institute, and he served as director of the

department of physical chemistry until 2004, when he was named professor emeritus.

When Ertl started his investigation of

PRIZE FOR CHEMISTRY The 2007 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to German chemist Gerhard Ertl, professor emeritus of physical chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, for work that explained in detail how

Communist Party. Openly opposed to the racist policies of the repressive South African government, Lessing was declared a “prohibited alien” in 1956 and in that same year Gerhard Ertl was banned from her former homeland. Influenced by 19th-century literary realism, Lessing placed her early fiction in an African setting as a means of self-projection and exploration. Her first collection of short stories, This Was the Old

of nonfic-

gas molecules react on solid surfaces. As common as the rusting of iron, surface chemical reactions were important in industrial chemistry (such as in the production of fertilizer from nitrogen) and in everyday use (such as in the oxidation of carbon monoxide in a car's catalytic converter).

surface

chemical

reactions,

little was

known about how they took place. Their study was difficult because the presence of air or of small amounts of impurities could interfere with the results. Ertl was able to overcome these limitations by making use of newly developed high-vacuum technology. He then made fundamental contributions to the study of surface chemistry by applying modern — analytic techniques, including a variety of spectroscopic techniques such as Auger electron spectroscopy

and Fourier-trans-

form infrared spectroscopy. By using multiple techniques to examine a surface and get results that he could reliably interpret, Ertl was able to determine the individual steps by which atoms and molecules of gases interact with a solid surface and the way they then react with each other on the surface. Among the applications of Ertl’s work was the development of processes used to create electronic components

from semiconductor materials and to make catalytic surfaces for producing renewable fuels such as hydrogen. One of the early studies that Ertl made of surface reactions concerned the Haber-Bosch process. In this process nitrogen

Nobel Prizes

gas (N,) and hydrogen gas (H,) react in the presence of an iron catalyst to produce

ammonia

(NH,).

Introduced

in

the early 20th century, the Haber-Bosch process soon became commercially important as a way of using nitrogen gas

from the atmosphere to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer for crops. Until Ertl’s research, beginning in the 1970s,

chemists

were

uncertain

how

the process worked, however. In particular, they did not know at what point in the process the strong triple bond was broken between the two nitrogen atoms that form a molecule of nitrogen gas. Using several spectroscopic techniques to identify the atoms and molecules on the iron surface, Ertl showed

that nitrogen molecules were broken apart into atoms on the catalyst surface once the molecules had been adsorbed (become attached) to it. Hydrogen molecules were also broken apart into atoms on the catalyst surface. One by one, three adsorbed hydrogen atoms then joined with an adsorbed nitrogen atom

to form ammonia.

Among other processes that Ertl examined was one that takes place in a vehicle’s catalytic converter to make the vehicle’s exhaust less toxic. In the catalytic converter a platinum catalyst helps oxidize carbon monoxide (CO) to carbon dioxide (CO,). (Carbon monox-

ide in the exhaust is produced through the inefficient burning of gasoline or other fossil fuel in the engine.) The chemical reaction on the platinum surface proved far more complicated to study than the HaberBosch process. Unlike the Haber-Bosch process, the overall reaction was affected by how the molecules covered the metal surface, and the reaction could be chaotic

and was irreversible. Ertl creatively used a new set of spectroscopic methods in a number of investigations (beginning in the 1980s) to observe and describe the complexities of the catalytic reactions. When Ertl received the call from Stockholm that he had won the Nobel Prize it was, coincidentally, his 71st birthday. He told reporters that the prize was “the best birthday present that you can give to somebody.” (SARAH WEBB)

PRIZE FOR PHYSICS The 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to French physicist Albert Fert and Czech-born German physicist Peter Griinberg. The two scientists led research groups that independently

discovered the phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR), in which weak changes in a magnetic field strongly affect electrical resistance. The discovery quickly revolutionized the technology of magnetic storage in devices such as computer hard-disk drives, and it opened the door to a new field of solid-state science. Fert was born on March Carcassonne,

masters

France.

7, 1938, in

He

received

degrees (1962) in mathemat-

ics and physics from the École Normale

Supérieure,

Paris, and a doctor-

ate (1970) in physical sciences from the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay, France) for studies on the transport properties of nickel and iron. Fert became an assistant professor at the university in 1964 and a professor of physics in 1976. He led the university's condensed-matter physics laboratory from

1970

until

1995,

when

he be-

came scientific director of the Joint Physics Unit, a research facility operated at the university in association with the French National Center for Scientific

Research

(CNRS)

and

the

technology firm Thales (then known as Thomson-CSF).

Fert became

a mem-

ber of the French Academy of Sciences in 2004 and was a recipient of the 2003 Gold Medal of the CNRS among many other awards. Peter Andreas Grünberg was born on May

18, 1939,

in Plzen,

Czech.

(now

Czech Republic). He studied physics at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt

am

Main,

Ger, and then at

Darmstadt University of Technology, where he received a masters degree (1966) and doctorate (1969). In 1972 he

became a research scientist at the Institute of Solid State Research of the Helmoltz Association's Research Centre Jülich (Ger). Although he officially retired from the institute in 2004, he con-

tinued working. Grünberg was the recipient of many awards, including the 2007 Stern Gerlach Medal of the German Physics Society, and in 2003 he became an external scientific member of the Max Planck Society. The fact that the resistance of an electrical conductor can be altered by an external magnetic field, a phenomenon called magnetoresistance, was observed in 1857 by English physicist William Thomson

(Lord

Kelvin),

who

that the electrical resistance

noted

of ferro-

magnetic metals, such as iron, cobalt,

few percent. Nevertheless, magnetoresistance was important technologically, particularly in iron-nickel sensor units for reading magnetic media such as magnetic disks in early computer hard drives. In 1988 the research groups led by Fert and Grünberg independently discovered materials that showed a magnetoresistive effect that was dramatically greater than ordinary magnetoresistance—by as much as an order of magnitude. They detected this giant magnetoresistance (a term coined by Fert) in materials in which a layer of a nonmagnetic metal that was only nanometres thick (just a few layers of atoms) was sandwiched between layers of a ferromagnetic metal. Both research groups studied GMR in materials with an iron-chromium-iron construction. Grünbergs group used a three-layer system, whereas Fert used a multilayer system with up to 60 alternating layers. GMR very quickly became the subject of a major international research effort because of its numerous potential applications, and the technology became widely adopted. The increased sensitivity of GMR made possible the construction of much smaller magnetic readout heads in computer hard drives, and as a result the amount of magnetic data that could be stored per unit area of a magnetic disk greatly increased. In addition,

GMR

found use in such de-

vices as solid-state compasses, nonvolatile magnetic memory, and landmine detectors. The discovery of GMR also helped lead to a whole new field of science called spintronics, or magnetoelectronics. Spintronics depends on the manipulation of two fundamental properties of the electron—its charge and its spin. Because electron spins are quantized and can take only one of two values, it was possible to envisage spintronic devices of nanometre dimensions in which the spin of an individual electron could be used to store a binary digit. GMR was a fascinating example of a fundamental scientific discovery that very quickly gave rise to new technologies, new commercial products, and new fields of science to explore.

(DAVID G.C. JONES)

PRIZE FOR PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE

and nickel, was affected by the direction of the magnetic field relative to the

The 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three sci-

current. In general, the effect is small,

entists—two

with changes of the order of at most a

Briton—for

Americans

their

and

one

development

of a 67

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nobel Prizes Cardiff University

m

AP

ON LEN On

at

9-1.

a>.

ES

c

Mario R. Capecchi

Sir Martin J. Evans

Oliver Smithies

technique for introducing modified genes into mice. The technique, which involved introducing a gene that

ceived an M.A. (1966) in biochemistry

and

recombination. Their early efforts were limited to working with cultured cells.

and devel-

Evans, meanwhile, worked with mouse

“knocks out” (replaces) a mouse’s own

opmental biology from University College, London. Evans taught at University College until 1978, when he joined the genetics research faculty at Cambridge. In 1999 Evans became a professor of molecular genetics at Cardiff University, where he also directed the School of Biosciences. Evans was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1993 and was knighted in 2004.

version of a targeted gene, became extremely useful in genetic research as a way of finding out what specific genes do. Sharing the prize equally were Mario R. Capecchi, professor of human genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine; Sir Martin J. Evans, director of the School of Bio-

sciences and professor of mammalian genetics at Cardiff (Wales) University; and Oliver Smithies, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the School of Medicine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Capecchi was born on Oct. 6, 1937, in

Verona, Italy. During World War I, when he was only four years old, his mother was arrested and taken to the Dachau

many.

concentration

Capecchi

had

camp

in Ger-

to live on

the

streets. Soon after the war, he and his

mother were reunited and moved to the United States. Capecchi received a Ph.D. (1967) in biophysics from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard Medical

School

from

1969

to

1973,

when he joined the faculty at the University of Utah as a professor of biology. In 1982 he also joined the faculty of the university's School of Medicine. Capecchi was appointed as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Maryland,

in 1988,

and he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1991. Evans

Stroud,

was

born

on Jan.

Gloucestershire,

68

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1, 1941,

Eng.

He

in

re-

from Christ’s College, Cambridge, a Ph.D. (1969) in anatomy

Smithies was born on June 23, 1925, in Halifax, Yorkshire, Eng. He earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. (both 1951) in

biochemistry from Balliol College, Oxford. He moved to the United States in 1960 and joined the genetics faculty at the University of Wisconsin. After he became

a naturalized

U.S. citizen,

he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine in 1988, where he held an appointment in pathology and laboratory medicine. Smithies was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1971.

Working independently to find a way to modify genes in mammals, Capecchi and Smithies sought to manipulate a natural mechanism, called homologous recombination, in which genes are exchanged between paired chromosomes during the division of sex cells (meiosis). Capecchi showed that DNA that was introduced into the reproductive cell of a mammal could recombine with native

chromosomes

in the cell, and

Smithies demonstrated that any gene could potentially be targeted with such

embryos to isolate and study embryonic stem cells—undifferentiated cells of an embryo that have the potential to develop into any cell type. The three scientists later collaborated to use their findings to develop gene targeting. In this technique a gene is introduced into embryonic stem cells in culture and undergoes recombination. The genetically modified cells are inserted into mouse embryos, which develop into chimeric

mice—that

is, mice

that are

composed partly of their own cells and partly of cells derived from the introduced modified stem cells. The mice are then crossbred to produce a line of mice whose genetic makeup corresponds to that of the introduced stem cells. Initially skeptical about the feasibility of developing the technique, the scientific community quickly embraced gene targeting once the first results were published in the late 1980s. Gene targeting and knockout mice revolutionized biomedical research, with applications that eventually appeared in almost every area of biomedicine, from research to clinical therapy. It allowed scientists to understand the roles of genes in organ development and was applied to the development of mouse models for human diseases such as cystic fibrosis and thalassemia. The combined work of the trio was previously honoured with the 2001 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. (LINDA BERRIS)

Biographies The SUBJECTS of these biographies are the people who in the editors’ opinions captured the IMAGINATION of the world in 2007—the most INTERESTING and/or IMPORTANT PERSONALITIES

of the year.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (b. Sept. 15, 1977, Enugu, Nigeria) In 2007 Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for her second novel, Half ofa Yellow Sun (2006). The young novelist, who stated that she had been writing stories since she was old enough to spell, was no stranger to the awards podium, however. She had already collected a number of honours for her short stories, including an O.

left for the U.S., and she graduated (2001) summa

cum laude with a bach-

Akinola, Peter (b. Jan. 27, 1944, Abeokuta, Nigeria)

year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for

history at Yale University. In 1998 Adichie’s play For Love of Biafra was published in Nigeria. She later dismissed it as “an awfully melodramatic play,” but it was among the earliest works in which she explored the war in the late 1960s between Nigeria and its secessionist Biafra republic. She later wrote several short stories about

In 2007 Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria stirred up controversy when he created an American diocese to welcome discontented Episcopal parishes to a more conservative branch of the Anglican church. As primate of the Church of Nigeria, Akinola led the nearly 20 million members in the world's fastest-growing Anglican province, second in membership only to the 26-million-member Church of England; his church was a prominent example of the growth of Christianity in the “Global South” made up of Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Peter Jasper Akinola was four years

Best First Book (overall).

that conflict, which would become

old when

Early in life Adichie, the fifth of six children, moved with her parents to Nsukka, Nigeria. She was a voracious reader but found Things Fall Apart by fellow Igbo novelist Chinua Achebe transformative. After studying medi-

subject of Half ofa Yellow Sun. Adichie began writing Purple Hibiscus while a student at Eastern Connecticut. Set in Nigeria, it is the coming-of-age story of Kambili, a 15-year-old whose family is wealthy and well-respected but is terrorized by her fanatically religious father Besides winning Com-

Henry Prize in 2003 for The American

Embassy,

and her debut novel, Purple

Hibiscus

(2003),

Commonwealth

had

garnered

the

Writers’ Prize in 2005

for Best First Book

(Africa) and that

cine for a time in Nsukka, in 1997 she

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

elor’s degree in communication and political science from Eastern Connecticut State University. Splitting her time between Nigeria and the U.S., she later earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,

Md.,

and

studied

African

the

monwealth Prizes, the work was short-

listed for the 2004 Orange Prize. Half of a Yellow Sun was the result of four years of research and writing. It was built primarily on the experiences of her parents during the Nigeria-Biafra war. The result was an epic novel that vividly depicted the savagery of the war (which resulted in the displacement and deaths of perhaps a million people) but did so by focusing on a small group of characters, mostly middle-class Africans. Although Half of a Yellow Sun became an international best seller, Adichie told the BBC that its reception in Nigeria was es-

pecially important. Biafra “is a subject that we are not honest about,” she said

of her fellow Nigerians. “What I hope this book will do. . .is get us to examine our history and ask questions." For her next project, Adichie planned to explore the experience of Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. (J.E. LUEBERING)

his father died, and he was

sent to live with an uncle. He attended school from the ages of 10 to 16; his uncle then told him to leave school and learn a trade. After an apprenticeship in Lagos, Akinola became a successful furniture maker and patent-medicine seller, but he gave up the business to study for the priesthood. He was ordained a deacon in 1978 and a priest in

1979;

he

traveled

to

the

United

States, graduating in 1981 from the Virginia Theological Seminary with a masters degree. Upon his return to Nigeria, he served in the Abuja diocese, being consecrated as bishop in 1989. In 1998 he became archbishop in Islam-dominated northern Nigeria, and in 2000 he was elected primate of all Nigeria. Akinola drew international attention after V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in 2003 became the first openly gay Anglican bishop. The Nigerian primate said that the U.S. Episcopal Church had “chosen the path of deviation from the historic faith” and called homosexuality “an aberration unknown even in animal relationships.” Under Akinola's leadership the Nigerian church established the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) to

provide a way for congregations

that

Shaun Curry—AFP/Getty Images

69

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Grant Leighton

were alienated by the actions of the Episcopal Church to retain fellowship with the Anglican Communion. CANAs first missionary bishop, Martyn Minns of Virginia, was installed in May 2007 against the wishes of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Akinola also made news in 2006 when, as president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, he issued a statement

in response

to Muslim

Andsnes, Leif Ove

(b. April 7, 1970, Karmøy, Nor.) By 2007 it was clear that pianist Leif Ove Andsnes was practically a hero in Norway and effectively his country's musical ambassador to the world. In August he received the Peer Gynt Prize, awarded by the Norwegian Storting (parliament) to individuals in recognition of their contributions in politics, sports, and culture. All year Norwegians commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of their beloved composer Edvard Grieg. In concerts throughout the year, Andsnes featured Grieg's music, notably the challenging

riots ig-

nited by the printing in Danish newspapers of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. "May we at this stage remind our Muslim brothers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation," the archbishop said. Archbishop Williams argued that the Nigerian meant to issue a warning, not a threat. In 2004, however, Akinola

had refused to condemn the retaliatory killings of 700 Muslims following the deaths of 75 Christians in sectarian violence.

(DARRELL J. TURNER)

Alsop, Marin (b. Oct. 16, 1956, New York, N.Y.)

American

conductor

Marin

Alsop

trained in the U.S., but the success

her international career, Europe, where she led a chestras in Britain and nent, helped propel her

of

particularly in number of oron the Contito the post of

music director of the Baltimore

(Md.)

Symphony Orchestra beginning with the 2007-08 season. She became the first woman to lead an American orchestra of this size and prominence. Alsop was the daughter of musicians and studied piano and violin as a child. By the age of nine, when she heard Leonard Bernstein lead the New York Philharmonic,

she

knew

that

she

wanted to be a conductor. She entered Yale University in 1972 but in 1975 transferred to the Juilliard School in New York City where she received bachelors

(1977)

and

masters

(1978)

degrees in violin performance. Working as a freelance violinist in New York City, she began to study conducting in 1979. Alsop formed the jazz group

Ballade in G Minor, with which, the pi-

anist American conductor Marin Alsop

sic in Santa

she assumed that post at the Colorado Symphony in Denver. She also held various positions with other orchestras. She became principal conductor in 2002 of the Bournemouth (Eng.) Symphony, with which she earned widespread notice, and in 2005 was appointed to the position in Baltimore. Alsop had a particular interest in American and contemporary music. In

2004 she conducted a revival of John Adams's Nixon in China with the Opera Theater of St. Louis (Mo.) and a semi-

staged performance of Bernstein's Candide with the New York Philharmonic. the orchestral works

of,

among others, the American composers Edward Joseph Collins and Samuel Barber. Alsop also garnered praise for her performances of the traditional, particularly Romantic, repertoire, including recordings of the works of Johannes Brahms with the London Philharmonic. In 2007 Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony, with Joshua Bell as soloist, released John Corigliano’s Red Violin Concerto. Alsop received many honours, among them the Stokowski Conducting Prize in

1988

and,

in

same

a

Leonard

everything from jazz to contemporary works. In 1988 she began conducting studies with Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa and won her first position with an or-

where in 1989 she won the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize. Gramophone magazine named her Artist of the Year in 2003; that year she also won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Conductor Award. In 2005 Alsop was named a

of the

Richmond (Va.) Symphony. The following year she became music director of the Eugene (Ore.) Symphony and of the Long

Island

(N.Y.)

Philharmonic.

In

1991 she became music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Mu70

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Tanglewood

fellowship

year,

String Fever (1981) and the Concordia Orchestra (1984), which performed

chestra, as associate conductor

Bernstein

the

(Mass.)

Music

to the Center,

MacArthur fellow, the first conductor to be accorded the honour, and received the Classical BRIT (British

Record Industry Trust) Female Artist of the Year Award.

he had

only recently

come to terms. Andsnes collaborated, moreover, in a yearlong Norwegian

Cruz, Calif., and in 1993

She recorded

claimed,

(ROBERT RAUCH)

Television project on Grieg’s life that culminated in a dramatic outdoor performance of the Ballade high in the Hardanger Mountains. Andsnes was the son of school music teachers. Though he studied piano, as a child he was more interested in playing in the school band and on the football (soccer) team

until at age

15 he

met Czech pianist Jiri Hlinka, who taught at the Bergen Conservatory. At age 16 Andsnes entered the conservatory and immersed himself in the study of his instrument. His reputation grew quickly and steadily; he won the German

Paul

Hindemith

Prize

in

1987,

both the Norwegian Music Critics’ Prize and the Robert Levin (Bergen International) Festival Prize in 1988, and the Grieg Prize in 1990. More recent

honours included being made Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 2002 and winning the Classical Brit Instrumentalist of the Year Award in both 2006 and 2007. Andsnes’s broad repertory included piano works of Norwegian composers (including little-known pieces); largescale concerti such as those of Johannes Brahms, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Bela Bartok,

and Witold

Lutoslawski;

other significant solo piano music; and chamber music, including collaborations with string players (such as German

violinist

Christian

Tetzlaff)

and

singers (such as British tenor Ian Bostridge). Critics and audiences appreciated the clarity and lyricism of his approach to music; he managed to be brilliant and self-effacing at the same time, according to the New York Times. Andsnes was a cofounder of and regular participant in the Risør Chamber Music Festival in eastern Norway, and in 2005 he became a pro-

Biographies Noah Berger

fessor at the Norwegian

Academy

of

found his niche as the host of Club Comedy, a radio show at Syosset High

Although Andsnes was honoured with a Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts

School, in which he interviewed estab-

Music, Oslo.

Award (1992), the quadrennial Gilmore Artist Award (1997), and four Grammy Award nominations, he was still better

known in Europe and Asia (especially Japan) than in the U.S. An extensive U.S. tour planned for 2008 seemed likely to raise his profile there. (CHARLES TRUMBULL)

lished professional comedians, including Garry Shandling, Steven Wright, and Jerry Seinfeld. Though he began working at the age of 16 as a dishwasher at a comedy club, he quickly launched his own stand-up act. After high-school graduation, Apatow enrolled in the screenwriting program at the University of Southern California. His tenure at USC lasted only about

Apatow, Judd

two

(b. Dec. 6, 1967, Syosset, N.Y.)

briefly to stand-up before becoming a joke writer for other comedians, notably Roseanne Barr. In his mid-20s Apatow worked as a producer on television programs for fellow comedians Ben Stiller and Shandling. In 1996 he rewrote the script for The Cable Guy, starring Jim Carrey, but his work for that film was uncredited. Apatow pursued but ultimately dropped a lawsuit to list his name as a screenwriter. Apatow went on to develop two critically acclaimed television series, Freaks

In 2007 director-writerproducer Judd Apatow became one of Hollywood's hottest providers of comedy entertainment with two films, Knocked Up and Superbad, which, including DVD

sales,

grossed nearly $400 million. Like much of his previous work, the movies drew heavily on his personal youthful experiences and featured unconventional protagonists played by largely unknown, average-looking male actors. In Knocked Up a 20-something slacker is forced to grow up after impregnating a beautiful, successful woman. Superbad featured a trio of teenage boys trying to seduce the girls of their dreams before they head off to college. The films’ combined success resurrected the Rrated sex comedy and firmly established Apatow’s reputation; for years his efforts had been critically regarded but underappreciated by broad audiences. Apatow was a self-described awkward, undersized child who was always picked last for school sports teams. He was deeply scarred as a youth by his parents’ divorce, and his anger over their breakup would become a recurring theme in his later work. Apatow

years,

however,

and

he returned

tablished in several fields of economic theory, including applied economics,

and Geeks and Undeclared, in 1999 and

macroeconomics,

2001, respectively. Though both shows were canceled after just one season, their young actors would become Apatow’s cinematic family, reappearing in his subsequent projects. In 2005 Apatow finally achieved unqualified suc-

When she completed her Ph.D. at age

cess when he wrote, directed, and pro-

nomics,

duced the surprise movie hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, starring Steve Carrell, an actor Apatow met while producing the 2004 film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. In 2007 Apatow was busy with the production of at least six films scheduled for release in 2008. (ETHAN MICHAELI)

science

Athey, Susan American filmmaker Judd Apatow

American economist Susan Athey

(b. Nov. 29, 1970, Boston, Mass.)

On April 20, 2007, Susan Athey of Harvard University became the first woman to win the John Bates Clark (JBC) medal, the American

Economic

Association award granted biennially to the best economist under the age of 40 working in the U.S. The citation noted Athey’s contribution to economic theory, empirical economics, and econometrics. In particular it recognized her research programs for their strong focus on the use of theory to understand economic problems in industrial organizations. The tools that Athey developed enabled the development of "more robust empirical results." In the academic

world,

economists

were

not

surprised by the award decision. Athey's reputation was already well es-

24,

a New

York

and

Times

econometrics.

headline

de-

scribed her as "The Top Draft Pick in Economics: A Professor-to-Be Coveted by Two Dozen Universities.” Susan Carleton Athey studied ecomathematics,

at Duke

and

University,

computer

Durham,

N.C. (B.A., 1991), and economics at the

Stanford University Graduate School of Business (Ph.D., 1995). She joined the

economics faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she later held (1997-2001)

the Castle Krob

Ca-

reer Development Chair. She returned to the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an associate professor of economics (2001-04) and then held the Holbrook Working Chair (2004-06). In

2006 Athey and her husband, econometrician Guido Imbens, accepted a joint offer from Harvard, where she worked as a professor of economics while rearing two young children. Although Athey’s work was extremely theoretical and complex, among other things it enabled economists to test their own predictions about how firms would behave in uncertain circumstances. Her “comparative statics” research into how economic variables alter when something in the environment changes identified the crucial economic assumptions on risk preferences and the nature of risk that allow a researcher to draw conclusions. Athey was affiliated with a firm that advised

Kevork Djansezian/AP

71

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Rick Rycroft/AP

governments

on

auction

design,

and

Australian Andrew Hughes. Qarase said that the bills would be put on hold and Hughes's appointment would be reviewed. Unimpressed, Bainimarama's troops effectively took over the reins of

much of her research was focused in this area, in which individuals, firms,

or governments actively specify and enforce the rules. From 1997 she was also associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

power on December 5. (MORGAN TUIMALEALI'TFANO)

Athey was a member of the CommitBanksy

tee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, and her desire to raise the status of women in her field was evident in her selection of 16 female

(b. 19742, Bristol?, Eng.)

In April 2007 London city workers painted over a mural by the graffiti artist Banksy near the Old Street Tube station in Hackney after the Transit Department determined that the 2003 mural—featuring American actors John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as gangsters in the film Pulp Fiction, holding bananas instead of handguns—contributed to the shabby appearance of the neighbourhood. That same month one of Banksy's works sold for £288,000

economists for the committee to organize the 2006 winter Econometric

Soci-

ety meetings. Her extensive editorial interests were reflected in involvement in

many journals, including coeditorship of American Economic Journals: Micro-

economics with

and

associate

Econometrica,

editorships

Theoretical

Eco-

nomics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. (JANET H. CLARK) Bainimarama, Voreqe (b. April 27, 1954, Kiuva, Fiji) On

Jan.

5,

2007,

Josaia

(“Frank”) Bainimarama

Voreqe

declared

him-

self interim prime minister of Fiji. He had served as acting president since leading a bloodless coup in December 2006 that toppled Prime Minister Laisenia

Qarase’s

government.

Baini-

marama’s supporters claimed that the military takeover was necessary in light of Qarase’s corrupt actions, while others believed that Bainimarama undertook the coup to avoid prosecution over his alleged mismanagement of military funds, which was then the subject of a government investigation.

Although Methodist,

Bainimarama he

attended

was the

a

Roman

Catholic Marist Brothers High School. From 1975 he pursued a career in the Fiji navy, rising to become commander (1988), captain (1994), and chief of staff (1998). On March 1, 1999, he was

appointed commodore and commander of all of Fiji’s military forces. On May 19, 2000, a group led by disgruntled businessman George Speight overthrew the coalition government led by Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Bainimarama persuaded then president Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara to resign on May 29, 2000, and took over as head of

an interim military government in what many saw as a countercoup. The Muanikau Accord, signed by Bainimarama

(as the head of government)

and Speight, led to the release of the insurgents’ hostages (including Chaudhry) on July 13, after 56 days in captivity. A few days later Bainimarama returned power to an interim government led by 72

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(£1

Fijian military leader Voreqe Bainimarama Qarase and Pres. Ratu Josefa Iloilovatu Uluivuda. One of the accord's conditions was that Speight's supporters would surrender without penalty. Bainimarama reneged on this (on the basis that he had signed the accord under duress) and had them arrested on July 27. A key player in the Muanikau Accord was Ratu Inoke Takiveikata,

a senator

and

Naitasiri

paramount chief. Outraged at what he saw as the militarys failure to observe the accord, on November 2 Takiveikata

instigated a short-lived mutiny, during which an attempt was made on Bainimaramass life. Following elections in 2001 and again in May 2006, Qarase was

returned

to

power, but the dissension between him and Bainimarama continued, particularly in regard to what the commodore perceived as the prime minister's soft treatment of high-ranking chiefs and politicians who had been convicted for their roles in the 2000 coup. The government

tried

to

oust

Bainimarama

while he was overseas visiting troops in October 2006, but the government's alternative commander declined to take over, and senior officers rallied behind

their commander. On his return to Fiji, Bainimarama purged the army of senior officers whom he considered disloyal and turned up the heat on Qarase’s government. In November 2006 Bainimarama demanded the withdrawal

of two bills, one

of which

in-

cluded powers to grant amnesty to coup leaders; he also demanded the dismissal of the police commissioner,

=

about

$2), breaking

the

sales

record at Bonhams Knightsbridge auction house. Though Banksy's identity was well guarded, he came to notice as a freehand graffiti artist in 1993. Using stencils since 2000 to enhance his speed, he developed a distinctive iconography of highly recognizable images, such as rats and policemen, that communicated an antiauthoritarian message. With wry wit and stealth, Bansky merged graffiti art with installation and performance. In the 2003 exhibition “Turf War,” Ban-

sky painted on the bodies of live pigs. At his “Crude Oils” exhibition in London

in 2005,

which

featured

altered

replicas of the works of Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Edward Hopper, he released 200 live rats in the gallery. Fully disguised, in 2005 Banksy installed his own works on the walls of major museums in New York City and London, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Britain. In 2005 Banksy also painted a wall on the Palestinian side of the West Bank;

on the viewer's side, children play on a forelorn patch of earth, while through an apparent hole in the wall there is a scene of a perfect tropical beach. Banksy described himself as a "quality vandal," challenging the authority of political and art institutions on both the right and the left. In September 2006 his one-weekend Los Angeles warehouse installation Barely Legal, for which he decorated a live elephant, attracted large crowds despite a lack of publicity. In Bristol in 2006 he depicted a naked man clinging to a window sill on the side of a public family-planning clinic; local residents voted to keep the mural.

Biographies

His books—which

included Banging

Your Head Against a Brick Wall (2001), Existencilism (2002), and Wall and Piece

(2005)—documented his projects; iconic examples of his work, including a life-size image of two policemen kissing, were featured in the bleak futuristic film Children of Men (2006). Although he was increasingly famous, Banksy remained anonymous; his rare interviews were conducted via e-mail or with responses delivered by an altered voice on tape. He remained committed to street art, declaring that life in a city in which graffiti was legal would be “like a party where everyone was invited.”

(DEBRA N. MANCOFF)

Baron Cohen, Sacha (b. Oct. 13, 1971, London, Eng.)

With his trio of outrageously ignorant alter egos—Ali

G, Borat, and Bruno—

British actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen took political incorrectness to new lows, creating social satire that had many calling him a comic genius. In 2007 his performance as the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist

Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev in the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) earned Baron Cohen his first Golden Globe award, for best

actor in a comedy. In addition, he received an Academy Award nomination for the mockumentary's script and was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people. Later in the year Baron Cohen published the travel book Borat: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. (also entitled Borat: Touristic Guidings to GloriBorat actor Sacha Baron Cohen

ous Nation of Kazakhstan). He then turned to more serious fare, starring opposite Johnny Depp in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Sweeney Todd. Sacha Noam

Baron Cohen, who was

born into a devout Jewish family, studied history at the University of Cambridge. After deciding to pursue a career in entertainment, in 1998 he joined the comedy series The 11 o'Clock Show, for which he created the character Ali G, a

“hip-hop journalist” who was aggressively stupid. With his over-the-top attire—a brightly coloured tracksuit, tinted sunglasses, and designer skullcap—mangled English, and outlandish questions, Ali G interviewed unsuspecting real politicians and celebrities and in the process revealed their own prejudices and ignorance. His phenomenal popularity led to Da Ali G Show in 2000. Baron Cohen soon introduced two other clueless characters: Borat and Bruno, a

gay Austrian fashion reporter. In 2001 both the show and Baron Cohen earned BAFTA awards. After making his film debut in Ali G Indahouse (2002), Baron Cohen sought new unwitting subjects, and in 2003-04 Da Ali G Show aired in the U.S. on the cable channel HBO. Baron Cohen subsequently focused on his film career, and in 2005 he provided the voice of the king of the lemurs in the animated Madagascar. He next appeared as a French racecar driver opposite Will Ferrell in the hit comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006). It was Borat, however, that made Baron Cohen a house-

hold name. Borats encounters with unsuspecting Americans as he traveled across the U.S. provided for outrageous and often cringe-inducing moments—a gun-store owner suggests the best gun for shooting a Jew and several fraternity brothers wish for the return of slavery. Not everyone appreciated the humour, however. Several people featured in Borat sued, and the government of Kazakhstan took out newspaper ads to counter the movie's unflattering portrayal. Despite the controversy, the movie rights to his character Bruno

sold for $42.5 million in

2006, and filming began the following year. In December 2007 Baron Cohen announced that he was permanently retiring the characters Borat and Ali G. (AMY TIKKANEN)

out in 2007. A technically accomplished and versatile musician with wide-ranging interests in classical and popular music,

he

was

also

an

audience

favourite for his matinee-idol good looks and his accessibility. His influence beyond the musical world was recognized when on January 16 he became the only American musician among the 250 Young Global Leaders named by the World Economic Forum. Bell received his first violin at age four from his parents after they found that he was making music by stretching rubber bands to different lengths on dresser drawers. He led a relatively normal childhood that included sports (he was an elite tennis player) and computer games. His violin studies became serious when at age 12 he attended the Meadowmount music camp in Westport, N.Y., where he met renowned

teacher Josef Gingold of Indiana University, who later became his mentor. Bell made his orchestral debut at age 14 with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra—becoming the orchestras youngest-ever soloist—and he made his first recording at age 18. In appearances as a soloist, with small groups and orchestras, and as conductor, Bell

began to reap top honours. He received a Grammy Award for his performance in the first recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto (2000)—which was writ-

ten for him—and his album Romance of the Violin won Billboard's 2004 Classical Album of the Year. In 2007 Bell was clearly at the peak of his form and the prime of his powers. On April 10 he received the rarely given Avery Fisher Prize. Also in the spring he was on tour in Europe as conductor and soloist with the orchestra of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He accepted a post in May as senior lecturer at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. In October with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall, he premiered the Violin Concerto written for him by 15-year-old Jay Greenberg, and at year’s end Bell was the guest soloist at the annual New Year’s Eve gala concert at Lincoln Center, New York City, with Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic. His 2007 recordings included the two-CD album The Essential Joshua Bell and (with pianist Jeremy Denk and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop [g.v.]) The Red Violin Concerto,

a con-

In a crowd of youthful professional vi-

cert version of the Academy Award-winning music composed by John Corigliano for the film The Red Violin

olinists,

(1998).

Bell, Joshua (b. Dec. 9, 1967, Bloomington, Ind.) American

Joshua

Bell

stood

(CHARLES TRUMBULL)

Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

73

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

Berdymukhammedov, Gurbanguly (b. June menistan)

29, 1957, Bararab, TurkOn Feb. 11, 2007, Gurban-

guly Berdymukhammedov was elected president of Turkmenistan, receiving 89.2396 of the votes cast. The former health minister had served as acting president of the country following the sudden death on Dec. Saparmurat Niyazov.

21,

2006,

of

Burhan Ozbilici/AP

There was some speculation that the powerful Turkmen security services was more comfortable with a person widely perceived as politically weak. According to a recurring rumour in the Turkmen exile community, it was whispered that Berdymukhammedov was the illegitimate son of Niyazov. Immediately after Berdymukhammedovs accession to the presidency, the Turkmen exile community and many citizens hoped for a relaxation of the tight control exercised by Niyazov. There were some improvements: Berdymukhammedov restored the pensions abolished by his predecessor,

jandro González Iñárritu. Bernal's performance as a poor teenager who turns to dogfighting to finance an affair with his sister-in-law won rave reviews and launched his career. He received best actor awards at the Chicago International Film Festival and at Mexico’s Ariel Awards. Amores perros was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar and brought Bernal to the attention of an-

eased restrictions on travel abroad, and

which followed two adolescent boys and an older woman on a road trip through

reinstituted the 10th year of basic education that had been dropped on Niyazovs order. Berdymukhammedov continued to spend the countrys income on

Turkmen Pres. Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov Gurbanguly Myliktulievich Berdymukhammedov was the grandson of a distinguished local schoolteacher. The future president graduated (1979) from the dental faculty of the Turkmen State Medical Institute and started work as a dentist in an Ashgabat clinic. By 1987 he had gradually increased his responsibilities and moved up professionally. He then studied therapeutic dentistry in Moscow for three years, returning to Ashgabat in 1990 to a teaching post at the Turkmen Medical Institute. In 1995 he moved to the Ministry of Health; two years later he was appointed minister of health, and in April 2001 he became deputy prime minister responsible for education, science, and health.

Although Niyazov publicly criticized him in November 2003, Berdymukhammedov retained his ministerial post. When Berdymukhammedov was appointed acting president by Turkmenistan’s Security Council, there was considerable surprise in the international community as well as in the country itself that a professional medical man would be tapped for the post. 74

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

grandiose

construction

projects,

however, and building was scheduled to begin on a project announced in September for a new seaport and airport for the city of Turkmenbashi on the Caspian Sea. By late 2007 there was little sign that Berdymukhammedov was considering plans to initiate genuine political and economic reform that would lead to democratization of the country. In addition, some observers noted that he was having some of the ostentatious portraits of Niyazov, which were such a striking feature of the Ashgabat cityscape, replaced with portraits of himself. This led to speculation that the new president was imitating his predecessor and was launching his own personality cult. (BESS BROWN) Bernal, Gael García (b. Oct. 30, 1978, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mex.) In 2007 Mexican heartthrob

movie star Gael García Bernal moved behind the camera to direct his first feature film, Déficit, which premiered at the Cannes international film festival. This effort was just the latest accomplishment of the multifaceted actor, producer, and political activist, who was known for pushing artistic boundaries. Bernals parents (his mother was an actress

and his father a director)

in-

other acclaimed

Mexican

director, Al-

fonso Cuaron, who cast the young actor as a colead (along with Maribel Verdü and Bernals childhood friend Diego Luna) in the coming-of-age film Y tu mamá

también

(2001).

The

movie,

Mexico, caused a stir with its frank de-

piction of the sexual relationship between the three primary characters. However controversial his part in Y tu mamá también might have seemed, Bernal pushed the envelope even further with his next major role: a priest who falls in love with and impregnates a 16year-old girl in E] crimen del padre Amaro (2002).

The

film smashed

box-office

records in Mexico and was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar, but Bernal's risqué turn led to threats of excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. The protests did little to affect Bernal, who called himself “culturally Catholic, but spiritually agnostic,” and he continued to take on challenging and potentially contentious roles, such as a young Che Guevara (Diarios de motocicleta; 2004), a sexually abused altar boy (La mala educación; 2004), and a mur-

derous and incestuous loner (The King; 2005). His turn in the eclectic comedy La Science

des réves

(2006)

showed

that

Bernal was as adept at exploring the lighter side of human nature as he was the dark. (ADAM AUGUSTYN)

Brooks & Dunn (b. May 12, 1955, Shreveport, La.,) and (b. June 1, 1953, Coleman, Texas) In

2007 Brooks & Dunn were the favourite vocal duo in country music. In fact, every year since 1991 the eminent pair

had been named top vocal duo by the

volved him in theatrical productions at

Country

an early age. He was cast in a Mexican

the Academy of Country Music (ACM)—and in most years by both. From the string of good-time honkytonk hits of their early years to the slick musicianship of their 2007 album Cowboy Town, Brooks & Dunn _ parlayed their odd-couple partnership into extraordinarily consistent success. By age six Leon Eric (“Kix”) Brooks was playing the ukelele; by the time he

soap opera at age 12 and transitioned to the big screen four years later in the short film De tripas, corazón (1996). When he was 17, Bernal left Mexico to

travel to Europe and won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In the middle of his studies, he returned to Mexico to film Amores perros (2000) with director Ale-

Music

Association

(CMA)

or

Biographies Rick Diamond—WireImage/Getty Images

ter, from whom he acquired his moral and political stance. Brown entered Parliament in 1983 as MP for Dunfirmline

American country music duo Brooks & Dunn was

a student at Louisiana State Uni-

the duo also had strong appeal in concert. Several times they won the Enter-

versity, he was performing regularly in nightclubs. He moved around the U.S., working on the Alaska oil pipeline and at an advertising job in Maine. Finally

CMA and three times from the ACM. By 2007, with two Grammy Awards to

he went to Nashville, where he took a

their credit, Brooks

position on the staff of Tree Publishing, writing hit songs for acts such as Sawyer Brown and the Oak Ridge Boys. He also recorded two solo albums before joining Dunn. Ronnie Gene Dunns father was a musician who also worked on oil rigs; his father's musicianship and his mother's devout Baptist faith were strong influences on him. When he was a student

panded their musical repertoire, incorporating some straight-ahead rock 'n' rol, covering the occasional classic country hit, and even composing a few sombre ballads. Their popularity remained strong, and the duo showed no signs of fading.

at Abilene

(Texas)

Christian

College,

planning to be a preacher, a dean gave him an ultimatum: quit playing music in bars or leave school. Dunn chose music. After winning the Marlboro Country Music Talent Search, he moved to Nashville and signed with Tree Publishing. Arista Records executive Tim DuBois

was familiar with the songwriting talents of both men and introduced them over lunch in 1990, suggesting that they try to write songs together. Both artists had set their sights on solo careers but agreed to give the partnership a try. Their first effort became the title track of the album Brand New Man

(1991),

which also included the hit single “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” Their second album, Hard

Workin’

Man

(1993),

confirmed

their popularity, immediately reaching third on the country music charts. With the laid-back Dunn singing and the wildly energetic Brooks playing guitar,

tainer of the Year award, once from the

& Dunn

had

ex-

(ANTHONY G. CRAINE) Brown, Gordon (b. Feb. 20, 1951, Glasgow, Scot.) On June 27, 2007, after serving 10 years

as one of the U.K.’s most successful chancellors of the Exchequer (equivalent to the finance minister in most countries), Gordon Brown achieved his

long-held ambition of becoming prime minister when his old friend Tony Blair stepped down. Within hours of taking over as prime minister, Brown faced the first of a series of crises—a threat of terrorism, followed within weeks by floods, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth

disease, and a run on a major bank— and won widespread praise for handling them all calmly and effectively. He lost much of the credit he had built up, however, by seeming to dither over whether to call an early election to secure his own mandate and by finally rejecting the idea in early October when the opinion polls turned against him. Brown was the son of a Labour Partysupporting Church of Scotland minis-

East,

an

industrial

con-

stituency near Glasgow. Brown and Blair, another new MP, were quickly identified as the two brightest Labour Party stars of their generation. Brown was initially regarded as the more senior figure, but by 1994 when then party leader John Smith died suddenly, Blair had overtaken Brown as the favoured candidate of Labour MPs, party activists, and the wider public. Brown reluctantly agreed to stand aside and leave Blair with a clear run as the "modernizer" candidate. In return, Blair agreed that Brown would be chancellor when Labour returned to power, with enhanced powers to oversee broad swathes of domestic economic and social policy. When Labour won the 1997 general election, Blair was named prime minister and was true to his word. Brown's first act as chancellor was a bold one: to give independence to the Bank of England to set interest rates. For the next decade Brown waited with mounting impatience for Blair to step aside; meanwhile, he presided over an economy with low inflation, cheap home mortgages, rising employment, and steady growth. In May 2007 Blair finally announced his intention to resign as prime minis-

ter and as Labour leader. Brown was the only candidate for party leader to receive sufficient nominations from his fellow MPs and was duly proclaimed the partys new leader on June 24. Three days later Brown took over as prime minister Initially he changed few government policies, but he and Foreign Secretary David Miliband (q.v.) did establish a new, more

cautious re-

lationship with the United States. In late July Brown visited U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and made clear his intention to reduce the number of British troops in Iraq and to do this, if necessary, independently of U.S. wishes. This display of independence proved to be immensely popular in the U.K. (PETER KELLNER) Burns, Ken (b. July 29, 1953, Brooklyn, N.Y.)

The seven-part documentary series The War, which premiered on PBS television in 2007, represented the latest installment in the continuation of the 25year-long relationship between filmmaker Ken Burns and public TV. His newest effort (co-directed and pro75

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

duced with Lynn Novick) focused on four American towns and the veterans who served in World War II. In addition to an original musical score by Wynton Marsalis, the 15-hour epic featured interviews with veterans and excerpts from diaries, in addition to archival photographs and film. Kenneth Lauren Burns spent his youth in Ann Arbor, where his father was a professor at the University of Michigan. When he was 11 years old, his mother died, an event, he said, that

influenced his interest in history and in pursuing a filmmaking career. Soon after graduating (1975) from Hampshire College,

Amherst,

Mass.,

Burns

co-

founded Florentine Films. His first major project, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), garnered an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category and set the tone for a productive career as a maker of films dealing with American history and culture. He created films about The Shakers (1984), The Statue of Liberty (1985; also nominated for an Academy Award), and legendary Louisiana politician Huey Long (1985). It was Burns’s 11-hour 1990 series The Civil War, however, that secured his rep-

slowing down, signed an agreement in January with PBS to produce work for the network through 2022; his 12-hour series on the history of the U.S. national park system was scheduled to air

in career earnings. In 1995 he drove the winners of both the Hambletonian and the Little Brown Jug. After achieving his best season in

in 2009.

earnings), Campbell was seriously injured in a racing accident in 2003 and missed several months on the track. He also lost time in 2004 when he aggravated that injury. When Campbell turned 50 in 2005, many thought that his star was waning, but in 2006 he drove Triple Crown-winning trotter Glidemaster to victory in the Hambletonian and the Kentucky Futurity. Although Flirtin Man, the first horse for which he was co-owner as well as

(BEN LEVIN)

Campbell, John D. (b. April 8, 1955, Ailsa Craig, Ont.) On Feb. 25, 2007, the U.S. Harness

Writers Association awarded Canadian Hall of Famer John D. Campbell the title of 2006 Driver of the Year. For Campbell, North American history's leading money-winning harness driver and winner of a record six Hambletonians (the top race for three-year-old trotters), the honour was especially rewarding. He had finished the 2006 sea-

and

Campbell absorbed the basics of horsemanship from his father and grandfather and then set off in the early

served as the impetus for other filmmakers to pursue ideas based on historical topics and themes that had not generally been supported in the past. Burns then made a combination of single films,

there, distinguishing himself with his driving skills and professionalism. In

miniseries, and extended series, includ-

1979, at age 24, he ranked as the rich-

ing the epics Baseball (1994), which won

est driver

an Emmy, and Jazz (2001). Other works

horses earned more than $3.3 million.

covered Thomas Jefferson, explorers Lewis and Clark, architect Frank Lloyd

Between 1982 and 2002, Campbell ranked either first or second in money earnings among all drivers in North America. He achieved a milestone in 1982 when Merger, a pacer he trained and drove, won the Little Brown Jug (the top North American race for threeyear-old pacers), but he soon gave up

Wright, boxer Jack Johnson, and femi-

nists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Besides his Emmys, Burns won two Erik Barnouw Awards from the

Campbell

drove

Ham-

Corleone

tational on the same race card. (DEAN A. HOFFMAN)

1970s to tracks in the Detroit-Windsor, Ont. area. When the Meadowlands

million,

bletonian,

stride in the 2007

fore suffering a severely broken leg in a collision during an elimination race on October 21. Campbell used the award ceremony to announce his imminent return. “If everything goes the way I hope,” he said, “I’m hoping to get back sometime in April.” True to his word, he was back on the track on April 1, and by season's end horses driven by Campbell in his career had earned

gross

$100

driver, broke

than $14 million in

Kosmos to victory in the Nat Ray Invi-

183 wins

more than $250 million and 9,905 victories.

than

(with more

in 1,427 starts be-

son with

utation as a master filmmaker; his signature pan-and-zoom technique created a sense of movement in the stills. The hugely successful series won two Emmy Awards, was the first documentary to more

2001

racetrack opened in East Rutherford, N.J., in late 1976, Campbell

in harness

relocated

racing

as

his

Castro, Raül (b. June 3, 1931,

Holguín

province,

Cuba) Revolutionary Raül Castro, better known as Cuban Pres. Fidel Castro's younger brother and as head of the country’s armed forces, marked one year in office on July 31, 2007, as provisional head of state. Raúl, who in recent years had solidified his position in Cuba’s communist hierarchy, took over temporary leadership in July 2006 while Fidel underwent surgery and continued to recover from a serious stomach illness. The youngest of three brothers, Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz was born to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother. He embraced socialism as an adult and forged strong links with the Soviet Union. Raúl participated with Fidel in the 1953 attack on Cubas Moncada Barracks in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat dictator Fulgencio Batista; the brothers spent nearly two years in prison for the assault. In 1956 Raül joined Fidel in launching the Cuban Revolution, which brought the 26th of July Movement

to power

on

Jan.

1,

of America, and the Career Achievement

drove Mack Lobell to victory in record

Award in 2002 from the International

time

Documentary Association.

next year he and Mack Lobell defeated Europe’s finest trotters in Sweden’s prestigious Elitlopp. In 1990 at age 35, Campbell became the youngest person ever inducted into the Living Hall of

1959. That same year he married fellow revolutionary Vilma Espín Guillois. During the Castro brothers' nearly five decades in power, Ratil emerged as a key figure in his own right, and he enjoyed the strong support and loyalty of top military officers, known as raulistas. He remained deeply committed to the political primacy of the Communist Party, which he developed and institutional-

Fame

ized. An avowed

Organization

of American

Historians,

the Television Producer of the Year Award in 1991 from the Producer’s Guild

Burns's 30-year career included collaborations with cinematographer Buddy Squires, editor Paul Barnes, producer Novick, writers Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan, and brother Ric Burns,

who

worked

with Ken

on

The Civil War before moving on to a successful documentary career of his own. Burns, who showed no signs of 76

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

training to concentrate in the

1987

on driving. He

Hambletonian;

at the Harness

the

Racing Museum

in Goshen, N.Y. The following year he drove Armbro Keepsake to victory in the Breeders Crown and became the first harness driver to pass $100 million

Marxist,

Raúl never-

theless demonstrated greater interest in economic reform than his older brother. In the mid-1980s he allowed the Cuban army to experiment with reforms in sev-

Biographies Jonathan Hayward—CP/AP

eral state-owned enterprises controlled by the military. The positive results gave him ample evidence to argue for greater reform when the collapse of Soviet subsidies provoked an economic crisis on the island. Thought to be the more traditional communist of the two Castro brothers, Raúl supported many of the economic and agricultural reforms that helped to partially revive the failing Cuban economy in the mid-1990s. As the longest-serving defense minister in the world,

Raúľs

influence

in

Cuba far exceeded that of other ministers. He had long occupied the number two position in the three principal bodies of the Cuban hierarchy: first vice president of the Council of State, vice president of the Council of Ministers, and second secretary of the Cuban Communist Party. In 2007 he served as the acting head of all three governmental organs. Following his elevation to Cuba's top spot in 2006, Raúl pledged to resolve Cuba's problems under the banner of the Communist Party. His government in September hosted more than 50 heads of state at the meeting in Havana of the Non-Aligned Movement, but Cuba kept a relatively low international profile after that summit. Though Raúl signaled that he would be willing to engage in dialogue with the U.S. to resolve a bilateral dispute, he waved off a 10-member delegation of U.S. congressional leaders who traveled to Cuba in December 2006 in hopes of meeting with him. Widespread speculation that Cuba would follow a Chinastyle model of economic opening remained unrealized. Despite efforts to divine

his intentions,

Raúl

remained

impassive and inscrutable, although the death of his wife in June 2007, after 48

years of marriage, deeply affected him. (DANIEL P. ERIKSON) Desai, Kiran (b. Sept. 3, 1971, New Delhi, India)

Kiran Desai's second novel, 7he Inheri-

tance of Loss, was short-listed for the Orange Broadband Prize in 2007, a year after it was published. That it failed to win hardly detracted from its prior success; a year earlier the novel had won two major prizes—the Man Booker Prize in Britain and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in the United States—and had become an international

best

seller.

Desai,

the

youngest female writer to have won the Booker, was following in the footsteps of her mother, novelist Anita Desai, who had been short-listed three times (1980, 1984, 1999) for the Booker.

Kiran Desai, one of four children, lived

in India until age 15, after which the family moved to England and then to the U.S. She graduated from Bennington (Vt.) College in 1993 and later received

two M.F.A.’s—one from Hollins University, Roanoke, Va., and the other from

Columbia University, New York City. One of her early stories appeared in the collection Mirrorwork (1997), edited

by

Salman

Rushdie

and

Elizabeth

West. In a 1999 interview, however, De-

sai explained that "I couldn't go to school and write at the same time. I couldn't write a novel in the writingworkshop environment." She left Columbia for several years to write her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Or-

chard (1998), about a young man in provincial India who abandons an easy post-office job and begins living in a guava tree, where he makes oracular pronouncements to locals. Unaware that he knows of their lives from having read their mail, they hail him as a prophet. Although Desai considered her novel a comedy and saw elements of folklore in it, she was reluctant to cat-

egorize it. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard drew wide critical praise and received a 1998 Betty Trask Prize from the British Society of Authors. While working on what would be-

Liberal Party of Canada leader Stéphane Dion sponsorship scandal in his home province. When Dion arrived at the party leadership convention in December 2006, he was well behind in the polls. His “three-pillar” (environmentalism, social justice, and economic prosperity) approach impressed other party members, however, and on December 2 they

elected him the Liberal Party leader.

novel, Desai lived a

Dion, the son of one of the cofounders

peripatetic life that took her from New York to Mexico and India. After more than seven years of work, she published The Inheritance of Loss. Set in India in

of Laval University’s political science department, grew up during a period

the mid-1980s, the novel has at its cen-

itating for more

tre a Cambridge-educated Indian judge who is living out his retirement in Kalimpong, near the Himalayas, with his granddaughter until their lives are disrupted when they are threatened by Nepalese insurgents. The novel also interweaves the story of the judge's cook's son as he struggles to survive as an illegal immigrant in the U.S. Critics hailed The Inheritance of Loss as a keen, richly descriptive analysis of globalization, terrorism, and immigration. Desai explained that she thought of the novel as "just a family story," but "if you are a writer, seriously writing in India, even if you're writing about a family story, you are automatically writing about immigration, globalization." (J.E. LUEBERING)

ties and increasingly favoured political separation from Canada. Although he initially supported the sovereignty movement, his federalist father’s systematic dismantling of the separatists’ arguments eventually led him to reevaluate his position. Dion pursued a career in academia, graduating with a

come

her second

Dion, Stéphane (b. Sept. 28, 1955, Quebec City, Que.) In 2007, his first year as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Stéphane Dion worked to revitalize and rebuild his party, which was badly damaged by a

known as “the Quiet Revolution,” when

Quebec’s francophone majority was ageconomic

opportuni-

B.A. (1977) and an M.A. (1979) in po-

litical science from Laval and a Ph.D. (1986) in sociology from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. From 1984 to 1996 he taught political science and public administration courses at the University of Montreal. Following the narrow victory of the federalist forces in a 1995 Quebec referendum

on sovereignty, Prime Minis-

ter Jean Chrétien recruited Dion to run for the Liberal Party in a Montrealarea parliamentary by-election to bolster the cabinet’s Quebec contingent. In January 1996 Dion was appointed min-

ister of intergovernmental affairs. In this post he helped to develop the federal government's position that unilat77

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Scott Heppell/AP

eral secession by Quebec would be illegal if it took place without a referendum addressing the question, a clear majority of popular support, and negotiations with the rest of Canada. This position was later affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada and drafted into federal legislation known as the Clarity Act. Although Dion became popular among Canadians outside the province for his tough position on Quebec separation, he was reviled by many Quebecois who saw the Clarity Act as undermining their right to selfdetermination. He was left out of Prime Minister Paul Martin's first cabinet in December 2003, but following the 2004 general election, which produced a Liberal-led

Drogba made the first of his 40 international appearances for Cóte d'Ivoire in 2002, and by 2007 he had scored 28 goals, a record for his country. In 2006 he captained Cóte d'Ivoire to the African Cup of Nations final match against Egypt but failed to score when it counted. His performance in the qualifying matches for the 2006 World

minority government, Dion returned to

American Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning jolted the automotive world in 2007 when Tesla Motors, the company they

the cabinet as environment minister. He led a successful attempt to achieve an international agreement for the renewal of the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. When the Liberals lost power in early 2006 and Martin resigned as leader, Dion ran to replace him on a platform that stressed the "three pillars." Dion, who gained delegate support from other candidates who dropped off the ballot during four rounds of voting, defeated former Harvard University professor Michael Ignatieff in a come-frombehind victory. (WILLIAM STOS)

Cup, however, enhanced his reputation,

and his nine goals in eight preliminary matches catapulted the Ivorians into the World Cup finals for the first time. (JACK ROLLIN) Eberhard, Martin, and Tarpenning, Mare

(b. May 15, 1960, Berkeley, Calif.) and (b. June

(b. March 11, 1978, Abidjan, Cóte d'Ivoire) On March 1, 2007, Ivorian association football (soccer) star Didier

Drogba was voted African Footballer of the Year for 2006, after having finished a close second the year before. For Drogba, who played professionally for the London-based Football Association (FA) club Chelsea, it was a personal tri-

umph. Chelsea fans had been slow to take Drogba to their hearts when he signed for the club in 2004 in a £24 million (about $44 million) trade from Olympic de Marseille. Though Chelsea won its first Premier League championship in 50 years that season, its new centre-forward was inconsistent. At 1.88 m (6 ft

2 in) tall and weighing 74 kg (163 Ib), Drogba was quick, thoughtful, alert, and supremely confident in his own ability, though he showed a tendency to a quick temper in matches. Even in his second season, when the title was suc-

cessfully defended, fan appreciation was still muted. Yet by 2006-07, when Chelsea failed in its attempt to take a third straight championship, Drogba had completely won over the skeptical 78

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sacramento,

Calif.)

founded, announced that its innovative,

Ivorian association footballer Didier Drogba

completely electric Tesla Roadster prototype had achieved an unprecedented range of 245 mi (394 km) ona single charge in company tests. Additional tests

Blues fans. His wholehearted efforts as a striker were rewarded with the Golden Boot as the league’s top scorer (with 20 goals), and he finished the season with an overall tally of 33 goals. Without his

showed

that the $98,000

sports

car could accelerate from 0 to 96 km/hr (60 mph) in less than four seconds and

ster returned home, but because of the worsening economic climate in Cóte d'Ivoire, he was sent back to his uncle.

could reach a top speed of 200 km/hr (125 mph). The lightweight car body, developed and built by Lotus Cars, was made of carbon fibre. The roadster produced no tailpipe emissions, since it did not use an internal-combustion engine, and Tesla Motors found that the car attained efficiency ratings that were equivalent to a gasoline mileage of 57 km per litre (135 mi per gal). The vehicle’s electric motor was powered by 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion cells— the type used in many laptop-computer batteries—that could be recharged from a standard 110- or 220-V electric outlet. Eberhard studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where

At age 15 Drogba became

he earned

invaluable contribution, Chelsea would

Drogba, Didier

1, 1964,

have finished much lower than second place in the premiership and would have been unable to carry off the FA Cup and Carling Cup trophies, as Drogba scored the club’s only goals in the finals of those two tournaments. It was a far cry from Cóte d'Ivoire, where he grew up with the nickname "Tito." At age five he was sent to France in the care of an uncle, a professional footballer. After three years the young-

an appren-

tice with second-division Levallois, and

then in 1997-98 he moved to Le Mans Football Club, where in his second sea-

son he signed as a professional. In January 2002 Drogba joined Guingamp, tallying 17 goals in 34 league games. This success prompted a €6 million (about $6.7 million) trade to

Marseille, where he scored 19 goals in 35 domestic matches and an additional 11 goals in European play as the club reached the 2004 Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA)

Cup final before losing 2-0 to Valencia of Spain.

a B.S. (1982) in computer

engineering and an M.S. (1984) in electrical engineering. He then held a number of positions, including electrical engineer at Wyse Technology, vice president of electronics at Belfort Memory International, and chief engineer at Network Computing Devices, which he cofounded. Tarpenning earned a B.A. (1985)

in computer

science

from

the

University of California, Berkeley. He began his career working for the conglomerate Textron in Saudi Arabia. Tarpenning then developed software and firmware products for several companies, including Seagate Technology

Biographies

book venture that produced the Rocket

work on a substantial revision of the undergraduate curriculum. Catharine Drew Gilpin grew up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where her parents raised Thoroughbred horses. She graduated from Concord

eBook (1998). Eberhard served as CEO

(Mass.) Academy in 1964 and received

and Tarpenning led development until

a B.A. in from Bryn She took married in

and Bechtel,

and later served

as vice

president of engineering at Packet Design, a network technology company. In 1997 Eberhard and Tarpenning cofounded

2000,

NuvoMedia,

when

Gemstar-IV $187

an

electronic

NuvoMedia

Guide

million.

was

sold

International

In 2003

e-

to

for

Eberhard

and

history magna cum laude Mawr (Pa.) College in 1968. the name Faust when she 1968; the marriage ended in

Tarpenning teamed up again to launch Tesla Motors. Eberhard said that he first envisioned the Tesla Roadster after an unsuccessful search for a sexy, high-powered, and efficient sports car for himself. Funding for the company was obtained from a variety of sources, most notably PayPal cofounder Elon

1976. She earned M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) degrees in American civi-

Musk, who contributed more than $30

ican

million to the new venture and served as chairman of the company. In late

women's studies program. In 2001 Faust became founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

2007

Eberhard,

who

had

been

Tesla

Motors’ CEO and president of technology, was serving on the advisory board of the company. Tarpenning was vice president of electrical engineering, supervising the development of electronic and software systems for the roadster. The initial roadsters were to be delivered to owners

in 2008, with the first

sales showroom

and service centre to

be located in Menlo

Park, Calif. Addi-

lization from the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty as an

assistant

professor in 1976.

In

1984 she became a full professor; she subsequently held endowed professorships, chaired the department of Amercivilization,

at Harvard,

and

the successor

directed

the

to Radcliffe

College, which had been Harvard Universitys womens college; she was also appointed Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. Faust's publications included A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in

the Old South, 1840-1860 (1977), The

Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War

tional Tesla outlets were planned for other U.S. cities, and the company said that it planned to expand the Tesla line by 2009 with a less-expensive fully electric luxury sports sedan, code-named

South

WhiteStar, and even farther down the road with a smaller model, code-named BlueStar, aimed at the mass market. (BARBARA A. SCHREIBER)

South in the American Civil War (1996), which received the 1997 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Her sixth book, This Repub-

Faust, Drew Gilpin (b. Sept. 18, 1947, New York, N.Y.)

In July 2007 historian Drew Gilpin Faust became the 28th president of Harvard University since its founding in 1636, the first woman to hold the of-

fice and the first president since the 17th century who did not have a Harvard degree. She succeeded Lawrence H. Summers, who resigned in the wake of controversy over remarks that attributed women's lack of visibility in the sciences to intrinsic sex differences. Within

her first six months

in office,

Faust filled several open deanships and appointed other top administration officials: Among the other areas commanding her attention as president were oversight of a major campus expansion in nearby Boston,

assessment

and expansion of the role of the arts in the university, and continuation of

(1982), James

Henry Hammond

and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (1982), Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (1992), and Mothers of

Invention:

Women

of the Slaveholding

lic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, was due in early 2008. Faust served as an officer of the American Historical Association and the Southern

Historical Association,

run for reelection. Some media outlets dubbed her the “Latin Hillary,” citing many parallels between her career and that of U.S. presidential candidate, and former first lady, Sen. Hillary Clinton. Following months during which she maintained a commanding lead in the polls, Fernandez de Kirchner captured 45% of the final presidential vote tally, nearly double that of her closest competitor, Elisa Carrió, who garnered 23%. Fernández de Kirchner formally assumed office on December 10 to begin a four-year term. Cristina, as most Argentines simply referred to her, attended the National

University of La Plata, where she met her future husband,

a fellow law stu-

dent. In 1975 she and Néstor Kirchner married. One year later, after the military junta seized control of Argentina, the couple fled La Plata for Néstor's hometown of Río Gallegos in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. There they opened a law practice and, with the return of democracy in 1983, became active in electoral politics. Fernández de Kirchner was a provincial delegate to the Justicialist (Peronist) Party (PJ) convention in 1985 and was

later elected to the provincial legislature. Her husband won election as mayor of Río Gallegos in 1987, and in 1991 she became the first lady of Santa Cruz as her husband was elected to the first of three consecutive four-year terms as provincial governor.

Fernández de Kirchner twice represented Santa Cruz in the Argentine Senate

(1995-97,

2001-05).

She

also

Argentine Pres. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

a

board member of the Society of American Historians and the Organization of American Historians, and a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in history. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. (MARTIN L. WHITE) Fernandez de Kirchner, Cristina (b. Feb. 19, 1953, La Plata, Arg.)

In 2007 Argentine first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became her country’s first elected female head of state by winning a landslide victory in Argentina’s presidential election held on October 28. Her husband, Pres. Nés-

tor Kirchner, had decided in July not to Markus Schreiber/AP

79

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Anoek de Groot—AFP/Getty Images

emissions). Some of Flannery's positions on global warming were controversial, including his insistence that nuclear energy needed to be considered as an alternative to coal-fired power plants in populous areas without renewable sources of energy. In 2007 Flannery joined the faculty at Mac-

served (1997-2001) in the Chamber of Deputies. During her tenure in Con-

gress, she was one of the PJ’s most vocal critics of the Peronist administration of Pres. Carlos Menem, voting frequently against his legislative initiatives. Her husband assumed the presidency on May 25, 2003, after Menem— facing a certain loss to Kirchner in a second-round runoff—withdrew from that year’s presidential race. In 2005 Kirchner was in a struggle with former president Eduardo Duhalde for control of the PJ in the crucial province of Buenos Aires, where 38% of the Argentine population resided. The struggle came to a head in October when Fernandez de Kirchner squared off against Duhalde’s spouse, Hilda González

de Duhalde,

quarie University, Sydney. Among many other affiliations, he was a member of

the Australian Academy of Science and of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, which reported on Australian environmental issues. (DAVID C. HAYES) Fleisher, Leon (b. July 23, 1928, San Francisco, Calif.) In December 2007 American pianist

Australian zoologist Tim Flannery

in the Buenos

Aires province senatorial election. In that contest Fernández de Kirchner won 4696 of the vote, trouncing González de Duhalde, who claimed just 20%. While the high-profile victory helped her husband win acknowledgment as the undisputed leader of Peronism, it also reaffirmed | Fernández de Kirchner's growing political influence and helped insulate her against charges of inexperience during her own later run for the presidency. (MARK P. JONES)

ered 16 species and many subspecies of mammals, including 2 species and 2 subspecies of tree kangaroos. His Chasing Kangaroos (2004) was an engaging collection of stories chronicling the history of the kangaroo and related species.

Flannery wrote the first scientific reference on the mammals of the region, and he provided a popular account of his experiences in Throwim Way Leg (1997). His best-selling The Future

Flannery, Tim

Eaters: An Ecological History of Aus-

(b. Jan. 28, 1956, Melbourne, Australia)

tralasian Lands

Zoologist Tim Flannery who became an outspoken environmentalist, was named Australian of the Year 2007 in recognition of his role as an effective

scribed how Australians had been using up their ecological resources to the detriment of their future. Seeing these resources as relatively limited, Flannery became a strong proponent of population control. In 1998-99 he was the visiting professor of Australian studies at Harvard University, and in 1999 he became the director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. In numerous radio and television appearances, he identified the threat of global warming. With his international best seller The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change

communicator

in explaining

environ-

mental issues and in bringing them to the attention of the Australian public. Timothy Fridtjof Flannery received a B.A. in English literature from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and he pursued postgraduate studies in geology before changing his focus to zoology and paleontology. He earned an M.Sc. (1981) from Monash University, Clayton, Vic., and a Ph.D. (1985) from

the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Flannerys doctoral studies involved the evolution of kangaroos and related animals, and he took part in the 1985 discovery of the first known Australian mammal fossils from the Cretaceous Period, which were more than 80

million

years

older

than

known specimens. From

previously

1984 to 1999

Flannery was the principal research scientist in mammalogy at the Australian Museum in Sydney. During this period he explored remote areas of Papua New Guinea, and over the course of many expeditions he discov80

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(2005),

and People (1994) de-

Flannery

became

the

most

prominent of Australia’s scientists arguing for measures to reduce carbondioxide emissions. (A companion volume, We Are the Weather Makers [2006],

was written for younger readers.) The book clearly spelled out a catastrophic vision if current trends in rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continued but argued that forceful action could avert a calamity. Flannery was highly critical of Australian energy policies (Australia was one of the few coun-

tries that had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol for controlling greenhouse-gas

Leon Fleisher reached a high point in a remarkable career when he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. A child prodigy, Fleisher began studying the piano at age four, gave his first public recital at eight, and at nine was taken under the wing of the legendary Austrian pianist and teacher Artur Schnabel. Fleisher made his debut at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre

Monteux

in 1944,

and

he en-

sured his place among the top pianists of the day when he won Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in 1952. Thereafter, he was much in demand by orchestras, concert promoters, and record companies. Especially notable was his series of concerts and recordings featuring the

concertos

of Mozart,

Beethoven,

and Brahms with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In early 1965 Fleisher began suffering from a malfunction of his right hand: the ring and little fingers curled uncontrollably to his palm. The problem was diagnosed in 1991 as focal dystonia, a condition related to repetitivestress syndrome, which not infrequently affects musicians. Undaunted, Fleisher focused his energies on teaching and conducting. In 1959 he began his long association with the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Md.; he also taught at the Curtis Institute

of Music,

Philadelphia,

and

the

Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory

of Music,

Toronto.

He

was

the founder in 1967 of the Theatre Chamber Players at the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and artistic director (1986-97) of the Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, Mass. Fleisher

was also a highly respected conductor.

Biographies

Eventually Fleisher began performing left-hand pieces for piano. (A number of such works—including compositions by Maurice Ravel, Sergey Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, and Paul Hindemith—were written for Paul Wittgenstein, a gifted pianist who lost his right arm

in World

War

I.) In

addition,

Fleisher commissioned or inspired new works from William Bolcom, Lukas Foss, Gunter Schuller, and several

other notable composers. During his years of affliction, Fleisher sought relief in numerous treatments, including brain surgery; in the mid-1990s he discovered that occasional injections of

home in Tokyo was, in fact, destroyed in an air raid. After the war Fukuda returned with his family to Tokyo, where he went on to study at Waseda University. Upon his graduation in 1959, he landed a job with the Maruzen Oil Co. (now Cosmo Oil). The company posted him to the U.S. between 1962 and 1964. During his father’s prime ministership (1976-78),

Fukuda

served as his chief

secretary. He was elected to the Diet in 1990, taking over his father’s seat in the lower house. He later served as chief cabinet secretary under both Prime Minister Koizumi

Yoshiro Mori (2000-01) and (2001-04). From 2005 until

Botox (botulinum toxin used as a muscle relaxant) combined with Rolfing (a

his elevation to prime minister, he led a number of committees within the

type of massage therapy) ameliorated the condition. Fleisher returned to twohand performance in 1995; his right hand steadily improved, although he did not abandon the left-hand repertoire. In 2004 he played a triumphant return recital at Carnegie Hall, and he made his first solo two-hand recording since the 1960s. A short documentary film by Nathaniel Kahn about

LDP.

Fleisher's persistence, Two Hands, was

nominated for a 2007 Academy Award.

(CHARLES TRUMBULL)

Fukuda, Yasuo (b. July 16, 1936, , Tokyo, Japan)

Following the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the wake of a massive defeat for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the July 2007 elections to the upper house of the Diet (parliament), leaders of eight of the nine LDP factions urged Yasuo Fukuda to run for the party presidency. With their backing, Fukuda, the son of

former prime minister Takeo Fukuda, was selected as LDP leader over former foreign minister

Taro Aso in a party

vote held on September 23. The LDPcontrolled lower house of the Diet then chose Fukuda to become prime minister, and he formally took office on September 26. According to some political analysts, Fukuda's ascent was significant in that it represented a strong reemergence by the factional leaders, whose decision-making power had been limited during the prime ministership (2001-06) of Junichiro Koizumi.

Fukuda was one of a dwindling number of Japanese politicians who had direct experience with World War II. Except for his father, who was serving as a high official in the Finance Ministry in Tokyo, his family fled the capital in 1945 to escape the U.S. fire-bombings of major Japanese cities. The family

Fukuda took over the prime ministership at the same age, 71, at which his father had assumed the post. They were the only father and son to have shared the countrys highest office. The younger Fukuda came to the job with the reputation as a moderate conservative—and as a diplomatic leader who was expected to improve relations with China. Unlike Koizumi, who had ignored Chinese and Korean objections and insisted on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where 14 Class-A Japanese war criminals were honoured, Fukuda announced that he had no plans to visit the shrine, stating that “there is no need to do things that others hate.” The new prime minister was on record as saying he would seek to strengthen relations with other Asian countries as well and would address nagging problems at home, such as income inequality between urban and rural areas and Japan's rising public debt. (SAM JAMESON)

acting career. Eventually, however, he realized that he had “become obsessed by other people’s roles in the process. I was just as interested in the sound, the lighting and other people's performances as I was in my own.” He began to seek directing opportunities, and in 1996 he got his chance with Arthur Miller’s The Last Yankee at Colchester. It was a triumph, and he knew that he had found his vocation. Grandage was soon in demand in his new role. In 1999 he became associate director of Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre;

the following year he was named artistic director of the Sheffield Theatres. He quickly began to attract major names to this regional theatre complex; in 2001 Joseph Fiennes played the title role in Marlowe's Edward II, and in 2002 Ken-

neth Branagh starred in Richard Grandage continued working

II. at

Sheffield until 2005. Meanwhile, in 2000

he became an associate director of London's Donmar Warehouse, and in 2002

he succeeded Sam Mendes as artistic director there. Grandages programming was diverse, including popular musicals, challenging European classics, and modern dramas. He won directorial awards for Peter Nichols's Passion Play (2000) (2003).

and Albert Camus's Caligula His revival of Stephen Sond-

(b. May 2, 1962, Yorkshire, Eng.)

heim's Merrily We Roll Along (2000-01) won multiple awards. In 2005 and 2006 he directed revivals of Guys and Dolls and Evita, which ran simultaneously in West End theatres. At the Donmar he mounted his first productions of new plays in 2006, directing Sir Ian McKellen in Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut and Langella in Frost/Nixon. Grandage did not slow down in 2007. In addition to directing three of the six plays staged at the Donmar and managing the transfer of Frost/Nixon to Broadway, he announced major business plans for the

Michael Grandage,

Donmar

Grandage, Michael

London’s

Donmar

artistic director of Warehouse

theatre,

made a belated but hugely successful debut on Broadway in 2007 with his production of the play Frost/Nixon. The work, written by Peter Morgan, dramatized the 1977 television interviews in which British writer and broadcaster David Frost induced former U.S. president Richard Nixon (played by Frank Langella) to express regret for the Watergate affair. Grandage, one of Britain’s busiest and most admired theatrical directors, grew up in Penzance, Eng.; at age 18 he en-

rolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. After graduating in 1984, he embarked on a promising

organization.

The

company

bought the lease on its theatre property, and it established a one-year residency at the Wyndham Theatre in the West End, where it planned to mount four productions beginning in September 2008.

(K. ANNE RANSON)

Grimsson, Olafur Ragnar (b. May 14, 1943, fsafjérdhur, Ice.)

In 2007, when global warming and escalating fossil fuel costs were high on the international agenda, few world leaders were as actively involved in promoting solutions as the president of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson. During his term of office, the small (population 310,000) European country had 81

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

become a leading centre for research into and development of alternative energy, especially geothermal. Grimsson spent much of the year traveling the world—meeting with academic leaders, scientists, and other politicians and promoting Icelandic companies that were already in the forefront of conservation and clean, renewable energy resources. Grimsson was born in a small fishing town on Iceland’s northwestern peninsula. He graduated from the Reykjavik Lyceum in 1962 and then studied in England, where he received a B.A. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1970) in political

science from the University of Manchester. He returned home to become a lecturer in political science at the University of Iceland and was appointed professor in 1973. In the early 1970s Grimsson became well known as a moderator of television talk shows, often engaging in discussions on controversial political and social subjects that generated heated debate. He joined the leftist People’s Alliance Party, serving as party chair-

emissions by sequestering CO, in rock deep beneath the ground. The announced research and Grimsson’s role in organizing the participants earned him a place on Time magazine’s 2007 list “Global Warming’s Big Thinkers.” (BJÖRN MATTHÍASSON) Gul, Abdullah (b. Oct. 29, 1950, Kayseri, Tur.) On Aug. 28, 2007, Abdullah Gul was

elected the 11th president of Turkey. He inherited his politics from his father (the owner of a modest metalworking shop), who had stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate of the National Salvation Party (NSP), the first

Islamist party to make an impact. After Gul graduated (1971) with a degree in economics from Istanbul University, where he was active in the nationalist Turkish

National

Students

Union,

he

Turkey to gain his Ph.D. (1983), he was briefly detained after the 1980 military coup and then went to work in 1983 as an economist at the Islamic Develop-

(b. Aug. 31 1971, Dublin, Ire.)

Eight years later Gul launched himself full time into Turkish politics, becoming the international spokesman for the Welfare Party (WP, a reincarnation of the NSP, which had been banned by the

including

one

stint

(1988-91) as minister of finance. As president (1984-90) of the Parliamentarians for Global Action, he traveled

widely to persuade political leaders of major countries to strengthen the cause of world peace, for which he received the Indira Gandhi Peace Award. During his political career, Grimsson tended to lean to the left in his views and developed a reputation for being a vigorous debater on the political scene. Despite widespread reservations about naming a career left-wing politician to the primarily ceremonial office of president, he was elected to the post in 1996 for a four-year term and was reelected in 2000 and 2004. As president, Grimsson was expected to stay above the fray of domestic politics, and he mostly followed precedent—except in 2004 when he vetoed legislation that had been passed by the parliament, the only time this had happened since the Republic of Iceland was established in 1944. The legislation, which had to do with limits on ownership of television stations, was subsequently rescinded. Grimsson

drew

attention

again

in

2007 when he endorsed an ambitious new research project outside Reykjavik, where an international team of scientists planned to reduce carbon dioxide 82

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(ANDREW MANGO)

Harrington, Padraig

signed to run for president. Grimsson was first elected to the Althingi (parlia1995,

hands.

ate studies in Exeter, Eng. Returning to

ment Bank in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.

until

founder, Kemal Ataturk, was safe in his

spent two years conducting postgradu-

man from 1987 until 1995, when he re-

ment) in 1978 and served off and on

head scarf and petititioned the European Court of Human Rights to disallow the ban on women students’ wearing the head scarf in Turkish universities (a petition she withdrew tactfully when her husband became foreign minister)—Gul was ideally placed to represent the mass of conservative Turks who practiced Islam while maintaining loyalty to the secular republic and remaining open to the outside world in their outlook. Both before and after his election as president, Gul insisted that he would work for all the country’s citizens irrespective of creed or ethnic origin. Nevertheless, he faced an uphill task in persuading Turkish secularists in general, and the Turkish military in particular, that the secular regime established by the republic’s

constitutional court) and then minister

in the coalition government headed by NSP leader Necmettin Erbakan. When Erbakan was eased out of office by the military in 1997 and NSP was closed down (just as its predecessor had been), Gul became a leading member of a group of modernizers who broke away from Erbakan and formed the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as a democratic,

conservative

but noncon-

fessional movement. Gul deputized for the AKP leader Istanbul Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was imprisoned on the eve of the 2002 parliamentary elections. In the elections the AKP won an absolute majority, and Gul served as prime minister for four months until Erdogan was allowed back into politics. Gul then became foreign minister in Erdogan’s government. During his fouryear tenure at the Foreign Ministry, Gul concentrated on pushing forward Turkey’s application for membership in

It was an emotional moment for golfer Padraig Harrington in May 2007 when he became the first home player since 1982 to win the Irish Open, but he had to wait only two months to achieve an even more impressive feat. In the British Open, held July 19-22 at Carnoustie, Scot., Harrington became the first European to win a major event in eight

years, the first Irishman to win a major championship since Fred Daly in 1947, and—since Daly was from north of the border—the first major winner ever from the Republic of Ireland. Drama built as Harrington, having come from six strokes behind at the start of the final day to one ahead of Spaniard Sergio Garcia, hit the ball twice into the stream

crossing the closing hole. A double bogey six dropped him one behind, but Garcia then bogeyed to make it even at seven under par. Harrington won the play-off—and the title—by one stroke. Harrington began golfing with his family at age five. As an amateur, he made three appearances (1991, 1993, 1995) for Great

Britain

and Ireland’s

match against the United States in the Walker Cup. Harrington completed an accountancy degree before deciding to turn professional in 1995 at the relatively late age of 24. “I decided I would because the guys I was able to beat as

the European Union, acquiring a repu-

an amateur

tation as a skillful and nonconfrontational negotiator who was as popular with his staff as he was with his foreign

cause I thought I was good enough,” he said. “I thought if I did well maybe I'd make a comfortable living on the Tour.” Far from being a journeyman, however, he followed three top 10 finishes with his first victory, winning the Spanish

constituents. A pious practicing Muslim

himself—and married to an observant wife who refused to discard the Muslim

were

turning pro,

not be-

Biographies Chris O'Meara/AP

tion for his second novel. His curiosity about their inner lives provided the story line for A Thousand Splendid Suns. Set in Afghanistan, the novel traced the relationship between two women,

Mariam

and

Laila,

the

first

and second wives of Rasheed. Afghanistan itself also emerged as one of the novel’s central characters. Hosseini found it impossible to separate the story of the novel’s characters from Afghanistan’s recent history, and he viewed his second novel as “more ambitious” than his first. Nonetheless, he

characterized both novels as being ultimately the same: "love stories" in which "characters seek and are saved by love and human connection." (J.E. LUEBERING)

Irish golfing sensation Padraig Harrington Open in Madrid in only his ninth start of the 1996 European Tour season. Harrington (with partner Paul McGinley) secured victory for Ireland in the World Cup the following year. He earned a Ryder Cup debut in 1999 by coming in second in the last two qualifying events. Although he did win two titles in 2000, he struggled with several second-place lief when he birdied the final hole to beat McGinley at the 2001 end-of-sea-

secondary-school teacher. In 1976 he and his parents moved to Paris, where his father worked at the Afghan embassy. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they found returning to their home impossible, and they moved to California, having been granted political asylum by the U.S. Hosseini attended Santa Clara University, where he studied biology, and in 1989 he began attending medical school at the University of California,

son Volvo Masters. More wins followed,

San Diego. He entered private practice

including three Ryder Cup trophies (2002, 2004, 2006) and a play-off victory over world number one American Tiger Woods in Japan's Dunlop Phoenix tournament in 2006. The latter came soon after Harrington had lifted the Order of Merit crown as the European Tours top money winner for the first time, and it seemed that the next logical step was a major title. He admitted that another near miss would have been hard to live with, but Garcia gave him a chance at Carnoustie, and Harrington took advantage of it. In December Harrington was named the 2007 European Tour Golfer

as an internist in 1996, three years after receiving his medical degree, but turned to writing full-time in 2004. In 2006 he was named a goodwill envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Hosseini began working in 2001 on The Kite Runner, writing at 4 AM before heading to his medical practice. The

finishes. Therefore, it was a massive re-

of the Year.

(MARK GARROD)

Hosseini, Khaled (b. March 4, 1965, Kabul, Afg.)

In 2007 Khaled Hosseini published his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which quickly topped American and British best-seller lists. His latest release did little, however,

international

popularity

to dent the

of his first

novel, The Kite Runner; four years after

its publication and for the second year running, it was in 2007 named the most popular book among British book clubs, and it continued to top bestseller lists in the U.S. Hosseini grew up in Kabul; his father was a diplomat and his mother a

novel’s narrator is Amir, a writer who

lives in California in the present day but who grew up in the 1970s in Kabul, the privileged son of a wealthy family. Amir’s story centres on his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of a family servant, and its subsequent dissolution. The Kite Runner was praised in reviews for its vivid depictions of Afghanistan and for its powerful storytelling, but it won no major literary awards and was, at times, dismissed by

critics for elements dramatic.

considered

Nonetheless,

melo-

the novel soon

gained wide popularity through readers’ word-of-mouth praise, and it was eventually published in more than three dozen countries. In 2003 Hosseini returned to Afghanistan for the first time since he moved to the U.S. It was during that trip that he found in the “women in burgas trailed by four, five or six children begging for money” the inspira-

Hu Shuli (b. 1953, Beijing, China) Hu Shuli, chief editor and cofounder of

Caijing, the preeminent business magazine in China, in 2007 attracted atten-

tion with a series of editorials calling on the government to "accelerate democratic change” in China and to “end monopolies and introduce more competition” into the Chinese market. Hu was already known internationally for her efforts to expose corruption in the Chinese government as well as among private and state-owned enterprises. Frequently referred to as “the most dangerous woman in China” because of her emphasis on aggressive investigative reporting, she consistently pushed the limits of press freedom in her country, publishing articles that ranged from exposés of bribery and deceitful business practices to well-researched critiques of government policy. Hu was born into a family of prominent journalists and publishers. During the Cultural

Revolution,

however,

her

family fell out of political favour, and while in her mid-teens Hu, along with her parents, was sent to work in the countryside. She joined the army in 1970, and after the Cultural Revolution

ended, she gained entrance to Renmin University of China (also known by its previous name, the People’s University of China) in Beijing. After graduating (1982) with a degree in journalism, Hu went to work as a reporter for the Workers Daily She was awarded a World Press Institute fellowship in 1987 that allowed her to study at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minn. Re-

turning to China, she participated in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. She later joined the staff of the China Business 83

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Doug Kanter—The New York Times/Redux

Academy

Award

nominations

as pro-

ducer and director of Babel (2006), the

ritu’s feature films, 27 Grams

third segment in a loose trilogy that began with Amores perros (2000). While he did not win in either category, Ifiárritus presence among the Hollywood elite (coupled with the movie's best

story of seemingly isolated individuals whose lives were subtly intertwined.

drama

(b. June 4, 1975, Los Angeles, Calif.)

win

at

the

Golden

Globes)

showed that the director was at the forefront of the burgeoning Mexican film renaissance. Ifiárritu was expelled from school at age 16 and tried out several occupations before turning to cinema. His first job as a commercial sailor persuaded him to complete his education at the IberoChinese publisher and businesswoman Hu Shuli Times, becoming chief of the newspapers international desk by 1995. With the financial backing of a group of U.S.-educated Chinese businessmen,

Hu launched Caijing in 1998. Under her editorial guidance, Caijing quickly became known for its hard-hitting journalism. In 2000 the magazine rocked the Chinese securities industry when it reported on stock-market manipulation by some of the country’s leading investment firms. Another of the magazines most notable exposés detailed government efforts to cover up the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) after the illness first appeared in Guangdong province in late 2002. Hu's insistence on independent reporting in a media market dominated by state-owned newspapers quickly brought her accolades from around the globe. BusinessWeek included her in its 2001 "Stars of Asia" feature recognizing 50 leaders "at the forefront of change" in the region. In 2003 the World Press Review named her the International Editor of the Year. As much as she sought to test the boundaries of press freedom in China, Hu admitted that certain topics had been deemed “off limits” for her publication. Among these were the controversial Falun Gong spiritual movement and the Tiananmen Square protests. Nevertheless, Hu maintained that there

were “tremendous opportunities for the finance-business press to play the role of watchdog” in China. (SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Iñárritu, Alejandro González (b. Aug. 15, 1963, Mexico City, Mex.) Acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu finally received mainstream

recognition

in 2007

with

teamed up for Babel). Like all of Iñár-

American

University,

Mexico

City. In

1984 Iñárritu became a popular disc jockey at Mexico's top-rated radio station, where he would piece together playlists into a loose narrative arc; he credited this experience with cultivating his interest in storytelling. He later became the youngest producer for Televisa, Mexico's premiere TV company. After leaving Televisa, he founded (1991)

Zeta films and moved into advertising as a writer and director of television commercials. From 1988 to 1990 he had concentrated on his first love—music— and scored six Mexican films. During this time he became acquainted with celebrated Mexican novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, and the two began a long and fruitful collaboration. The pair continued to correspond and develop ideas when Iñárritu traveled to the U.S. to study filmmaking, and they transformed one of their early ideas— about three interconnected stories set in a grim yet realistic Mexico

City—into

the screenplay for Iñárritu’s feature directorial debut, Amores perros. The movie was an international success; it won

awards at the Cannes and

Chicago

film

festivals,

Mexican

Ariel Awards,

garnered

10

and earned

an

told the

(ADAM AUGUSTYN)

Jolie, Angelina In 2007 American actress Angelina Jolie, one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, continued to light up the screen and to use her celebrity to draw attention to the social issues she championed. Her highly publicized film A Mighty Heart (2007), in which she portrayed the widow of slain reporter Daniel Pearl, not only gave the small-budget movie a greater media presence but also provided the actress with a forum for speaking out about the plight of journalists reporting from war zones. She also continued in her role, begun in 2001, as a hands-on

UN goodwill ambassador, work that had already taken her on awareness-raising campaigns to such countries as Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Pakistan (the site of Pearl’s abduction and murder).

Jolie was the daughter of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand. It did not take long for Jolie to follow in her parents’ footsteps—she filmed a bit part in the comedy Lookin’ to Get Out at the age of 5 and enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute at 11. She became a professional model as a teenager and appeared in several music videos before transitioning into acting fulltime. Jolie had prominent roles in the films Hackers (1995) and Foxfire (1996)

and quickly became a popular sex symbol, but she was better known for her

Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie

Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. Iñárritu parlayed his newfound celebrity into high-profile jobs directing two unconventional short films. In 2001 he directed Powder Keg, an entry in a series of extended BMW commercials made by A-list directors. The next year Iñárritu contributed a segment titled “Mexico” to the episodic short-film collaboration /109’01—September 11, a collection of reflections on

the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. that were all limited to 11minute 9-second running times and were shot in a single frame. In 2003 the director-screenwriter team of Ifiárritu and Arriaga crafted the second part of the trilogy, 21 Grams (the two also Andrew Medichini/AP

84

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Al Zanyk/Courtesy Wexner Center for the Arts

full lips and her numerous magazine covers than for her acting ability. Her career took off after appearances in two made-for-television productions; she played an embattled politician's wife in

AIDS in 1988.) The book Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane examined their work together. In the wake of Zane's death and the death of another member of the company, Jones

George Wallace (1997) and an AIDSstricken supermodel in Gia (1998), roles

(who himself is HIV-positive)

that earned her back-to-back Golden Globe Awards. Her critically acclaimed performances continued in 1999 when she portrayed a psychiatric patient in Girl, Interrupted and earned the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Following her Oscar win, Jolie starred in a string of big-budget films, including the video-game adaptation Lara

some of his most powerful works, including Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and Still/Here (1994). Jones received MacArthur fellowship (1994) and

a a

number of additional awards in the performing arts. His memoir, Last Night on

Earth (1995; with Peggy Gillespie), was a compelling narrative of his life that revealed the issues that animated and

Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the thriller

Taking Lives (2004), and the tongue-incheek spy adventure Mr. & Mrs. Smith

motivated him.

(2005). The latter film paired her with

Kawase, Naomi (b. May 30, 1969, Nara, Japan)

Brad Pitt, and the two superstars began a relationship soon thereafter (Pitt was married at the time) that quickly became a media sensation, earning the pair the ubiquitous tabloid moniker “Brangelina.” Pitt in 2006 adopted Jolie’s two children (whom she had previously adopted on her own in 2002 and 2005 from orphanages in Cambodia and Ethiopia, respectively), and the couple had their first biological child on May 27, 2006. They added a fourth child to their family in March 2007 when they adopted a boy from a Vietnamese orphanage. Pitt and Jolie characteristically used the public’s interest in their relationship as a platform for speaking out for a cause; the pair vowed to never marry until couples of all sexual orientations were able to do so legally. (ADAM AUGUSTYN)

created

(KATHLEEN KUIPER)

Japanese film director Naomi Kawase was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2007

Cannes

(France)

International

Film Festival for her motion Mogari

American choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones William Tass Jones was the 9th of 12 children of migrant farm workers. His parents moved from rural Florida when he was three years old, and he grew up just south of Rochester, N.Y., in a small

community known as Wayland. In high school he became involved in athletics,

no

mori

picture

(2007; The Mourning

Forest), which earned widespread praise from critics for its sensitive portrayal of two people struggling to cope with overwhelming grief. While the Grand Prix added to her reputation as one of the world’s most talented young directors, it was not the first time that

Kawase had been honoured at Cannes. Her debut feature-length film, the family drama Moe no suzaku (1997), earned her the Caméra d’Or, the festi-

especially track, and in theatre. His thirst for performance was slaked when he took a secondary role in a school production of The Music Man. After graduation he attended the State University of New York at Binghamton. There he rejected the ethos of college athletics and became interested in movement and

val’s

dance. There, too, he met Arnie Zane,

first effort, Ni tsutsumarete (1992; Em-

impressive entrance, jumping up on the

who became his partner in business and

bracing), documented her search to find

stage to receive an award for best choreography for his work in the musical Spring Awakening. Based on Frühlings Erwachen (1891), a tragedy by German

in life. With Lois Welk and Jill Becker,

her father, whom she had not seen since

the two men formed American Dance Asylum in 1973 and started choreographing works that tested the boundaries of modern dance. Jones and Zane scandalized some by incorporating partnering between men and addressed subjects such as racism and AIDS. Much of their work incorporated multimedia elements such as spoken narrative and videotape, and they examined through movement autobiographical elements of their lives. In 1982 Jones and Zane formed Bill T.

her parents divorced during her early

Jones, Bill T. (b. Feb. 15, 1952, Steuben county, N.Y.)

At the Tony Awards in 2007, choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones made an

dramatist

Frank

Wedekind,

the

new

musical dealt with adolescent sexual awakening and the damage that can be caused by a repressive and hypocritical society. Its adaptation as a Broadway musical made the producer's selection of Jones, an intellectual who had estab-

lished himself early on as a postmodern dance innovator

in many ways

a sur-

prising choice for choreographer He acknowledged as much as he accepted the applause of the audience with a broad smile, thanking them for "taking a snob like me into their hearts."

Jones/Arnie Zane & Company, now the

Bil T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. (The company’s name continued as it was despite Zane’s death from

prize

Kawase

was

for

first-time

the youngest

directors. person

ever

to win the award. After Kawase

graduated (1989) from

the Osaka School of Photography, she lectured there for four years. She began her career in film as a maker of short autobiographical documentaries. Her

childhood. Her second film, sumori (1994), was a portrait

Katatof her

grandmother, who had helped to rear Kawase. Turning to full-length features, Kawase directed as well as wrote the screenplay for Moe no suzaku. Besides earning her the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, Moe no suzaku also brought Kawase the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Prize at the Rotterdam (Neth.) International Film Festival.

Kawase continued to attract critical acclaim with her later films. The love story Hotaru (2000; Firefly) won both the FIPRESCI Prize and the CICAE (International Confederation of Art Cinemas) 85

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

Prize at the Locarno

(Switz.) Interna-

tional Film Festival. She returned to documentary filmmaking with Tsuioku no dansu (2003; Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom), which chronicled the final days in the life of one of Kawase’s mentors, Kazuo Nishii, a photographer and film critic suffering from cancer. Her motion

picture Sharasojyu

(2003;

Shara), about the family of a young boy who disappeared without a trace, was selected to compete at Cannes in 2003. In Mogari no mori, Kawase

again ex-

plored the themes of death and bereavement that had dominated many of her earlier works. The film portrayed the relationship between an elderly man haunted by memories of his longdead wife and the man’s caregiver, a young nurse who herself mourns the loss of a child. The film’s plot focused on a trip that the two take together, during which they share their anguish. Kawase’s next film, Sekaiju ga watashi o suki dattara li no ni (If Only the Whole World Loved Me), was set for release in 2008. (SHERMAN HOLLAR)

confirmed the identity of the fort. Subsequent excavations recovered hundreds of thousands of artifacts (such as

tools, household items, weaponry, and body armour), as well as the skeletal remains of some of the first colonists. Kelso began working in field archaeology after earning an M.A. (1964) in early American history at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. He then earned a Ph.D. (1971) in his-

torical archaeology from Emory University, Atlanta. Kelso served as commissioner of archaeology (1971-79) for the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission, and he studied historical sites

The commemoration in May 2007 of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown—the first permanent English settlement in North America—carried heightened significance, given the wealth of archaeological findings about Jamestown that had been coming to light through the work and leadership of William Kelso. Kelso, the director of

Klüft, Carolina Evelyn (b. Feb. 2, 1983, Sandhult, Swed.)

Swedish track and field athlete Carolina Klüft in 2007 won a record third consecutive International Association of

was a research archaeologist (1979-85)

championships title in the heptathlon,

and director of archaeology (1986-93) at Monticello, the Virginia home of former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. As Kelso became an expert on Colonial America, he pioneered the use of archaeology to learn about slavery during the period. Kelso held a longtime fasci-

with a score of 7,032 points, the second

and after be-

coming director of archaeology in 1993 for the APVA Jamestown Rediscovery Project, he enthusiastically shared the process of archaeological discovery with the public. He lectured extensively about the ongoing archaeological work at the Jamestown site and headed a Jamestown archaeologist William M. Kelso

Federations

(IAAF)

world

highest in history. Kluft’s tally, a 31point improvement on her previous per-

sonal best, was the highest in 18 years and vaulted the 24-year-old Swede past Larisa Nikitina of the former Soviet Union on the all-time list. Only worldrecord holder Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the U.S. had scored higher. Klüfts

father

Johnny

Klüft,

was

a

Swedish first division association football (soccer) player, and her mother, Ingalill Ahlm Klüft, was a long jumper. The second of four daughters, Klüft, known to her fans as "Carro," followed

in her familys athletic footsteps. In 1995, at age 12, she placed second in her first championships multievent, a youth track and field triathlon, and she did not

lose another multievent until May 1999. She won world junior heptathlon titles in 2000 and 2002 and in the second of these victories broke a world junior record that had stood since the year she was born. When Klüft won Olympic gold in 2004, her 517-point margin of victory over Lithuanian silver medalist Austra Skujyte was greater than Skujytes margin over the 25thplace competitor. In 2005 Klüft, then 22, became the youngest athlete ever to have won the "grand slam" of the five track and field championship titles available to Europeans: the Olympics plus both the indoor and the outdoor IAAF world championships and European championships. She was troubled by a hamstring injury in 2006 yet still managed to repeat as gold medalist at the European outdoor championships, held in Góteborg, Swed. By the end of

lier, however, the exact location of the

original fort of the Jamestown colonists on the James River in Virginia had been a mystery, and all that was known about the earliest years of the settlement came from historical accounts and documents. Although the prevailing view was that the site had been washed away by the river long ago, Kelso firmly believed that the remains of the fort still existed, and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) named him to head the redis-

covery effort. He began excavations in 1994 at a location where he deduced the fort might have been, and he soon unearthed several early 17th-century objects. By late 1996 he and his staff had uncovered evidence of palisades and the foundations of other structures that

2007, Klüft had contested a career-total 45 multievents (indoors and outdoors)

and had lost only 6, with her last loss coming in 2002 in an indoor European Dave Bowman—The Daily Press/AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Community (1997), the Buried Truth (DAVID C. HAYES)

Athletics

archaeology for the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, helped show how the archaeological evidence underpinned the importance of Jamestown as the beginning of what would become the United States. A little more than a decade ear-

86

in the Plantation and Jamestown, (2006).

such as colonial farms and plantations along the James River before they were lost to real-estate development. He later

nation with Jamestown,

Kelso, William M. (b. March 30, 1941, Chicago, Ill.)

summer field school at which students and outside archaeologists could participate in the excavations. Kelso was also the author of a number of books on American archaeological projects, including Kingsmill Plantations, 1619-1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia (1984), Archaeology at Monticello: Artifacts of Everyday Life

Biographies Thomas Kienzle/AP

pressing the Korean language and culture, especially during World War II. He began writing poetry in 1945. Physically slight and emotionally sensitive, Ko as a young adult endured the deadly struggle between the communists and nationalists and the viciousness of the ensuing Korean War (1950-53). He was

——exua 200

traumatized by the all-pervasiveness of death and the loss of friends and family in the turmoil of the period, and he lost hearing in one ear as a result of a suicide attempt. In 1952 he sought solace by becoming a Son (Zen) Buddhist monk. He continued to write and published his first book of poetry, Piangamseong (“Transcendental Sensibility”), in 1960. Kos anomie became more pronounced again after 1961, when militarists under Park Chung Hee seized power in South Korea. Ko left the monastic life in 1962, and in 1970 he

attempted suicide a second time. In 1980 he was incarcerated for antigov-

Swedish track and field champion Carolina Klüft

ernment activities in a military prison,

Cup pentathlon. In the 293 component events of these 45 competitions, she had failed to finish just one: in 2000 at the Swedish junior championships, when she abandoned the heptathlonconcluding 800-m run but nonetheless finished with enough points to secure an age-18 national title. Klüft also was an accomplished long jumper, with a personal best of 6.97 m (22 ft 10% in) set in 2004, the same

year she won the bronze medal in that event at the world indoor championships. Although Joyner-Kersee’s heptathlon

world

record,

set

in

1988,

loomed just 259 points from her grasp at the end of 2007, Kluft teased that she

might turn her attention full-time the long jump in future seasons.

to

(SIEG LINDSTROM)

Ko Un (b. Aug. 1, 1933, Kunsan, North Cholla province, Japanese-occupied Korea [now South Korea]) By 2007 Korean

poet Ko Un, the author of more than 150 works, including about 70 books of poetry, had gained an international readership with verse informed by both his political activism in South Korea and a broader concern for humanity. His poetry was demotic and often brash, written to be read aloud, and its

subjects were usually everyday people and commonplace occurrences. Ko was born in a farming village, and his schooling took place under Japanese authorities who were intent on sup-

where he was often kept in total darkness. In his cell he began to envision personalities from his past and decided to write a poem about every person he had known. The first three volumes of his

Man'inbo

(Jen

Thousand

Lives)

project were published in 1986. In the much more liberal South Korean political climate that followed the democratic

constitution

of 1987,

Ko

flourished as a widely admired poet and leader in the Korean cultural scene. He was elected chairman (1989-90) of the Association of Korean Arts and served as president (1992-94)

of the Association of Writers for National Literature. He accepted a resident professorship in the graduate school of Kyonggi University, Seoul. In 1998-99 Ko was a visiting professor at

the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University’s HarvardYenching Institute. A proponent of Korean reunification, Ko in 1998 led the

first South Korean delegation to North Korea and later recorded his observations in a book of poems, Nam kwa puk (2000; “South and North”).

Ko’s first volume of poetry in English translation, The Sound of My Waves, was published in 1993. His later books in English included Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems sand Lives (2005),

(1997); Ten Thouexcerpts from the

first 10 volumes of the Ten Thousand Lives project; and The Three Way Tavern

(2006). Ko also published

novels,

drama, and literary criticism. (CHARLES TRUMBULL)

Koirala, Girija Prasad (b. 1925, Bihar state, India)

On April 1, 2007, Nepalese Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala swore into his cabinet five representatives of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). It was a moment of great hope for Nepal, which from 1996 to 2006 had endured a bloody insurgency waged by Maoist rebels. With the Maoists included in a newly formed interim government and the role of the monarchy suspended, elections were scheduled for a Constituent Assembly that would determine the monarchy’s future status. The Maoists, however, began calling for the immediate abolishment of the monarchy as well as for the conduct of the elections under a system of proportional representation that gave them their best chance of success. When these demands were refused, they left the cabinet in September. Koirala then indefinitely postponed the elections, scheduled for November 22. The possibility of renewed war loomed, and Koirala’s government was in jeopardy. Girija Prasad Koirala was a member of the most prominent political family in Nepal. His older brothers both served as prime minister: Matrika Prasad Koirala in 1951-52 and 1953-55 and Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala from 1959 until King Mahendra overthrew the government in December 1960. Bisheshwar Prasad and Girija Prasad were subsequently imprisoned. After his release in 1967, Girija Prasad went into exile with other leaders of the Nepali Congress Party (NCP) and did not return to Nepal until 1979. In 1990 Koirala was a leader of the People’s

Movement

(Jana

Andolan),

which achieved a restoration of democracy in Nepal. He was elected to the parliament in 1991 and served his first term

as prime minister from

1991

to

1994. Factional disputes within the NCP brought that government down. In 1995 Koirala won the presidency of the NCP, and he was named prime minister again in April 1998. He headed a minority government until the end of the year, when he formed a coalition. In elections in May 1999, the NCP won an absolute majority, but Koirala’s intraparty rival, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, became prime minister. In March 2000,

however,

Koirala

ousted

Bhat-

tarai by withholding support and became prime minister for a third time. By this time the Maoist insurgency had gathered strength. Koirala sought to deploy the army against it, but this action was opposed by King Birendra, 87

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Raveendran—AFP/Getty Images

Nepalese Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala who had succeeded Mahendra in 1972. After the murder of the king by Crown Prince Dipendra in June 2001, Koirala was forced to resign. He had been criticized for his failure to prevent the royal massacre, but disputes over his handling of the insurgency as well as ongoing corruption allegations were more

immediate His

reasons

successor

for his departure.

Sher

Bahadur

Deuba,

was twice dismissed by the autocratic new king, Gyanendra, who assumed direct power on Feb. 1, 2005. Koirala was under house arrest from that date until the following April. International pressure and another Peoples Movement forced the king to restore the parliament in April 2006. At that point, Koirala was elected to his fourth term as prime minister. Talks with the Maoist rebels culminated in a comprehensive peace

agreement

in November

2006.

Despite the Maoists' decision to abandon the interim government in 2007, Koirala remained hopeful that new elections could be held by April 2008. (K. ANNE RANSON)

Kony, Joseph (b. 1961?) In late 2007, more than two years after the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued a warrant for his arrest,

Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony remained at large. The mysterious cultish figure led the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),

a militia

that

had

terrorized

northern Uganda for nearly 20 years. Kony and other LRA leaders were charged with human rights violations that included some 10,000 murders and

the abduction and enslavement of more than 24,000 children. Kony was said to be hiding in the Democratic Republic 88

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of the Congo as yearlong peace talks moved forward slowly. Kony was reared in the village of Odek in northern Uganda. An ethnic Acholi, he served as an altar boy during his youth and was fond of dancing. He left school to become a traditional healer. When Yoweri Museveni seized power in Uganda in 1986 and became president, some Acholis revolted. A relative of Kony’s, spirit medium Alice Lakwena, led a rebel group called the Holy Spirit Movement, which was quashed by government troops as it advanced on Kampala, the capital. Kony joined another faction and in 1987 proclaimed himself a prophet for the Acholi people and took charge of the Holy Spirit Movement, which would eventually become the LRA. In its early years the LRA enjoyed support in northern Uganda, but as its resources diminished, the militia began to plunder the local population. The movement gained considerable strength in 1994 when it received the backing of the government of The Sudan, which sought to retaliate against Kampala for its support of Sudanese rebels. Kony, armed with prophecies that he said he received from spirits who came to him in dreams, ordered the LRA to

attack villages, murdering, raping, and mutilating in a campaign of intimidation that displaced some two million people. Children were abducted and brainwashed into becoming soldiers and slaves. Kony convinced them that holy water made them bulletproof. Children who resisted or tried to escape were beaten to death by their peers. Kony was reported to have taken as many as 50 of his female captives as “wives.” By 1996 the government began setting up secure camps. Children living in villages in northern Uganda became known as “night commuters,” walking kilometres every evening to the relative safety of the camps or towns in hopes of avoiding abduction. Kony’s aim for the LRA was never particularly specific beyond the ouster of Museveni and the establishment of a new government based on the Ten Commandments. The ICC warrant, made public in October 2005, brought Kony and the LRA under international scrutiny, and Sudanese support for the rebels was soon withdrawn. This led Kony to make his first peace offering in May 2006 (and his first public appearance in 12 years), but negotiations dragged. Ironically, the ICC warrant proved to complicate the situation, because the prospect of arrest made Kony less likely to come out of

hiding. The Ugandan government sought to have the warrant suspended, but such a move was seen as potentially damaging to the integrity of the nascent court.

(ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

Lagarde, Christine (b. Jan. 1, 1956, Paris, France)

In June 2007 Christine Lagarde, one of France’s most talented and eminent lawyers, was appointed finance minister by newly elected right-of-centre Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy. She was the first woman in the Group of Eight (G-8) countries to hold this influential position. The Wall Street Journal Europe rated Lagarde as the fifth most successful businesswoman in Europe, while Forbes magazine ranked her the 12th most powerful woman in the world. For Lagarde this remarkable appointment marked a final break from a glittering career as a lawyer in the U.S., where she had defended the interests of American corporations to the detriment of French companies; for France it reflected the end of a political leadership dominated by antiglobalization and a tacit acceptance of the unpleasant measures needed to revitalize its increasingly uncompetitive and flagging economy. In contrast to her predecessors, Lagarde held the controversial view that Frances 35-hour workweek was a symbol of the right to be lazy. She wanted the country to work harder and play less, and the French business community welcomed her appointment. Lagarde was educated in the U.S. and France. After graduating (1974) from the prestigious Holton-Arms girls' college-preparatory school in Bethesda, Md., she studied at the Law School of

the University of Paris X-Nanterre, where she lectured after graduation before going on to specialize in labour law, in which she obtained a postgraduate diploma (DESS). She also acquired a masters degree in English. In 1981 Lagarde joined the international law firm Baker & McKenzie in Paris. She was made a partner in 1987 and became the first female member

(1995-99)

of

the executive committee. She was made chairman of the executive committee in 1999

(reelected

2002)

and

moved

to

Chicago. At Baker & McKenzie, she implemented a "client first" way of thinking whereby lawyers anticipated clients' needs rather than being reactive, and profits at the firm rose strongly. As a member of the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), La-

garde led the US-Poland Defense Industry Working Group, advancing the

Biographies

interests of aircraft companies Boeing and Lockheed Martin against those of Airbus and Dassault Aviation. In 2003 she was a member of the CSIS commission that culminated

in a $3.5 bil-

lion contract for the sale of 48 Lockheed Martin jet fighters to Poland. Despite what struck some French observers as a conflict of interest, Lagarde in March 2004 received France's highest honour, the Legion of Honour, from Pres. Jacques Chirac, who described her as a role model and a "charismatic leader of the largest law firm in the world." John Thys—AFP/Getty Images

James Hugh Calum Laurie was educated at Eton College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. His father won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics as a member of the British national rowing team, and while at Eton, Laurie fol-

lowed him into the sport. He and his partner were the 1977 national junior coxed pairs champions and came in fourth in the world junior championships. Laurie joined the rowing team at Cambridge the following year, but illness caused him to withdraw from competition, and he became involved with Cambridge’s Footlights Club comedy revue group, eventually serving as its president. While on an end-of-year tour with the Footlights, he met the actor-playwright Stephen Fry. The two collaborated on The Cellar Tapes, entered that revue in the 1981 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and won the Perrier Pick of the Fringe Award. Along with Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton, and fellow Foot-

lights performer Emma Thompson, they soon were writing and performing on the television sketch-comedy program Alfresco (1983-84). That led to Laurie’s

Newly appointed French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde Lagarde returned to France in June 2005 to join Prime Minister Dominique

de Villepin s government as trade minister before becoming (briefly) minister for agriculture and fisheries in 2007. As trade minister she encouraged foreign investment in France and the opening of new markets for French products, particularly in the technology sector, helping exporters though the Cap Export mechanism, which she launched in September 2005.

(JANET H. CLARK)

role on Rowan Atkinson’s series Blackadder IT and various other Blackadder sequels (beginning in 1986), and he and Fry wrote and performed in 26 episodes of A Bit of Fry and Laurie between 1987 and 1995. Among his other comedy series was Jeeves and Wooster, also with Fry (1990-93). Laurie’s films included Peters Friends (1992), Sense and Sensi-

bility (1995), The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), and Cousin Bette (1998), and he provided the voice for characters in numerous TV and movie cartoons. In addition to possessing fine acting skills, Laurie

directed

TV

shows

and

commercials and was a talented musician. He wrote and recorded a number of songs and performed with the celebrity band Band from TV (formerly

Laurie, Hugh

16:9) and the band Poor White

(b. June 11, 1959, Oxford, Eng.)

and the Little Big Horns. In addition, he was the author of the novels The

When in 2007 it became apparent that the number of British actors filling major roles—mostly as Americans—in pilots for television series in the U.S. had grown tremendously, credit was given to Hugh Laurie for paving their way. As the brilliant but rude and arrogant Dr. Gregory House in the TV drama House, Laurie—whose American accent was so

convincing that people often thought he was joking around when he spoke with his natural British accent—had garnered such awards as 2006 and 2007 Golden Globes and a 2007 Screen Actors Guild Award as well as the seemingly unlikely status as a sex symbol.

Trash

Gun Seller (1996) and The Paper Soldier (2007). Laurie was made OBE in the

2007 New Year's Honours. (BARBARA WHITNEY)

oneering research in eastern Africa. During the year, Meave was a lead author of a study in Nature magazine that went against the prevailing view of the ancestral lineage of Homo sapiens, namely that the species H. habilis evolved into H. erectus in linear succession. In 2000 the Koobi Fora Research Project, which Leakey and her daughter Louise Leakey co-directed, had found fossil cranial specimens of H. habilis and H. erectus that dated from about 1.5 million years ago in an area east of Lake Turkana in Kenya. The study suggested that the two species coexisted in the area for about 500,000 years. The discovery was the latest in her career that helped to show that the evolution of hominins (modern

humans and fossil species more closely related to modern humans than to other living species) was not as simple as a relatively sparse fossil record might have previously suggested. She was born Meave Epps. As a college student, Meave planned to be a marine zoologist, and she earned a B.S. in zoology and marine zoology from the University of North Wales, Bangor. Finding that there was a lack of positions for women on ocean expeditions, she began graduate work in zoology, and from 1965 to 1968 she worked as a zoologist at Tigoni Primate Research Centre

outside Nairobi.

At the centre,

which was administered by Louis Leakey, she conducted doctoral research on the forelimb of modern monkeys, and she obtained a doctorate (1968) in zoology from the University of North Wales. Soon thereafter she joined a team led by Richard Leakey to explore new fossil sites near Lake Turkana. Meave and Richard were married in 1970, and they continued their research in the Lake Turkana area. In 1989, when

Richard shifted his attention to wildlife conservation,

Meave

became

the coor-

dinator of the National Museums of Kenya's paleontological field research in the Turkana basin. She was also the head of the National Museums' Division of Paleontology from 1982 to 2001. In 1994 Leakey led a team that discovered the remains of a previously unknown

Leakey, Meave G.

species—Australopithecus

(b. July 28, 1942, London, Eng.)

that was bipedal (walked upright) and, with an age of 4.1 million years, was one of the earliest hominins then known. One of Leakey' interests was in examining evidence at research sites to determine how the environment might

By 2007 paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey had engaged in fossil-finding fieldwork in the study of human origins for more than 35 years, and as the wife of Richard Leakey (son of Louis and Mary Leakey), Meave formed part of a family of renowned paleoanthropologists who had conducted decades of pi-

have

influenced

hominin

anamensis—

evolution,

such as the development of bipedalism. In 2001 Meave and colleagues reported 89

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

on the discovery of a 3.5-million-yearold skull that they determined belonged to a previously unknown hominin

having been found guilty of exceeding campaign spending limits. After a oneyear self-imposed exile in the U.S., he was elected mayor of Seoul in 2002. As mayor, he attracted attention with an ambitious urban-beautification project that included the restoration of a stream running through Seoul’s downtown—a stream that his company had helped pave over almost 40 years earlier. Despite strong opposition from local shop owners and civic groups that questioned the $900 million price tag, the beautification of the Cheonggye stream proved a huge hit with the public after its opening in September 2005. The business scandal that could undo Lee’s presidency centred on his involve-

jor international meets, twice lowering

Lee Myung-bak

ment in an asset-management company

the

(b. Dec. 19, 1941, Osaka, Japan)

closed by authorities in 2001 amid allegations of stock-price manipulation and embezzlement. Although Lee was cleared by prosecutors two weeks before the election, a videotape emerged just days before the vote on which Lee stated that he had established the company. By year's end the matter had been referred to an independent counsel, and Lee would be forced to give up the presidency if found guilty before his inauguration. (PETER M. BECK)

and anchoring Australian 4 x100-mmedley-relay teams to short-course and long-course global marks. Meanwhile, she was on a quest to regain her world record in the 100-m freestyle. She took it back from Henry in 2006 with a time of 53.42 sec, only to lose it again seven months later to Germanys Britta Steffen, who posted 53.30 sec at the 2006 European championships. Lenton blazed a historic 52.99-

genus

and

species—Kenyanthropus

platyops. The find challenged the conventional view that the specimen's contemporary, A. afarensis, was in the direct ancestral lineage of H. sapiens. In 2002 Leakey, along with her daughter Louise, was named an explorer in residence by the National Geographic Society. In addition to authoring many published scientific papers, Leakey was coeditor of The Koobi Fora Research Project, Volume I (1977) and Lothagam: The Dawn of Humanity in Eastern Africa (2003).

(DAVID C. HAYES)

On Dec. 19, 2007, Lee Myung-bak completed an improbable rise from the depths of poverty to become president of South Korea, winning election on his 66th birthday. The former corporate executive and mayor of Seoul secured a landslide victory with 48.6% of the vote,

while

his nearest

rival,

Chung

Dong-young, managed to claim just 26.2%. Along with his record as one of South Korea’s most successful businessmen,

however,

came

a cloud

of

scandal that threatened to derail Lee’s presidency even before it was to begin on Feb. 25, 2008.

Lee’s life story read like a rags-toriches fairy tale. He was born in wartime Japan, the fifth of seven children. In 1946 the boat ferrying his family back to a liberated homeland capsized, and the family’s life savings were lost. Lee helped his mother sell food on the street by day and went to school at night, and he later recalled always being hungry as a child. He collected trash to put himself through Korea University, Seoul, only to be thrown in jail for several months in 1964 for protesting against the normalization of relations with the country of his birth. Lee's meteoric rise in the business world echoed South Korea’s transformation from an impoverished land into the “miracle on the Han River.” When he joined fledgling Hyundai Construction in 1965, it had fewer than 100 employees. When Lee resigned in 1992 as CEO of the company and nine affiliates, there were some 160,000 employees. Lee’s aggressive style and can-do spirit earned him the nickname “the bulldozer.” Lee entered politics in 1992 by winning election to the National Assembly. He was reelected in 1996 but was forced to resign two years later after 90

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Lenton, Lisbeth (b. Jan. 28, 1985, Townsville, Queens., Australia) A charter member of Aus-

tralia’s aquatic “Golden Girls,” Lisbeth (Libby) Lenton was already among the most decorated female swimmers in Australian history when she arrived at the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) world championships in March 2007. By the time the competition ended, she had added five gold medals (three individual and two relay)

to her total and emerged as perhaps her country’s greatest hope for a multimedal performance at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It was in 2003 that Lenton launched herself into the elite ranks of both Australian and world swimming, winning her first national title in the 50-m freestyle. She also made an auspicious international debut with a win in the 100-m freestyle event at the inaugural “Duel in the Pool” against the U.S. in Indianapolis and took two bronze medals at the FINA world championships in Barcelona. At the 2004 Olympic trials in Sydney, Lenton came into her own, leading four women under the once-formidable 25sec barrier for the 50-m freestyle with her 24.70 sec and setting a world record of 53.66 sec for the 100-m freestyle. At

the Athens Olympics later that year, expectations were sky-high for 19-year-old Lenton, and the pressure was enormous under the relentless glare of the international media spotlight. She failed to qualify for the final of the 100-m freestyle and then watched as teammate Jodie Henry cracked her global mark with a time of 53.52 sec and took the gold. All was not lost, however,

as

Lenton sparked her 4 x100-m-freestylerelay team to a gold medal and a worldrecord 3 min 35.94 sec and earned an individual bronze in the 50 m. After Athens, Lenton seemed well nigh unstoppable, winning a total of 18 gold, 4 silver, and 2 bronze medals in five ma100-m

short-course

world

record,

sec swim at the 2007 Duel in the Pool,

but the time was not accepted as a world record by FINA because it came in an “unrecognized event’—a mixed men’s and women’s relay in which Lenton swam against American Michael Phelps. “I know that I swam that fast,” said Lenton, “and I know that I can do it again.” (PHILLIP WHITTEN)

Matsuzaka, Daisuke

(b. Sept. 13, 1980, Tokyo, Japan) In 2007 Japanese baseball pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka concluded his first season in Major League Baseball (MLB) by helping the Boston Red Sox to a four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies in the best-of-seven World Series. Despite a couple of shaky starts to begin the playoffs, the heavily hyped rookie came up with a pair of clutch performances when his team needed him most. In the decisive game seven of the American League Championship Series (ACLS) against the Cleveland In-

dians, Matsuzaka started the game and pitched five solid innings as Boston secured the pennant with an 11-2 win. He notched another victory on October 27 in game three of the World Series, during which he pitched a shutout into the sixth inning before giving up two runs; the Red Sox went on to beat the

Rockies 10-5 in that game and on the following night clinched the title.

Biographies Kyodo/AP

pectations, which at times Matsuzaka struggled to meet. He got the 2007 season off to an auspicious start in early April, pitching seven innings and allowing only a single run in his first appearance, and eventually tallied a respectable regularseason record of 15-12, though with a somewhat disappointing 4.40 earned run average. His

gutsy play in the ALCS and the World Series,

however,

quieted

critics.

With

his victory over the Rockies in game three,

Matsuzaka

became

the

first

Japanese pitcher ever to win a World Series game.

(SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Mayweather, Floyd (b. Feb. 24, 1977, Grand Rapids, Mich.)

At the beginning of 2007, boxer Floyd Mayweather, Jr, was already widely considered the best fighter, pound-forpound, in the world, a reputation he had earned by winning titles in five different weight classes and remaining undefeated in 38 professional bouts (24 by knockout). It was not, however, un-

Before moving to the U.S. to join the Red Sox, Matsuzaka had attained legendary status in Japan. A star pitcher from his youth, he led Yokohama High School to the 1998 Japanese national high school championship, pitching a no-hitter in the title game. Upon his graduation that year, the 1.8-m (6-ft), 84-kg (185-Ib) right-hander was selected by the Seibu Lions as the top overall pick in the Nippon Professional Base-

til he defeated fellow American Oscar De La Hoya on May 5 for the World Boxing Council (WBC) super welterweight (junior middleweight) title that Mayweather gained mainstream recognition. More than the fight itself, it was the four-part documentary 24/7, which was broadcast on HBO cable television during the buildup to the fight, that boosted Mayweathers profile. He emerged as a riveting character with an ego as large as his talent and a proclivity for being alternatively obnoxious and charming, as well as being the centrepiece of a bitter feud between his

ball (NPB) draft. As a rookie, Matsuzaka

two trainers—his

led the NPB with 16 wins, and in eight seasons with the Lions, he compiled a win-loss record of 108-60 and threw a total of 1,355 strikeouts in 204 games. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Matsuzaka helped the Japanese baseball team capture the bronze medal. He further raised his international profile with his dominating performance at the 2006 World Baseball

Floyd Mayweather, Sr, and his uncle Roger Mayweather, a former holder of the WBC super featherweight Gunior lightweight) and super lightweight Gunior welterweight) titles. Mayweather earned his “Pretty Boy” nickname during his amateur career because of his unmarked face. He won the

Japanese baseball pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka

Classic, where he was named the tour-

nament's Most Valuable Player after going undefeated in three starts and giving up just four hits during Japan's 10-6 victory over Cuba in the championship game. The Red Sox ultimately won a bidding war among MLB teams but at a staggering price, agreeing to pay the Seibu Lions more than $51 million for

the negotiating rights to Matsuzaka and then signing the pitcher to a six-year contract

worth

another

$52

million.

Such a large contract brought hefty ex-

father, former boxer

national Golden Gloves in 1993,

1994,

and 1996 but ended his amateur career on a sour note at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, where he lost a con-

troversial decision to Serafim Todorov of Bulgaria in the semifinals and had to settle for a bronze medal in the featherweight division. He turned pro on Oct.

11, 1996, scoring a second-round

knockout of American Roberto Apodaca. Despite the turmoil in his corner, Mayweather flourished, winning the WBC junior lightweight title on Oct. 3, 1998, in his 18th bout by stopping veteran American titleholder Genaro Her-

nandez in the eighth round. Mayweather also won The Ring magazine's Fighter of the Year award in 1998. Mayweather moved up in weight four times,

capturing

The

Ring

magazine

and WBC lightweight titles in 2001, the WBC super lightweight title in 2005, and The Ring magazine and WBC welterweight titles in 2006, before winning the super welterweight title bout against De La Hoya. While Mayweather's dazzling quickness, sharp reflexes, and peerless boxing skills allowed him to continue to win as he moved up in weight, he also became less aggressive against larger men, and many of his bouts were one-sided boxing lessons that lacked excitement. Despite its aesthetic shortcomings, Mayweather's fight against De La Hoya was an enormous financial success. Mayweather underlined his dominance by stopping Britain’s previously undefeated Ricky Hatton in the 10th round on December 8 in Las Vegas. The bout attracted another capacity crowd of 16,700 spectators and, together with his victory over De la Hoya, earned Mayweather The Ring magazine’s Fighter of the Year award for 2007. (NIGEL COLLINS) McGrath, Glenn Donald (b. Feb. 9, 1970, Dubbo, N.S.W., Australia) When cricketer Glenn (“Pigeon”)

McGrath retired in 2007 at the age of 36, the

1.95-m

(6-ft 5-in) Australian

with the metronomic action and the clinical mind had taken more wickets than any other fast bowler in Test history: 563 wickets in 124 Tests at an av-

erage of 21.64. The figures for his final Test, against England (for whom he often reserved his best efforts), read: 21 overs, 11 maidens, 38 runs, and 3 wick-

ets. These were typical figures for McGrath throughout his 13-year international career; he hated to give away runs as much as he enjoyed taking wickets. McGrath was not a true fast bowler in that he did not rely on pure speed to take wickets. His average pace was medium-fast, but with his height and a near-perfect upright delivery stride, he generated bounce and movement from the most docile pitch. Above all, he was a master of psychology, regularly predicting the results of Test series before the start and targeting individual batsmen for particular pressure. A gentle and humorous

man

off the field, Mc-

Grath on the field was an unsmiling assassin—both with the accuracy of his bowling and with the acidity of his 91

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

tongue—who never let any batsman settle for one minute. Very few managed to come out on top. Like all Australian

cricketers,

McGrath

relished

wearing his Baggy Green cap, the symbol

of the

Australian

team,

and

de-

lighted in battles against the best batsmen in the world—particularly the brilliant West Indian Brian Lara. McGrath was brought up in Narrowmine, where he was discovered by former Australian batsman Doug Walters. He progressed quickly through school, grade (club), and state cricket

to the Australian Test Test debut against November 1993 and national debut the against South Africa.

team, making his New Zealand in his one-day interfollowing month

He became the second fast bowler (af-

ter Courtney Walsh of the West Indies) to take 500 wickets,

at Lord’s cricket

Like many notable jazz pianists, Bradford Alexander Mehldau was originally classically trained. He began studying piano at age six, and he became interested in jazz in his early teens. He played in the noted Hall High School jazz band

in Hartford,

Conn.,

and then studied jazz in New York City at the New School, graduating in 1993; there his teachers included jazz pianists Junior Mance, Fred Hersch, and

Kenny Werner. After taking high-profile sideman jobs in New York, Mehldau played (1994—95) with the quartet led by tenor saxophone player Joshua Redman. Mehldau also accompanied top musicians in jazz, country, and rock music. He played on four film sound tracks before composing the score for another film, Ma femme est un actrice

(2001).

Meanwhile,

Mehldau

devoted

much

of his creative energy to working with his trio, including bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy; drummer Jeff Ballard replaced Rossy in 2005. The trio was noted for its sensitive interplay and for Mehldau's

English wife, Jane, recover

tres (e.g., five or seven beats to the measure); their reputation grew, especially with a series of annual CDs titled The Art of the Trio (1996-2000). Mehldau also excelled as an unaccompanied pianist—like one of his influ-

from can-

cer, McGrath came back strongly to lead the attack as Australia reclaimed the Ashes 5-0 in the southern summer of 2006-07. His Test farewell was eclipsed by the departure of his more charismatic teammate, leg-spin bowler Shane

Warne,

but McGrath

could be

sure that Australia would miss him equally. (Often working in tandem, he and Warne took 1,271 Test wickets between them.) McGrath crowned his in-

ternational career by helping Australia win the 2007 World Cup, in which he was the leading bowler, taking 26 wickets.

(ANDREW LONGMORE)

Mehldau, Brad (b. Aug. 23, 1970, Jacksonville, Fla.) In January 2007 an enthusiastic cover story in Down Beat magazine featuring

Brad Mehldau characterized him as perhaps the most influential jazz artist of his generation. Many of his colleagues joined in the praise, and the pianist began a year of unprecedented popularity. Mehldau, with his trio and the guitarist Pat Metheny, played concerts

across

North

America,

Europe,

and Asia. As they toured, their albums Metheny Mehldau (2006) and Metheny Mehldau Quartet (2007) rose to the top

of the jazz-album charts. For the introspective Mehldau the partnership with the extroverted Metheny marked a distinctly new phase.

choose

between

heartthrob

Edward,

whom she first encountered in Twilight (2005), and Jacob Black, a young werewolf she befriended in New Moon (2006), hoping all the while that she does not inflame an age-old conflict between vampires and werewolves. A self-confessed “girly-girl” with no interest in vampire novels prior to writing

ground in London in the first Test of the 2005 Ashes series, which England unexpectedly won 2-1. Less than three months later, in the Super Test at Sydney, he surpassed Walsh’s 519 wickets. Though he took time away from the game in his final season to help his

arrangements,

printing, 150,000 were sold on the first day in stores. The Twilight Saga tells the story—fraught with danger suspense, and, of course, searing passion— of teenager Bella Swan and her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen. In October Meyer's series edged Harry Potter from his perennial perch atop the New York Times best-seller list, prompting speculation that vampires could become the next big craze in teen fiction. In the much-anticipated Eclipse, Bella must

often in uncommon

me-

ences, Keith Jarrett—in improvisations

that ranged from delicately played, brooding ballads to grand, harmonically rich rhapsodies. His repertoire was eclectic: he played tunes by pop performers, including Radiohead and Paul Simon, as well as his own original songs and jazz standards. The jazz idiom could not contain Mehldau’s ambitions. Over the years classical composers such as Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann had often influenced his jazz stylings. Mehldau entered the classical realm himself when he composed settings of poems by Maria Rainer Rilke and Louise Bogan. Mehldau accompanied the soprano Renée Fleming’s performances of the songs, which they recorded on the 2006 album Love Sublime.

her own, Meyer described her vampires as "very light"—sensitive, thoughtful, even beautiful figures rather than blood-guzzling predators. Some, like Edward and his family do not drink human blood. They do not turn into bats or sleep in coffins, and they travel abroad in daylight. This unconventional take on vampires, along with vivid characterizations and spot-on portrayals of obsessive love and other varieties of teen angst, won Meyer a fervid following among teenage girls. Notwithstanding the erotic tension of the novels, Meyer, a Mormon committed to keeping her writing consistent with her faith, eschewed sexual explicitness, a decision that made her popular with parents. Stephenie Morgan spent her childhood in Phoenix. The recipient of a National Merit Scholarship, she attended Brigham Young University, receiving a

bachelor’s degree (1997) in English literature. She married in 1994 and worked as a homemaker, caring for her three sons. Inspired by a dream, Meyer began writing Twilight, her first book, in Best-selling author Stephenie Meyer

(JOHN LITWEILER)

Meyer, Stephenie (b. Dec. 24, 1973, Hartford, Conn.)

Up-and-coming American author Stephenie Meyer breathed new life into young adult fiction post-Harry Potter with the August 2007 release of Eclipse, the third book in her Twilight Saga. Of the million copies in the books first Karen Shell

92

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Andreas Solaro—AFP/Getty Images

2003. Working in secrecy, she completed the manuscript in three months. She eventually showed it to her older sister, who urged her to try to sell it.

social awareness was noteworthy in that it originated with the writer’s deep faith in traditional Roman Catholicism and his desire to see the ethos of the church better reflected in the modern era. Mosebach’s birthplace, Frankfurt am

Months later Little, Brown and Co. offered Meyer $750,000—the most the

company had ever offered a first-time author—for the manuscript and two future books. Twilight won accolades from

Main, would itself become an unofficial

the New

Frankfurt

York Times, the American

character in many of the author's literary efforts. After studying law in both

Li-

and

Bonn,

Mosebach

em-

brary Association, Teen People, and Publishers Weekly, which named Meyer one of the most promising new authors of

barked in the early 1980s on a career as a freelance writer in his hometown. He mirrored his own homecoming in his

2005. Meyer’s second novel, New Moon,

first novel, Das Bett (1983), the story of

topped the list of best-selling children’s chapter books in the New York Times within a month of its publication.

a man who returns to Frankfurt and reverts to a childlike state. The book established a major theme in Mosebach’s writings of exploring the past to find core values that are applicable in the here and now. He featured Frankfurt prominently in many of his later works, including Ruppertshain (1985), Westend

(JANET MOREDOCK) Miliband, David (b. July 15, 1965, London, Eng.) When Gordon Brown (q.».) became the

U.K.’s prime minister in June 2007, he surprised many by appointing 41-yearold David Miliband as foreign secretary—one of the youngest men ever to hold this post. Miliband’s rise had been extremely rapid; he had been an MP for only six years and a cabinet minister for just two. By general consent, however, his sharp intelligence, easy manner,

and

moral

conduct

combined

to

make him highly suited for the post. Miliband was the son of Jewish (and

Marxist) refugees who had fled from Adolf Hitler—his father was Belgian and his mother Polish. He grew up in a home devoted to fierce political debate. Like his younger brother, Edward (another member of Brown’s cabinet in 2007), Miliband attended a local com-

prehensive school in North London. He secured a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a master’s degree in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In London Miliband worked (1989-94)

as a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank with close links to the Labour Party’s

British Foreign Secretary David

Miliband Shields, in northeastern England. Within 12 months Blair appointed him minister of state for schools—a post just below cabinet rank. In 2004 Miliband became a minister for the Cabinet Office, and following the 2005 general election, he was made a full

(1992), and his breakthrough novel Eine lange Nacht (2000). His non-Frankfurt novels included Die Türken (1999), a

meditation on the true roots of man's search for meaning, and Nebelfürst

member of the cabinet, as minister for

(2001), the humorous tale of a 19th-cen-

communities and local government. A year later he acquired one of Whitehall’s largest departments when he became secretary of state for environ-

tury newspaperman who gets caught up in an elaborate international confidence scam. In addition to his career as a novelist, Mosebach was an equally accomplished nonfiction writer. His most prominent work in this genre was Häresie der Formlosigkeit. Die römische

ment,

food,

and

rural affairs.

In this

post his responsibilities included developing British policy on climate change. Less than

14 months

later, however,

Brown took over as prime minister and promoted him to the foreign office. (It was considered a mark of his political sensitivity and maturity that Miliband was trusted by both Blair and Brown.) As foreign secretary, Miliband steered British foreign policy away from unquestioning support for the United States, especially over the war in Iraq. He also sought to convince all sides that despite his Jewish background he would be evenhanded in his dealings with the continuing disputes concerning Israel and Palestine. (PETER KELLNER)

Liturgie und ihr Feind (2002; rev. ed.,

2007), which eloquently turn to the Latin Mass can II Catholic Church. published poetry; wrote

dio, television, and theatre; and was

a

regular contributor to various German newspapers. He returned to fiction (and Frankfurt) with Der Mond und das Mäd-

chen (2007), a sardonic reimagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream. In addition to the Büchner Prize, Mosebach was awarded the Heimito von Doderer Prize (1999), the Kleist Prize (2002), and the Kranichsteiner Literature Prize (2005).

(ADAM AUGUSTYN)

“modernizers,” who wanted to distance

the party from its traditional socialist doctrines. In 1994 he edited a collection of essays, Reinventing the Left. When Tony Blair was elected party leader that same year, he appointed Miliband as his head of policy, and when Blair became prime minister three years later, Miliband was named to head the Policy Unit, where he earned a reputation for being clever but not arrogant. Wishing to pursue a political career, Miliband in 2001 was elected MP from the safe Labour constituency of South

argued for a reof the pre-VatiMosebach also scripts for ra-

Mosebach, Martin (b. July 31, 1951, Frankfurt am Main,

Ger.) German novelist and essayist Martin Mosebach in 2007 received the Georg Biichner Prize, his homeland’s most prestigious literary honour. The award was given by the German Academy for Language and Literature for the most outstanding lifetime contribution

Mukasey, Michael (b. July 28, 1941, New York, N.Y.) On Nov. 9, 2007, Michael Mukasey was sworn in as the 81st U.S. attorney gen-

eral. Mukasey, the third attorney general to serve under Pres. George W. Bush, replaced Alberto Gonzales, who

resigned

after

having

become

em-

to German culture, and Mosebach’s se-

broiled in a number

of controversies,

lection continued a recent trend of awarding the prize to a socially conscious author. His particular brand of

which included accusations that he helped the administration legally justify the torturing of detainees suspected of 93

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

terrorism. Mukasey, who had no previous

ties to the Bush

administration,

came to the attorney general's post with the reputation for being a political conservative with independent tendencies. Mukasey attended Columbia University (B.A., 1963), New York City, and Yale

Law

School

(J.D.,

1967).

After

working in private practice from 1967 to 1972, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York City. Returning to

private practice in 1976, he joined the firm

of Patterson,

Belknap,

Webb

&

Tyler, where he represented such highprofile clients as lawyer Roy Cohn, socialite Claus von Bulow, the New

York

Daily News, and The Wall Street Journal. In 1987 Mukasey was nominated by Pres. Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship in the Southern District of New York. He rose to chief judge in 2000 and retired from the bench in 2006. From 1993 Mukasey taught law at Columbia University. As a federal judge, Mukasey was viewed as fairminded. His views on the role of law and the courts in national security were believed to have been shaped by his experience in the federal courtroom. He oversaw the trial of Sheikh

Omar

Abel Rahman,

Nadal, Rafael (b. June 3, 1986,

tory of the prestigious Manacor,

Mallorca,

Spain) By 2007 Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal had established himself unequivocally as one of the most indefatigable competitors in the game, winning three consecutive French Open championships from 2005 to 2007 and ranking number two in the world for most of that period. Rafael Nadal Parera grew up in a sports-minded family; his uncle Miguel Angel Nadal was a professional association football (soccer) player who competed in the 1994, 1998, and 2002 World

Cups. Rafael began playing tennis at the age of four, guided by another uncle, Toni Nadal, who remained his coach on

the pro tour. In his early years, Nadal (who wrote with his right hand) played left-handed tennis with his forehand and Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

After the

Sept.

11, 2001,

attacks

the

on

U.S.,

Mukasey drew criticism for approving the detention of Muslim men as mate-

istration in its attempts to expand ex-

ecutive powers in the name of national security, and he was outspoken in his approval of the USA PATRIOT Act. This was seen as a crucial element in Bush's decision to nominate Mukasey, but it also led to complications during Senate confirmation hearings. In those hearings Mukasey refused to define waterboarding—a type of simulated drowning used to terrify detainees during interrogations—as torture. He also said that he believed that the Constitution gave the president the power to override federal law in some cases. These stances triggered criticism and opposition from many Democrats, and a nomination process originally thought to be a formality suddenly became contentious. The Senate ultimately voted 53-40 to approve the nomination. (ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

94

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a singles

als (ATP)

tour,

including

his second

straight French Open win—this time eclipsing Federer in the final. He also reached his first final on the grass at Wimbledon before falling to Federer. In 2007 Nadal extended his victories on clay surfaces to a record 81 consecutive matches before losing to Federer on May 20 in the final of the ATP Masters Series Hamburg. After bouncing back to his third title at Roland

Garros,

nings of more than 12 million. (STEVE FLINK) Nardelli, Robert (b. May 17, 1948, Old Forge, Pa.)

Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal

rial witnesses in terrorism cases.

Mukasey supported the Bush admin-

win

number two, however, with career win-

trial of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen ac-

a terrorist.

to

Nadal lost again to Federer in a grueling 3-hour 45-minute five-set Wimbledon final. He fared poorly at the U.S. Open, losing in the fourth round as he struggled with apparent knee problems. Nadal finished the year still ranked

sentenced to life in prison for having planned to bomb the United Nations and other sites in New York City. Mukasey received death threats during that trial. He also presided over the of being

competition

match for a victorious country. Nadal quickly became fully engaged in a stirring rivalry with world number one Roger Federer, toppling his Swiss adversary in 8 of their first 13 meetings, beginning with the 2004 ATP Masters Series Miami. In 2005 Nadal set a record for a teenage male player by chalking up 11 tournament victories, including a triumph at his French Open debut, when he upset Federer in the semifinals. The next year, Nadal secured five more titles on the Association of Tennis Profession-

win

who was

cused

team

international

backhand

both two-handed,

but when

he was 12, his uncle encouraged him to adopt a more conventional left-handed style. Nadal stuck with his two-handed backhand but switched to what became his signature one-handed forehand, the stroke that was credited with lifting him into the sport’s upper echelons. Nadal, who officially turned professional in 2001, appeared in only one Grand Slam tournament as a junior competitor, when he reached the semifinals at the 2002 All-England championships (Wimbledon). He began his professional career in earnest the next year, breaking into the top 50 in the world. In 2004 he played a crucial role as Spain defeated the United States 3-2 in the Davis Cup final. Toppling Andy Roddick—then number two in the world—in a fourset opening-day singles clash, Nadal became the youngest player (at 18 years 6 months) in the his-

The year 2007 began with an ending for Robert Nardelli: bowing to pressure from shareholders, on January 2 the board of directors of home-improvement retailer the Home Depot persuaded him to resign as CEO. Shareholders, angry that the company’s stock price had been sinking for years, also resented Nardelli’s $38 million salary in an era of slowing sales and stiff competition from competitors such as Lowe's. Just six months after leaving Home Depot, however, Nardelli accepted the top job at automaker Chrysler, which had recently been spun off by its former owner, German automotive firm Daimler. Robert Louis Nardelli served in the Reserve Officers Training Corp while earning a B.S. (1971) in business. After

graduation he joined General Electric, where his father had worked as an engineer and middle manager. While working at GE, Nardelli earned an M.B.A.

(1975) from

the University

of

Louisville, Ky. By 1988 he had become a company vice president, but when GE failed to move him into a general man-

Biographies Manpreet Romana—AFP/Getty Images

agement position, he left to take a position as a division leader with Case Equipment

Co. He returned

to GE

of making PepsiCo a well-balanced consumer products company that would be less reliant on sales of its flagship soft drinks and to aggressively pursue international expansion. She also expressed a particular desire to help make more nutritional foods available in less-developed countries. “I grew up in an emerging market, and I cannot forget that,” she once stated. “I have a basic belief that positive nutrition is important in developing markets.” (SHERMAN HOLLAR)

as

the head (1991-92) of its appliancemanufacturing subsidiary in Canada and then held the top jobs at GE Transportation Systems (1992-95) and GE Power Systems (1995-2000); under his

leadership

GE

Power

Systems'

sales

grew from $5 billion to $20 billion.

It appeared that Nardelli had become a leading contender for the job that he had spent his career pursuing: the CEO of GE, but he was passed over for that job in November 2000. Within one week he was tapped for the CEO position at Home

Depot—a

company

growing

so

rapidly that its board of directors welcomed the structure and fiscal discipline that the GE alumnus would bring. Nardelli reduced costs, revamped purchasing systems, upgraded communications and information technology infrastructure, and opened numerous stores. He lacked a background in retail management, however, and some of his ini-

tiatives drove customers away. Rivals cut into Home Depot's market share, and as the company's competitors increased in value, Home Depot's value sank. When Nardelli left the firm, some analysts (and shareholders) saw his $210

million severance package as an insult. After taking the helm at Chrysler in August, Nardelli selected his new management team, luring the head of Toyota's North American operations to lead sales and marketing. Chrysler weathered a brief labour strike in October,

put several large pieces of property on the block to generate an expected $1 billion in cash, and began eliminating weaker vehicle models while laying off thousands of workers in North America. It remained to be seen if Nardelli could achieve his mandate to improve quality, sharpen Chrysler’s brand identity, and turn the struggling firm into a profitable car manufacturer. (SARAH FORBES ORWIG)

Nooyi, Indra (b. Oct. 28, 1955, Madras [now Chennai], India) On May 2, 2007, Indra K.

Nooyi, PepsiCo,

the chief executive Inc., assumed

officer of

the additional

title of chairman of the board. Nooyi, the fifth chairman and CEO in PepsiCo’s 42-year history, was the first woman to lead the soft-drink and snack-food giant and one of only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Nooyi had assumed the title of CEO

Obama, Barack (b. Aug. 4, 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii) On Feb. 10, 2007, first-term U.S. Sen.

in October 2006, the same

month that she was ranked number one

Indian businesswoman Indra Nooyi on Fortune magazines list of the top 50 most powerful women in business. Nooyi earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Madras Christian College in 1976 and a master's in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta two years later. After moving to the U.S., she earned an additional masters degree in public and private management from the Yale School of Management in 1980. For the next six years, Nooyi

worked as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. She later held executive positions

at Motorola,

Inc., and

the engineering firm Asea Brown Boveri (now ABB) before joining PepsiCo in 1994 as senior vice president of corporate strategy and development. In 2001 Nooyi was named president and chief financial officer of the company. In her career at PepsiCo prior to

being named CEO, Nooyi was responsible for guiding a major restructuring, which included the company’s spin-off of its restaurants—which included KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell—into TRICON Global Restaurants (now YUM! Brands,

Inc.), as well as the spin-off of PepsiCo’s bottling operations. In addition, she oversaw the acquisition (1998) of Tropicana Products and a merger in 2001 with the Quaker Oats Co. as part of the company’s strategy of diversifying into more healthful foods and drinks. Although analysts expressed some surprise at the timing of Nooyi’s appointment as chairman (her predecessor, Steven Reinemund, had served just

five years before abruptly deciding to retire), many praised the strong talents that she would bring to the job. Nooyi was expected to continue the strategy

Barack Obama of Illinois formally announced that in 2008 he would seek the Democratic Partys presidential nomination. He was immediately recognized as a top contender and went on to raise more

money

(about $60 million) than

any other Democratic candidate in the first six months of his campaign, mainly through individual donations. An outspoken critic of the Iraq War, Obama said that he would like to remove combat troops from the country by late 2008 and employ those forces to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also proposed universal health care coverage for the uninsured and sought to ban White House political appointees from lobbying the administration once they vacated their posts. During his campaign speeches Barack Hussein

Obama,

Jr., often emphasized

his unique background. His parents had met while they were both students at the University of Hawaii. His mother, who was white, was a native of Kansas; his father, Barack Obama, Sr., was from

Kenya and the university's first African student. When young Barack was two years old, his parents divorced, and his father eventually returned to Kenya to work as an economist. His mother later married an Indonesian oil manager, and Obama lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. He then returned to Hawaii and lived with his maternal grandparents. Obama earned a bachelors degree (1983) from Columbia University, New

York City, and a law degree (1991) from Harvard University, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. After earning his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago, where he had earlier been a community organizer. He became active

in the Democratic Party and lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He also worked as an attorney 95

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

on civil rights issues. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate. As a state senator, he served as chairman

of the

Health and Human Services Committee. Obama shot to national prominence after delivering a powerful keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. That same year

he was elected to the U.S. Senate by a significant margin, defeating Republican Alan Keyes in the first U.S. Senate race in which the two leading candidates were African Americans. Obama became only the third African American—and the first African American male Democrat—to be elected to the U.S. Senate after the end of Reconstruction (1877). He was the author of

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the

Ochoa, who grew up near the Guadalajara Country Club, won 44 Mexican national junior events, plus five consecutive age-group titles (1990-94) at the junior world golf championships in San Diego. (Tiger Woods was among the other age-group winners her first two years there.) While attending the University of Arizona, Ochoa was twice National Collegiate Athletic Association Player of the Year, and in her sophomore year she set an NCAA record with victories in her first seven events. In November 2001 she became the first golfer and youngest recipient of Mexico’s National Sports Award, presented by Pres. Vicente Fox. After turning professional in 2002, Ochoa topped the money list on the Futures Tour to gain promotion to the LPGA, where she was the 2003

Golfer Lorena Ochoa, already recognized as one of Mexico’s all-time sports stars, carried the hopes of a nation on

Rookie of the Year. The following year she became the first Mexican-born player to win on the LPGA circuit. To her delight, the victory came on the same day that her brother Alejandro climbed to the summit of Mt. Everest. Ochoa’s opening-round 62 in the 2006 Kraft Nabisco Championship (held at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif.) equaled the lowest round ever in major championships. She lost in a play-off to Australian Kar-

her shoulders

and in 2007

rie Webb, but with six wins Ochoa went

she took over from Sweden’s Annika Sórenstam as the world number oneranked woman player, achieved her first major title, and (with 8 victories in

on to surpass Sörenstam as the tour's leading money winner that season before putting the icing on the cake with

25

tour. No player had previously topped

ber Ochoa announced that in 2008 she would host an LPGA tournament in her name back home at the Guadalajara Country Club. (MARK GARROD)

$3 million, but Ochoa brought it off even before she claimed the $1 million

Paisley, Ian

American Dream

(2006), both of which

were best sellers. In 2006 he won a Grammy Award for best spoken-word album for the audio version of Dreams from My Father. (EDITOR) Ochoa, Lorena (b. Nov. 15, 1981, Guadalajara, Mex.)

with ease,

tournaments)

established

record

earnings for one season on the Ladies Professional

Golf Association

(LPGA)

first prize in the season-ending ADT Championship in West Palm Beach, Fla., and finished the year with $4,364,994.

One victory gave Ochoa particular pleasure: the 2007 Womens British Open, the first women's professional tournament ever staged on the Old Course

at St. Andrews,

Scot.

After

a

number of near misses in other major championships—she had finished in the top 10 in 11 of the previous 15 tournaments—Ochoa dominated at St. Andrews from start to finish. She led by two strokes after her opening-round sixunder-par 67, stretched her advantage to six with a round to play, and won by four strokes, despite a one-over-par 74 on the final day. “I love St. Andrews,” she said, “I love to make history. It’s been a very special week and I couldn't be more happy.” 96

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

an even better year in 2007. In Novem-

(b. April 6, 1926, Armagh, N.Ire.) On May 8, 2007, as lasting peace

ap-

peared to have finally returned to Northern Ireland, longtime Unionist leader Ian Paisley was sworn in as first minister. A militant Protestant leader in the region's sectarian conflict from the 1960s, Paisley relented in his long-held refusal to compromise on Northern Ireland’s political status, and in March 2007 the former firebrand agreed to form a power-sharing government with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, the son of a maverick

Baptist

minister,

was

combine the language of biblical certainty with that of politics, and his ideological message blended fervent antiCatholicism with militant unionism. From the 1960s he strove to become the leader of extreme Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland by organizing street protests and rallies, which led to frequent confrontations with the authorities and a brief prison term for unlawful assembly in 1966. That year he established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, which served as paramilitary adjuncts to his churches. In 1970 Paisley was elected to the British Parliament for North Antrim, N.Ire. The next year, in an attempt to broaden his electoral base, he led a

split in the Ulster Unionist Party, cofounding the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In 1979 he was elected to

the European Parliament, where he remained until 2004. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, he sought to turn the DUP into the largest unionist party. Although Paisley’s personal following was never in doubt, his popularity began to show signs of waning after 1994. Despite his considerable oratorical skills, his vibrant churches, and a well-

organized political party, he failed to impede attempts at a negotiated settlement of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In April 1998 eight political parties signed the Good Friday Agreement on steps leading to a powersharing government. Although Paisley had earlier refused to participate in multiparty talks that included Sinn Fein and had campaigned against the accord in a popular referendum held in May 1998, he won a seat in the new Northern Ireland Assembly. By 2003 the DUP had become the largest unionist party in the Assembly, but devolved power had been suspended the previous year. Paisley made modest overtures to Sinn Fein and took part in multiparty talks, though he insisted that the negotiations were with the British government rather than Sinn Fein. He expressed cautious optimism over Sinn Fein's vote in January

2007 to support the Protestant-dominated police force in Northern Ireland. In the March 2007 Assembly elections, the DUP captured 3096 of the vote and

or-

36 of the 108 seats; Sinn Fein was sec-

dained by his father in 1946. He cofounded and became moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church in 1951. (In 1969 he founded the Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast.) Paisleys strength lay in his ability to

ond with 28 seats. The powersharing executive followed soon after In September 2007 Paisley affirmed that he would resign as moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church in early 2008, but he intended to remain first minister

Biographies www.mnf-iraq.com

and to run for reelection to the British Parliament if another election was called. (EDITOR)

Párson, Anja (b. April 25, 1981, Umea, Swed.)

Anja Parson of Sweden made history in 2007 when she became the first skier to have won world championship races in each of the five disciplines of Alpine ski racing. Four other skiers previously had won in four of the five disciplines, but Parson stood alone with her world championship triumphs in the slalom, giant slalom (GS), supergiant slalom (super

G), combined,

and

downhill.

Along with her prowess on the slopes, Párson won the hearts of skiing fans with a distinctive victory celebration, a sprawling belly-flop slide that she called “the walrus.” Parson was coached by her father at the same ski club in tiny Tarnaby, Swed., that had produced the great Ingemar Stenmark, who during his career (1973-89)

won

more

races

than

any

other skier in history. Parson idolized Stenmark and from a young age was compared to him, as well as to Pernilla Wiberg, whose nine Olympic and world championship medals in the 1990s had made her Sweden’s most successful woman skier. By 2007, however, Parson

had surpassed Wiberg by amassing a combined 16 medals in the Olympics and the world championships. Parson flashed hints of Wiberg-like greatness in 1998 at age 17 when she won her first World Cup race, the slalom,

at Mammoth

Mountain,

Calif.

In 2000 she secured the gold in the slalom and the GS at the world juniors championships. The following year she made an auspicious debut at the world championships in St. Anton, Austria, beginning her assault on the five disciplines with a gold in the slalom and a bronze in the GS. She competed in her first Olympics at the 2002 Salt Lake City (Utah) Winter Games, where she took the silver medal

in the GS and the bronze in the slalom. She triumphed in the GS at the 2003 world championships, held in St. Moritz, Switz., before embarking

on a

two-year run of World Cup overall titles in 2003-04 and 2004-05. At the 2005 world championships in Bormio, Italy, Parson won in a third discipline, the super G, while adding another gold in the GS. Parson approached the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy, with high hopes but nearly had them dashed. After earning bronze medals in the combined and the

downhill, she was visibly disappointed on the podium after each race. She came back to take the gold in the slalom, however, and happily performed her first Olympic “walrus” celebration. In February 2007 the world championships were held in front of a friendly crowd in Are, Swed., and Parson—de-

spite having had knee surgery after the 2005-06 season—claimed the gold in the super G for the second time in her career.

Next,

she won

the combined,

which gave her victories five disciplines. Two days off an amazing streak, downhill to complete sweep.

in four of the later, capping she won the her historic

(ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

Petraeus, David (b. Nov. 7, 1952, Cornwall-on-Hudson,

American military commander Gen. David Petraeus

N.Y.) When Pres. George W. Bush appointed Gen. David Petraeus in January 2007 to command the multinational forces in Iraq (after his nomination won unanimous approval in the U.S. Senate), the specialist on counterinsurgency warfare wasted little time in implementing a plan to secure Baghdad and the surrounding area. Petraeus, elevated from the rank of lieutenant general to full (four-star) army general, sought to reduce levels of violence with a “surge” of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to reinforce the 132,000 already fighting in Iraq. Eight months after his appointment, Petraeus went to Capitol Hill to testify about overall progress in the war and reported that the incidence of violent attacks had declined substantially. David Howell Petraeus was the son of Dutch American parents. After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at

Twice in his career accidents almost ended his life. In 1991 he required five hours of surgery after being shot in the chest with an M16 rifle when a soldier tripped during a training exercise. While skydiving in 2000, Petraeus survived the collapse of his parachute, but his shattered pelvis needed to be rebuilt. Petraeus first led troops into battle as commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Following the end of major combat operations, the division was responsible for the northern city of Mosul. In addition to maintaining security, the division was charged with rebuilding the local economy and establishing democratic institutions in the city. In June 2004 Petraeus was chosen to head both the Multi-National Security Transition Command—Iraq and

West Point, N.Y., in 1974, he was com-

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and

the latter role he was responsible for organizing and training Iraqi military and police forces. In October 2005 he was appointed to head the U.S. Army Combined Arms

International Affairs, where he earned a

Center

Master of Public Administration degree

home to several army training schools.

(1985) and a Ph.D.

While

missioned into the infantry as a second lieutenant. Later, as a captain, he spent two

years

at

Princeton

University’s

(1987) in interna-

tional relations. In his doctoral dissertation, Petraeus dealt with the lessons

learned by the U.S. in the Vietnam War and contended that the U.S. failure in Vietnam left the U.S. reluctant to use military force in other conflicts. Among his many staff and command appointments, Petraeus served (1995) as chief operations officer for the UN mission to help establish democracy in Haiti and as assistant chief of staff for

the NATO

Training

at Fort

Mission—Iraq.

Leavenworth,

at Leavenworth,

In

Kansas,

he coauthored

the army's new official manual on counterinsurgency warfare. Petraeus’s honours included the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal, two awards of the Defense Superior Service Medal, four awards of the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star Medal with “V device” (given for valour). (PETER SARACINO)

operations (2001-02) for the NATO-led

Popovich, Gregg

multinational Stabilization Force sent to enforce a cease-fire in Bosnia and

(b. Jan. 28, 1949, East Chicago, Ind.)

In 2007 Gregg Popovich, the head coach

Herzegovina.

of the National Basketball Association 97

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

San Antonio Spurs, added another piece of jewelry to his collection of NBA championship rings—making a total of three in four years and four in nine years. Popovich described star power forward Tim Duncan as the "common denominator" of the Spurs' titles in 1999, 2003, 2005, and their most recent one, a 4-0

sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2007 best-of-seven series. Popovich was much less comfortable defining himself, saying, "I guess I'm just somebody who tries to make sure that the environment is such that they can thrive. I think that's what most coaches try to do." His colleagues disagreed. "His best quality is that he knows how to manage people, how to push the right buttons, and who he can push, on and off the court," said

Hank Egan, the former Air Force head coach who later became an assistant to Popovich with the Spurs. Those abilities allowed Popovich to bring out the best in French guard Tony Parker who emerged as the Most Valuable Player of the 2007 finals, and to persuade Argentine starting guard Manu Ginobili to become a sixth man. Popovich, who was of Serb and Croatian descent, played basketball while attending the U.S. Air Force Academy, becoming the team's captain and leading scorer as a senior. He earned a degree in Soviet studies and later received a masters degree in physical education and sports sciences from the University of Denver. During his five-year military service in the air force, he toured East-

ern Europe and the Soviet Union and became the captain of the Armed Forces team that won the 1972 Amateur Athletic Union basketball championship. He also was invited to the training camp for the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, though he failed to make the final squad. After a stint as an assistant coach at the Air Force Academy, he worked for eight years (1979-86 and 1987-88) as an assistant professor and coach at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges in Claremont, Calif., serving during the intervening season

(1986-87) as a volunteer assis-

tant to head coach Larry Brown at the University of Kansas; he rejoined Brown as an assistant with the Spurs in 1988-89. Popovich moved in 1992 to the staff of the NBA Golden State Warriors before returning to San Antonio in 1994-95

as executive vice president

of basketball operations/general manager He took over as the Spurs head coach after the first 18 games of the 1996-97 season. In 2003 Popovich was

named NBA Coach of the Year.

Off the court Popovich was cofounder (1991) of the Spurs/Pizza Hut DrugFree Youth Basketball League. He was also a renowned wine connoisseur, with a 3,000-bottle collection in an above-

ground cellar behind his home in San Antonio. (PHIL JASNER)

72nd-minute substitute against Canada; she scored in the 89th minute to secure a 2-1 victory. From then on it was an almost unbroken series of triumphs. Despite a high-profile sponsorship with Nike and local collaboration with a BMW car franchise, Prinz was a private,

against Brazil in Shanghai, Birgit Prinz, playing in her third World Cup final, opened the scoring in the 52nd minute on the way toward a 2-0 win for Germany's second straight Women's World Cup title. It was a record 14th goal in World Cup matches for the Ger-

publicity-shy person who still lived with her parents. She also demonstrated a deep social conscience; in 2005 she visited Afghanistan with the German charity Learn and Play Project, and she worked with FIFA on its antiracism agenda. Originally trained as a masseuse and later qualified as a physiotherapist, in 2007 she was studying for a degree in psychology at the University of Frankfurt. In November 2007 Prinz was awarded the Hessian Order of Merit for her outstanding success as a personality

man

in the community.

Prinz, Birgit (b. Oct. 25, 1977, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.) On Sept. 30, 2007, in the Fédéra-

tion Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup final

striker; since her debut in 1994,

Prinz had made 169 appearances for her country and scored 114 goals. In addition to two World Cup trophies, Prinz had secured three consecutive FIFA Player of the Year awards (2003-05) and two Olympic bronze medals

(2000 and 2004), and by 2007

she reigned supreme in the female side of association football (soccer).

Prinz was an all-around sports enthusiast as a girl, with swimming, trampoline, and athletics among her varied outdoor pursuits. Her soccer-playing father encouraged her to take up that sport too, coaching her while she played as a youth for SV Dórnigheim and FC Hochstadt. In 1992 she changed clubs to FSV Frankfurt, and two years later, at

age 17, she moved on to the premier league FFC Frankfurt. She soon developed as a striker of exceptional ability. At more than 1.79 m (5 ft 10 in), Prinz

was taller than most of her contemporaries, with a physical fitness level above most of the other players on the team. With drive, speed, and a clinical finish

in front of goal, she was widely regarded as the number one player in Europe. Prinz’s team claimed four European championships, two Union des Associations Européennes de Football Cups, eight German league championships, and eight domestic cup trophies. Because German women’s soccer was played at a semiprofessional level, however, she broadened her experience in 2002 by playing a season in the U.S. for the professional Women's United Soccer Association Carolina Courage, helping that team win the WUSA championship before returning to FFC Frankfurt. Prinz's rise to international fame was equally rapid. She made her international debut for Germany at age 16 asa

Radcliffe, Daniel (b. July 23, 1989,

(JACK ROLLIN)

Fulham,

London,

Eng.) After mesmerizing millions of fans with his on-screen portrayal of the boy wizard Harry Potter, in February 2007 British actor Daniel Radcliffe worked his magic onstage with his performance in the London West End theatrical production of Peter Shaffer's Equus. In the challenging role of psychotically deranged teenager Alan Strang, whose unnatural love of horses drove him to blind six of them with a hoof pick, Radcliffe demonstrated the breadth of his acting skill, as well as his level of maturity as an actor. He also succeeded in literally shedding his childlike image when he was required to appear nude onstage during one scene. Daniel Jacob Radcliffe began acting at the age of six when he appeared as a monkey in a school play. After passing

British actor Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame

Mark J. Terrill/AP

98

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Lee Jin-man/AP

up an opportunity to audition for a television production of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, he caught the attention of TV producer Kate Harwood, who was impressed by his "charm and simplicity" and he was cast in the title role of David Copperfield (1999). Two years later Radcliffe appeared in the film The Tailor of Panama (2001). His big break came when he was cast to star in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). His parents initially re-

Hollywood movie, Speed Racer, scheduled for release in 2008. He also announced plans for an English-language album. “Once I release my album,” he said, “people can say, Justin Timberlake, he is like an American version of

Rain."

Reichs, Kathy (b. 1950, Chicago, Ill.)

Forensic

Azkaban (2004), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), in which he

anthropologist-cum-sleuth

Temperance ("Bones") Brennan her creator American author

fused to let him audition for the role,

but a chance meeting with Sorcerer's Stone director Chris Columbus and producer David Heyman at the theatre one evening led to an eventual audition. Those involved with the film, including Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, were in overwhelming agreement that Radcliffe would make the perfect Harry, and the books’ legions of fans seemed to agree. He reprised his role in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of

(K. ANNE RANSON)

and and

forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, were back in 2007 with a new book and a new television season. Released in September, Bones to Ashes was the 10th novel in Reichs's best-selling series featuring the feisty Brennan. The same month,

the

television

loosely based on Reichs's its third season on the air. year the Crime Writers of inated Reichss previous

series

Bones,

novels, Earlier Canada novel,

began in the nomBreak

No Bones (2006), for the 2007 Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. In Brennan,

South Korean pop singer Rain

whom

performed some of his own stunts. In addition to Equus (which was expected to open on Broadway in 2008), Radcliffe juggled numerous other onscreen projects, including three released in 2007: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the British TV movie My Boy Jack, and the Australian coming-ofage film December Boys. Radcliffe also signed on to complete the last two films in the series, Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince, which went into produc-

crossover success in the U.S.; that goal remained unrealized.

tion in 2007 for release in late 2008, and

School,

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

How to Avoid the Sun. Another cessful television soap opera,

Rain’s given name was Jung Ji Hoon.

He began performing in his teens as a rapper in a short-lived band called Fanclub. He decided to pursue a solo career, and in 2002 he launched his first

album, Bad Guy, with a glittering concert performance that made him a star in South Korea overnight. The following year he starred in a Korean television serial, Sang Doo! Let’s Go to

readers first met in Déjà Dead

(1997),

Reichs

created

a memorable

protagonist whose professional life paralleled her own. She also dazzled her audience with her meticulous accounts of Brennan’s forensic investigations, details of which Reichs sometimes culled from her own lab work. Reichs,

born

Kathleen

Joan

Toelle,

studied anthropology at American University,

B.A.

Washington,

in 1971.

She

(1972) and a PhD.

D.C.,

received

earning

an

a

M.A.

(1975) in physical

cast in Asia. In 2004, following the suc-

anthropology from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. She was an assistant professor at Northern Illinois University from 1974 until 1978, when she accepted a position at the University of

Rain

cessful release of his third album, {t's

North Carolina at Charlotte, where she

(b. June 25, 1982, Seoul, South Korea)

Raining, Rain made his first concert tour of Japan. By 2005 he was atop the

became afull professor in 1996. Reichs began consulting with the office of the chief medical examiner in North Carolina in the mid-1980s. She was certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology in 1986 and in 1988 began working part of each year at the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Quebec. She also taught at the FBI Academy in

(scheduled for release in 2010). (BARBARA A. SCHREIBER)

In 2007 South Korean pop singer and actor Rain topped Time magazine’s online poll as the most influential person in the world. Though this status was undoubtedly testament more to the dedication of his fans (who could vote as many times as they wished) than to the true breadth of his influence, Rain was unquestionably a pan-Asian superstar. Often called the Korean Justin Timberlake for his smooth hip-hop dance moves, he dominated the charts throughout East and Southeast Asia and sold out arenas across the region. He also began to par-

House,

Korean

and released

a second

followed; it was

wave,

hallyu,

album,

sucFull

widely broad-

and he was

ar-

guably the chief object of the Asian craze for Korean pop culture. His Rainy Day concert tour sold out throughout East Asia; he had become a heartthrob to millions of fans around the world,

aided by the Internet and DVDs. In 2006 Rain made

concert

appear-

ances in New York City and Las Vegas, recorded a duet with the American R&B singer Omarion, released his fourth album, Rains

World, and made

his film

lay some previous acting experience, as

debut in Fm a Cyborg, but Thats OK. At the end of the year, a planned world tour

well as his boyish good looks and muscular physique, into a movie career. His

ran into trouble, and most of the North American concerts were canceled. Rain,

greatest ambition, however, was to be-

apparently unfazed, continued to study English, and he began work on his first

come the first Asian pop star to achieve

Quantico, Va. In 1999 she served as a

consultant to the UN Tribunal on Genocide in Rwanda, and in 2001 she helped identify remains of victims of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Throughout her academic career, Reichs was the author of

numerous scholarly articles; she also edited three books on physical and forensic anthropology. 99

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Will & Deni McIntyre/Corbis

neered an 11-play, 83-yd drive in the game’s final two minutes to secure a come-from-behind win over the Detroit Lions that gave the Cowboys their first National Football Conference (NFC) East Division title in nine years. Romo

finished the regular season with 36 touchdowns and 4,211 passing yards— another franchise record. Antonio

Ramiro

Romo,

the son of a

Mexican American father and a mother of Polish and German descent, spent most of his childhood in southern Wisconsin, where he idolized Packers quarterback Brett Favre, whose aggressive, risk-taking style of play he eventually sought to emulate. Although Romo was a standout player for Burlington (Wis.) High School, he was not recruited by the major college football teams and wound up attending Eastern Illinois University, a Division I-AA school in Charleston, Ill.

At

Eastern

(2000-02)

American forensic anthropologistturned-novelist Kathy Reichs In the late 1980s Reichs wrote an unpublished novel. She reworked the novel in the mid-1990s, salvaging only the main character, Temperance Brennan, from the earlier manuscript. Scribner, the first publisher to receive the completed manuscript for Déjà Dead, signed Reichs

to a $1.2 million,

two-

book deal. Déjà Dead won the 1997 Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel. Other novels in the series included Death du Jour (1999), Deadly Décisions (2000), Fatal Voyage (2001), Grave Secrets (2002), Bare Bones (2003), Monday Mourning (2004), and Cross Bones (2005). On Sept. 13, 2005, the series

Bones premiered on the Fox network. Reichs, who consulted with the show’s

writers, was also a producer and appeared in one episode during the show’s second season.

(JANET MOREDOCK)

Romo, Tony (b. April 21, 1980, San Diego, Calif.)

he Ohio

was

a_

Valley

three-time Conference

Player of the Year, and in his senior season he received the Walter Payton Award as Division I-AAS top offensive player. Despite being eligible for the 2003 NFL draft, Romo was again overlooked. Later that year he signed with the Cowboys as an undrafted free agent, but he earned little playing time in his first three seasons. He did not take over as starting quarterback until 2006, when he replaced an aging Drew Bledsoe near midseason. Romo blossomed almost immediately in the starter’s role, helping the Cowboys land a wild-card spot in the play-offs. His ability to improvise plays and his willingness to throw downfield quickly made him a fan favourite. He finished the season having passed for 19 touchdowns and 2,903 yd and became the first Cowboys quarterback to be selected for the Pro Bowl since Aikman in 1996. Although Romo was blamed for the Cowboys’ 2006 play-off loss to Seattle— he dropped the snap on a potentially game-winning field-goal attempt—he returned to lead the team to a 12-1 start in 2007, the best in franchise his-

In 2007 the Dallas Cowboys’ Tony Romo staked his claim as one of the elite quarterbacks of the National Football League (NFL) with a series of phenomenal performances. He threw for more than 300 yd in four of the first five games of the season and on November

tory. He raised his profile off the field with a spate of television commercials and a stint as a judge for the 2007 Miss

29, in a 37-27 victory over the Green

Bay Packers, notched his 30th touchdown pass and thereby broke Danny White’s team single-season record for scoring passes. In the Cowboys’ next

provided plenty of fodder for the tabloids. In December Romo was again chosen for the Pro Bowl, joining Favre and the Seattle Seahawks' Matt Hasselbeck at the quarterback position on the

outing,

NFC team.

on

December

100

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

9, Romo

engi-

Universe

contest.

Meanwhile,

his ru-

moured relationships, notably with country singer Carrie Underwood (q.v.) and

singeractress

Jessica

Simpson,

(SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Rubin, Rick (b. March 10, 1963, Long Island, N.Y.)

In keeping with his unflappable, bearded guru image, American record producer Rick Rubin chose to avoid the 2007 Grammy Award ceremony, and although he won the Grammy for best producer, he characterized the year as “not unusually special.” Nonetheless, Rubin exerted a quiet dominance on the industry's sales charts. He had production credit on two of the five nominees for album of the year (the Dixie Chicks’ Taking the Long Way and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium) and had contributed to a third (Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds).

Frederick Jay Rubin grew up listening to heavy metal and early punk, and he frequently took the train into Manhattan from his Long Island home to see New York punk pioneers the Ramones. While a student at New York University, he became interested in rap and immersed himself in the local scene. In 1983 he produced his first single, “It’s Yours,” by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. Its success as a dance track in local nightclubs inspired him to create his own

label, Def Jam

Records. After hearing "Its Yours," Russell Simmons, who was already a rising star in the hip-hop scene, joined Rubin at Def Jam. The two, based in Rubin's

dormitory room, collected demo tapes from aspiring rappers and disc jockeys. In 1984 they had their first hit with LL Cool J's "I Need a Beat," a single that sold 100,000 copies. Rubin created Def Jam to fill a niche that the mainstream recording industry had ignored, but when its sales topped 300,000 albums in 1985, the major labels took notice. Columbia Records placed Rubin and Simmons under contract, and Def Jam’s ros-

ter expanded to include the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and Run-D.M.C. Rubin left Def Jam in 1988 over a disagreement about the structure of the label’s relationship with Columbia. He moved to Los Angeles and founded a new

label,

Def

American,

with

the

heavy metal acts Slayer and Danzig as his first artists. In 1991 he guided the Red Hot Chili Peppers to multiplatinum success with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and with that success he established himself as a performer’s producer. Whereas Phil Spector’s work was characterized by the “wall of sound” and Sam Phillips made a career of the “Sun Sound,” there was no particular aural quirk that could be called “Rubinesque.” His presence in the studio simply seemed to make good artists better. Rubin's gift was perhaps most clearly

Biographies Damian Dovarganes/AP

Putting an end to more than a decade of conservative government in Australia, the ALP claimed 84 seats in the

House of Representatives to the LiberalNational coalition’s 64. Rudd took office as prime minister on December 3.

Rudd grew up on a farm in Eumundi, Queens. Politically active from his youth, he was a member of the ALP from 1972. He attended the Australian National University in Canberra, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies before embarking on a diplomatic

American record producer Rick Rubin in his domicile demonstrated in 1993, when country legend Johnny Cash was at the nadir of his popularity having been dropped by his label and facing an audience that was seemingly indifferent to his brand of music. The 1994 release American Recordings (Rubin had dropped the “Def” from the labels name the previous year) was a surprise smash hit. This success marked the beginning of a partnership that would earn five Grammy Awards and restart Cash's career. Through the 2000s Rubin continued to lend his talents to established performers such as Neil Diamond,

Jay-Z, and

Tom Petty. In May 2007 he was named cochairman of Columbia Records. (MICHAEL RAY) Rudd, Kevin (b. Sept. 21, 1957, Nambour,

Queens.,

Australia) In 2007 Australian opposition leader Kevin Rudd ramped up his calls for Prime Minister John Howard to set a date for the next federal elections and urged Howard to meet him in face-toface debates. Rudd, who had served as

leader

of the Australian

Labor

Party

(ALP) since 2006, was riding a wave of

popular support at the same time that Howard's voter satisfaction ratings were dropping. A poll taken in mid-August found that Rudd’s performance satisfaction ratings stood at an impressive 60%. Howard eventually called elections for November 24. Rudd was able to maintain his momentum and succeeded in leading the ALP to a historic victory.

career.

He

served

(1981-88)

Army (JAM), reemerged publicly in May 2007 after nearly four months of isolation in Iran and regained momentum as one of the most powerful political forces in Iraq. Sadr was the son of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, one of the most prominent religious figures in the Islamic world. Sadr was greatly influenced by his fathers conservative thoughts and ideas and by those of his father-in-law, Shi‘ite figure Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, founder of the Islamic

in

Australia’s Department of Foreign Af fairs and Trade, holding embassy posts in Stockholm and Beijing. He left the department to become chief of staff for Queensland opposition leader Wayne Goss—a position he retained after Goss became premier of Queensland in 1989. Rudd served as director general of the state cabinet office from 1992 to 1995. Entering the private sector, he worked for two years as a senior consultant for the accounting firm KPMG Australia. Rudd was first elected to the federal House of Representatives—as the mem-

Wissan al-Okaili—AFP/Getty Images

ber for Griffith, Queens.—in 1998 and was twice reelected (2001 and 2004). In

Parliament he held a series of increasingly responsible positions within the Labor Party. After the 2001 election, in which Howard’s coalition secured a strong working majority, Rudd was appointed shadow minister for foreign affairs. Frequently appearing in televised interviews and on political talk shows, Rudd became known as a vocal critic of the Howard government's handling of the war in Iraq. He was given the additional shadow ministry portfolios of international security in 2003 and trade in 2005. At the ALP caucus held on Dec. 4, 2006, he was chosen party leader, defeating former head Kim Beazley by a vote of 49-39. Rudd promised to bring “a new leadership style, with fresh ideas, fresh vision, and fresh energy” to Australian politics. As prime minister, he reiterated his plan to withdraw Australia’s combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008, although some troops would remain in a support role. He also signed the paperwork to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and pressed ahead with his comprehensive $2 billion public-health reform plan. (SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr Dawah Party, who in 1980 was executed for his opposition to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. After completing middle school, Sadr enrolled in the Shi'ite kawza (religious seminary) in Al-Najaf, but he never finished his studies. Sadrs father was killed in 1999, along with his two older brothers, reputedly by Iraqi agents. His father's will stipulated that his hawza be put in the hands of Sayyid Kadhim al-Ha‘iri, an Iraqi religious scholar, but Ha‘iri delegated the administrative and financial affairs of the kawza to Sadr,

who became one of al-Haʻiri’s disciples. Almost immediately after the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, Sadr emerged from the shadows and began to open offices in his fathers name (known collectively as the Office of the Martyr Sadr) in Baghdad, Al-Najaf, Karbala,

and

other

areas.

He

had immediate success in Madinat alThawra (Revolution City), a poor Baghdad

Sadr, Muqtada al(b. 1974, Al-Najaf, Iraq) Muqtada al-Sadr, the controversial Iraqi Shiite leader and head of the armed militia known as the Mahdi

Basra,

suburb

of two

million

Shi‘ites,

which he renamed Sadr City in honour of his father. By the end of that year, Sadr headed a Shi‘ite political movement known as the Sadrist Movement and had attracted millions of Shi‘ite fol101

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Kevork Djansezian/AP

lowers across Iraq, mainly youth and the poor and downtrodden, to whom he

Baltic region, including Estonian Arvo Part and Finns Jean Sibelius, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg. Salonen began a collaboration with Austrian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who died in 2006, on a project to record all of his orchestral works. Of particular interest were Salonen’s collaborations with American stage director Peter Sellars,

offered a variety of social, educational,

and health services. He also maintained tight security over the areas he controlled and established

a Shari‘ah (Is-

lamic law)-based court system. Sadr was accused of staging the murder of ‘Abd al-Majid al-Khu%, a rival Shiite cleric, and a warrant for his ar-

most recently The Tristan Project (2004), a multimedia concert presenta-

rest was issued but never executed. Sadr concentrated his fiery rhetoric on Iraqi nationalism, especially the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq, and

tion of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde; one act was played on each of three successive evenings, and all were accompanied by a video by Bill

anti-Americanism, while his militia, an

ill-coordinated collection of thousands of outlaws, engaged in direct armed clashes with the multinational forces in April and August 2004 and was accused of contributing heavily to the ongoing civil conflict between Shi‘ites and Sunnis. Sadr’s critics held JAM responsible for brutal acts of retribution against Sunnis, including kidnapping, killings, torture, and the destruction of mosques and property. Many Shi‘ites regarded Sadr as a hero who opposed the Sunni terrorists supporting al-Qaeda and who protected Shi'ites from Sunni insurgents. In the

Viola. Salonen won

Finnish composer and conductor EsaPekka Salonen Orchestra in London as its principal conductor and artistic adviser. Salonen

ducting,

studied

and

French

horn,

composition

at

con-

Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (1973-77)

and composition with private teachers in Italy (1979-81). In 1979 he made his

Sadr’s movement stood with other Shi'ite parties as part of the United Iraqi Alliance, which won a plurality of seats (128 of 275) in the parliament; 32 seats

phone magazine award went in 1986 to

went to the Sadrists. In the formation of the government, Sadr supported Nuri al-Maliki of the Da‘wah Party for prime minister, but in April 2007 six Sadrist ministers withdrew from Maliki’s cabinet after their demands for a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops remained unrealized. In August Sadr

Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for their recording of Witold Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 3. Salonen’s dynamic and theatrical approach proved a perfect match for the Los Angeles musicians, and he led the orchestra through 15 years of excitement and successes. Particularly rejuvenating was the move in 2003 to the spectacular new Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. During his

2005

election,

members

of

made another tactical move, which co-

incided with the U.S. troop surge—he ordered that his militia suspend all activity for six months, during which time he intended to reorganize it in an attempt to restore its credibility. (LOUAY BAHRY) Salonen, Esa-Pekka (b. June 30, 1958, Helsinki, Fin.)

The year 2007 would prove to be something of a watershed for Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. He announced that after the 2008-09 season he would step down as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a position he had held since 1992, in order to devote more

time to

composing. He planned to continue an association with the orchestra as director emeritus, and he had already decided to work with the Philharmonia 102

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

time

as director,

Salonen

and the or-

chestra were the first to play John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music (1999)

as well as several

of his own

compositions, including LA Variations (1997), 1001 Nights (1998), and Wing on Wing (2004).

Like other international star conductors, Salonen

continued

awards,

including the Siena Prize for composition (1993), two Royal Philharmonic Society Awards (1995 and 1997), and the Helsinki Medal (2005). He was

named 2006 Musician of the Year by the publication Musical America. (CHARLES TRUMBULL)

the

conducting debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He burst onto the international scene in 1983 with his performance of Gustav Mahlers Third Symphony with the Philharmonia in London. An American Grammy Award and a British Gramo-

December

numerous

to work with

many of the world’s highly regarded orchestras. He was also active in the international music festival circuit and made numerous recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Salonen’s programming emphasized contemporary music while not ignoring the classical repertoire (in 2006 he completed a cycle of Beethoven symphonies). Among his favourites were composers from the

Serra, Richard (b. Nov. 2, 1939, San Francisco, Calif.)

American sculptor Richard Serra’s 2007 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was a major event for the art world; the museum had even

designed its newest gallery space with his massive work in mind. Serra was best known for his large-scale abstract steel sculptures whose substantial presence forced viewers to engage with the works and their sites. Like other minimalists of his generation, Serra steered clear of art as metaphor or symbol, proposing instead the idea of sculpture as an experience of weight, gravity, space, process, and time. Serra was exposed early to the processes of metalwork; his father worked as a pipe fitter in the shipbuilding industry, and Richard worked in steel mills during his college years. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957 and graduated from the universitys Santa Barbara campus in 1961 with a B.A. in English literature. Since childhood Serra had been interested in art, however, and he went on to

study painting at Yale University, where by 1964 he had earned both B.F.A. and M.FA. degrees. Supported by fellowships, he spent time in France and Italy before moving in 1966 to New York City. Serra’s sculptures and drawings were exhibited regularly in Europe and the U.S., and in 1968 he began his long association with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City; an early show consisted of molten-lead splashings and castings at the meeting of wall and floor. The scale of Serra’s work grew with pieces

Biographies

(his "props") constructed by such techniques as pinning a sheet of steel to the wall with a rolled lead pipe or leaning the sheets against each other in different configurations held together by gravity alone. In 1970 he began creating his large-scale sculptures of rolled steel plates and curved slabs, made to fit specific sites. Serra's interest in place and the way an object could shape the space around it made him a popular artist for public art commissions. Tilted Arc, commissioned in 1981 by the U.S. government for the Federal Plaza in New York City, brought about arguments in court about its artistic purpose and its effect on the public space; the piece was destroyed in 1989. In 1993 Serra became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A large permanent installation of eight Serra works was completed in 2005 at the Guggenheim Bilbao (Spain), in what critics praised as a stunningly appropriate use of their setting. Serra’s work was to be showcased at Monumenta, the contemporary art show at the Grand Palais, Paris, in

2008.

(EDITOR)

Sidibé, Malick (b. 1935 or 1936, Soloba, French Sudan [now Mali]) In 2007 Malick Sidibé be-

came the first photographer and the first African to receive the Venice Biennale art exhibition’s Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement. After underscoring the importance of photography as a creative medium in Africa, exhibition director Robert Storr

said of Sidibé: “No African artist has done more to enhance photography’s stature in the region, contribute to its history, enrich its image archive, or increase our awareness of the textures and transformations of African culture in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.” Sidibé’s first home was a Peul (Fulani)

village. After finishing school in 1952, he trained as a jewelry maker and then studied painting at the Ecole des Artisans

Soudanais

(now the Institut Na-

tional des Arts) in Bamako, graduating in 1955. In 1956 he was apprenticed to French photographer Gérard Guillat and began to photograph the street life of Bamako, capturing the spirit of the city’s inhabitants as Mali made the transition from colony to independent country. In particular, Sidibé chronicled the carefree youth culture at dance clubs and parties, at sporting events, and on the banks of (or in) the Niger River. His

remarkably intimate shots show exuberant young Africans intoxicated with

Western styles in music and fashion. Although he continued his street work and close association with young Malians for another 20 years, in 1958 Sidibé opened his own commercial studio and camera-repair shop. There he took thousands of portraits, of both individuals and groups, creating dramatic images of subjects eager to assert their postcolonial middle-class identity, often with exaggerated idealized versions of themselves. After 1978 he worked exclusively in his studio. Sidibés work was unknown outside his own country until the early 1990s, when European art critic André Magnin, who was in Bamako to visit another Malian photographer, Seydou Keita, was taken to Sidibé’s studio by mistake. Magnin began to publicize the photographs of Sidibé, and he published a monograph on the photographer in 1998. There followed an impressive number of group and solo exhibitions

Japan. In selblad Award in his work:

in Europe,

the

U.S.,

and

2003 Sidibé received the HasFoundation International Photography. He has said of “Art from Africa is admired

because it has life, it has truth, it has

purity. . . The people of Mali will rediscover themselves in [my] photographs." (K. ANNE RANSON) Simic, Charles

(b. May 9, 1938, Belgrade, Yugos.) Upon being named U.S. poet laureate in 2007, Charles Simic expressed his discomfort with a question asked of him about the place of poetry in American culture. Such a question, he told

where, at the time of his being named poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, he was an emeritus professor of English. Simic learned English when he moved to Paris. A few years later, in 1959, he published his first poems in English. (He later claimed that he started writing poetry to impress girls.) In the late 1950s he toyed with writing a novel, and he eventually published a number of prose works—primarily collections of essays—over the course of his career.

In the

1960s,

however,

he

made poetry the primary focus of his writing, and he also began to translate poems by Eastern European writers.

What the Grass Says (1967) was the first of the nearly 20 collections of poetry Simic had published by 2007. Taken together, the works resisted formal and thematic categorization. Simic’s poetry was labeled surrealist as often as it was called accessible. His preoccupation in his verse with mundane, everyday objects and situations was frequently interpreted as a reaction to his family’s struggle to survive in Yugoslavia. The World Doesn't End (1989), among his best-known collections, won a Pulitzer Prize; it consisted of prose poems without titles, and its imagery was dark and disorienting. His Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2005) won a Griffin Poetry Prize. In a 2007

television interview,

Simic

explained that his poetry was dependent on humans' not knowing themselves. He believed that "the best things that happen in poems are discoveries." (J.E. LUEBERING)

the New York Times, reminded him ^so

much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?” Simic grew up in a Belgrade devastated by World War II. The hunger and poverty of the postwar period drove his family to leave Yugoslavia. His father went to work in Italy and then in the United States, while Simic and his mother moved to Paris, when he was 15,

and then to the U.S. By the mid-1950s the family was living in the Chicago suburbs, where Simic attended high school. He went on to the University of Chicago and worked at the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper at night, but he received a B.A. from New York University in 1966, after a two-year stint (1961-63) in the

U.S. Army. Simic worked at the photography magazine Aperture in the late 1960s, and in 1973 he began teaching at the University of New Hampshire,

Simpson, Lorna (b. Aug. 13, 1960, Brooklyn, N.Y.)

With her work featured in 2007 in a 20year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, Lorna Simpson had completed the transition from provocative young photographer to one of the most influential multimedia artists working in the U.S. During a career that saw her work evolve from documentary photography to studio shots to film and video, Simpson explored stereotypes of race and gender, most often with an emphasis on African American women.

Simpson, an only child who took an interest in art at an early age, attended the High School of Art and Design in New York City. As an undergraduate at the New York School of Visual Arts, she

studied painting at first but switched to photography before receiving her B.F.A.

(1982).

103

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies John Antonelli

After graduation she traveled to Europe and Africa, where she not only developed her skill at documentary photography but also began to wonder how she could expand beyond the limitations of the genre, which she felt offered a primarily voyeuristic experience for the artist and the viewer While

work. He founded

earning an M.E.A. (1985) at the Univer-

the funding stopped, and it fell to Simwinga to keep the work going. This he did with extraordinary energy, working alone for about a year. He established a new organization, the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and

operatives that provided business loans and technical assistance to farmers. The project was so successful that in 1996 corrupt government officials, who benefited from the poaching, attempted to close it down. The Owenses, away at the time, were

sity of California, San Diego, she began experimenting with new ways to pres-

ent her ideas in photographs and engage the viewer. What emerged was what became her signature technique: photo-text, which involved including brief passages of text that were often superimposed on the photographs and introduced new levels of meaning to the images. The images themselves were now posed studio shots, characterized by the use of human subjects, usually African American women,

whose faces

were hidden or obscured. Simpson’s photography typically explored the perception of African American women in American

culture.

Youre

Fine,

Youre

Hired (1988), using Polaroid prints framed in wood, depicted an African African woman lying on her side. To the left of the images was a list of terms relating to a physical exam; to the right, the words Secretarial and Position. By the late 1980s, Simpson’s work was being displayed in solo exhibitions. In 1990 she became the first African American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. By the mid-1990s, with her name firmly linked to photo-text, Simpson pushed in new directions to avoid what she characterized as a paralysis that could be created by outside expectations. While not abandoning photography, she turned her attention toward film and video installations. Her film Corridor (2003) juxtaposed the stories of two African American women—a U.S. Civil Warera runaway slave and a bored mid-20th-century housewife— and drew parallels between their lives of isolation. Among her awards and honours were a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1985), the Whitney Museum American

Art Award

(2001),

and

Community

Zambian conservationist Hammerskjoeld (Hammer) Simwinga 1990 by Richard Goldman and Rhoda Goldman, the Goldman Environmental Prize included a cash award of $125,000 per recipient to grassroots environmen-

talists from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions.) In announcing the prize, the Goldman organization said, “In an area where rampant illegal wildlife poaching decimated the wild elephant population and left villagers living in extreme poverty, Simwinga

created

an

innovative

sus-

tainable community development program that successfully restored wildlife and transformed this poverty-stricken area.” It was not an exaggeration for his admirers to call him a hero. Simwinga was named for Dag Hammerskjéld, the United Nations secretary-general who died in a plane crash in Zambia in 1961. Simwinga’s father was a medical aide who worked in various regions of Zambia, and Simwinga became fluent in seven African languages. After earning agriculture certificates from the Zambia College of Agriculture and the City and Guilds London Institute (Lusaka, Zambia), he

worked as a farm manager. Concerned about wildlife poaching, in 1994 he joined the North Luangwa Conservation Project. This organization

had been

founded

in 1986 by Mark

an

Owens and Delia Owens, American zo-

Alphonse Fletcher Sr. fellowship (2006), in recognition of her work toward improving race relations in the U.S.

ologists who had gone to the region to study lions but instead turned their attention to the rampant poaching of elephants in North Luangwa National Park. With funding from a German zoological society, they set up antipoaching patrols and began community development projects to give the villagers an alternative to poaching for survival. Simwinga became the main force behind the agricultural development

(ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

Simwinga, Hammerskjoeld (b. Nov. 17, 1964, Isoka, Zambia) Zambian conservationist Hammer-

skjoeld

(Hammer)

Simwinga

was

awarded the 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa. (Founded in 104

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

“wildlife clubs,” co-

advised

not to return;

Development

Programme,

funded by a British charity called Harvest Hope. With additional money from the Owens

Foundation,

he established

beekeeping and fish-farming projects, among other new endeavours. By the time Simwinga received the Goldman

Prize, sometimes

called the

environmental Nobel Prize, poaching in North Luangwa Valley had been largely stopped, and wildlife was returning to the area. Moreover, the villagers subsisted on agriculture, from which they earned far more than they had from poaching. Simwinga's work improved the lives of some 35,000 people in 64 villages, and his programs were a model for other regions. (K. ANNE RANSON)

Singh, Kushal Pal (b. Aug. 15, 1931, Bulandshahar, Uttar Pradesh, India) In 2007 real-estate

baron Kushal Pal Singh became India’s second richest person following the wildly successful initial public offering (IPO) by his flagship property development

firm, DLF

Ltd., on July 5. The

much-anticipated IPO raised 91.88 billion

rupees

(about

$2.24

billion)

through the sale of 175 million shares of stock and thereby made the offering India’s largest-ever IPO. Singh, who with members of his immediate family controlled roughly 87% of DLF, saw a more than 50% increase in his net worth in the months following the IPO. By October, as DLF’s stock price continued to soar, his wealth had grown to an estimated 1.29 trillion rupees (about $32.9 billion). Singh thus joined the Ambani brothers—business tycoons Mukesh and Anil—as India’s only rupee trillionaires. After earning a degree in science from Meerut College, Singh studied engineering in the U.K. and then served as an officer in an elite cavalry regiment in the Indian army. He left the military in 1960 to join DLF, which had been founded in 1946 by his father-in-law,

Biographies

entrepreneur Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh. His fatherin-law initially gave him assignments in the manufacturing field. One of Singh's early successes involved a joint venture with a U.S.-based firm to produce automotive batteries and electric motors in India. By 1979, however, Singh had set his sights on an ambitious plan to develop property in the small township of Gurgaon in mostly rural Haryana state. He envisioned transforming the area into a satellite city of nearby New Delhi and

pervised by noted philosopher

attracting

to

Berlin, was published as his first book,

establish operations there. He eventually acquired some 1,400 ha (3,500 ac) around Gurgaon, on which DLF constructed modern commercial and residential buildings. In the 1990s General Electric became one of the first major international corporations to lease space in the sprawling new hub known as DLF City. As India emerged as a top outsourcing destination, other wellknown companies became DLF tenants, including American Express,

The Explanation of Behavior (1964). In that volume Taylor charged that psychological behaviourism studied human activity without considering thought or subjective meaning. In 1961 he returned to Canada, where he taught at McGill and attempted for a time to be elected to Parliament. Subsequently he taught at numerous Canadian,

international

companies

British Airways, IBM, and Nestlé.

Under Singh's leadership, DLF ultimately expanded its development projects far beyond Gurgaon. Money raised in the company’s IPO was expected to help finance an array of building projects already under way across India. Despite fears among some experts and analysts of a property market crash, Singh was clearly bullish on the longterm outlook for India’s real-estate industry. “You will need 100 DLFs,” he was quoted as saying. At the same time, he seemed increasingly willing to invest in fields other than real estate. In September DLF launched a bid to enter India’s telecommunications industry, announcing its intention to apply for licenses to provide telecom services across the country. (SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Taylor, Charles (b. Nov. 5, 1931, Montreal, Que.)

In 2007 Charles Taylor became the first Canadian to receive the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. Announcing the award, the Templeton foundation’s president, John M. Templeton, Jr., said that Taylor “has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistics, literature, and every other facet of humanities and the social sciences.” In further recognition of Taylor’s interest in the tension between secularization and spirituality, in 2007

Quebec Premier Jean Charest appointed him cochair of a commission on the accommodation of cultural and religious differences in public life. Charles Margrave Taylor was born to a French-speaking mother and an English-speaking father. After earning a B.A.

(1952)

from

McGill

University,

Montreal, Taylor attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and received a B.A. (1955) and Ph.D. (1961). His dissertation, which was su-

American,

and

European

Isaiah

modernity

as

a movement

away

from spirituality toward objective reasoning. The lectures were published in three volumes, of which the last, A Secular Age (2007), was conceived as a

comprehensive examination of secularization and the modern world. In all of his work, Taylor sought to remedy the tendency of academics in most fields to ignore the human need to seek meaning and goodness. When the 2007 Templeton Prize was announced, Taylor called for more study of the spiritual dimensions of violence; he characterized appeals to violence as a distortion of people’s searches for meaning. He chastised those secularists and believers who did not consider themselves part of the problem, saying, “We will pay a high price if we allow this kind of muddled thinking to prevail.”

was restricted to committee

members,

the majority of whom were Beijing loyalists. Tsang had served as the head of the Hong Kong government since 2005,

when he replaced the embattled Tung Chee Hwa as chief executive after Tung resigned the post under pressure from Beijing. Tsang formally began his new five-year term on July 1. Information Services Department of HKSARG

institutions,

and he was in frequent demand as a lecturer. In 2002 he became a professor of law and philosophy at Northwestern University Evanston, Ill. A lifelong Roman Catholic, Taylor delivered the annual Marianist Lecture at the University of Dayton, Ohio, in 1997 (published as A Catholic Modernity? in 1999); he urged the church to avoid two extremes—fully identifying with Western civilization or fully rejecting modernity. In the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1999, Taylor traced the development of Western

2007, was overwhelmingly reelected to a second term in office, defeating prodemocracy challenger Alan Leong with 649 of the 772 valid votes cast by the special administrative region’s 800member Election Committee. Voting

(DARRELL J. TURNER)

Tsang, Donald (b. Oct. 7, 1944, Hong Kong) As widely expected, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang on March 25,

Donald Tsang, chief executive of Hong Kong

Tsang

grew

up

in Hong

Kong.

He

joined the Hong Kong Civil Service in 1967 and gained experience working on administrative issues pertaining to the return of the crown colony to Chinese sovereignty. He worked for the Asian Development Bank in Manila in 1977 and later studied in the United States,

where

he earned

a master’s

degree

(1981) in public administration from Harvard University. Returning to Hong

Kong, he held a number of government positions, including deputy secretary of the General Duties Branch (1985-89), director general of trade (1991-93), and

secretary for the treasury (1993-95). In 1995 Tsang was appointed financial secretary of Hong Kong. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, it

was Tsang who made the decision to invest billions of dollars of public funds in the stock and futures markets in an effort to help strengthen the Hong Kong dollar. The move, while mostly popular at home, stirred considerable controversy abroad. Tsang was made a Knight of the British Empire in 1997. Named chief secretary of Hong Kong in 105

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies

2001, he was

responsible

the 180,000-member

for leading

Civil Service.

He

Zimbabwe African National Union-Pa-

that in 2005 launched

triotic

performed a cover of the Pretenders’ “Tl Stand by You.” Made available as a single on Apple’s iTunes service, the song

Front

[ZANU-PF]

garnered

62

was awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal—Hong Kong’s highest honour— in 2002 in recognition of his lifetime service to the region. Following Tung’s resignation in March 2005, Tsang was first named acting chief executive and then in June, facing no opposition, was selected by the Election Committee to serve out the rest of Tung’s term. In his first two years in the top post, Tsang earned high marks for his financial stewardship, presiding over a steadily growing economy and recovering stock market. He

seats) in the parliamentary elections in June, posing a more serious challenge than the ruling party had expected. The eldest of nine children, Tsvangirai left school at a young age to seek employment to assist his family He also served as an official in Mugabe's party. His political conversion began in 1974 when he joined a nickel-mining company and became a member of the Associated Mineworkers Union. Working his way through the ranks of the union, in 1988 he became secretarygeneral of the Zimbabwe Congress of

faced

Trade

mounting

criticism,

however,

from democratic lawmakers impatient with the pace of reform in Hong Kong. Tsang failed to win passage of a limited constitutional reform package in 2005 (blaming the defeat on “some bloodyminded politicians who wouldn't allow it through in the Legislative Council— against the people's wishes”). He pledged to make a more ambitious effort in his new term, declaring the goals of achieving full democracy and the direct election of the chief executive by the time his term ended in June

2012.

(SHERMAN HOLLAR)

Unions

(ZCTU).

The savage beating on March 11, 2007, of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai by police and the imprisonment that same day of the senior officials of his political party, the Movement

for Democratic

Change

(MDC),

heightened international attention to the plight of Tsvangirai and the MDC. While on his way to attend a prayer meeting arranged by local churches, Tsvangirai

was

seized,

arrested,

and

pummeled. Police denied his version of events, claiming that MDC activists had started the trouble. Although the U.S., the European Union, governments of the Commonwealths, and human rights groups condemned the actions of the police and urged attempts at reconciliation between the Zimbabwean government and the MDC, many neighbouring African countries remained silent. Tsvangirai became known for his effective dissent against the policies of longtime Zimbabwean Pres. Robert Mugabe. In February 2000 the MDC helped to defeat the ruling governments proposals for a constitutional reform bill, which

included

a clause

to

expropriate farms from white landowners. In addition, Tsvangirai’s MDC won 57 seats (Mugabe’s ruling party, the

he

led a series of strikes against Mugabe's taxation policy, and in September 1999, with the support of the ZCTU (a former ZANU-PF ally), he helped found the MDC in opposition to ZANU-PF.

Shortly before the presidential elections of 2002, in which Tsvangirai was a candidate, he was charged with treason for allegedly plotting to assassinate President Mugabe. Tsvangirai was acquitted after enduring a long trial but was again charged with treason in 2003 after calling for mass protests to overthrow the president. Soon after, he was acquitted once more.

Tsvangirai, Morgan (b. March 10, 1952, eastern Zimbabwe)

In 1997-98

On Oct. 12, 2005,

differences in opinion regarding the participation of the MDC in the national Senate elections led to a split in the party, one faction being led by Tsvangirai and the other by Arthur Mutambara, a former student protest leader, professor, and consultant. Subsequent attempts to solve the conflicts within the party met with only limited success. In 2007 Tsvangirai tried to maintain his popularity with his supporters while sorting

out

rivaling

interests

among

MDC party members and defending himself against state-controlled media propaganda. (KENNETH INGHAM)

was

downloaded

more

her career,

than

and

300,000

times and became the first digital-only release to crack the Billboard top 10. Underwood shone at the Country Music Association

awards

in November,

re-

peating (she won in 2006) as female vocalist of the year and claiming single of the year honours for “Before He Cheats.” At the American Music Awards later that month, she added three more

trophies. Underwood captured awards for favourite country album, favourite country female singer, and favourite artist (fans voted via text messaging for the latter award). She finished 2007 with

another round of Grammy nominations. Carrie Marie Underwood was reared in Oklahoma on her family’s farm in Checotah. She was the youngest of three sisters and the first to demonstrate an interest in music. Underwood started singing at a young age, initially at church and later in school plays and talent shows. She became more serious about music while in high school but put her ambitions aside to devote time to her studies when she entered (2001)

Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Okla. Underwood intended to pursue a career as a newscaster, but her in-

terest in country music drew her back to the stage. In 2004 she interrupted her senior year to audition for the fourth season of the TV singing competition American Idol. By the time she reached the finals in May 2005, the field had been narrowed from a pool of thousands Country music artist Carrie Underwood

Underwood, Carrie (b. March 10, 1983, Muskogee, Okla.) American country music artist Carrie

Underwood continued to assert her dominance over industry sales charts in 2007. For the third year in a row, she ranked as the top-selling female country artist, and her sophomore album, Carnival Ride, landed on the charts at number one in November, with more than

half a million copies sold in its first week of release. Underwood started the year with a pair of wins at the Grammy Awards, taking home trophies for best new artist and best female country vocal performance. In April she returned to American

Idol, the television

show Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

106

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Kurov Alexander—ITAR-TASS/Landov

of other contestants to two—Underwood and long-haired rocker Bo Bice. Though Bice was favoured to win, viewers

selected

Underwood,

and

she

re-

ceived the top prize of a recording contract. The resulting album, Some Hearts (2005), was a massive commercial suc-

cess, selling some six million copies and cementing Underwood's status as one of American Idol’s most successful alumni. She supported the album with a 150show tour in 2006, sharing bills with Kenny Chesney and Brad Paisley in addition to headlining her own dates. Underwood made time to return to school, however, and she graduated (2006)

magna cum laude with a B.A. in mass communications from Northeastern State.

(MICHAEL RAY)

Upshaw, Dawn (b. July 17, 1960, Nashville, Tenn.) American soprano Dawn Upshaw,

known for her exquisite voice and for her meticulous attention to texts in many languages, in 2007 was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a “genius grant”). She was cited for “stretching the boundaries of operatic and concert singing and enriching the landscape of contemporary music.” Upshaw received a bachelor’s degree in 1982 from Illinois Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in 1984 from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. Also in 1984 she was successful in the Young Concert Artists auditions and became an apprentice singer with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City. In 1985 Upshaw shared the first prize in the Walter M. Naumburg Competition, consequently making her recital debut at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She appeared nearly 300 times with the Metropolitan Opera and also sang with companies throughout the U.S. and Europe, performing works from all periods of opera history. Upshaw served on the faculties of the Tanglewood Music Center, Lenox, Mass., and Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The recital and chamber-music repertoire was of special interest to Upshaw, and she devoted a substantial part of her time to programs that included selections ranging from art songs to works of the musical theatre and American popular songs. Upshaw was a favoured partner of such notable performers as pianists Gilbert Kalish and Richard Goode,

conductors Kent Nagano and Esa-Pekka Salonen (g.v.), and chamber groups Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird. Up-

shaw collaborated with a number of contemporary composers,

often singing in

the first performances of their works; she participated in more than two dozen premieres in the past decade. Significant opera premieres included John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (1999), Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin (2000), and Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar (2003).

Upshaw’s discography included more than 50 recordings. She performed in Henryk Goreckis Symphony No. 3, which Gramophone magazine chose as recording of the year in 1993. (The recording sold more than a million copies, an unusual feat in the classical world.) In addition,

she received

two

Grammy Awards for best classical vocal performance: in 1989 for Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and in 1991 for The Girl with Orange Lips, both collections of songs by 20th- and 21st-century composers. In 2004 the Grammy for the best chamber-music recording was awarded to Berg: Lyric Suite, on which Upshaw collaborated with the Kronos

Quartet,

and in 2006 she received a Grammy as a performer in the best opera recording, Golijovs Ainadamar. (ROBERT RAUCH) Vishneva, Diana (b. July 13, 1976, Leningrad, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) Within a

few years of her first international appearances in the late 1990s, Russian ballerina Diana Vishneva rose to become one of ballet's brightest stars, and in January 2007 Pres. Vladimir Putin awarded her the honorary title People's Artist of the Russian Federation. Vishneva, a product of the grand tradition of the Mariinsky Ballet (formerly Kirov Ballet),

dazzled

audiences

worldwide

with the musicality, flamboyance, and technical brilliance of her performances and brought a modern physicality and energy

to

her

expansive

repertoire,

which included works choreographed by George Balanchine, John Neumeier, William Forsythe, and Aleksey Ratmansky as well as the full range of 19th-century classics. Her strength, speed, and precision enabled her to perform Balanchine with an aplomb—and relish— beyond the reach of most Russiantrained

dancers,

while

her

Russian ballerina Diana Vishneva

radiant

persona, pinpoint control, and famously pliant spine empowered explorations of new dramatic possibilities in such classic roles as the title character in Giselle and Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Vishneva applied unsuccessfully at the age of nine to the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Leningrad, where Natalia

Makarova, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail

Baryshnikov had studied. The rejection only spurred Vishneva’s ambition, and two years later the academy accepted her. At the age of 17 she won the rarely awarded gold medal at the 1994 Prix de Lausanne international ballet competition. She turned down the prize, which would have enabled her to study fora year at an international ballet school of her choosing, and returned to her studies at the Vaganova school. During her last year at the academy, she also danced with the Mariinsky Ballet, quickly rising to become a solo performer. In 1996 she was promoted to principal dancer with the Mariinsky. Soon after, she began touring internationally with the company. In 2001 Vishneva was awarded a Golden Mask at Moscow’s annual Golden Mask Festival for her solo performance in Balanchine’s Rubies. Her growing renown brought numerous invitations to perform as a guest artist throughout the world. In 2003 Dance Europe magazine named her Dancer of the Year. Bynowan established internationalstar she contin-

ued to add new roles to her substantial repertoire, debuting in 2003 as the soloist in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, in 2004 as the soloist in Balan-

chine’s Ballet Imperial, and during 2004-06 in the roles of Odette-Odile in fourdifferentversions of Swan Lake. Having first performed with American Ballet Theatre in 2003, Vishneva became a principal with that New York City-based company in 2005. (JANET MOREDOCK) 107

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Lewis Whyld/AP

West, Kanye (b. June 8, 1977, Atlanta, Ga.)

At a time when hip-hop music sales were in decline, rapper and producer Kanye West continued to thrive in the upper echelons of the pop music industry in 2007. His newest album, Graduation, sold almost one million copies in the first week after its release in September. As a performer, West distinguished himself by fusing commercially appealing “gangsta” rap with politically aware themes and lyrics. As a producer, he developed his own distinctive style, borrowing a technique learned from rappers of an earlier era: he sampled classic hit songs and inventively incorporated them into rap songs. For most of his childhood, West lived

with his mother in the Chicago area. He spent some summers with his father in Maryland and a year, at age 10, in Nanjing, China, while his mother was teaching English there. When he was in high school, he befriended producer No LD., and by age 15 he was spending substantial amounts of time making music in his bedroom on a sampling keyboard. After high school he attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago and then transferred briefly to Chicago State University to study English; music was his real interest, how-

ever, and he soon left college for good. West first made his mark in the music industry as a producer, working with artists such as Mase and Jermaine Dupri. His reputation skyrocketed when he wrote five songs for rapper American rapper and hip-hop artist Kanye West

Jay-Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint. That success led to more work producing for artists on Jay-Z’s label, Roc-A-Fella. That same year, West began working on his own album, but Roc-A-Fella was not

interested in recording it because West did not have the tough “street” image that most hip-hop artists cultivated. His fortunes changed, however, in October

2002 after a near-fatal car crash in Los Angeles left West hospitalized. While recuperating, he composed and recorded the song “Through the Wire,” which sampled Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire” and incorporated vocals mumbled through his still-wired-shut jaw. The song anchored his first album, The College Dropout, which was released on the Roc-A-Fella label in 2004 and was a critical and commercial

success,

win-

passed the previous album in sales and acclaim and garnered three more Grammy Awards. Other production credits included work with artists such

Harry’s included working on a cattle station in Australia and in an orphanage in Lesotho. William then attended St. Andrews University in Fife, Scot., graduating (2005) with a degree in geography. Harry did not go to university but in-

as Foxy Brown,

stead

ning three Grammy Awards. album,

Late Registration

Keys.

His next

(2005),

Ludacris,

and

sur-

Alicia

(ANTHONY G. CRAINE)

William of Wales and Henry of Wales, Princes (b. June 21, 1982, London, Eng.) and (b. Sept. 15, 1984, London, Eng.) On Aug. 31, 2007, British Princes William

and Harry (as the younger brother, Henry, was universally known) organized a memorial service to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of their mother, Diana, princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris. At Diana's funeral in 1997, one of the more

moving sights had been that of her two sons—then aged 15 and almost 13— walking behind the gun carriage holding her coffin. Ten years later the brothers were adults who attracted attention in their own right—in William's case, because he was the elder son of the heir to the throne, Charles, prince of Wales, and hence a future monarch, and in

Harrys because his burgeoning military career raised the question of whether he would serve with other British troops in the Iraqi war zone. William Arthur Philip Louis and Henry Charles Albert David were both born at St. Marys Hospital in London (unlike their father

Prince

Charles,

who

was

born at Buckingham Palace). The two boys attended the same sequence of private nurseries and schools, ending up at Eton College. After Eton, both boys engaged in "gap year" projects—William's included stints with the British army in Belize and as an aid worker in Chile; Matt Sayles/AP

108

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Princes Harry (left) and William of Wales

entered

(May 2005)

Sandhurst,

Britain’s leading military academy for training army officers; he was commissioned an officer in April 2006. William followed his younger brother to Sandhurst in 2006, and it was announced in

2007 that he would go on attachment in 2008 to the Royal Air Force and then to the Royal Navy, so that (in keeping with his father's training) the future king could gain experience in all three major branches of the armed services. As he grew into adulthood, William proved almost as popular with the public as his mother and rather more popular than his father; opinion polls showed that many Britons would prefer that the crown pass directly to him following the reign of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth IL rather than to Prince Charles. Much media attention, therefore, centred on Kate Middleton, the nonaristo-

cratic young woman whom William had met in 2003 at university and who (except for a brief, highly publicized break in the spring of 2007) remained his girlfriend four years later. As the younger brother, Harry usually made the headlines only when he misbehaved and/or had too much to drink. He was the subject of intense criticism in January 2005 when he attended a fancy-dress party wearing a Nazi uniform

with

a swastika

arm

band;

he

apologized for what he conceded was a serious error of judgment. In February 2007 it was announced that Harry’s army regiment would be deployed to Iraq. On advice from the armed serv-

Biographies

ices, however, it was decided that nei-

ther William nor Harry would serve with Britain's forces in Iraq: not to shield members of the royal family from danger but because it was felt that they would become specific targets of attack and so put their fellow soldiers at excessive risk.

(PETER KELLNER)

Williams, Lucinda (b. Jan. 26, 1953, Lake Charles, La.)

With the enthusiastic reception in 2007 of the hit album West, American musi-

cian Lucinda Williams seemed to have finally earned the high level of commercial success that many believed she deserved. The genre-blurring singersongwriter had devoted fans, admiring colleagues, and respectful critics, but she was not well known by the general public—although audiences might well have heard her on the sound track of their favourite television show or film. Lucinda Gayl Williams, whose father was the poet Miller Williams, began writing songs after borrowing a guitar at age 12. She later studied first guitar and then voice, but she never learned

to read music. Early musical influences included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and

especially Bob Dylan. Miller Williams introduced his daughter to some of his friends—among them the notable writers Allen Ginsberg, Flannery O'Connor, and James Dickey; this exposure strongly influenced her lyrics. In 1979, having built a solid foundation of live performance, Williams recorded Ramblin’ on My Mind, an album of folk, country, and blues standards that was reissued in 1991 as Ramblin’; she recorded only original songs for her next effort, Happy Woman Blues

(1980).

Neither

album

drew

much attention, and Williams working with a series of record none of them for long; major proved incompatible with her

began labels, labels perfec-

tionism, and several minor labels went

out of business. Her big break came in 1988 with the release of Lucinda Williams. Widely hailed as a classic, it revealed her growing confidence as a songwriter The emotional intensity of the songs was underscored by Williamss rough-edged singing, which, though lacking in range, resonated with both vulnerability and power. In 1992 Sweet Old World, a folkinfused collection that included songs of suicide and regret, came out. In the same year, Mary Chapin Carpenter covered Williams’s “Passionate Kisses,” a

single from her self-titled album. Carpenters version earned Williams a

Grammy Award for country song of the year. Williams’s legendary perfectionism was evident during the recording of her fifth album,

Car

Wheels

on

a Gravel

Road. Her initial unhappiness with the work led to a number of delays, and it was not released until 1998. The album brought Williams her first real commercial success. Universally acclaimed, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road also won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album. In 2001 she released the understated Essence. It featured the song “Get Right with God,” which earned Williams a Grammy for best female rock vocal. World Without Tears (2003)

was her first album to debut in the top 20 of Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart. (AMY TIKKANEN)

offs: Teen Vogue, Men's Vogue, and Vogue Living. Meanwhile, Wintour orchestrated a spate of high-profile philanthropic Vogue associations, including the transformation of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Costume Institute Ball fund-raising gala (of which she served as cochair)

from an elite gathering of Manhattan socialites into an internationally chronicled celebrity-dominated red-carpet event known as the "East Coasts answer to the Oscars." In September 2003, with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Wintour also jointly inaugurated the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which offered financial support and business mentoring to the "next generation" of American fashion designers. Eric Ryan/Getty Images

Wintour, Anna (b. Nov. 3, 1949, London, Eng.)

American

Vogue magazine’s

editor in

chief, Anna Wintour, continued in 2007

to exceed the influence of her predecessors and rivals by extending her clout beyond the pages of the glossy, glamorous magazine she has helmed since her 1988 appointment. A profile in the New York Times in February 2007 crowned Wintour the fashion industry's most powerful figurehead and estimated that her influence was "greater than any contemporary editor and running close to a press baron." Wintour was the daughter of Charles Vere Wintour, who twice served as edi-

tor of London's Evening Standard newspaper. She dropped out of North London Collegiate in 1966 and four years later became a fashion assistant for Harper's & Queen magazine. After working as a fashion editor for a series of New York magazines, she served as editor (1986) of British Vogue and as editor (1987) of House & Garden, which she controver-

sially relaunched in the U.S. as HG. Wintour replaced Grace Mirabella, a 17-year veteran at Vogue, three years after the dynamic 1985 U.S. launch of the French magazine Elle consistently threatened to reduce Vogue’s circulation and advertising revenue. In explaining her publishing philosophy of democratic fashion fantasy, Wintour remarked, "Mass with class—thats my mantra." Her Vogue covers began featuring prominent women (including actresses Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie [g.v.] and politician Hillary Clinton) rather than exclusively using models. Under

Wintours

direction,

Condé

Nast Publications (Vogue's parent company) launched three successful spin-

Fashion icon Anna Wintour

Wintour was instrumental in bolstering the careers of numerous prominent fashion professionals, including the 1990s generation of supermodels, gifted fashion photographer Herb Ritts, and several important designers. Deploying her influence and clout, she secured financial backing for John Gallianos fledgling eponymous Paris fashion house, a move that helped in his elevation in 1997 to designer in chief at Christian Dior. Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs also benefited from Wintours patronage, and menswear designer Thom Brown launched his collection into 90 Brooks Brothers stores in 2007 after an introduction by Wintour. Vogue’s colossal circulation—by February 2007 a reported 1.28 million—secured Wintour’s reputation as the "unimpeachable first lady of fashion.” Her

imperious

demeanour,

however,

109

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Don Emmert—AFP/Getty Images

heightened by her propensity to sport dark sunglasses at all times, sometimes eclipsed her incomparable talent. The 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a fictionalized account of the comic travails of one of the three executive assistants running Wintours New York City office.

Samuel Zielonka was the son of Polish émigrés who had circled more than half the globe before settling in the U.S. Midwest,

May

2007,

Umaru

Yar'Adua, the governor of Katsina state,

was handpicked by outgoing president Olusegun Obasanjo. Yar'Adua was born to an elite Fulani family, and his birthplace was an important centre of Islamic learning. His family was prominent in both traditional and modern politics; his father served as a federal minister during the First Republic (1960-66), and his late elder brother, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua,

was Obasanjo’s deputy in the military government of 1976-79. Yar'Adua received his university education at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. From 1975 to 1983 he taught in various colleges and a polytechnic before becoming a businessman, serving in manage-

ment

and

as

a

director

of many

companies.

Yar'Adua first entered party politics as a mobilizer for the (now-defunct) Peo-

ples Redemption Party. During the long transition program (1989-93) to restore civilian rule, he became a founding member of the Peoples’ Front, a political association led by his elder brother, which eventually became the core of the

(now-defunct)

Social

Democratic

Party. Yar'Adua began concentrating on state politics in 1991, when he stood as a candidate in the Katsina state gubernatorial election, which he lost. Seven

years later, during the transition government of Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar,

Yar'Adua participated in the founding of the K34 political association, which merged with the PDP. Under the PDP banner he successfully contested for the governorship in 1999 and won reelection in 2003 to a second term. As state governor he focused on the socioeconomic development of his state, with particular attention to the educational and health sectors. Not only did he pay down the huge state debt that 110

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

entered

at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Zell began purchasing and leasing properties to other college students. He also met Robert Lurie, an engineering student, who became Zell's business partner for the next three

Musa

YarAdua of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was inaugurated as Nigerias 13th president in the capital of Abuja. The ceremony marked the first time in the countrys history that an elected civilian head of state had handed over power to another.

father

While studying (B.A., 1963; J.D., 1966)

(BRONWYN COSGRAVE)

29,

Zells

the wholesale jewelry business and invested in Chicago-area real estate.

Yar'Adua, Umaru Musa (b. 1951, Katsina, Nigeria) On

where

decades. While Zell worked

l

t

Nigerian Pres. Umaru Musa Yar'Adua he had inherited, but he also accumu-

lated a $50 million surplus in the treasury. He became known for his ascetic lifestyle and personal probity and was one of the few governors not investigated for corruption during Obasanjo’s

(1966-68)

as an attorney in Ann Arbor, the two friends managed apartment buildings in southeastern Michigan. In 1968 Zell returned to Chicago, and within two years Lurie had moved there to join him. They remained business partners until Luries death in 1990, and in 1999

Zell and Lurie's widow jointly endowed $10 million to establish the Samuel Zell

In the wake of open confrontation in late 2006 between Obasanjo and his

& Robert preneurial Michigan’s Although

vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who be-

railroad

came a presidential candidate for the Action Congress, Yar'Adua emerged as a dark-horse PDP presidential candidate. He won a decisive landslide victory with 70% of the vote in the April

parks, insurance, and a minority stake in the Chicago White Sox baseball team, his fortune arose primarily through investments in commercial real estate. Having developed a knack for turning around distressed businesses, he coined the self-applied moniker “Grave Dancer.” Zell transformed Equity Office, which he founded in 1976, into the largest U.S. office landlord, largely by identifying opportunities that other investors overlooked. He was still finalizing the sale of Equity Office—and driving up the price via a bidding war between Black-

regime.

21, 2007, election, but it was marred by

reports of widespread electoral malpractice. Yar'Adua faced the enormous task of maintaining the development programs begun by his predecessor, establishing peace and reconciliation in the Niger delta, and continuing the war against widespread systemic corruption. More important, he needed to establish his political independence from Obasanjo, who would remain leader of the PDP.

(LARAY DENZER)

Zell, Sam (b. Sept. 28, 1941, Chicago, Ill.)

Those who expected tycoon Sam Zell to retire after he sold his commercial realestate firm, Equity Office Properties Trust, in February 2007 were mistaken. Not long after he had closed the $39 billion sale to the private equity firm Blackstone Group, Zell became the preferred bidder for the Tribune Co. in his native

Chicago, with an offer of $315

million for a controlling interest in the media firm. Under the deal, which was

completed in December, he gained veto power over management decisions, the right to select a minority of board members, and an option to buy a remaining 40% share in the company, which was valued at $8.2 billion.

H. Lurie Institute for EntreStudies at the University of Ross Business School. Zell’s investments included cars,

radio

stations,

trailer

stone and Vornado Trust, another real-

estate investment trust—when he began pursuing the Tribune Co. acquisition.

Few bidders expressed interest when Tribune put itself on the market in September 2006. Once Zell came forward,

however, the Tribunes management favoured his offer over competing proposals from two Los Angeles-based billionaires, Eli Broad and Ronald Burkle.

The agreement would transfer Tribune shares to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and thereby would permit stockholders (i.e., Zell and employees) to avoid taxes on income earned from the shares. Some observers categorized Zell as another billionaire pursuing a trophy media property despite its dwindling profitability, while others assumed that he would use the Tribune's newspaper, broadcast, and Internet out-

Biographies Ryan Pyle/Corbis

lets to advance a political agenda. Yet Zell insisted that his plans were purely economic and that, after selling a few Tribune assets—such as the Chicago Cubs baseball team—he fully intended to remain a long-term owner of the company. (SARAH FORBES ORWIG) Zennstróm, Niklas, and Friis, Janus (b. 1966, Sweden ) and (b. 1976, Denmark) With the commercial launch in

(voice-over-Internet

protocol)

technol-

ogy. Skype offered free basic phone service (including long-distance and international calls) through the Internet, with the firm's earnings coming from fees levied on services

(such as voice

mail, call waiting, and downloaded ring tones) and imposed on calls placed to land-based telephones. Although they sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, in 2007 the partners remained on

May 2007 of Joost, a global platform for viewing television programs—for free—via the Internet, entrepreneurs

board,

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstróm, who

ties, however, left them free to pursue

a year earlier had already made Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people, once again tapped the Internet as a means of delivering services and entertainment to individual users. Joosts central product was software that made it possible to view streamingvideo content through an Internet con-

interests, notably Joost NV, which they founded in January 2006. Unlike Skype, Joost was designed to earn money through advertising; and unlike KaZaA, Joost would protect copyrighted material for all content providers. A beta

nection.

Unlike

YouTube,

however,

which was dominated by short video clips uploaded by individuals, Joost provided a wide selection of primary TV programming from such established content providers as CBS, Warner Bros.

Television, National Geographic, and Comedy Central and gave users complete control over which shows to watch and when to watch them. Zennstróm studied business and engineering

physics/computer

science

at

with

Zennstróm

as

CEO

and

Friis as executive vice president of innovation. Their reduced responsibili-

(test) version of Joost was made

avail-

able to invited users in early 2007, and by the official launch in May, Joost's global sponsors included Nike, Intel, Coca-Cola,

Microsoft,

and

Kraft.

Zennstróm conceded in August that Joost might introduce a pay-per-view structure for certain kinds of programming, while others hinted that Joost might eventually deliver its content to TV screens.

(SARAH FORBES ORWIG)

Zhang Huan (b.

Jan.

3,

1965,

Anyang,

Henan

Uppsala (Swed.) University and the University of Michigan. He began his

province, China) In 2007 Chinese artist Zhang Huan rode a wave of enormous

career at Tele2, a Swedish telecommunications firm, where he hired Friis, a

interest in contemporary

self-taught telecom operator who had launched his career as a help-desk staffer for CyberCity, an Internet service provider (ISP). The first Zennstróm-

Friis ventures were the ISP get2net and everyday.com, a Web portal. The partners gained popularity (by providing access to free media content) as well as

notoriety (largely because of copyright lawsuits) through their next Web serv-

tures,

however,

including

Joltid,

a

provider of traffic-optimization software, and Altnet, a peer-to-peer wholesale network. The duo's next major breakthrough was Skype Technologies SA, which applied the increasingly popular VoIP

in 1989

in a series

of pro-

democracy rallies in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Like many Chinese art students of the time, Zhang was attracted to the avant-garde, but he had limited resources. Perhaps not surprisingly then, his expression took the form of provocative, transgressive performance art that was photographed. For most of his performances, he was nude,

Square Metres (1994) for which he cov-

in Berlin, and one each in

New York City, London, and Madrid. Perhaps best known as a performance artist, Zhang in 2006 more or less gave up his conceptual work in order to focus on making sculptures, installations, paintings, and photographs. These he produced on a massive scale—with the help of about 100 assistants—in his stu-

ered himself in fish oil and honey sat motionless for several hours public latrine while insects crawled him. He also initiated several group

dio, a 7,000-sq-m (75,000-sq-ft) former

and laid atop one another until they achieved a height of one metre. Other characteristic images of art made during this period included Zhang’s face and body covered with calligraphy, sometimes to the point of obliterating all skin surface. He was included in the influential New York exhibition “Inside Out” in

(mostly)

million, even after they had sold their shares in KaZaA in 2002. They continued to develop other successful ven-

minating

shows—two

Friis and Zennstróm

than $125

young artists formed a collective in a slum of Beijing that came to be known as the East Village. This period was a dramatic time in Chinese history, cul-

becoming the subject of five major solo

art,

competed with peer-to-peer music platform Napster Legal challenges from music and film companies concerning copyright infringement ultimately cost more

Huan

and he was often undergoing some painful experience, as in the piece /2

Chinese

textile mill on the edge of Shanghai. Under Zhang’s direction, his assistants turned out paintings made from varying shades of incense ash acquired from temples, massive sculptures of

ice, KaZaA, a free file-sharing site that

Contemporary Chinese artist Zhang

heads

covered

with

incense

ash, assemblages that combined woodcarvings with photographs, a variety of prints, and stuffed animals, as well as

giant copper hands in mudras and copper feet that recalled Buddhist statues. Zhang earned a B.A. (1988) at Henan

University, Kaifeng—where he worked as an instructor from 1988 to 1991—and an M.A. (1993) at the Central Academy

of Fine Arts in Beijing. Zhang and other

and in a over per-

formances, such as To Add One Metre to an Anonymous Mountain (1995). In this

piece Zhang and nine others gathered on a mountain peak, removed their clothes,

1998, and he lived and worked in New

York City from 1998 to 2006. By that point he had grown tired of performance art and stated that he had run out of new ideas. He returned to China in 2006 and began to mass-produce works of stunning variety. It was clear that the change of scene had had a galvanizing effect on him. (KATHLEEN KUIPER) 111

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Biographies Paul Sakuma/AP

Zoellick, Robert B. (b. July 25, 1953, Evergreen Park, Ill.) On July 1, 2007, Robert Zoellick, an American with extensive experience in

economic policy and foreign affairs, began a five-year term as the 11th president of the World Bank. He faced a potentially difficult situation as he replaced the unpopular Paul D. Wolfowitz, who had been forced to resign after two years in the post, partly over charges of favouritism. Robert Bruce Zoellick grew up in Naperville, outside Chicago. He received a B.A. (1975) in history from Swarthmore (Pa.) College, a Juris Doctor degree (1979) from Harvard Law

School, and a Master of Public Policy degree (1981) from Harvard's

John FE

Kennedy School of Government. He subsequently worked in the administrations of three Republican presidents. Under Pres. Ronald Reagan, he was a deputy assistant secretary (1985-88) in the Treasury Department. In the administration of Pres. George H.W. Bush, Zoellick was an undersecretary of state (1989-92) before serving (1992-93)

as

the White House deputy chief of staff and an assistant to the president. From 1993 to 1997 Zoellick was a vice president of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and during this time he also taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and was a scholar at the Kennedy School of Government. He was an adviser to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign, and with Bush's election Zoellick once again entered government service. As U.S. trade representative (2001-05), he greatly expanded the number of free-trade pacts with countries throughout the world. He completed negotiations that brought China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and was influential

in getting congressional approval of the Trade Act of 2002, restoring so-called fast-track authority to the president. In 2005-06 he was deputy secretary of state, dealing particularly with China and The Sudan. After leaving the administration in June 2006, Zoellick be-

came a vice-chairman of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. On May 30, 2007,

Bush nominated him for the World Bank presidency, and the bank’s board approved the nomination on June 25. Zoellick was considered to be a member of the neoconservative

movement,

advocating aggressive policies in both trade and foreign affairs. He took the view that trade should be used as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, and as trade representative he did not hesitate 112

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

to bypass the WTO in order to conclude bilateral treaties with other countries. Nonetheless,

he was

considered

to be

more pragmatic than many other neoconservatives. Restoring the morale of employees, which had suffered under Wolfowitz; enacting reforms, particularly to curb fraud; and improving relations with donor countries were among Zoellick’s most pressing challenges at the World Bank.

(ROBERT RAUCH)

Zuckerberg, Mark (b. May 14, 1984, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.) In May 2007 Mark Zuckerberg, the 23year-old founder and CEO of the social networking Web site Facebook, announced the launch of Facebook Platform, which would allow independent developers to build applications within Facebook. With more than 24 million active members in early 2007 (and more than double that by year’s end), Facebook was already a phenomenon— the sixth most trafficked Web site in the U.S., according to Zuckerberg. In October the company announced an agreement with Microsoft, already its exclusive broker of banner advertising and sponsorships. The software company would pay $240 million to buy a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which now valued at some $15 billion.

was

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester county, N.Y., where he attended Ardsley High School before going to Phillips Exeter Academy, a private school in New Hampshire. He enrolled at Harvard University in 2002 and

on Feb.

4, 2004,

launched

Face-

book (originally, thefacebook.com), a directory in which fellow Harvard students entered their own information and photos into a template that he had devised. Within two weeks half of the student body had signed up. Zuckerbergs roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, helped him add features and make the site available to other campuses across the country. That summer they moved their headquarters

to

Palo

Alto,

Calif,

where

Zuckerberg talked venture capitalist Peter Thiel into giving them seed money. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on the fledgling company, which received its first major infusion of venture

capital

($12.7

million)

in

May 2005. Four months later Facebook opened to registration by high-school students. Meanwhile, it expanded on college campuses (where in September 2005, 85% of students were said to be

registered). Foreign colleges and universities also began to sign up, and by

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg September 2006 anyone with an e-mail address could join a regional network based on where he or she lived. About this time Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo! Facebook offered an online place where registered users could create profiles, upload photos and other media, and keep in touch with friends. It differed from other social networking sites, however, in its emphasis on real names (and e-mail addresses), or

“trusted connections.” It also laid particular emphasis on networking, with information disseminated not only to each individual's network of friends but also to friends of friends—what Zuckerberg called the “social graph.” In late 2007 the founders of a Facebook competitor refiled an earlier lawsuit in which they alleged that Zuckerberg had misappropriated the idea for Facebook; he denied the charges. Just days later he responded to user protests and agreed to modify a new advertising feature that monitored online purchases by Facebook users. These two setbacks were not expected to deter Zuckerberg from his next goal: to overtake social networking rival MySpace— owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and claiming at least 100 million users—and to transform Internet use. (K. ANNE RANSON)

Obituaries In 2007 the world LOST many LEADERS, pathfinders, NEWSMAKERS, heroes, CULTURAL ICONS, and ROGUES. The pages below RECAPTURE the lives and accomplishments of those we REMEMBER best.

Aug. 5, 1912, Lyons, France—d. Jan. 22, 2007, Paris, France), championed the

2007, Gaza, Emerging

tonomous Area), was a founding mem-

pro-democracy leaders. Adamec resigned on Dec. 7, 1989, and stepped down as Communist Party leader the next year, but he remained a member of the new Czech parliament until

cause of the homeless in France and throughout the world. The Emmaus

ber (1964-65) of the executive commit-

1992.

Abbé

Pierre

(Henri-Antoine

Groués;

the “ragpickers’ saint”), French Roman Catholic priest and social activist (b.

movement,

which he founded

in 1949

with a single centre for the homeless in a Paris suburb, held its first World As-

sembly in 1969, and by 2007 Emmaus International had more than 100 communities in France as well as in some 40 other countries. Abbé Pierre was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 for his World War II work in the French underground, was made an officer of the Legion of Honour in 2001 (after having refused the award for years), and in 2004 was advanced to the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, France's highest distinction.

Roman Catholic priest and champion of the poor Abbé Pierre

Abdel Shafi, Haidar, Palestinian nationalist (b. June 10, 1919, Gaza,

British-occupied Palestine—d. Sept. 25, Palestinian Au-

tee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and a longtime secular voice in negotiations with Israel for Palestinian self-rule. Abdel Shafi studied medicine at the American University in Beirut and later (after completing his World War II service in the British Jordanian Army) at a hospital in Dayton, Ohio. He settled in

Aguilar,

Antonio

AGUILAR

(PASCUAL

BARRAZA;

TONY

ANTONIO

AGUILAR;

TONI AGUILAR, “EL CHARRO DE MEXICO"), Mexican actor, singer, and cowboy (b. May 17, 1919, Villanueva, Zacatecas, Mex.—d. June 19, 2007,

ciety. Abdel Shafi led the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid Arab-Israeli peace conference, though he opposed the subsequent Oslo Accords. He

Mexico City, Mex.), enraptured audiences with his powerful voice and became the most popular of the ranchero singers during the golden age of Mexican films; he appeared in more than 125 motion pictures, many of which used scripts that he wrote, and recorded at least 150 albums during his heyday. Though he initially moved to

was elected (1996-97) to the Palestin-

Los Angeles to pursue an operatic ca-

ian Legislative Council before withdrawing his support from PLO leader Yasir Arafat, particularly over what he considered insufficient action in response to Israeli settlements in disputed territory.

reer, Aguilar returned to Mexico in 1945 and became a mariachi. A spot on a radio show led to a record deal and

Gaza,

where

he

practiced

medicine,

worked for independence, and founded (1972) the Palestinian Red Crescent So-

his first film role, in Un rincón cerca del cielo (1950). Six years later he secured

Adamec, Ladislav, Czech politician (b.

his first starring role, in Tierra de hombres. He was perhaps best known for his portrayals of Mexican revolutionar-

Sept

Rad-

ies; he starred in the title role of Emil-

hostem, Moravia, Czech. [now in Czech Republic]—d. April 14, 2007, Prague,

iano Zapata (1970) and portrayed Pancho Villa in La sangre de un valiente

Czech Rep.), failed to prevent the end of communist rule in his country even as he tried to initiate modest reforms

(1993).

as

10,

federal

1926,

prime

Frenstat

minister

pod

(1988-89).

Adamec joined the Communist Party in 1946 and the party’s central committee in 1966. He served as deputy premier

He

returned

home

to make

films and in 1997 received a Special Golden Ariel Award for his contribution to Mexican cinema. In 2000 Aguilar, who sold more than 25 million records,

had his star embedded wood Walk of Fame.

on the Holly-

(1969-87) and premier (1987-88) in the

Czech Socialist Republic before being named head of the national government on Oct. 11, 1988. During the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Adamec opened the country’s borders and refused to authorize military intervention, but his offer of limited multiparty government was rebuffed by Vaclav Havel and other

Alexander, Lloyd, American author (b. Jan. 30, 1924, Philadelphia, Pa.—d. May 17, 2007, Drexel Hill, Pa.), trans-

ported readers to a world of fantasy with a five-book series that was known as the Prydain Chronicles. The Book of Three

(1964)

launched

the

series,

which chronicled the rise of a young

Philippe Wojazer—Reuters/Landov

113

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

hero named Taran from an assistant pig keeper to leader of the imaginary kingdom of Prydain. Along the way, Taran and his memorable companions confront

villains,

war,

and

Mapuche Indians and for contributing to deforestation. In 2000 he established a new holding company, AntarChile, which had assets of about $8.5 billion.

personal

dilemmas. The second novel in the se-

Antonioni,

ries, The Black

director,

Cauldron

(1965),

was

chosen as a Newbery Honor Book in 1966,

and

the

last

installment,

Wanderer

(1967). The

The

Disney feature film The Black Cauldron (1985) was based on the Prydain nov-

els. Alexander first found success with And Let the Credit Go (1955). He eventually turned his efforts toward children’s literature and released (1963) his

first juvenile fantasy, Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason and Gareth. Alexander later penned the Westmark trilogy and the Vesper Holly advendealt with concepts such as democracy, freedom, and corruption in the fictional kingdom of Westmark. Books starring spirited 19th-century orphan Vesper Holly and her guardian offered fast-paced journeys through distant lands where the two characters help right injustices. Alexander received many honours, including the National Book Award in 1971 for The Marvelous Misadventures

of Sebastian

(1970) and

in 1982 for Westmark and the 1986 Regina Medal for his contribution to children’s literature. Alonso, Alberto Julio Rayneri, Cuban dancer, ballet master, and choreographer (b. May 22, 1917, Havana, Cuba— d. Dec. 31, 2007, Gainesville, Fla.), was cofounder in 1948 (with his brother, Fernando Alonso, and his sister-in-law, Alicia Alonso) of the National Ballet of

Cuba and went on to gain international fame with his choreography for Carmen Suite (1967), a role he initially created

for Bolshoi Ballet prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya. After being granted (1993) political asylum in the U.S., Alonso joined the Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, where he also served as

resident choreographer for the Dance Theater of Santa Fe. The 2007 documentary Dance of My Heart showcased his contributions to dance. Anderson, William Robert, commander (ret.), U.S. Navy, and American politician (b. June 17, 1921, Bakerville, Tenn.—d. Feb. 25, 2007, Leesburg, Va.),

piloted the world’s 114

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

first nuclear-pow-

cinematographer,

and

pro-

“realistic” narrative and traditional plots in favour of character study and often poetic visual imagery that used film as a metaphor for human experience rather than a record of it. His most successful motion pictures internationally were L'avventura (1960; The Adventure) and the English-language Blowup (1966; also spelled Blow-Up), which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes

animated

tures. Westmark (1981), The Kestrel (1982), and The Beggar Queen (1984)

Italian film

ducer (b. Sept. 29, 1912, Ferrara, Italy— d. July 30, 2007, Rome, Italy), eschewed

High King (1968), won the Newbery Medal in 1969. The series also included The Castle of Llyr (1966) and Taran

Michelangelo,

Festival,

Former U.S. naval commander William Robert Anderson

ered submarine,

the Nautilus, beneath

the North Pole on Aug. 3, 1958. The historic voyage under the polar ice cap, which began off Point Barrow, Alaska, and ended in the Greenland Sea,

received

both

BAFTA

and

Academy Award nominations, and came to epitomize “swinging ‘60s” London. Antonioni attended the University of Bologna, where he studied classics and then economics and commerce. He also began haunting the cinemas and writing film criticism for a newspaper in neighbouring Padua. In about 1940 he moved to Rome, where he became a

staff member of the magazine Cinema and studied at a film school. He collaborated on the scripts of some major

earned Anderson a hero’s welcome in New York City, as well as the moniker “the 20th century's Captain Nemo.” After Anderson retired from the navy in

feature films, one of them Roberto Rossellini’s Pilota ritorna (1942; A Pilot Returns), and went to France to assist

1962, he made an unsuccessful run for

du soir (1942; The Devils Envoys).

governor of Tennessee but in 1964 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He became a staunch critic of the Vietnam War before retiring from

1943 Antonioni began to direct a short documentary called Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley), but its completion was interrupted by the chaos of Italy's defeat in World War II. For a while he made his living by translating from the

Congress in 1973. Angelini, ^Anacleto, Italian-born Chilean industrialist (b. Jan. 17, 1914,

Bondeno,

near Ferrara, Italy—d. Aug.

28, 2007,

Santiago,

Chile), amassed

a

personal fortune of about $6 billion as a shrewd businessman who turned a succession of poorly run firms into successful enterprises after immigrating to Chile in 1948. He parlayed a Chilean paint company and a fishing concern into thriving businesses before taking control of Copec, a conglomerate with holdings that included forestry products, shipyards, mining, and thermal electric generation. Angelini also benefited from the privatization of many state industries when the country was

under

the rule (1974-90)

of

Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Angelini was credited with supplying jobs and creating wealth, but he was also vilified for forcibly appropriating the land of the

director Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs In

French; he then became film critic for

the underground paper Italia Libera, wrote some unproduced scripts, and directed several short subjects. Antonioni’s first full-length feature, Cronaca di un amore (1950; Story ofa Love Affair), established him as a talent to be watched. Other significant films included Le amiche (1955; The Girlfriends), L'eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), Il deserto rosso (1964; The Red Desert),

and

the

English-language

Point (1970). Antonioni’s

Zabriskie

later work—

including the documentary Chung KuoCina (1972; China), the enigmatic thriller Professione: reporter (1975; The Passenger), and Il mistero di Oberwald (1981; The Mystery of Oberwald), based on a Jean Cocteau play—did not earn as much acclaim, though Identificazione di una donna (1982; Identification of a Woman) won the 35th An-

Obituaries Chester Higgins Jr. —á'he New York Times/Redux

niversary Prize at Cannes. He continued

phia, Pa.—d. March

to work, though at a reduced pace, after suffering a paralyzing stroke in

Ore.), led the team at IBM that during the 1950s designed FORTRAN (formula translation), the first important algorithmic language for computers and the most continuously used high-level language in information technology. The development of FORTRAN was instrumental in paving the way for modern

1985.

Antonioni

in 1995

received

an

honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Arfons, Art(hur) Eugene, American automotive racer (b. Feb. 3, 1926, Akron, Ohio—d. Dec. 3, 2007, Akron),

software. Backus, who

was a three-time holder of the world's land-speed record for wheeled vehicles. While

serving

(1943-46)

in the

U.S.

half brother Walter, with whom he built

a series of racing cars, each called the Green Monster; and by 1959 he was involved in car racing full time. In the early 1960s he designed the ultimate Green Monster, powered by a J-79 jet aircraft engine, which he drove at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. He reached speeds of 434.02 mph (698.34 Oct. 5, 1964; 536.71 mph km/hr), Oct. 27, 1964; and mph (927.64 km/hr), Nov. 7,

1965. The last of these records was broken eight days later by Craig Breedlove’s attainment of a speed of 600.601

mph

also designed name

(966.37

km/hr).

speedboats,

Arfons

using

the

Green Monster Cyclops.

‘Arif, ‘Abd al-Rahman, Iraqi army officer and politician (b. 1916, Baghdad, Iraq—d.

Aug.

24, 2007,

Amman,

Jor-

dan), assumed the Iraqi presidency on April 17, 1966, four days after the death in a helicopter crash of his brother, Pres. ‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif. ‘Abd al-Rahman was regarded as a weak president, however, and in July 1968 he was deposed in a Ba‘thist coup led by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. The ‘Arif brothers both pursued military careers, with ‘Abd alRahman rising to major general. They were involved in the 1958 overthrow of King Faysal II and in the 1963 coup that in turn toppled ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim and brought ‘Abd al-Salam to power. Under his brother, ‘Abd al-Rahman served as acting chief of staff of the army. After being ousted as president, he lived in exile until 1979 and

again after the U.S-led overthrow 2003 of Pres. Saddam Hussein.

in

Astor, Brooke Russell (ROBERTA BROOKE RUSSELL), American socialite,

philanthropist,

and writer

(b. March

30, 1902, Portsmouth, N.H.—d. Aug. 13, 2007, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.), em-

ployed her position, wealth, and ener-

tired of labori-

ous hand coding, was granted permission to assemble a team at IBM that would work on improving efficiency; the group devised FORTRAN, which produced programs that were as good as those written by professional programmers. Backus also cocreated (with

Navy, Arfons received training in diesel mechanics. He began his career as a drag racer in the early 1950s with his

km/hr), (863.56 576.533

17, 2007, Ashland,

Gene

M. Amdahl)

FORTRAN

for the

IBM 704 computer and designed (with Peter Naur) Algol 60, a new international scientific programming language. Restless as a young man, Backus found his niche in mathematics, earning a B.S. (1949) and an M.A. (1950) from Co-

Socialite Brooke Astor

lumbia University, New York City. He joined IBM in 1950 and remained there until his retirement in 1991. Among his many honours, Backus received the 1977 Turing Award, the National Medal of Science (1975), and the Charles Stark

gies in the interest of cultural enrichment and the poor and presided over

Draper Prize (1993), the highest award conferred by the National Academy of

the distribution of about $195 million as president (1959-97) of the Vincent

Engineering.

Astor Foundation. At age 16 she married her first husband. She began writing for Vogue and Pictorial Review, volunteering for charitable organizations, and serving on charity boards. After her

Bakker,

divorce in 1930, she made her home in

Tammy

Faye,

see

Messner,

Tammy Faye.

Barre, French

Raymond-Octave-Joseph, economist and politician (b.

New York City. During her second marriage, which lasted from 1932 until her

April 12, 1924, Saint-Denis, Réunion— d. Aug. 25, 2007, Paris, France), as prime minister (1976-81) and minister

husband’s

of

death in 1952, she traveled

extensively and began writing for Town and Country and editing for House and Garden magazine. In 1953 she married Vincent Astor (heir to the fortune of fur

finance

and

economic

affairs

(1976-78) of France, instituted austerity measures

to reduce government

ex-

penditures and to control inflation and oversaw his country’s entry (1979) into

magnate and financier John Jacob Astor). The couple established the chari-

the European Monetary System. Barre

table foundation, which she led from his death (1959) until she made the fi-

nion and then moved to Paris, where he studied law, economics, and politics

nal gifts in 1997. Astor’s novels, The Bluebird Is at Home (1965) and The

at the University of Paris and at the Institute for Political Studies. He later taught at both institutions and at other universities. In 1959 he became an adviser to the government of Pres. Charles de Gaulle. As vice president

Last Blossom on the Plum Tree (1986),

examined life in upper-class society and reflected her personal experience. Her two autobiographical works, Patchwork Child (1962) and Footprints (1980) treated, respectively, her youth and her life as a socialite and philanthropist. In 1996 the New York Landmarks Conservancy named her a “Living Landmark.” Backus, John Warner, American computer scientist (b. Dec. 3, 1924, Philadel-

completed his early schooling in Réu-

(1967-72)

for economic

and financial

affairs of the Commission of the European Communities, Barre was influen-

tial in drafting proposals for economic reforms and monetary union. He then became a director of the Banque de France. In January 1976 he was named minister of foreign trade, and the fol115

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

lowing August Pres. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing appointed him prime minister In 1978 Barre was elected to the National Assembly, where he remained after Giscard lost the 1981 presidential election to Frangois Mitterrand. Barre ran unsuccessfully for president in 1988. In 1995 he was elected mayor of Lyon, a position he held until 2001. Barre published a number of works on economics and politics, among them the widely used textbook Economie politique (1956), which frequently appeared in revised editions. Among his many honours was admission as a chevalier to the Legion of Honour.

Baudrillard, Jean, French sociologist and cultural theorist (b. July 29, 1929, Reims, France—d. March 6, 2007, Paris, France), imparted theoretical

tographies 1985-1998, was published in

ideas

(b. Aug. 20, 1931, Siegen, Ger.—d. June 22, 2007, Rostock, Ger), together with his wife, Hilla, depicted functional

lacrum”

power behind the throne of King Hassan IL. Basri—who controlled police, security, and intelligence services; supervised committees dealing with business and investment; and managed elections—was widely feared and was believed to have been responsible for many human rights abuses as well as political repression. Soon after Hassan II ascended to the throne in 1961, Basri

was put in charge of internal security at the Ministry of the Interior. In 1973 he was named to head counterintelligence, and he became the ministry's secretary of state in 1974. When Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975,

Basri took charge of security there as well. Hassan ITs successor as king, Mohammed

VI, fired Basri

within

three

months of taking power. Moroccan politician Driss Basri

that influenced

and

“simu-

academia,

es-

pecially in the United States, and spread into popular culture through the 1999 film The Matrix. After studying German

at the Sorbonne,

Baudrillard

taught German literature in secondary schools (1956-66). At the same time, he

attended the University of Paris X at Nanterre, where he completed a dissertation in sociology, Le Systéme des objects (published 1968; The System of Objects,

Basri, Driss, Moroccan politician (b. Nov. 8, 1938, Settat, Mor—d. Aug. 27, 2007, Paris, France), as Morocco’s minister of the interior (1979-99), was the

of "hyperreality'

1996), under the direction

of

Marxist historian Henri Lefebvre. Baudrillard taught (1966-68) in the sociol-

ogy department at Nanterre, which was one of the centres of the 1968 student revolts, with which he was in sympathy. He then moved to the University of Paris IX (now the University of Paris at Dauphine), from which he retired in 1987. Baudrillard’s early work—including The System of Objects, La Société de consommation

(1970;

The

Consumer

Society, 1998), and Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe (1972; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1981)—combined Marxist political economy and a semiology influenced by Roland Barthes in the critique of everyday life in consumer society, in which, according to Baudrillard, things have symbolic value in addition to the Marxian use and exchange values. In Le Miroir de la production ou l'illusion critique du matérialisme historique (1973; The Mirror of Production, 1975) and L'Échange symbolique et la mort (1976; Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1993), Baudrillard broke with Marxism and turned to a poststructuralist account of postmodern society in which consumer and electronic images have become more real (hyperreal) than physical reality and in which simulations of reality (simulacra) have displaced their originals, leaving only "the desert of the real.” This idea was incorporated into The Matrix,

in which

the hero,

Neo,

hides contraband in a copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994; originally published as Simulacres et Simulation, screen

mentor,

1981), and his on-

Morpheus,

quotes,

“Welcome to the desert of the real.” Baudrillard was also an accomplished photographer, who asserted that “every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest.” A collection of his images and related essays, Jean Baudrillard: PhoMehdi Fedouach—AFP/Getty Images

116

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1999.

Becher, Bernd, German photographer

postindustrial water

structures—including

towers,

steel

mills,

blast

fur-

naces, and grain elevators—in blackand-white images that captured the stark elegance of the objects without romanticism or artistic embellishment. Many of the structures that the pair photographed—they referred to them as “anonymous sculptures”—were later destroyed, and only their images were left as documentary evidence. Becher studied painting and lithography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Stuttgart (1953-56) and typography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1957-61) and meanwhile worked at a

Düsseldorf advertising agency, where he met Hilla Wobeser (they were married

in

1961).

Because

the

Kun-

stakademie Düsseldorf did not offer courses in photography, the Bechers developed their own program, traveling around in a van to record the industrial landscape, first with a Rolleiflex and later with a large plate camera. Their first exhibition was in Siegen in 1963. The pair settled in Düsseldorf, where Bernd became professor of photography (1976-96) at the Kunstakademie and influenced a generation of young conceptual artists. The Bechers were awarded the Golden Lion for sculpture at the

1991

Venice

Biennale,

and

in

2004 they won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. Behr Edward Samuel, British journalist and author (b. May 7, 1926, Paris, France—d. May 26, 2007, Paris), covered wars in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as such interna-

tional emergencies as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in his role as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency (1950-54) magazines

day

and the American newsTime (1957-63), The Satur-

Evening

Newsweek

Post

(1963-65),

(1965-87).

During

and 1968

alone, he was on hand to report on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the student riots in France, and the unsuccessful

anti-Soviet uprising in Prague. Behr’s books included The Algerian Problem (1961), the critical biography Hirohito: Behind the Myth (1989), and Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus (1991). The Last

Emperor

(1987),

Behrs

biography

of

Obituaries AFP/Getty Images

China's Pu Yi, was released in conjunction with a film of the same name.

loneliness, vulnerability, and torment. Although Bergman never won an individual Academy Award (despite nine

Béjart,

|.(MAURICE-JEAN

nominations), three of his movies won

BERGER), French dancer and choreog-

Oscars for best foreign language film— Jungfrukállan (1960; The Virgin Spring), Såsom i en spegel (1961; Through a Glass Darkly), and Fanny och Alexander

rapher

Maurice (b. Jan.

France—d.

1, 1927,

Nov.

22,

2007,

Marseille, Lausanne,

Switz.), was renowned for his flamboyant theatricality, his use of African dance

rhythms,

and

his erotic,

often

shocking interpretations of such works as Igor Stravinskys Le Sacre du printemps (1959) and Maurice Ravel's Bolero

(1961). Béjarts modern works ranged from an homage to the rock band Queen to the masterful Symphonie pour un homme seul (1955), set to musique concréte. The diminutive (1.6-m [5-ft 4-

in]) Béjart studied dance in Paris and made his professional debut in 1945 with the Marseille Opera. He toured with the Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit (1947-49), the International Ballet (1949-50), and the Royal Swedish Ballet (1951—52) before forming (1954) his own troupe in Paris. He was resident

(1983; Fanny and Alexander).

In 1971

the academy presented him with a lifetime achievement award. Bergman was the son of a Lutheran pastor and frequently remarked on the importance of his childhood background in the development of his ideas and moral preoccupations. He attended Stockholm University, where he studied art, history, and literature and began writing, acting in, and directing student theatrical productions. He went on to become a trainee director at the Máster Olofsgàrden Theatre and the Sagas Theatre. In 1944 Bergman was given his first fulltime job as a director, at Helsingborg's municipal theatre. Carl-Anders Dymling, then head of the Svensk Filmin-

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman Whispers), Scener ur ett aktenskap (1974; Scenes from a Marriage), and Herbstsonate

(1978;

Autumn

Sonata)

won popular as well as critical fame. Bergman also directed for Swedish radio and television—his last teleplay,

choreographer for Brusselss Théátre Royal de la Monnaie and founder

dustri, commissioned

(1960) of its Ballet du XX* Siécle (Bal-

(1944;

let of the Twentieth Century), which he

year Bergman was given a chance to di-

Saraband

directed until 1987, when he moved to

rect Kris (Crisis). His sixth film as a director, Füngelse (1949; Prison, or The Devils Wanton), was the first for which

characters from Scenes from a Marriage and received a theatrical release—and for the stage, most notably at the

he also wrote an original screenplay. Bergman gained international success with the bittersweet romantic comedy-

Malm6

Switzerland to establish the Béjart Ballet Lausanne. Béjart also directed for the theatre and wrote a novel, autobio-

graphical works, and a play. Bell, Carey (CAREY BELL HARRINGTON), American blues harmonica player (b. Nov. 14, 1936, Macon, Miss.—d. May 6, 2007, Chicago, IIl.),

became a fixture on the Chicago blues scene soon after his arrival in the city in 1956. After perfecting his playing under the tutelage of such masters as “Little Walter" Jacobs, "Big Walter" Horton, and Sonny Boy Williamson II (Alex Miller),

he toured

and recorded

with

such stars as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. In later years he worked with his guitar-playing son, Lurrie. In 1998 Bell received the W.C. Handy Award for traditional male blues artist of the year.

him to write an

original screenplay for the film Hets Frenzy

or Torment).

The

next

Seventh Seal) and Smultronstället (1957; Wild Strawberries); all his early work was revived; and he became an

Laterna magica (The Magic Lantern), was published in 1987. In 1977 he received the Swedish Academy of Letters Great Gold Medal, and in the following year the Swedish Film Institute established a prize in his name.

(1955;

Smiles ofa Summer Night). In the next few years, he released a succession of

international sensation, universally recognized as one of the most important figures in cinema. The trilogy he made during this period—Through a Glass Darkly, Nattsvardsgästerna (1961; The Communicants, or Winter Light), and Tystnaden (1963; The Silence)—was re-

mans relationship to himself, to others,

Anna). With Beróringen (1971; The Touch), his first English-language film, Bergman returned to an urban setting and more romantic subject matter. Viskingar och rop (1972; Cries and

writer-director (b. July 14, 1918, Upp-

and to God. He was noted for his versatile camera work and for his fragmented narrative style, which contribute to his bleak depiction of human

(1952-59)

wrote

leende

characters; the best known of this Faro series were Persona (1966) and En passion (1969; A Passion, or The Passion of

Swedish

main

pieces, Det sjunde inseglet (1956; The

Sommernattens

writing and directing films that, in an unmistakably individual style, examine the issues of morality by exploring

Ingmar,

Theatre

the

new films, which included two master-

drama

sala, Swed.—d. July 30, 2007, Fáró, Swed.), achieved worldwide fame for

(Ernst)

Municipal

featured

and at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, where he was a regular director from the early 1960s (manager 1963-66) and where in 2002 he staged his last play, a heavily adapted version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Bergman

garded by many as his crowning achievement. About this time, Bergman acquired a country home on the bleak island of Fáró, which provided a characteristic stage for a series of films involving a small closely knit group of

Bergman,

(2003),

several novels, and his memoir,

Bhutto, Benazir, Pakistani politician (b. June 21, 1953, Karachi, Pak.—d. Dec. 27, 2007, Rawalpindi, Pak.), as the

prime and

minister 1993-96),

of Pakistan was

the

(1988-90

first woman

leader of a Muslim country in modern times. Although she was admired by many as a progressive, pro-Western politician, her two administrations were both dismissed under accusations of corruption and economic mismanagement. Bhutto, the daughter of Pakistani leader (1971-77) Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was educated at Harvard Uni-

versity (B.A., 1973) and the University of Oxford (B.A., 1977). After her father's execution (1979), she became the 117

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

titular head of his opposition Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). She endured frequent house arrest between 1979 and 1984 and lived in exile from 1984 until Pres. Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq lifted martial law in 1986. In the National Assembly elections held after Zia's death (1988), the PPP won the largest bloc of seats, and Bhutto was sworn in on Dec. 1, 1988, at the head of a coalition government. Dismissed in August 1990,

she and the PPP lost the subsequent elections. In the 1993 election, however,

surviving

member

of the Hollywood

seum in London, "When Philip Met Is-

clique (dubbed the Rat Pack) that included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr, and Peter Lawford.

abella." In 1981 Blow became assistant to Anna Wintour, then fashion editor of

Bishop was remembered for his deadpan comic delivery and for his skill at ad-libbing; he was also credited with writing much of the material when the group headlined together at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. He appeared with the Rat Pack in the films Ocean's Eleven

zine, but she returned to London in 1986. She was fashion director of The

(1960) and Sergeants Three (1962). He starred (1961-65) in a television sit-

the party won a plurality of votes, and Bhutto became head of another coalition. After her dismissal in November

com, The Joey Bishop Show, and appeared regularly on late-night television

1996, she suffered a decisive loss in the

his own Show.

1997 elections. In 1999 Bhutto and her

talk shows.

He

also hosted

talk show,

(1967-69)

The Joey Bishop

husband, businessman and senator Asif

Ali Zardari (who was jailed from 1996 to 2004 on other charges), were both convicted of corruption, a decision overturned by the Supreme Court in 2001 because there was evidence of governmental interference. Bhutto was not permitted to stand for election in 2002, though a PPP spin-off party earned a strong vote. Amid unresolved discussions of a power-sharing deal

Blow, Isabella (ISABELLA DELVES BROUGHTON), British fashion editor (b. Nov. 19, 1958, London, Eng.—d. May 7, 2007, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, Craig Dunsmuir—WireImage/Getty Images

with Bhutto, Pres. Pervez Musharraf fi-

the American Sunday

edition of Vogue maga-

Times

Style

magazine

(1997-2001) and of Tatler from 2002).

Blow died by her own hand. Bo Yibo (BO SHUCUN), Chinese political leader (b. Feb. 17, 1908, Jiang vil-

lage,

Dingxiang

county

Shanxi

province, China—d. Jan. 15, 2007, Bei-

jing, China), was the last surviving member of the Eight Immortals, the highly influential group of Chinese Communist Party leaders who had been purged during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966-76) but brought

back to assert power under the countrys de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, in the 1980s and '90s. Bo was instrumental in supporting Deng’s market reforms, and he helped guide the country toward a market economy despite efforts by Marxist hard-liners to derail the plan. Bo supported the 1989 military crackdown that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of student demon-

nally granted her amnesty for the earlier corruption charges. In October 2007 Bhutto returned to Karachi from Dubai after eight years of self-imposed exile. She was assassinated while campaigning for the upcoming national elections.

strators in Tiananmen Square. His son, Bo Xilai, rose to become commerce

Billings,

John

physician

(b. March

2007, Stockholm, founding chairman

James,

minister, a post he held at his father’s death. Bolin,

bourne, Australia—d. April Richmond, Vic., Australia),

Mel-

UN mate mer 2007

1, 2007, devised,

with his pediatrician wife, Evelyn, the Billings Ovulation Method, a natural family-planning technique in which a woman could monitor her own fertility by observing specific changes in her cervical mucus. The couple’s method, which Billings first began contemplating in the early 1950s, was believed to be more accurate than the traditional rhythm method and was sanctioned by

Fashion editor Isabella Blow

John Galliano, Jun Takahashi, and Hussein Chalayan) and models (Stella Tennant, Honor Fraser, and Sophie

tion

Dahl) while becoming memorable for her own flamboyant style of dress, especially the extravagant hats designed for her by Philip Treacy. She was best known for her association with couture milliners Stephen Jones and especially Treacy, for whom she served as muse. This relationship was the subject of an exhibition in 2002 at the Design Mu-

Method

Billings

Church,

(WOOMB)

to

teach the technique. John and Evelyn Billings were both made Members of the Order of Australia in 1991. Bishop, Joey (JOSEPH ABRAHAM GOTTLIEB), American comedian (b. Feb. 3, 1918, New York, N.Y.—d. Oct. 17, 2007, Newport Beach, Calif), was the last 118

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

15, 30,

Swed.) was the (1988-97) of the

and

from

Uppsala

studied

(Swed.)

meteorology

(M.S., 1949; Ph.D., 1956) at Stockholm

granted Billings a papal knighthood in 1969. He and his wife later established the World Organisation of the Ovula-

Catholic

(1946)

University

which

Roman

Johannes,

Intergovernmental Panel on CliChange, the corecipient (with forU.S. vice president Al Gore) of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Bolin grad-

uated

Eng.) discovered and promoted fashion designers (Alexander McQueen,

the

Richard

Swedish meteorologist (b. May 1925, Nykóping, Swed.—d. Dec.

Australian

5, 1918,

Bert

University. As a professor of meteorology (1961-90) at Stockholm, he did significant fundamental research into the carbon cycle in nature. His ability to articulate his research findings and the threat posed by climate change earned him numerous

honours, as well as his

position with the IPCC and the post of scientific director at the European Space Agency. Bolin’s final book, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was published shortly before his death. Bondy, Egon (ZBYNEK FISER), Czech writer (b. Jan. 20, 1930, Prague, Czech. [now in Czech Republic]—d. April 9,

Obituaries Bettmann/Corbis

2007, Bratislava, Slovakia), produced dozens of surrealist novels, poems, and

1975-77 he was chorus master

Glyndebourne

Festival

Opera,

of the

after

philosophical treatises, most of which were disseminated through underground samizdat publications, but his veiled criticisms of Czechoslovakia's communist government reached a wider audience when the underground rock-and-roll band Plastic People of the Universe used his poetry as lyrics and titled the groups third album Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned (1974-75). Bondy, a devout Marxist, opposed the post-Velvet Revolution republic as much as he had the old communist regime, and after the

which he worked as resident conductor (1977-89) at the San Francisco Opera. In 1989 Bradshaw became chief conductor and head of music of the COC,

dissolution (1993) of the combined state, he settled in Slovakia.

recorded 1950). Her other hits included

and he ascended to the position of artistic director in 1994 and general director in 1998. Brewer,

1931, Toledo,

2 Em.

E J

IS $ c» REL

D.

(1967-71)

Boyd, one of the first African Ameri-

had a banner offensive year in 1967 with 26 home runs and 96 runs batted in. He captured the Gold Glove Award in 1969. Boyer later coached for the Oakland As and the Yankees.

America,

as-

sembled an all-black, college-educated sales force that crisscrossed the country spreading company goodwill despite the Jim Crow laws of the era that frequently forced them to sit in the back of buses and search for hotels and restaurants where they would be welcome. Boyd and his team helped boost sales in the African American market into the double digits, and their marketing blitz resulted in Pepsi's overtaking Coke in the cola wars for the first time. After leaving Pepsi in 1951, Boyd worked for several other companies before establishing his own market-research consultancy, Resources Management Ltd. He retired in 1981. Boyer,

Clete

American

(CLETIS LEROY

baseball

BOYER),

player (b. Feb.

1937, Cassville, Mo.—d.

9,

June 4, 2007,

Oct.

17, 2007,

Again with You" (1953). Brewer was a

in 1947 as an assistant sales manager. corporate

Ohio—d.

"Copenhagen" (1949) and "Till I Waltz

American baseball player Clete Boyer

to enter

VERONICA

New Rochelle, N.Y.), was a pop star in the 1950s, best known for her signature song, "Music! Music! Music!" (first

Angeles, Calif), was the trailblazing creator of advertisements for PepsiCola that featured middle-class African American consumers in fun-loving scenarios rather than the standard ads that caricatured blacks. In the process, Boyd helped to introduce what later became known as niche marketing: advertising campaigns aimed at a specific group. Boyd introduced the first pointof-purchase displays specifically targeted to minorities, and one of his most famous displays pictured a small boy shopping for Pepsi with his mother (the boy was Ron Brown, who later became U.S. secretary of commerce). After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, Boyd held a variety of jobs before being hired by Pepsi

cans

(THERESA

BREUER), American singer (b. May 7,

:

Boyd, Edward Francis, American business executive (b. June 27, 1914, Riverside, Calif.—d. April 30, 2007, Los

Teresa

Atlanta, Ga.), helped the New York Yan-

regular guest on TV musical variety shows during the 1950s. She reinvented herself as a jazz singer in the 1970s, recording several albums with the bands of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, and appeared frequently in Las Vegas nightclubs.

kees professional baseball team capture five consecutive pennants (1960—64) and two World Series (1961 and 1962)

as the team’s acrobatic third baseman. Boyers diving catches and precision throws from his knees resulted in his holding

the World

Series

record

(66)

Brialy, Jean-Claude, French actor (b. March 30, 1933, Aumale, French Algeria [now Sour el-Ghozlane, Alg.]—d. May

30,

2007,

Paris,

France),

epito-

mized New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), cinema with natural charm and finesse in

for most career assists by a third baseman. Boyer and two of his brothers entered the professional leagues; Ken (a

some Serge) and Les Cousins (1959; The

third baseman)

Cousins),

and Cloyd (a pitcher)

both played for the St. Louis Cardinals; Clete and Ken were the only siblings to hit home runs in the same World Series game (1964). Boyer later played

Bradshaw,

for the Atlanta Braves

Richard

James,

such classics of the genre as Claude Chabrols Le Beau Serge (1958; HandFrangois

Truffaut's Les Qua-

tre Cents Coups (1959; The 400 Blows) and La Mariée était en noir (1968; The Bride Wore Black), Jean-Luc Godard's

and

French actor Jean-Claude Brialy

British-

born Canadian conductor (b. April 26, 1944, Rugby, Warwickshire, Eng.—d. Aug.

15, 2007,

Toronto,

Ont.), raised

the Canadian Opera Company (COC) to international stature and worked tirelessly for nearly 20 years to bring a purpose-built opera house to Toronto; as a result of his successful campaign, he was able to launch the COC’s 2006-07 season in the new Four Seasons Centre

for the Performing Arts with Canada’s first complete staging of Richard Wagners The Ring of the Nibelung. Bradshaw studied conducting in England and won a fellowship with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. In Bettmann/Corbis

119

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Diana Walker—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Une Femme est une femme (1961; A Woman Is a Woman), Roger Vadim's La Ronde (1964; The Circle of Love), and Eric Rohmer’s Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire's Knee). During his 50-year career, Brialy appeared in nearly 200

Emmy Award for his guest role as Professor Foster on an episode of The Cosby Show, and he portrayed

films; his later character roles included

won a César Award for best supporting actor, and poet Max Jacob in the biog-

Buchheim, Lothar-Günther, German art collector and author (b. Feb. 6, 1918, Weimar, Ger—d. Feb. 22, 2007, Starnberg, Ger.), scrutinized the difficult lives of a German U-boat crew in

raphical Monsieur Max (2006). He also

his autobiographical

acted onstage, directed for the theatre

(1973; The Boat, 1974), which he based on his own World War II service on the German submarine U-96. Buchheim

the bisexual (1987;

The

father

in Les Innocents

Innocents),

for which

he

and films, and was involved in several

arts festivals. Brialy was inducted into the Legion of Honour in 1986. Brooks-Randolph, Angie Elisabeth, Liberian jurist and diplomat (b. Aug. 4, 1928, Virginia, Montserrado county, Liberia—d. Sept. 9, 2007, Houston, Texas), became (1969) the second

woman president of the UN General Assembly. After receiving a bachelor's degree (1949) from Shaw University, Raleigh, N.C., she pursued law studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. (She later earned doctorates of law

from both Shaw Howard University

University and in Washington,

(1980-81)

the

scholarly

butler

Saun-

ders in the comedy Soap.

novel Das

Boot

published collections of photographs as well as several fiction and nonfiction works about his wartime experience, but it was Das Boot that brought him worldwide fame, especially after it was made into a film in 1981. From the 1950s Buchheim also amassed an impressive art collection, primarily of works by Die Briicke artists and other German Expressionists but also including ethnographic and folk art from around the world. In 2001 he opened the Buchheim Museum in Bernried, Ger., to house his extensive collection. Jan Pitman/AP

D.C.). She returned to Liberia in 1953

and was appointed to Liberia’s mission to the UN in 1954, when India’s Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the General Assembly, was completing her term. Brooks served for more

than

two

decades

in the

Roscoe

UN,

April

Lee, American char-

11, 2007,

Los

Angeles,

Calif), had a regal bearing and a sonorous voice that he used to memorable effect in a string of films; in Broadway plays, notably August Wilson's Two

Trains Running

(1992),

for

which he received a Tony nomination for best supporting actor; and as the

his satire toward politics; at its peak Buchwald’s thrice-weekly column appeared in some 500 newspapers, and in 1982 he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Of his 30 published books, 5 were

novels, 3 were

memoirs,

and the

Carlisle, Kitty (CATHERINE CONN; KITTY CARLISLE HART), American actress (b. Sept. 3, 1910, New Orleans, La.—d. April 17, 2007, New York, N.Y.),

acter actor (b. May 2, 1925, Woodbury, N.J.—d.

Buchwald

rest contained collections of columns. In February 2006, after having been diagnosed with kidney failure, Buchwald refused dialysis and moved into a hospice. Surprisingly, his kidneys began functioning, and he spent the next several months holding court in the hospice with the famous and well-connected and writing a final memoir, Too Soon to Say Goodbye.

where she took special interest in the transition of trust territories to independence. In 1977 she was appointed the first woman associate justice of the Liberian Supreme Court, a position she held until the 1980 coup d’état that overthrew Pres. William Tolbert. Browne,

American newspaper columnist Art

German author and art collector Lothar-Géünther Buchheim

Buchwald, Art (ARTHUR BUCHWALD), American humorist (b. Oct. 20, 1925, Mount Vernon, N.Y.—d. Jan. 17, 2007,

Opera (1935) and had two other notable

narrator of such films as Babe (1995),

column of observational satire that was

operatic performances (on Broadway in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lu-

Babe: Pig in the City (1998), Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), and Epic

an institution for some 40 years. Buchwald began his career after World War

cretia [1948] and in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the title role in Carmen) before

Movie

Il

making her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967 in Die Fledermaus. Her onstage career featured roles in such

(2007). Browne

launched

a ca-

reer in show business in 1956 and went on to win an Obie Award in 1965 for his portrayal of a rebellious slave in Benito Cereno. For his television work he took parts that capitalized on his dignified persona; Browne earned an 120

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Washington, D.C.), wrote a newspaper

was an effervescent entertainer who performed onstage and in films but was best remembered as a guest panelist on the TV game shows Whats My Line? and 7o Tell the Truth. She was celebrated for her singing role in the Marx Brothers film comedy A Night at the

with

an

entertainment

column,

"Paris After Dark," for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune; the column soon became a humour col-

umn

about

society that was

widely

read. In 1962 he relocated from Paris to Washington, D.C., where he directed

productions as White Horse Inn (1936), Three Waltzes (1937), and On Your Toes (1984). Carlisle, who was married to

playwright Moss Hart, became after his

Obituaries

death in 1961 a tireless promoter of the

Chauhan,

arts, and in 1991 she was awarded the

separatist leader (b. 1927, Tanda, Punjab, British India—d. April 4, 2007, Tanda, Punjab state, India), as a promi-

National Medal of Arts. She appeared in Woody Allen's film Radio Days (1987) and in Six Degrees of Separation (1993) and continued to perform into her 90s, touring in a one-woman show,

Jagjit Singh,

Indian

Sikh

Claiborne, Liz (ANNE ELISABETH JANE Kapoor Baldev—Sygma/Corbis

Enéas

Ferreira,

CLAIBORNE;

ELISABETH

CLAIBORNE

ORTENBERG), American fashion designer (b. March 31, 1929, Brussels, Belg.—d. June 26, 2007, New York,

Heres to Life. Carneiro,

gan losing support. In 2001 Chauhan was permitted to return to India, where he founded a charity hospital.

N.Y.), revolutionized the women’s apparel industry in the U.S. as the head designer and cofounder (with her hus-

Brazilian

cardiologist and politician (b. Nov. 5, 1938, Rio Branco, Braz.—d. May 6, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Braz.), was an ex-

band, Arthur Ortenberg, and partners, Leonard Boxer and Jerome Chazen) in

treme right-winger who ran for the presidency of Brazil three times, coming in third the second time; he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in

1976 of the company name.

At a time

when

that bears her career

women

were looking for an alternative to suits,

2002 with the most votes (1.6 million)

her

a legislative candidate had ever received. Carneiro was recognized throughout Brazil because of his bushy black beard, large glasses, and bald head as well as his campaigning catchphrase, “My name is Enéas!” Although he had a thriving practice as a cardiologist, Carneiro was encouraged by his wife to enter politics. He founded the right-wing Party for Rebuilding the Na-

colourful sportswear separates allowed customers to mix and match elements of their wardrobes (jackets, pants,

tional Order (Prona) in 1989 and ran as

its candidate in the first presidential election following military rule. He ran again in 1994, and in his bid in 1998,

he called for Brazil to develop an atomic bomb. In 2006 Carneiro was reelected to the Chamber of Deputies and merged Prona with the centrist Liberal Party (PL) to form the Republic Party (PR). Cassel, Jean-Pierre (JEAN-PIERRE CROCHON), French actor (b. Oct. 27, 1932, Paris, France—d.

April 19, 2007,

Paris), delighted audiences for more than 50 years in nearly 200 roles, but he achieved fame as the comic protagonist in a series of films directed by Philippe de Broca, notably Les Jeux de l'amour (1960), Le Farceur (1960), and

L'Amant de cinq jours (1961). Cassel, a tall man with an expressive face and natural

charm,

was

a dancer

and bit

player in movies, on television, and on the stage when the American actor and dancer Gene Kelly cast him in The Happy Road (1957). Cassel appeared in many international productions, among them Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), The Three Musketeers (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Prét-à-Porter (1994), and Mauvaise foi (2006; Bad

Faith). He also had a successful nightclub and stage career.

line

skirts,

^

Att Indian Sikh separatist leader Jagjit Singh Chauhan

of casual,

sweaters,

comfortable,

and

blouses).

and

Clai-

borne offered her collection at realistic prices, and her company executives persuaded retailers to merchandise all the related pieces of a collection together. Her designs, which were meant to be more functional than trendsetting, were nonetheless pathbreaking; in one season her velour peasant blouse sold

15,000

units.

Though

Claiborne,

who had close-cropped black hair and wore oversized glasses, preferred to wear trousers, she nonetheless diversified her business and created (1982) a

nent figure in the movement for an in-

dress division.

dependent Sikh state (called Khalistan)

shoe line, a short-lived (1984-87)

in Punjab, organized a government-inexile in London. After serving as Punjab’s finance minister in the 1960s, Chauhan moved to London in 1971. That year he took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times proclaiming the formation of the Republic of Khalistan, a Sikh theocracy, and at-

lection for girls ages 5 to 12, acces-

She also introduced

a

col-

Revolutionary fashion designer Liz Claiborne

tempted to set up a government-in-ex-

ile in Pakistan. Back in London in the early 1980s, he declared himself president of Khalistan, appointed a cabinet, issued passports and currency, and opened embassies in several countries. By then the separatist movement in Punjab had turned violent; some 20,000

people died in the struggle over the next decade. Armed Sikh separatists occupied (1982-84) the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and Indian security forces stormed the temple in June 1984, killing hundreds of Sikhs. Chauhan promptly announced his governmentin-exile and said that Sikhs would “behead” Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. After Gandhi was assassinated in October by her Sikh bodyguards, however, the separatist movement beLouie Psihoyos/Corbis

121

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

sories, jeans, a men's label, and a perfume. In 1986 the sales of Liz Claiborne, Inc., reached $5.6 million, and the firm broke into the Fortune 500 list

search in analysis. Cohen’s publications included Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966).

of the largest industrial companies in that list to be

Coltrane, Alice (ALICE MCLEOD; TURIYA SAGITTINANDA), American jazz

headed by a woman. The following year

keyboard artist (b. Aug. 27, 1937, De-

Claiborne was elected chairman of the board and CEO, but in 1989 she and her husband retired from active man-

troit, Mich.—d.

the U.S.,

the first on

agement in the fashion concern. Thereafter Claiborne stayed busy initiating environmental

conservation

projects

handled by the charitable foundation she started. Cohen, Paul Joseph, American math-

ematician

(b. April

2,

1934,

Long

Branch, N.J.—d. March 23, 2007, Stanford, Calif.), was awarded the Fields

Medal in 1966 for his proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the other axioms of set theory. Cohen attended the University of Chicago

(M.S.,

1954; Ph.D.,

N.Y.

(1957-58),

and

the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1958-59) before joining the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. (1959-61). In 1961 he moved to Stan-

ford University; he became professor emeritus in 2004. Cohen solved a problem (first on David Hilbert's influential

1900 list of important unsolved problems) concerning the truth of the continuum hypothesis. Georg Cantor's continuum hypothesis states that there is no cardinal number between X, and 28). In 1940 Kurt Gédel had shown that if one accepts the ZermeloFraenkel system of axioms for set theory, then the continuum hypothesis is not

disprovable.

Cohen,

in

1963,

showed that it is not provable under those hypotheses and hence is independent of the other axioms. To do this he introduced a new technique known as forcing, a technique that has since had significant applications throughout set theory. The question still remains whether with some axiom system for set theory, the continuum hypothesis is true. Alonzo Church, in his comments to the Congress in Moscow, suggested that the “Gédel-Cohen results and subsequent extensions of them have the consequence that there is not one set theory but many, with the difference arising in connection with a problem which intuition still seems to tell us must ‘really’ have only one true solution.” After proving his startling result about the continuum hypothesis, Cohen returned to re122

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

geles, Calif.), played bop piano with Detroit musicians and with Terry Gibbs (1962-63), and impressionist piano with John Coltrane’s combos (1965-67). She married Coltrane in 1965, and after

his death in 1967 she led her own groups. She was featured on organ on her noted recording Universal Consciousness (1972), and she also played harp. In 1975 she founded the Vedantic Center,

an

ashram

near

Santa

Monica

for the study of Hindu and Buddhist writings. Her final recording, Translinear Light (2004), included playing by her sons, saxophonists Ravi and Oran Coltrane. Comencini, Luigi, Italian director and screenwriter (b. June 8, 1916, Salo,

Lombardy,

Italy—d.

April

6, 2007,

Rome, Italy), was often called the “chil-

dren’s director” because of his delicate treatment of children’s issues, notably in the short documentary Bambini in citta (1946), the neorealist melodrama Incompreso (1960), the television documentary series Bambini e noi (1970), and the classic TV miniseries Le avventure di Pinocchio (1972), a shortened version of which was later released to cinemas. Many of Comencini’s commercially successful films balanced neorealistic elements with lighthearted humour, including such romantic comedies as Pane, amore e fantasia (1953) and its sequel Pane, amore e gelosia (1954), starring Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida. Comencini was also a cofounder (1947) of the Italian film-preservation archive Cineteca Italiana. In 1987 the Venice Film Festival honoured him with a career achievement award.

Compton, Sir John George Melvin, Saint Lucian politician (b. April 29, 1925, Canouan island, British Windward Islands [now in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines]—d. Sept. 7, 2007, Castries, Saint Lucia), was instrumental in

negotiating the independence (1979) of Saint Lucia from Britain and served three times as prime minister (1979, 1982-96, 2006-07). He governed as a

(1961)

the

National

Labour

Movement political party, which became, with another party, the United Workers’ Party in 1964, the same year he was chosen first minister of Saint Lucia. He served in that position until the status of Saint Lucia was changed from colony to associated state in 1967, when he became premier. Compton began negotiating for independence in 1974, and when it was achieved, he be-

came the country’s first prime minister. Compton was knighted in 1997 and was awarded the Order of the Caribbean Community in 2002. Courtin-Clarins, Jacques (JACQUES COURTIN), French business executive (b. Aug. 6, 1921, Paris, France—d. March 23, 2007, Paris), founded (1954)

the Clarins Institute of Beauty, a Paris skin-care salon that grew into the luxury cosmetics and perfume firm Clarins Group, with sales of more than €900

1958). He

held appointments at the University of Rochester,

Jan. 12, 2007, Los An-

founded

million

(about

$1 billion)

and

subsidiaries in 150 countries. Courtin set his company apart from the competition by insisting that Clarins use only natural, plant-based ingredients rather than the artificial chemicals that were prevalent in other skin-care and beauty products. In 1978 he and his two sons, who took over running the firm when he retired, legally added the company name Clarins to the family name. Crane, Eva (ETHEL EVA WIDDOWSON), British bee scientist (b. June 12, 1912, London, Eng.—d. Sept. 6, 2007,

Slough, Berkshire, Eng.), tirelessly amassed and disseminated knowledge about bees and beekeeping, becoming one of the world’s foremost authorities on bees. Crane earned a master’s degree in quantum mechanics from Kings College, London, and a Ph.D. (1938) in nu-

clear physics

from

London.

was

She

the University teaching

of

(1941-43)

physics at Sheffield University when her interest in apiculture was piqued by a colony of bees she received in 1942 as a wedding gift. She soon joined the British Beekeepers’ Association, becoming secretary of its research committee. Crane founded (1949) the Bee Research Association (from 1976, the

International

Bee

Research

Associa-

tion) and directed it until 1984. She ed-

ited Bee World and the Journal of Apicultural

Research

1962-82,

respectively),

(1949-84

compiled

and

and

sup-

edited (1950-84) Apicultural Abstracts,

ported economic diversification and pan-Caribbean cooperation. Compton

and wrote more than 180 articles, papers, and books, including the ency-

pro-Western

conservative

and

Obituaries CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

clopaedic Bees and Beekeeping: Science, Practice,

and

World

Resources

(1990)

and The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999). Crane was created OBE in 1986.

Wayne Gretzky's official retirement portrait from the National Hockey League. Although Danby’s paintings of sporting events were probably his best known, his more than 2,000 works also

included portraits of famous Canadians Crowe, William James, Jr., rear admiral (ret.), U.S. Navy (b. Jan. 2, 1925, La Grange, Ky—d. Oct. 18, 2007, Bethesda, Md.), as chairman (1985-89) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was credited with the amelioration of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. In

ber 2001.

1989 he forged an agreement with the Soviets that outlined methods for avoiding accidental military encounters. A year earlier he had been instrumental in defusing an international incident after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger jetliner. Crowe grad-

year-old boy) of the Dixie Hummingbirds (briefly known as the Sterling High School Quartet), an a cappella group that pioneered a style called

uated (1946) from the U.S. Naval Academy, commanded (1960-62) the diesel

submarine Trout, and was promoted in 1973 to rear admiral. He served as NATO

commander

in chief (1980-83)

for Southern Europe and commander (1983-85) of the U.S. Pacific Command. In addition, he was U.S. ambassador (1994-97) to the United Kingdom. Crowe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.

Dadullah,

Mullah

(Pierre Trudeau)

and numerous

land-

scapes. Danby was awarded the Order of Canada in 2002, retroactive to Octo-

Davis, James Bodie, American gospel singer (b. June 6, 1916, Greenville, S.C.—d. April 17, 2007, Philadelphia, Pa.), was a founding member (as an 11-

"trickeration,"

in which

one

vocalist

would pick up a note where another left off. The group also performed as the Swanee Quintet and the Jericho Boys. The Hummingbirds signed in 1939 with Decca Records and in 1942 were booked into New York Citys Café Society one of the first integrated nightclubs. During their heyday in the 1940s and '50s, the group incorporated the concept of shouting lead parts in such songs as "Thank You for One More Day,” “Trouble in My Way,” and “Bedside of a Neighbor.” Their artistry influenced rhythm-and-blues stars Hank

Actress Yvonne De Carlo as Lily Munster in the TV series The Munsters B.C.—4d. Jan. 8, 2007, Woodland

Hills,

Calif.), appeared in a string of B-westerns and was best remembered on the big screen for her role as the wife of Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), but the character with whom

she was most indelibly identified was that of Lily Munster—the vampirelike matriarch of the TV sitcom family The

(DADULLAH

Ballard, Bobby (“Blue”) Bland, and the

AKHUND), Afghan guerrilla commander (b. 1966?, Uruzgan province, Afghan.—

Temptations. The Hummingbirds later recorded with various independent la-

Munsters (1964-66). Some of De Carlo’s

d. May

bels,

other

12, 2007,

Helmand

province,

Afg.), was a notoriously ruthless senior leader of the Taliban insurgency. Dadullah, an ethnic Pashtun, fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the

1980s. He rose to prominence

in

the 1990s with the Taliban army that conquered most of the country and remained active even after his leg was severed by a land mine in 1995. Dadullah was believed to have escaped to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion in

notably

the

Peacock

label,

and

Bethesda, Md.), expertly orchestrated the public image of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan while serving as his deputy

Ivins, Utah), portrayed decent and steadfast women in Hollywood films of

chief of staff (1981-85) and was a close

role was that of Mary Lamont, the beloved nurse in seven Dr. Kildare movies. Though Day’s early contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer often relegated her to roles in what she termed

Provincial

Park, Ont.), was best known for paint-

ings that featured brilliant colours and were emblematic of Canada, notably At the Crease

(1972),

which

depicted

1940s,

but

her

most

memorable

“B+” films, her loan to other studios al-

lowed her to work with such prominent directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille. From the 1950s until the 1980s, she appeared primarily on television.

a

masked hockey goalie, Lacing Up, which showed a hockey player tying his skates, and The Great Farewell (2001),

of Angels

Day, Laraine (LA RAINE JOHNSON), American actress (b. Oct. 13, 1917, Roosevelt, Utah—d. Nov. 10, 2007,

the Taliban’s struggle for control of Afghanistan. He was killed by U.S.-led coalition forces.

Algonquin

Band

(1957), McLintock! (1963), and Munster Go Home! (1966).

the

Sept. 23, 2007,

included

scored a hit in 1973 with their interpretation of Paul Simon’s “Loves Me like a Rock,” for which they won a Grammy Award. Davis retired in 1984, but the Hummingbirds remained active.

2001, but he later returned to continue

Danby, Ken (KENNETH EDISON DANBY), Canadian painter (b. March 6, 1940, Sault Sainte Marie, Ont.—d.

films

De Carlo, Yvonne (MARGARET YVONNE MIDDLETON; "PEGGY") American actress (b. Sept. 1, 1922, Vancouver,

Deaver, Michael Keith, U.S. government official (b. April 11, 1938, Bakersfield, Calif—d. Aug. 18, 2007,

personal friend of Reagan and his wife Nancy. Deaver worked briefly in business before joining (1967) Reagan’s staff as a political aide following Reagan’s election as governor of California. After leaving the White House in 1985, Deaver became a successful lobbyist, but two years later he was convicted of perjury for having lied about his lobbying activities. He was fined and barred from lobbying until the 1990s. Capitalizing on his relationship with the Reagans, Deaver wrote the best sellers A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (2001) and Nancy: A Portrait of My Years with

Nancy Reagan (2004). 123

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Burak Kara/Getty Images

Delp, Brad (BRADLEY E. DELP), Amer-

ican guitarist and singer (b. June 1951, 2006,

Danvers, Atkinson,

12,

Mass.—d. March 9, N.H.) was the lead

which the team lost to Italy. After World War II, Derwall played professionally for Oberliga West, Alemania Aachen,

and Fortuna

Düsseldorf,

and

singer for the rock group Boston, whose unique hard-rock-pop sound was created by Delp’s distinctive highregister vocals and Tom Scholz’s soaring guitar. Delp and bandmates Scholz,

he made two appearances in 1954 with the national team. After retiring as a player in 1959, Derwall coached at the club level until he was recruited in

Fran John

Helmut Schón. He succeeded Schón as head coach soon after the 1978 World Cup (in which West Germany failed to advance past the second round), but he was replaced by Franz Beckenbauer after Germany did poorly in the 1984 European championship. Derwall unexpectedly moved to Istanbul, where he introduced European training techniques and built Galatasaray into one of Turkeys most successful clubs. He retired in 1988.

Sheehan, Barry (“Sib”) Hashian

Goudreau, and burst onto the

pop music scene in 1976 with the meticulously crafted single “More than a Feeling,” which combined elements of progressive rock and 1960s pop. Their eponymous first album became the biggest-selling debut in rock history. In 1978 the group’s second album, Don't Look Back, appeared, but it was not until 1986 that it released Third Stage, a blockbuster hit. By this time only Scholz and Delp remained from the original members. Some of the band's chart toppers included the songs "Smokin,"

"Let

Me

Take

You

Home

Tonight," and "Amanda." Though Delp did not perform on the band's album Walk On (1994), he sang on its most recent one, Corporate America (2002).

Delp also was the front man for Beatlejuice, a tribute band he formed in the 1990s. Denard,

French

Bob

(GILBERT BOURGEAUD),

mercenary

Bordeaux,

(b. April 7, 1929,

France—d.

Oct.

13, 2007,

Paris, France), participated in approximately 20 coups (or attempted coups) and civil wars across postcolonial Africa in Angola, Benin, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Zaire, as well as in Iran and

Yemen. Between 1975 and 1995 he took part in several coups in the Comoros, where he was believed to have been the real power behind Pres. Ahmed Abdallah from 1978 until the latter was killed in 1989. Prior to becoming a freelance soldier of fortune in the early 1960s, Denard served in both the French navy and the colonial police. He was twice (1993 and 2006) convicted in a French court, but in both cases he received a

1970 as assistant to the national coach,

Dibdin, Michael John, British crime novelist (b. March 21, 1947, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire [now in West Midlands], Eng.—d. March 30, 2007, Seattle, Wash.), delighted fans of detective fiction with a series of novels

featuring idiosyncratic Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen. (End Games, the 11th book in the series, was to be published in late 2007.) Dibdin studied at the Universities of Sussex (B.A., 1968) and Alberta (M.A., 1969) and later

taught English

in Perugia,

Italy His

first novel, The Last Sherlock

Story

(1978),

gained

little

Holmes

attention.

His third, however, Ratking (1988), in-

troduced the cerebral, world-weary Zen and won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Fiction. Dibdin’s non-Zen novels included A Rich Full Death (1986), with Victorian poet Robert Browning turned amateur sleuth, and the Agatha Christie-like whodunit The Dying of the Light (1993). Two

Spectre

of his later novels—Dark

(1995)

and

Thanksgiving

(2000)—were set in the U.S., where he settled in the 1990s. Dibdin also edited

The Picador Book of Crime Writing (1993) and The Vintage Book of Classic Crime (1997).

suspended sentence.

Ger), during his tenure as national coach (1978-84), guided West Germany to 45 wins (including a record 23 11 losses,

and

11 ties; the

1980 European championship title; and the final of the 1982 World Cup, in 124

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

thorities denied took place), Dink was arrested for “insulting Turkishness” and was convicted and given a six-month suspended sentence. He was shot dead outside the Agos offices. Doherty,

Denny

(DENNIS

DOHERTY),

Canadian singer (b. Nov. 29, 1940, Halifax, N.S.—d. Jan. 19, 2007, Mississauga, Ont.), with John Phillips, Michelle Phillips, and (“Mama”) Cass

Elliot, was a member of the original Mamas and the Papas vocal quartet, whose intricate harmonies brought them to the forefront of the folk rock movement of the 1960s. Doherty and Elliot performed with the short-lived rock group the Mugwumps before joining the Mamas and the Papas, whose cascading harmonies were featured in the hit songs “California Dreamin” (1965), “Monday, Monday” (1966), and

“Creeque Alley" (1967). The group disbanded in 1968, re-formed briefly in 1971, and was inducted into the Rock

and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. During the 1990s Doherty appeared as the Harbour Master on Theodore Tugboat, a popular Canadian children’s TV series. He also co-wrote Dream a Little Dream,

Derwall, Jupp (JOSEF DERWALL), German association football (soccer) manager (b. March 10, 1927, Würselen, Ger.—d. June 26, 2007, Sankt Ingbert,

straight),

Turkish journalist Hrant Dink

19, 2007, Istanbul, Turkey), cam-

a stage show reminiscence of the Mamas and the Papas that debuted Off Broadway in 2003.

paigned for the rights of ethnic Armenians, both as a prominent spokesman for his ethnic community in Turkey and

Douglas, Dame Mary (MARGARET MARY TEW), British social anthropolo-

Dink,

Hrant,

Sept.

15,

Jan.

1954,

Turkish

journalist

Matalya,

(b.

Turkey—d.

as the founder (1996) and editor of the

bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos. After writing in 2005 about the 1915-16 massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians (which Turkish au-

gist (b. March 25, 1921, San Remo, Italy—d. May 16, 2007, London, Eng.),

examined structure in societies of all types and all places in a number of influential books, attracting many read-

Obituaries

ers from outside her discipline as well as admiration and controversy within it. Beginning in 1949, Douglas did her fieldwork studying the matrilineal Lele people of the Kasai in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her best-known books included Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), in which she introduced the

concepts of “grid” and “group” as tools for the analysis of social groups. Douglas was named a fellow of the British Academy in 1989. She was appointed CBE in 1992 and advanced to DBE shortly before her death. Dube, reggae

Lucky Philip, South African singer-songwriter (b. Aug. 3,

1964, Ermelo, S.Af—d. Oct. 18, 2007, Rosettenville, near Johannesburg, S.Af.), sang in Zulu, Afrikaans, and EnJon Hrusa—epa/Corbis

star Peter Gabriel in the early 1990s and often performed with other African singers. Dube was instantly recognizable by his long dreadlocks, but unlike many other reggae singers, he publicly repudiated alcohol and drugs. The last of his 15 reggae albums, Respect, was released in 2006. Dube was shot dead in an attempted carjacking. Eagleton, Thomas Francis, American politician (b. Sept. 4, 1929, St. Louis, Mo.—d. March 4, 2007, Richmond

Heights, Mo.), agreed to run as Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s running mate in the 1972 election, but he was asked to step down by McGovern 18 days after he joined the ticket after it became known that he had been voluntarily hospitalized for a nervous condition and depression three times in the early 1960s and treated twice with electroshock therapy. The event forever overshadowed Eagleton’s accomplishments in the U.S. Senthe fight for legislation that denied funding for the bombing of Cambodia

released

(1986)

an

album

Afrikaans but switched to reggae as a way of reaching a broader international audience. He toured with British pop

Protestant

militant

and politician

doned the illegal loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer sive

Force

American

psychologist

(UVF)

to join

political wing, the Progres-

Unionist

Party

(PUP),

which

he

headed from 2002. Although he opposed unification with Ireland, Ervine played a key role in negotiating both the 1994 cease-fire and the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. Ervine, who joined the UVF as a teenager, was arrested by British soldiers in 1974 while transporting a bomb. He spent more than five years in the Maze prison, where he renounced violence, finished

his secondary education, and began an Open University degree program. After his release (1980), Ervine became active in the PUP; he was later elected to

the Northern Ireland Assembly and to the Belfast city council. tionary and womens

Albert,

(b.

July 21, 1953, East Belfast, N.Ire.—d. Jan. 8, 2007, Belfast, N.Ire.), aban-

tended to limit the ability of the president to take the country to war. He was known for his liberal views and his unshakable integrity.

oped the psychotherapeutic approach known as rational emotive behaviour therapy, which aims to help patients overcome irrational beliefs and unrealistic expectations. In Elliss approach, patients were taught to eliminate selfdefeating thoughts while focusing on those that were beneficial and self-accepting. He popularized his approach in numerous best-selling books and in weekly seminars that he held at the AIbert Ellis Institute in New York City. He also worked with noted zoologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and explored the topic of human sexuality in such books as The American Sexual Tragedy (1954) and Sex Without Guilt

in

David Walter, Northern Irish

Espín Guillois, Vilma,

(b. Sept. 27, 1913, Pittsburgh, Pa.—d. July 24, 2007, New York, N.Y.), devel-

also

Ervine,

in 1973 and for the War Powers Act, in-

Ellis,

glish about peace, unity, and respect while criticizing both apartheid and the postapartheid South African government. Dube began at age 18 as a performer of traditional Zulu-language mbaqanga music, recording the first of his six mbaganga albums in 1981. He

Buttons (1994).

the UVF’

ate, where he served (1968-87) and led

South African reggae star Lucky Dube

How to Keep People from Pushing Your

Cuban revolu-

rights activist (b.

April 7, 1930, Santiago, Cuba—d. June 18, 2007, Havana, Cuba), as the wife of

Raül Castro, the younger brother of longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was for decades regarded as the unofficial first lady of Cuba and the most politically powerful woman in the country. She fought alongside Raúl and

Vilma Espín Guillois, with brother-inlaw Fidel Castro

(1958). Ellis established his institute in

1959. In 1982 an American Psychological Association survey of clinical psychologists ranked Ellis ahead of Freud—and second only to Carl R. Rogers—on a list of the most influential persons in their field. Among other books by Ellis were How to Live with a Neurotic

(1957),

How

to Stubbornly

Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything! (1988), and

"à

J

a

Tomas Garcia—Prensa Latina Archive/AP

125

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

Fidel during the 1959 Cuban Revolution and married her husband shortly after the overthrow of the regime of Gen. Fulgencio Batista. Because Fidel was divorced at the time he came to power, Espín assumed the first lady's responsibilities, and she continued to fulfill the role even after her brother-inlaw later remarried. She went on to hold key positions in the Cuban Communist Party and was a member of the countrys influential Council of State. She also founded the Cuban Federation of Women,

and she oversaw

its devel-

opment into a national organization for women's rights. Espín frequently represented Cuba at the UN General Assembly. She officially became first lady in 2006 after an ailing Fidel ceded power to Ratl, who assumed

the title of act-

ing president.

for some 80 motion pictures, including three songs that won Academy Awards—“Buttons and Bows” from the Bob Hope western comedy The Paleface (1948); “Mona Lisa” from Captain Carey, U.S.A. (1950) and later made fa-

mous by Nat (“King”) Cole; and “Que Sera, Sera,” sung by Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Among their numerous other popular movie songs was “Silver Bells” from another Hope feature, The Lemon Drop Kid (1951); it became a Christmas stan-

dard and sold over 140 million records. The team also wrote television theme music for such shows as Bonanza and Mr. Ed. The partnership ended when Livingston died in 2001. Fabro, Luciano, Italian artist (b. Nov. 20, 1936, Turin, Italy—d. June 22, 2007,

Italy), was

avant-garde

Ferré, Gianfranco, Italian fashion de-

tured in the traveling exhibition “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972.”

Milan, Italy—d. June 17, 2007, Milan),

Falwell, Jerry Laymon, Sr., American

religious leader (b. Aug. 11, 1933, Lynchburg, Va.—d. May 15, 2007, Lynchburg), was a charismatic televangelist who, as the founder in 1979 of the Moral Majority, a political organization for the promotion of conservative social values, was largely responsible for making American Christian conservatives politically active. The pro-family, pro-American organization, which quickly grew to several million members, was credited with playing an important role in the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as president in 1980; it remained

Evans, Ray (RAYMOND B. EVANS), American lyricist (b. Feb. 4, 1915, Salamanca, N.Y.—d. Feb. 15, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), in collaboration with composer Jay Livingston, created songs

Milan,

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992, and in 2001 his work was fea-

Arte

grouped Povera

with

the

movement,

(Praise the Lord) Club, the con-

servative Christian organization and television network of the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker. Falwell advocated a conservative Christian faith and condemned what he perceived as the sinfulness and godlessness of contemporary society. A segregationist

in his

which emphasized “poor,” or raw, materials, though Fabro never fully accepted the characterization. Fabro’s best-known sculptural works included

early years, he later abandoned that view. He opposed abortion, feminism, gay rights, and other causes associated with the social and cultural transfor-

Il buco (The Hole, 1963), a mirror with

mations of the 1960s and ‘70s. In 2004,

part of the reflective backing scraped off; Sisifo (Sisyphus, 1994), in which a cylindrical piece of marble leaves a pattern when it is rolled through a rec-

buoyed by the electoral victories of Pres. George W. Bush, Falwell founded the Faith and Values Coalition—now the Moral Majority Coalition—as a successor to the Moral Majority. Throughout his career Falwell engendered controversy with remarks that many Americans perceived as intolerant or bigoted, but his supporters endorsed his staunch beliefs.

tangle of flour; his Piedi (Feet) series,

which include paws and claws made of such materials

as marble

and bronze;

and a series of reliefs in the shape of the Italian peninsula. Fabro was the subject of a 25-year retrospective at the 126

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

earned the nickname “Larchitteto” (“architect of fashion”) after he applied his architecture degree (1969) from Milan’s Polytechnic Institute to the design of sculptural, carefully constructed couture, ready-to-wear,

and fashion accesMassimo Sestini/Getty Images

a force in Ameri-

can politics during the first half of the 1980s but was disbanded in 1989. After graduating (1956) from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo., Falwell founded Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg; the congregation grew from some 35 members to more than 20,000 by the time of his death. In 1956 Falwell started broadcasting his sermons ona radio program, the Old-Time Gospel Hour. Six months later the program began appearing on a local television network; eventually the show went into national and international syndication and claimed more than 50 million regular viewers. In 1971 Falwell established the Lynchburg Bible College—later Liberty University, a fundamentalist Christian university—which he led until his death. In the late 1980s he unsuccessfully sought to revive the PTL

signer (b. Aug. 15, 1944, Legnano, near

The “architect of fashion,” Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré sories. He was particularly noted for women’s business suits with bold, pronounced seams and for his trademark array of white blouses. Although Ferré launched his own ready-to-wear line in Milan in 1974, he triggered intense criticism throughout France in 1989 when he was named artistic director of the Paris fashion house Christian Dior. AF ter being replaced at Dior by the edgier British designer John Galliano in 1996, Ferré focused on his creations for Gianfranco Ferré SpA, even after the eponymous fashion house that he founded in 1978 was sold in 2000 to an Italian holding company. Ferré died just days before he was to present his spring-summer 2008 menswear collection. Fitzgerald, Len, Australian rules foot-

ball player (b. May 17, 1929—d. April 17, 2007), was one of Australia’s finest

“footy” players in the era before the separate state leagues evolved into the national Australian Football League (AFL). Fitzgerald made his professional debut in 1945 at age 15 for the Collingwood Magpies in the Victoria Football

Obituaries Carl De Souza—AFP/Getty Images

League and went on to score 49 goals in 96 games for the Melbourne club. In 1950 he unexpectedly moved to Adelaide to join Sturt in the South Australia National Football League

and re-

and ’70s. Although detractors derided his emotion-laden music as sentimental, Fogelberg’s best-known songs—including “Part of the Plan,” “The Power of Gold,” “Longer,” “Hard to Say,” “Run for the Roses” (for the Kentucky Derby), “Same Old Lang Syne” (inspired by a chance meeting with a former girlfriend), and “Leader of the

ceived the Magarey Medal as the SANFLs best player three times (1952,

Band” (a tribute to his father, an educator and bandleader)—combined sim-

1954, 1959). He also coached at Sturt (1951-55), Benalla (1955-58), and

ple melodies crafted lyrics. and art at the found his true leased a score

(SANFL). During his two stints with Sturt (1951-55, 1959-62), he scored

201 goals in 125 games, was named to the

1953

All-Australian

team,

Glenelg (1964-66). Fitzgerald was an inaugural inductee into the Halls of Fame

of both the AFL (1996) and the

SANFL (2002).

ning with Home Free (1972), which he

recorded Fluckey, Eugene

and poignant carefully Fogelberg studied acting University of Illinois but passion in music. He reof solo albums, begin-

Bennett,

rear adm.

college.

soon His

after dropping last

album,

Full

out of Circle,

(ret.), U.S. Navy (b. Oct. 5, 1913, Washington, D.C.—d. June 29, 2007, An-

came out in 2003, but a follow-up tour was canceled after Fogelberg was diag-

napolis, Md.), was the daring submarine commander during World War II of the U.S.S. Barb and earned the moniker the "Galloping Ghost" because of his ability to pilot his submersibles undetected through enemy-laden waters. The much-decorated Fluckey was awarded four Navy Crosses and a Medal of Honor for his exploits during the war. He was specifically cited for having located more than 30 enemy ships in Nankuan Chiang (Mamkwan Harbour) and for having successfully blown up an ammunition ship and crippled five other ships with a volley of torpedoes. He was the first submarine commander in history to use guided missiles at an enemy target. He destroyed two Japanese factories, sank 29 ships, and helped with the destruc-

nosed (2004) with prostate cancer.

American adventurer Steve Fossett

Forte of Ripley, Charles Forte, Baron (CARMINE MONFORTE), Italian-born British entrepreneur (b. Nov. 26, 1908, Mortale [later renamed Monforte], Italy—d. Feb. 28, 2007, London, Eng.),

expanded

a tiny London

milk

bar

(snack bar), which he opened in 1934, into Trusthouse

Forte

PLC,

a vast in-

Fogelberg,

Dan

(DANIEL

GRAYLING

FOGELBERG), American singer-songwriter (b. Aug. 13, 1951, Peoria, Ill.—d. Dec. 16, 2007, Maine), captured the essence of the mellow, acoustic folk-

tinged pop music that emerged on the American college scene in the 1960s

March

3, some

67

hours later. Fossett undertook the longest nonstop airplane flight, taking off on Feb. 8, 2006, from Canaveral, Florida, aboard the

Cape Glob-

11, having covered a record 42,469.5 km (26,389.3 mi). As a sailor, Fossett

breweries,

wine

mer-

1982.

naval operations. After Fluckey retired from military service in 1972, he and his wife ran an orphanage in Portugal.

on

airport caterers,

Sakhalin Island, where, under the cover

to Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the chief of

there

alFlyer and making an emergency landing in Bournemouth, Eng., on February

gent of eight commandos from his crew used rubber rafts to reach the shores of of darkness, they planted on railroad tracks explosive charges that were detonated by a passing 16-car train. Fluckey was most proud that among the crew members who received a Purple Heart, none had sustained a serious injury. After the war he became an aide to Navy Secretary James Forrestal and

returned

ternational enterprise that included highway service centres, restaurants, chants, and a string of accommodations that ranged from the moderatepriced Travelodge motel chain to such luxury hotels as London’s Waldorf and Grosvenor House. The 1996 hostile takeover of Trusthouse Forte by the British media giant Granada was the subject of a BBC television documentary in 1999. Forte was knighted in 1970 and awarded a life peerage in

tion of another, and in 1945 a contin-

piloting the GlobalFlyer, a specialized plane that featured 13 fuel tanks, and

Fossett, Steve, American adventurer (b. April 22, 1944, Jackson, Tenn.—dis-

appeared

Sept.

3,

2007,

northern

recorded the quickest transatlantic crossing—4 days 16 hr 28 min 6 sec— in 2001,

and in 2004

he circumnavi-

gated the globe in an unprecedented time of 58 days 9 hr 32 min 45 sec. His other achievements included the fastest flight (1,194.17 km/hr [742.02 mph]) in

a nonsupersonic airplane (2001) as well as a number of gliding records. Fossett was reported missing after his singleengine plane disappeared during a scouting mission. In November his wife sought to have him declared legally dead.

Nevada), set a number of world records

in aviation and sailing; he became the first balloonist to circumnavigate the world alone in 2002 and made the first nonstop solo global flight in an airplane in 2005. Fossett undertook a number of challenges, including swimming the English Channel (1985), before gaining international attention with his ballooning feats. After five unsuccessful attempts to circumnavigate the globe, in 2002 he started at Northam, W.Aus., in the balloon Spirit

of Freedom and successfully crossed his starting point on July 2. On Feb. 28, 2005, he took off from

Salinas,

Kan.,

Franca, Celia (CELIA FRANKS), British-

born Canadian dancer, choreographer, and artistic director (b. June 25, 1921, London, Eng.—d. Feb. 19, 2007, Ottawa, Ont.), in 1951 founded the National Ballet of Canada, which she led

until 1974. Franca began her career with England's Ballet Rambert in 1936, danced with and choreographed for the Sadlers

Wells

Ballet

from

1941,

and

from 1947 was a dancer and ballet mistress of the Metropolitan Ballet. In 1950 she was asked to form a new ballet company based in Toronto, and with energy and determination Franca 127

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

assembled a troupe of dancers; the National Ballet of Canada concentrated on the classical ballets favoured by Canadian

audiences,

and

Franca

danced

principal roles, notably Giselle, until 1959, when she opened (with Betty Oliphant) the National Ballet School. Franca was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1967 and elevated to Companion in 1985. Francis, Freddie (FREDERICK WILLIAM FRANCIS), British cinematographer and director (b. Dec. 22, 1917, London, Eng.—d. March 17, 2007, Isleworth, Middlesex, Eng.), during a 60year career (1937-96) in the film in-

dustry, devised subtle, atmospheric lighting and camera work, notably in such black-and-white classics as Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Innocents

Friedmann led a team of scientists who identified strings of crystals found in fragments of a Martian meteorite as remnants of oxygen-dependent magnetotactic bacteria. Friedmann’s expertise in the biology of extreme environments dated back to his discovery, in 1961, of algae in the middle of Israels Negev desert, which led to similar studies of

life in the harsh Gobi and Atacama deserts. In 1976 he (together with his wife, Roseli Ocampo) published the article that first brought his work to NASA's attention; it described cryptoendoliths (bacteria that are "hidersin-rocks”) from the Ross desert in

Antarctica that closely resembled those he would later find in the Martian meteorite. In 1943 Friedmann was among

the Jews sent to a forced-labour camp in the Carpathian Mountains (he was liberated the following year). Following

(1961), and Sons and Lovers (1960), for

the war he earned a Ph.D. (1951) from

which he won the first of two Academy Awards. His second Oscar was for the American Civil War drama Glory

the University of Vienna.

(1989). Francis earned BAFTA nominations for The Elephant Man (1980), The French Lieutenants Woman (1981),

Glory, and Cape Fear (1991), as well as a lifetime achievement award from the British Society of Cinematographers and the American Society of Cinematographers’ International Award, both in 1997. Beginning in the early 1960s, he also built a cult following as a director of low-budget horror films. Friedmann,

born American

(E.)

Imre,

Hungarian-

astrobiologist (b. Dec.

20, 1921, Budapest, Hung.—d. June 11,

2007), discovered the most compelling evidence of past life on Mars. In 2001

Soon there-

after he moved to Jerusalem, where he

served until 1967 as an instructor at the Hebrew University. After a period (1968-2000)

as a professor at Florida

State University, Friedmann became affiliated in 2001 with NASAs Ames Research Center, and from 2005 he was a

visiting professor at the University of Washington. Froehlich,

American

Harold

Edward

(“Bub”),

engineer (b. July 13, 1922,

Minneapolis, Minn.—d. May 19, 2007, Maplewood, Minn.) led the team at

General Mills that designed Alvin (named for oceanographer Allyn C. Vine), a three-person submersible equipped with a mechanical arm and built to withstand pressures in the deep seas. The minisub, which was launched

Astrobiologist Imre Friedmann

in 1964, was commissioned by the U.S. Navy but operated out of Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. Alvin was used to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the underwater mountain chain in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean), to

recover an errant hydrogen bomb in 1966, and to lead co-developer Robert Ballard to the wreckage of the Titanic. Froehlich later joined the 3M Corp., where he worked on devising navigation buoys and medical products. He retired in 1989.

128

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ness after the death of their father Joseph Gallo, Sr., who had founded the

Gallo Wine Co. in 1909. The brothers maintained that they learned winemaking on their own after their father inexplicably killed their mother and then shot himself just after the end of Prohibition. With Ernest handling the marketing and Julio serving as the winemaker

the

two

introduced

some

16

brands of wine and cornered more than 25% of the American market. Some of their early offerings, including the widely popular Thunderbird, Ripple, and

Boone’s

Farm

wines,

drew

criti-

cism; these inexpensive wines with a relatively high alcohol content were branded

“street wines,”

the choice

of

winos and tramps. Later market entries that appealed to the suburban palate included Hearty Burgundy and Chablis Blanc. The brothers also began to market varietal and vintage wines aggressively. In 1981 the company began producing a premium-quality chardonnay, and in the 1980s it branched out into medium-priced Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers. The company, which owned nearly half of the vineyard acreage in California, reportedly had annual revenues of about $1 billion. In 1983 a third brother, Joseph, Jr.

launched a cheese factory under the Gallo name, which prompted the winery to sue him (1986) for trademark in-

fringement. His countersuit charged that he had been cheated out of a onethird interest in the family business. The

court

ruled,

however,

that

Julio

and Ernest had started their own concern when Joseph was 13 years old. The courtroom trial brought the family history under scrutiny, and their saga became the subject of the book Blood and Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire (1993). Julio died in

1993, and Joseph predeceased Ernest by less than a month. Gennes, physicist

Pierre-Gilles (b. Oct. 24,

France—d. France), was

May

18,

de, French 1932, Paris,

2007,

Orsay,

awarded the 1991 Nobel

Gallo, Ernest, American winegrower (b. March 18, 1909, near Modesto, Calif.—d. March 6, 2007, Modesto), to-

Prize for Physics for his discoveries about the ordering of molecules in liquid crystals and polymers. Gennes studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He was employed as an engineer at the French Atomic Energy

gether with his brother Julio, founded

Commission

(1933) E.&J. Gallo Winery in Modesto

professor with the Orsay Liquid Crystals Group of the University of Paris

and built an empire by shaping American drinking tastes with inexpensive Patrick Harbron/Landov

nonvintage wines. The brothers claimed to have started their own busi-

(1955-61) and then was a

(1961-71). He later taught at the Col-

Obituaries

lége de France (1971—76) and served as

director of the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles (1976-2002).

Gennes

investigated how

extremely complex forms of matter behave during the transition from order to disorder. He showed how electrically or mechanically induced phase changes transform liquid crystals from a transparent to an opaque state, the phenomenon exploited in liquid-crystal displays, including LCDs used in televisions and other consumer items. His research on polymers contributed to understanding how the long molecular chains in molten polymers move, which made it possible for scientists to better determine and control polymer properties. A few of the judges on the Nobel committee described Gennes as “the Isaac Newton of our time” in having successfully applied mathematics to generalized explanations of several different physical phenomena. Ghazi, Abdul Rashid, Pakistani Islamic militant (b. 1964?, Pakistan?—d. July 9-10, 2007, Islamabad, Pak.), was

the younger son of Maulana Abdullah, founder of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) and its associated radical Islamic

religious

schools

(madrassas).

Against his father’s wishes, Ghazi studied at the secular Quaid-e-Azam University and took a civil service job with the Ministry of Education. After his father was assassinated in 1998, however,

he joined his elder brother, Maulana Abdul Aziz, in the operation of the Lal Masjid. The brothers expressed strong support for the Taliban in Afghanistan and called for revolt against Pakistani Abdul Rashid Ghazi, Pakistani Islamic militant

Pres. Pervez Musharraf. Periodic clashes between radical Lal Masjid students and Musharraf’s security forces escalated in early July 2007 into violent confrontations. Ghazi was among those killed in the fighting when Pakistani troops stormed the mosque compound after an eight-day standoff. Ghosananda,

Maha

(SOMDET

MAHA GHOSANANDA),

dhist

patriarch

PHRA

Cambodian Bud-

(b.

1929?,

Takeo

province, Cambodia, French Indochina—d. March 12, 2007, Northampton, Mass.), devoted his life to the

search for peace, especially for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence in his homeland

after the 1979 overthrow of

the brutal Khmer Rouge. Ghosananda

was often satirized by younger, hipper entertainers. Goulet played along with the characterization, portraying himself on a TV episode of The Simpsons and appearing in a number of humorous TV commercials. Gracq, Julien (LOUIS POIRIER), French writer (b. July 27, 1910, Saint-Florentle-Vieil, France—d. Dec. 22, 2007, Angers, France), wrote a score of

works, including novels, essays, journals, and the literary study André Breton: quelques aspects de l'écrivain. Gracqs fiction displayed the strong surrealist influences of Stendhal and especially Breton, who reportedly admired Au cháteau d'Argol (1938), Gracqss first novel. His best-known novel, Le Rivage

was initiated into the Cambodian Buddhist Order in 1943 and in 1988 was

des Syrtes (1951), was awarded the Prix

elected supreme patriarch by his fellow

nour, but Gracq, who maintained an in-

monks. In the late 1980s a Buddhist temple in Leverett, Mass., invited him

tensely private life and disliked publicity, refused the award.

to settle in New continued to

Graham, Colin, British opera director,

England, though he travel extensively.

Goncourt, France's highest literary ho-

Ghosananda was a fourtime nominee for the Nobel Prize for Peace and was awarded the 1998 Niwano Peace Foun-

designer,

dation prize. His book Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion was published in 1992. American 26, 1933,

opera productions, most notably a record 57 world premieres. He was most closely associated with composer Benjamin Britten, with whom he collaborated from 1953 until Britten's death in 1976. Graham served as di-

Oct. 30, 2007, Los

rector of productions (1963-79) of Brit-

Angeles, Calif.), possessed a rich baritone voice and matinee-idol good looks, attributes that fueled his rise to stardom as an award-winning recording artist and actor in musicals. Already a well-known television personality in

ten’s English Opera Group (later the English Music Theatre) as well as artistic director (1969-89) of the company’s annual Aldeburgh Festival. He was also

Canada,

Sadlers Wells Opera (later the English National Opera). In 1979 he joined the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where he was named artistic director in 1985. Graham was made OBE in 2001.

Goulet, Robert Gerard, singer and actor (b. Nov. Lawrence, Mass.—d.

where

he was

reared,

Goulet

burst on to the American scene in 1960 when he played Sir Lancelot in the original Broadway production of Camelot. By 1962 he had recorded two albums and a hit single, "What Kind of Fool Am I,” and that year he won the Grammy Award for best new artist. He would place 15 more albums on the charts by the end of the decade. On television Goulet won an Emmy Award in 1966 for his work in an adaptation of Brigadoon. A Tony Award came in 1968 for his performance in the Broadway musical The Happy Time. Although his popularity reached its zenith in the 1960s,

his more

than

60 albums,

his

film and TV appearances, and his work in Las Vegas nightclubs and in touring theatricals kept him busy for the rest of his career. Though his name in later years became synonymous with the typical old-school lounge singer that

and

librettist

(b. Sept.

22,

1931, Hove, Sussex, Eng.—d. April 6, 2007, St. Louis, Mo.), staged some 250

associate director (1967-75) and director (1977-84) of productions for

Griffin, Merv (MERVYN EDWARD GRIFFIN),

American

talk-show

television

host, and

producer,

entrepreneur

(b.

July 6, 1925, San Mateo, Calif.—d. Aug. 12, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), was the

congenial host of the long-running 7he Merv Griffin Show (1962-63, 1965-86) and the creator of two of television's most successful game shows, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Griffin parlayed his entertainment success into a multimillion-dollar business empire that included hotels, resorts, and casinos. He

studied piano as a youth and by 1945 had begun singing professionally on the radio. He toured as a vocalist with bandleader Freddy Martin from 1948

Aamir Qureshi—AFP/Getty Images

129

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

tenor in the U.S. during the mid-1980s and early '90s, and his recordings earned him three Grammy Awards. Hadley made his professional debut in a Lake George Opera production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte (1976). He was under contract (1979-89) with the New

York City Opera and was a regular performer at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where his most memorable roles included Tom Rakewell in Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1997) and the title role in John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (1999). Hadley also enjoyed a long run (1986-2005) at the Chicago Lyric Opera, where he sang 11 leading roles, including Camille de Rosillon in Franz Lehárs The Merry Widow (1986)

and

Luigi in the world

premiere

of

William Bolcom's A Wedding (2004), di-

rected by Robert Altman. Hadley, who suffered from depression, succumbed to a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Merv Griffin, television producer and talk-show host and, in 1951, recorded the novelty song "Ive Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” which became a number one hit. Griffin went on to enjoy a brief film career, appearing in such movies as So This Is

Love (1953), By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953), and The Boy from Oklahoma (1954) before focusing his efforts

on television. After hosting the 1950s game show Play Your Hunch and substituting in 1962 for host Jack Paar on The Tonight Show, Griffin was offered his own daytime talk show. Though canceled

after

its initial

season,

The

Merv Griffin Show returned in 1965 as a syndicated program. A skilled interviewer, Griffin was noted for his ability to put his famous guests at ease, and his show ran for more than 20 years on various networks. He achieved even greater success with his production company, which launched Jeopardy! in 1964 and Wheel of Fortune in 1975. By the time he sold Merv Griffin Enterprises—for

$250 million—in

1986,

he

had become, by Forbes magazine’s estimate, the richest performer in the history of Hollywood. Griffin was the recipient of a Daytime Emmy Award for lifetime achievement in 2005. Hadley, Jerry, American

acclaimed in the U.S. and Europe for his bold stage presence and superb acting ability as well as for his versatile lyric tenor voice that lent itself to both operatic and musical theatre interpretations. He was considered the leading

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in 1964 for his penetrating coverage of the Vietnam War as a staff reporter (1960-67) for the New York Times and

went on to become the best-selling author of 21 meticulously researched books. Halberstam's examination of power resulted in three volumes that were viewed loosely as a trilogy: The Best and the Brightest (1972) chronicled the military failings of the U.S. during

sity. Her experience as a young South-

ern woman in Manhattan provided the backdrop for her sombre, introspective first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945), about a lonely young woman seeking to free herself from the ghosts of her past. During Hardwick’s marriage (1949-72) to the poet Robert Lowell, she wrote her second novel, The Simple Truth (1955), about a murder trial in a uni-

versity town. As a novelist she was perhaps best known for Sleepless Nights (1979), a partly autobiographical work about the transitory, poignant nature of human encounters. As a frequent contributor to the Partisan Review and other liberal intellectual journals, Hardwick developed the elegant, incisive analytic voice that became her trademark as an essayist and critic. She edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961), published the essay collection A View of My Own (1962), and helped to found The New York Review of Books (1963). The latter journal became the principal outlet for her criticism,

a second

volume

of which,

Se-

duction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, appeared in 1974. Hardwick published the essay collection Sight Readings in 1998 and a brief biography of novelist Herman Melville in 2000. Hart, Johnny (JOHN LEWIS HART), American cartoonist (b. Feb. 18, 1931, Endicott, N.Y—d. April 7, 2007, Nineveh, N.Y), created a formidable fol-

for those that dealt with baseball (The Summer of ‘49 [1989]) and basketball

lowing of more than 100 million readers as the creator in 1958 of the comic strip B.C., which focused on prehistoric cave dwellers and anthropomorphic animals and plants while being laced with puns and clever satire about modern society. In an effort to expand his commentary, in 1964 Hart, together with Brant Parker, launched The Wizard of Id

(Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and

strip. Like B.C., The Wizard, which fea-

the

tured a megalomaniac in a medieval kingdom, relied on sight gags and puns, but it also lampooned politics. In later years Hart’s evangelical Christianity seeped into the strip, and critics decried his depiction of a menorah morphing into a cross. Hart claimed that the images were meant to honour the two faiths. Both comic strips were expected to be continued by family members of Hart and Parker, who died eight days after Hart, at the age of 86.

the Vietnam War; The Powers That Be (1979) reviewed the impact that the

media had on history; and The Reckoning (1986) scrutinized the auto indus-

try. Besides covering politics and economics, Halberstam penned works on lighter topics and was especially noted

World

He

Made

[1999]).

Two

books—New York September 11: By Magnum Photographers (2001) and Firehouse (2002)—were written in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His final work, The Coldest Winter,

a book about the Korean War, appeared posthumously.

opera singer

(b. June 16, 1952, Princeton, Ill.—d. July 18, 2007, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.), was

130

Halberstam, David, American journalist and author (b. April 10, 1934, New York, N.Y.—d. April 23, 2007, Menlo Park, Calif), received a Pulitzer Prize

where she studied at Columbia Univer-

Hardwick, Elizabeth, American novel-

ist, short-story writer, and essayist (b. July 27, 1916, Lexington, Ky.—d. Dec. 2, 2007, New

York, N.Y.), was

known

for her eloquent literary and social criticism. After attending the University of Kentucky

(B.A.,

1938;

M.A.,

Hardwick

moved

to New

York

1939),

City,

Hartack, Bill (WILLIAM JOHN HARTACK, JR.), American jockey (b. Dec. 9, 1932, Ebensburg, Pa.—d. Nov. 26, 2007, near Freer, Texas), was the second

Obituaries Jennifer Graylock/AP

jockey, after Eddie Arcaro, ever to win five Kentucky Derby races and the first,

with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey and then with teams from New Zealand. In later years he lived with his family in Greenland, where he made an unsuccessful attempt in 1979 to circumnavigate the island. His books included Across the Top of the World (1969) and The Noose of Laurels (1989), in which he determined that American explorer Robert Peary, famed for being

in 1956, to win $2 million in a single

year, a record he broke the following year by earning $3 million. For three consecutive

years—1955,

1956,

and

1957—he was the national champion jockey winning 417, 347, and 341 races, respectively. In 1960 he was again the national champion, with 307 winning mounts. In 1956 Hartack rode Fabius to victory in the Preakness Stakes, and in 1957 he rode Iron Liege to victory in the Kentucky Derby. His four other Kentucky Derby winners were Venetian Way (1960), Decidedly

the first man

had actually fallen short in his attempt. Herbert was knighted in 2000.

(1962), Northern Dancer (1964), and Majestic Prince (1969). He won the Preakness for a second time in 1964, He

also was victorious in the 1960 Belmont Stakes aboard Celtic Ash. In 1972 Hartack became the fifth jockey ever to

Leona Helmsley, American hotel mogul

win more in 1980.

added to her notoriety by leaving her pet Maltese a $12 million trust fund in her will.

than 4,000 races. He retired

Hazlewood,

(Barton)

singersongwriter

Lee, American

and music producer

(b. July 9, 1929, Mannford, Okla.—d. Aug. 4, 2007, Henderson, Nev.), was a

pioneer in the musical genre of country rock and achieved fame as the writer and producer of “These Boots Are Made

for Walkin’,” which became

a number one hit in 1966 for singer Nancy Sinatra. After starting his career as a radio disc jockey in the 1950s, Hazlewood released a solo album, Trouble Is a Lonesome Town (1963), before

teaming up with Sinatra, with whom he collaborated on nine albums (three

of them duets) and four top 10 singles. He later moved

to Sweden,

where

he

continued to release his own recordings before retiring in 1977. Hazlewoods fi-

Herbert,

Don

(DONALD

JEFFRY

HER-

BERT), American television personality (b. July 10, 1917, Waconia, Minn.—d. June 12, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), was

praised for his ability to engage and instruct his young viewers with simple scientific experiments as host (1951-65; 1971) of Watch Mr. Wizard, a popular live weekly television science program for children. Herbert, an actor by training who did not hold an advanced degree in science, returned to presenting

science to children with Mr Wizard's World, which appeared on a cable channel from 1983 to 1990. Watch Mr. Wizard was honoured with a Peabody Award for young people's programming

Leona

(LEONA

MINDY

ROSENTHAL), American hotel magnate (b. July 4, 1920, Marbletown, N.Y.—d. Aug. 20, 2007, Greenwich, Conn.), was

dubbed "the queen of mean" as a result of her imperious manner and callous, abusive treatment of employees of Helmsley Hotels, of which her real-estate mogul husband, Harry Helmsley, had made her president in 1980. In 1989 she was tried on tax-evasion charges—it was reported that she had declared that "only the little people pay taxes"—and was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison; she served less than half of that. Helmsley

ran human

rights activist (b. Jan. 30,

life to chronicling and investigating the abuses and massacres committed by right-wing paramilitary death squads, which were believed supported by the U.S., during El Salvador's civil war (1980s and early '90s), as the founder (1983) of Tutela Legal| a Roman

Catholic-based human rights group. Hernández was teaching law at the University of Central America, San Salvador, when Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero recruited her to help support his human rights activities. After Romero was murdered in 1980 by death squads, she continued to seek evidence of paramilitary abuses and to work toward bringing these killers to justice. She documented the slaughter in 1981 of several hundred villagers in El Mozote with the testimony of the lone surviving eyewitness to the massacre, Ru-

fina Amaya, and sought to prosecute the perpetrators with the help of evidence from forensic anthropologists. Herrera

Campíns,

Luis,

Venezuelan

politician (b. May 4, 1925, Acarigua, Venez.—d. Nov. 9, 2007, Caracas, Venez.), served (1979-84) as president

Herbert, Sir Wally (WALTER WILLIAM

of Venezuela during a time when the countrys economic boom stemming from high oil prices (beginning in 1973) began to show serious defects. The measures that Herrera Campíns took to rein in inflation and the government’s spiraling expenditures were ineffective, and his party lost the presidency in the elections held in late 1983. Herrera Campins studied law at the Central University in Caracas. With

HERBERT), Helmsley,

María Julia, El Salvado-

in 1953.

nal solo album, Cake or Death, was re-

leased in 2006.

Hernández,

1939, Honduras—d. March 30, 2007, San Salvador, El Salvador), devoted her

riding Northern Dancer, and for a third time in 1969, on Majestic Prince.

to reach the North Pole,

British polar explorer

(b.

Oct. 24, 1934, York, Eng.—d. June 12, 2007, Inverness, Scot.), led the British

Transarctic Expedition that crossed the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole on an epic 15-month trek from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen in Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Herbert (with 3 colleagues, 4 sleds, and 40 dogs) left Point

Barrow

on

Feb.

21,

1968,

and

reached the Pole on April 6, 1969. By the time the team reached Spitsbergen on May 29, they had walked more than

Rafael Caldera, he founded (1946) the

5,800

which became the second largest political party in Venezuela (after the Democratic Action party) in the decades after World War II. In 1952 Herrera

km

(3,600

mi) and

had

taken

some 250 ice-core samples. In the 1950s and early '60s, Herbert spent several years trekking in Antarctica, first

moderate known

as

Social Christian Party (also the

Christian

Democrats),

131

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Archivo El Universal —AFP/Getty Images

"y,

coeditor

(with

four-volume

Stanley

New

Sadie)

of the

Grove Dictionary

of

American Music (1986), which was con-

sidered a premiere reference work because of its inclusiveness. Another notable work and vital college text was Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (1969, rev. 2000). Ho, Don (DONALD Tat Loy Ho), American singer (b. Aug. 13, 1930, Honolulu, Hawaii—d. April 14, 2007, Honolulu),

became an icon of the relaxed Hawaiian lifestyle with his rich baritone interpretations of such songs as ‘TIl Remember You,” “With All My Love,” “The

Hawaiian

Wedding

Song,”

“Pearly

Shells,” “Hanalei Moon,” “Kanaka Wai

Luis Herrera Campíns, former

president of Venezuela Campíns was arrested and sent into exile as a result of his activities against the dictatorial regime of Pres. Marcos Pérez

Jiménez.

Herrera

Campíns

re-

turned to Venezuela after the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez in 1958 and was

elected

(1959)

a member

of the

Chamber of Deputies (lower house of the parliament). Successively reelected, he served as chairman of the Social Christian faction in the parliament until his election in 1973 to the Senate. He also served (1969-77) as secretary-

general of the Latin American Congress of Christian Democratic organizations.

Wai,” and especially “Tiny Bubbles,” a hit single in 1967 that became his signature tune. Ho began performing at his father’s bar but soon found a following in the 1960s among tourists in Waikiki nightclubs and later at the Coconut Grove in Hollywood and the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. His success on the mainland sparked the TV variety program The Don Ho Show (1976-77), but he remained indelibly identified as a national spokesperson for Pacific Island leisure. Ho continued to perform until two days before his death. Hofstetter, Ernest, Swiss mountaineer (b. Aug. 14, 1911, Davos, Switz.—d. June

prominent civil rights attorney who battled against racial prejudice in numerous cases, most famously the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. At one point Hill was handling 75 civil rights cases, and he won a succession of them

involving voting rights, jury employment rights, and access to school buses for black students. In 1999 Hill was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Everest,

Khumbu

N.Y.),

was

a

founding

director

(1971-93) of the Institute for Studies in

American Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and the 132

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

across

the

treacherous

Icefall and the glacial basin

called the Western

Cwm,

to reach the

South Col, close to the top. Their route was followed by the 1953 expedition on which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first reached the mountain’s summit and by most subsequent climbers. The Swiss summit party, which included Tenzing himself but not Hofstetter, came within 198 m (650 ft)

of the summit before they were forced to turn back. Hofstetter was instrumental in the safe return of the team down the mountain. Howell,

F(rancis)

anthropologist Kansas

Hitchcock, H(ugh) Wiley, American musicologist (b. Sept. 28, 1923, Detroit, Mich.—d. Dec. 5, 2007, New York,

France), was

a member of the Swiss team of amateur climbers who in the spring of 1952 forged a passage up the South Face of Mt.

Hill, Oliver (OLIVER WHITE), American lawyer (b. May 1, 1907, Richmond, Va.—d. Aug. 5, 2007, Richmond), was a

1, 2007, Argentière,

(b.

City, Mo.—d.

Clark,

Nov. March

American

27,

1925,

10, 2007,

Berkeley, Calif.), utilized experts in several areas of study, including biology, ecology, geology, and primatology, to establish paleoanthropology as a multidisciplinary science in the study of early human origins. Howell conducted extensive field research in Africa, Asia,

and Europe, and he earned a Ph.D. (1953) from the University of Chicago. During the early 1950s he taught anatomy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., but he then returned to his alma mater,

where he taught (1955-70) physical anthropology. Howell went on to serve (1970-91) as professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Human Evolution Research Center Perhaps his best-known work was Early Man (1965), a volume

that contained

illus-

trations of early hominids, beginning with a Neanderthal and evolving to the modern Homo sapiens; these drawings were used to teach the concept of human evolution and were featured in the Time-Life Nature Library series. Howell was a founding member of the Leakey Foundation, a member

of the National

Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Charles Darwin Award for Lifetime Achievement in Physical Anthropology. In addition, he was

an adviser for the

Encyclopedia Britannica. Huang Ju, Chinese politician (b. September 1938, Jiashin, China—d. June 2, 2007, Beijing, China), served as vice-

premier of China from 2003 until his death and as a member of the powerful Standing Committee of the Political Bureau was responsible for reforms to China’s banking and financial systems. Huang joined the Communist Party of China in 1966. He trained as an electrical engineer and worked for various companies in Shanghai, where he became

a protégé

of Jiang

Zemin,

a

Shanghai party boss who later became president of China. Huang served as vice-mayor (1986-91) and then mayor (1991-95)

of Shanghai

the post of Shanghai from

and

also held

party secretary

1994 to 2002, when

he was

ele-

vated to the nine-member Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. During his tenure in the central government, he was a loyal member of the "Shanghai Gang," an influential group of leaders allied to Jiang. Humbard, Rex (THE REV. ALPHA REX EMMANUEL HUMBARD), American televangelist (b. Aug. 13, 1919, Little Rock, Ark.—d. Sept. 21, 2007, Lantana, Fla.),

used the powerful medium of television to spread the gospel to millions of people worldwide through his weekly program Cathedral of Tomorrow, which was carried by more than 2,000 TV stations and broadcast in some 91 languages. The religious show featured revival

Obituaries PA Photos/Landov

preaching mixed with lively musical numbers, including folksy guitar music and songs performed by Humbard, a choir, and guest performers such as Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. At its peak of popularity in the 1970s, Humbard's program attracted some 20 million viewers. He began his career in broadcasting at age 13, singing gospel

(b. Feb. 26, 1921, Battle Creek, Mich.— d. March 12, 2007, Palm Springs, Calif), electrified audiences with her

Hunt, E(verette) Howard, Jr., Ameri-

explosive personality and high-spirited performances in musicals and comedies on the stage and screen. Hutton began performing for audiences at the age of three in her mother’s Detroit speakeasies during the Prohibition era. In 1937 she became the lead vocalist with the Vincent Lopez Orchestra, and in 1940 she found success on Broadway in Buddy DeSylva’s Two for the Show and Panama Hattie. Her film career took off when she was signed by Paramount Pictures and appeared in the films The Fleets In (1942) and The Miracle of Morgan Creek (1944). Her biggest success came with the MGM

can

musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950), for

songs on KTHS

Radio in Hot Springs,

Ark. Humbard was ordained during the 1940s and in 1949 began airing his sermons from a CBS-TV affiliate in Indianapolis. Later he built the ornate 5,400-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow near Akron, Ohio; shortly after he left the airwaves, he sold it in 1994.

spy (b. Oct.

9, 1918,

Hamburg, Fla.),

which she replaced Judy Garland in the

spent 33 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to wiretapping and conspiracy in the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, Washington, D.C., and he organized a

lead role. Other hit films included Red, Hot, and Blue (1949) and the Academy

N.Y.—d.

Jan.

23, 2007,

Miami,

string of covert operations as a consultant to U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon,

who was forced to resign in the face of impending impeachment proceedings and following Hunts indictment. Before serving as a consultant to Nixon,

Award-winning

British comedian and actor John Inman

The Greatest Show on

Earth (1952). Hutton also hosted her own television program, The Betty Hut-

ton Show (1959-60). Plagued by a host of emotional problems, Hutton lived in relative obscurity during the 1970s. A Roman Catholic priest helped to turn her life around. Hutton finished her education and taught during the 1980s.

ences on three continents with his campy portrayal of Grace Brothers’ senior sales assistant Wilberforce Clayborne Humphries in all 69 episodes of the BBC television sitcom Are You Being Served? (1972-85), as well as a sim-

ilarly

titled BBC

sequel

Grace

and

Hunt worked (1949-70) for the CIA and

Hyde,

politi-

Favour (1992-93; U.S. title, Are You Be-

was involved in the abortive U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Hunt recruited four of five operatives who had taken part in that mission to burglarize the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Hunts phone number was found on one of the captured Watergate intruders, and that discovery led investigators to the White

cian (b. April 18, 1924, Chicago, Ill.— d. Nov. 29, 2007, Chicago), served (1975-2007) in the U.S. House of Rep-

ing Served? Again!). Inman's over-thetop characterization, eyebrow-raising double entendres, and lilting catchphrase “I’m free” made him a fan favourite and in 1976 earned him the titles of BBC TV Personality of the Year and TV Times’s Funniest Man on Television. Although the effeminate Mr. Humphries drew criticism from some gay rights groups, Inman refused to acknowledge that the flouncing salesclerk was homosexual. Inman also appeared in the short-lived sitcoms Odd Man Out

House. Prior to that break-in, Hunt had

masterminded the burglary of the Beverly Hills office of the psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the classified documents later known as the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War. Hunt was also allegedly at the centre of a plot to assassinate syndicated columnist

Jack

Anderson,

who

had

John, American

spin-off

(1980-81), a 1977 feature film, and the

12-episode Henry

Australian

resentatives, where during his freshman term he won support in 1976 for a law that prohibited federal funds for abortions

(the Hyde Amendment)

and

was at the forefront of a group of House Republicans who in 1998 monitored the impeachment hearings of Pres. Bill Clinton. Hyde, à Roman Catholic

and

onetime

Democrat,

switched to the Republican Party and became a force in Illinois, serving in the Illinois House (1967-74) and hold-

ing the position of majority leader (1971-72). In national politics Hyde held key positions—the ranking Re-

(1977)

and

Take

a Letter

Mr.

Jones

(1981) and was a popular performer in pantomimes and theatrical farces. Ivins,

Molly

(MARY

TYLER

IVINS),

written a series of damaging articles about the Nixon administration. In

publican (1985-91) on the House Select

American political satirist (b. Aug. 30,

Committee

1944,

1981 Hunt was awarded $650,000 in a

(1995-2001) of the House Judiciary Committee, and chairman (2001-07) of

libel case that originated from an article that alleged that Hunt was involved in the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy; the verdict was overturned, however and Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997.

Hutton, Betty (ELIZABETH JUNE THORNBURG; "THE BLONDE BOMB-

SHELL"), American

actress and singer

on

Intelligence,

chairman

the House International Relations Committee. Shortly before his death, Hyde was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Inman, (Frederick) John, British actor and comedian (b. June 28, 1935, Preston, Lancashire, Eng.—d. March 8, 2007, London, Eng.), delighted audi-

Monterey,

2007, Austin,

Calif.—d.

Texas), wrote

Jan.

31,

a newspa-

per column from a staunchly liberal point of view that mercilessly and humorously skewered politicians in both her home state of Texas and the federal government. Ivins began her career in 1967 as a reporter for the Minneapolis (Minn.)

Tribune.

In 1970 she became

editor of the liberal biweekly magazine the Texas Observer, and it was there that

she

developed

her

distinctive

style. 133

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

States (1963-69), and was an environ-

mentalist noted for her emphasis on beautification. She was the daughter of a prosperous businessman and was nicknamed “Lady Bird” on the suggestion of a family nursemaid. She graduated from high school at 15 and later attended St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Girls in Dallas. After earning a B.A. (1933) from the University of Texas at Austin, she remained there an addi-

tional year to take a degree in journalism. She married Johnson on Nov.

Political columnist Molly Ivins Ivins

worked

(1976-82)

for the New

York Times before spending 10 years with the Dallas Times Herald. She then wrote her column for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Ivins came to national prominence with the rise to national politics of Texas politician George W. Bush, and her column was widely syn-

17,

1934, just a few months after their first meeting. Lady Bird gave birth to two daughters, Lynda Bird in 1944 and Luci Baines in 1947. In 1937 Lady Bird used $10,000 of her inheritance to support her husband's first congressional campaign. In 1943 the Johnsons purchased a struggling radio station in Austin, and Lady Bird took over as manager. As her husband's political career advanced and he became a powerful figure in Washington, D.C., Lady Bird participated in his campaigns but shied away from giving speeches. In 1960, however, when

that sought to encourage people to make their surroundings more attractive. To encourage private donations, she formed the First Lady’s Committee for a More Beautiful Capital. She urged Congress to pass the Highway Beautification Bill, which was strenuously opposed by billboard advertisers. Her involvement in the legislation was highly unusual, and though she received some criticism, the bill (in diluted form)

passed Congress and became law in October 1965. After Lyndon announced that he would not seek reelection in 1968, the Johnsons retired to their ranch in Texas, where she remained after her

husband’s death in 1973. There she established the National Wildflower Research Center (now the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center at the University of Texas at Austin). Early in her White House tenure, she had begun to record her impressions in daily tape recordings, and a fraction of the thousands of hours she taped became the basis of her book A White House Diary (1970). In 1977 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom for her conservation efforts.

Frank Wolfe—Bloomberg News/Landov

Johnson,

Tom

(THOMAS

CHRISTIAN

JOHNSON), Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. Feb. Man.—d. Nov. 21,

dicated. She wrote six books, including, with Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short but

Mass.),

Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (2000) and Bushwhacked (2003).

during which time he helped lead the team to six Stanley Cup titles (1953, 1956-60) with his superb puck handling; he received the Norris Trophy in 1959 as the National Hockey League’s best defenseman. Johnson played for the Boston Bruins from 1963 until injury ended his playing career in 1965. He coached the Bruins to the 1972 Stanley Cup title. Named vice president

Ensemble,

tata, The Negroes’ Burial Ground; and a rap-jazz opera, Fresh Faust.

Lady Bird Johnson, environmentalist and wife of former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon was nominated for vice president, she actively campaigned throughout the South. In the 1964 election Lady Bird rode through seven Southern states on her campaign train, dubbed the “Lady Bird Special,” urging voters to support her husband. Following his

Lady

Bird

(CLAUDIA

ALTA

TAYLOR), American first lady (b. Dec. 22, 1912, Karnack, Texas—d. July 11, 2007, Austin, Texas), was the wife of Lyndon

B. Johnson, 36th president of the United 134

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Canadiens,

Bruins’ front office until his retirement in 1998. Johnson was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1970. Jolley, Elizabeth (MONICA ELIZABETH KNIGHT), British-born Australian nov-

elist and short-story writer (b. June 4, 1923, 2007,

Birmingham, Eng.—d. Feb. 13, Perth, Australia), crafted dryly

environ-

comic fiction filled with eccentric characters, especially women, lovingly portrayed. Jolley was raised in a Germanspeaking household in England. She moved to Perth in 1959 when her husband became a librarian at the University of Western Australia, and her work often contrasts a stagnant Europe and a brash, vital Australia. She began writ-

mental program, called “beautification,”

ing her first novel, Palomino, in the late

election,

Johnson,

(1947-48,

of the team in 1979, he remained in the

and as a soloist he accom-

panied dancers. Jenkins recorded with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and his own ensembles, among others. He also composed works for chamber groups and orchestras, such as Concerto for Improvised Violin and Orchestra; a can-

15 seasons

1949-63) for the Montreal

Jenkins, Leroy, American musician (b. March 11, 1932, Chicago, Ill.—d. Feb. 24, 2007, New York, N.Y.), became the

leading free-jazz violinist by improvising long atonal, arrhythmic, rhapsodic lines. Jenkins was among the members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians who in 1969-70 introduced AACM sonic and formal innovations in Europe and New York City. He played (1971-77) in the noted New York trio the Revolutionary

played

18, 1928, Baldur, 2007, Falmouth,

she

concentrated

on

Head

Start, a program aimed at helping preschool children from disadvantaged backgrounds. She became most closely identified,

however,

with

an

Obituaries

1950s, but because publishers were wary of the story (which concerns a lesbian relationship between a 60-yearold doctor and a much younger woman pregnant with her own brother's child), it was not printed until 1980. Five Acre Virgin, the first of several short-story collections, came out in 1976. Jolley won numerous awards, including the The Age newspapers Book of the Year Award three times—for Mr. Scobie’s Riddle (1983), My Fathers Moon (1989), and The Georges’ Wife (1993). Her other novels included The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981), Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983), The Well (1986; filmed 1997), Lovesong (1997), and An Innocent Gentleman (2001). She also wrote

radio plays, notably a dramatization of her short story “Woman in a Lampshade.” Jolley was awarded the Order of Australia in 1988 and was named a National Living Treasure in 1997. Jordan, Winthrop Donaldson, American historian, educator, and author (b. Nov. 11, 1931, Worcester, Mass.—d. Feb. 23, 2007, Oxford, Miss.), explored

the nature of race in meticulously researched works that included White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968), which won numerous prizes, including a National

Book

Award,

and

The

White

Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (1974). In addition, he wrote

Tumult and Silence

at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (1993), an account of a failed slave uprising in 1861 and its aftermath that he cobbled together, using little-known documents, and The United States (1976; with Leon F. Litwack), a college textbook. Jordan taught (1963-82) at the University of California, Berkeley, before he joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi, from which he retired in 2004.

Kennedy, the Rev. D(ennis) James, American evangelist (b. Nov. 3, 1930, Augusta, Ga.—d. Sept. 5, 2007, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.) , was dedicated to

Barbara. She developed her acting skills enough to be hired as a leading lady and portrayed the major role of Sister

spreading conservative Christianity through his broadcasts on radio and the outreach programs he established. After becoming (1960) pastor of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort

which she won her first New York Film Critics’ Circle Award (her subsequent

Lauderdale,

ternational hit and led to an MGM contract and the opportunity to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters later that year. After 1947 Kerr established herself in Hollywood, typecast by MGM—in what Kerr referred to as “tiara roles”—as a well-bred young

1984-87)

host of Criss Cross

and

dous success of his ministry led to a weekly syndicated program, The Coral Ridge Hour, which by 2007 had reached audiences of some 3.5 million nationally. Kennedy founded (1967) the Evangelism Explosion clinic to teach Christians how to spread the gospel, and in 1974 he began broadcasting his sermons from his own radio station. Kennedy

founded

and Barbara

Kerr, Deborah (DEBORAH JANE KERRTRIMMER), British actress (b. Sept. 30, 1921, Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, Scot.—d. Oct. 16, 2007, Suffolk, Eng.),

was known for the poise and serenity she exhibited in portraying complex characters. Kerr trained as a ballet dancer but discovered an interest in acting. In 1941 she made her British film debut in a supporting role as a Salvation Army volunteer in the film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major British actress Deborah Kerr

British

matron.

Kerr

(on loan

from

MGM) was cast against type in the role of a lusty adulterous army wife in From Here to Eternity (1953). The scene from

that film of Kerr and her costar Burt Lancaster making love on the beach as waves crash against them became a classic Hollywood image. Also in 1953, Kerr made an acclaimed debut on Broadway in Tea and Sympathy, and she reprised her role in the 1956 film adaptation. While she continued to play prim-and-proper, cultured, or virtuous women, such as the governess Anna in the film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musical The King and I (1956) and a spirited unmarried artist in Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana (1964), she demonstrated her versatility with such passionate portrayals as her romantic role in the tearjerker An Affair to Remember (1957). Kerr announced her retirement

in 1969, though she continued to take occasional roles. She received six Academy Award nominations for best actress and was awarded an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 1994. She was created CBE in 1997. Soviet

Tikhon

composer

and

Nikolayevich,

bureaucrat

(b.

May 28 [June 10, New Style], 1913, Yelets, Russia—d. Aug. 14, 2007, Moscow, Russia), as head (1948-91) of

the Union

of Soviet

Composers,

en-

forced Stalinist ideas of socialist music,

Quiz in the 1960s.

and

the short-lived situation comedy B and B (1968). Kelly occasionally acted in films and on television and later ran a show-business consulting agency.

awards were for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison [1957] and The Sundowners [1960]). Black Narcissus became an in-

Khrennikov,

as the

Kelly (1951)

(1994) an outreach

group called the Center for Christian Statesmanship, which offered biblical studies to members of the U.S. Congress, and he also formed the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, which sought to educate people about political activism.

She joined her real-life husband on several radio and television programs, notably An Evening at Home with Bernard Braden

increased

bers to more than 10,000. The tremen-

widespread popularity as a regular panelist on the long-running British edition of the television quiz show Whats My (1951-63;

Kennedy

his congregation from about 40 mem-

Kelly, Barbara, Canadian-born actress (b. Oct. 5, 1924, Vancouver, B.C.—d. Jan. 15, 2007, London, Eng.), enjoyed

Line?

Fla.,

Clodagh in Black Narcissus (1947), for

1

denouncing and denying forums to composers who failed to conform— among them Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian. At the first Congress of Composers in 1948, Khrennikov’s vehement condemnation of what he described as “formalist music” delineated the strictures under which Soviet musicians would labour for the next several decades. Khrennikov was a prolific composer. His incidental music for a

PA Photos/Landov

135

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

1936 production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and his first opera, Into the Storm (1939), both showed his characteristic optimism, energy and lyricism and won him the favour of Joseph Stalin, who put him in charge of the composers' union. Khun Sa (CHANG CHI-FU OR CHUFU OR

SHI-FU), Myanmar drug trafficker and militant separatist (b. Feb. 17, 1934, Shan state, Burma [now Myanmar]—d. Oct. 26, 2007, Yangon [Rangoon],

Myanmar), was the “king of the Golden Triangle,” dominating the trade in heroin coming out of the area that straddles the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand.

The ruthless

and

arrogant Khun Sa (his nom de guerre) originally trained as a soldier in the Kuomintang Chinese Nationalist Army, but he broke with the official military and from 1963 operated with impunity at the head of his own militia of 10,000-20,000

men,

which he claimed

was dedicated to fighting for the independence of the Shan people. He was imprisoned from 1969 to 1974, but at the height of his power in the 1980s, Khun Sa was believed to have controlled at least 70% of the heroin trade in the Golden Triangle and an estimated 40-45% of the heroin entering the U.S., which resulted in the U.S. government’s offering a $2 million bounty for his capture. In 1996 he surrendered to authorities and retired quietly to

impersonal finish characteristic of Pop art canvases with the loose, painterly brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, but his work differed from that of his Pop contemporaries in his use of complex and allusive figurative imagery, including a wealth of pictorial references to historical, artistic, and literary topics. His semiabstract paintings also feature brightly coloured and imaginatively interpreted human figures portrayed in puzzling and ambiguous relation to one another. Kitaj studied art at the Cooper Union in New York City and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After working as a merchant seaman

and serving

(1955-57)

in the

U.S. Army, he settled in England, where he attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts and the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj was associated with the beginnings of the Pop art movement

in Great Britain in the

early 1960s, and he continued to exhibit widely throughout the '60s and "0s while teaching painting at various British fine arts schools. A 1994 retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery (now

Tate

Britain)

in London

drew

harsh criticism, though the exhibition was praised when it was mounted in New York City and Los Angeles. Kitaj's wife died shortly after the Tate retrospective, and in 1997 he moved back to the U.S. Knievel,

Evel

1915, New York, N.Y.—d. Dec. 23, 2007,

Los Angeles, Calif.), collected five Tony Awards for his stage choreography for Finians Rainbow (1947), Guys and Dolls (1951), Can-Can (1953), Li'l Abner (1957), and Destry Rides Again (1959) and earned accolades for his work in

film, including such movies as Where’ Charley? (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), which featured incredible acrobatic dance numbers, and Hello, Dolly! (1969). Kidd’s own footwork was show-

cased

in the

film

It’s Always

Fair

Weather (1956), in which he performed

with Gene Kelly and Dan Dailey. For his contribution to musical film, Kidd

was presented Award in 1997. Kitaj, R.B.

a

(RONALD

American-born

special

Academy

BROOKS

painter

KITAJ),

(b. Oct.

29,

1932, Chagrin Falls, Ohio—d. Oct. 21, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), mingled the

136

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

over the Snake River Canyon in Idaho using a rocket-powered motorcycle called the Sky-Cycle (1974), jumping over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium in London (1975), and leaping over a shark-filled tank in Chicago (1976). Teddy

(THEODOR

HERZL

motorcycle dare-

1911, Nagyvazsony, Austria-Hungary [now in Hungary]—d. Jan. 2, 2007,

Kidd, Michael (MILTON GREENWALD),

12,

(1973), a failed attempt to soar

KOLLER), Israeli politician (b. May 27,

devil (b. Oct. 17, 1938, Butte, Mont.— d. Nov. 30, 2007, Clearwater, Fla.), cap-

(b. Aug.

seum

CRAIG

(ROBERT

KNIEVEL), American choreographer

some 50 cars at the Los Angeles Coli-

Kollek,

Yangon.

American

Legendary motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel

tivated audiences with his deathdefying aerial stunts and horrified them with his bone-shattering crashes when his exploits ended in failure. Clad in his trademark star-spangled red, white, and blue jumpsuits, Knievel made more than 300 jumps during his career and claimed to have broken nearly every bone in his body. Knievel performed his first motorcycle stunt in his late 20s in order to stimulate business for a motorcycle shop that he coowned, jumping over rows of parked cars, a caged cougar, and a box of rattlesnakes. After performing (1965-68) with a troupe called Evel Knievel's Motorcycle Daredevils, he decided to pursue a solo career. In 1968 Knievel performed perhaps his most famous stunt—a spectacular jump over the fountains at Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas in which he botched the

Jerusalem, Israel), as the popular and pragmatic Labour Party mayor of Jerusalem for six terms and 28 years (1965-93), transformed the city into a

thriving metropolis. Although Kollek supported a unified Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, he advocated peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs and worked for freedom of religion as well as legal and social benefits for Israel’s Arab minority. A committed Zionist, Kollek emigrated in 1935 from Vienna to then British Palestine. He worked for Zionist causes overseas and served (1952-64) as director general of

the office of the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who encouraged him to run for mayor of Jerusalem. Kollek was awarded the Israel Prize in 1988. Kornberg,

chemist

and

Arthur,

physician

American

(b. March

bio-

3,

his skull, and was

1918, Brooklyn, N.Y.—d. Oct. 26, 2007, Stanford, Calif.), received (with Severo

comatose for a month. Other well-publicized stunts included jumping over

Ochoa) the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the

landing,

fractured

Obituaries Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

means by which DNA molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell, as well as the means for reconstructing this duplication process in a test tube. At the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., Kornberg directed research (1942-53) on enzymes and in-

termediary metabolism. He also helped discover the chemical reactions in the cell that result in the construction of flavine adenine dinucleotide (FAD) and

diphosphopyridine nucleotide (DPN), coenzymes that are important hydrogen-carrying intermediaries in biological oxidations and reductions. While serving (1953-59) as professor and director of the microbiology department at Washington

University,

St.

Louis,

Mo., he continued to study the way in which living organisms manufacture nucleotides, the building blocks for the giant nucleic acids DNA and RNA. This research led Kornberg directly to the problem of how nucleotides are strung together (polymerized) to form DNA molecules. Adding nucleotides “labeled” with radioactive isotopes to extracts prepared from cultures of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli, he found (1956) evidence of an enzyme-catalyzed polymerization reaction. He isolated and purified an enzyme (known as DNA polymerase) that, in combination

with certain nu-

cleotide building blocks, could produce precise replicas of short DNA molecules (known as primers) in a test tube.

Kornberg became (1959) a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, serving (1959-69) as department chairman. His writings included Enzymatic Synthesis of DNA (1961). Kornberg’s son Roger D. Kornberg won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. They became the sixth fatherson tandem to win Nobel Prizes. Koshland, Daniel Edward, Jr., American biochemist and editor (b. March 30, 1920, New York, N.Y.—d. July 23, 2007, Walnut Creek, Calif.), investi-

gated the function of enzymes in the human body and set forth the theory known as "induced fit," which held that

enzymes sometimes change their shape in reaction to the chemicals they encounter. He later examined the behaviour of bacteria and was active in the field of bioenergy. Koshland earned a B.S. (1941) in chemistry from the Uni-

versity of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. (1949) in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago. He worked (1951-65) at the Brookhaven

Laboratory

National

Upton, N.Y., and then re-

turned to Berkeley as professor of molecular and cell biology. There he was instrumental in reorganizing the department of biological sciences. He concurrently accepted the editorship (1985-95) of Science magazine and ex-

panded its scientific news coverage and lightened its tone with his satiric editorials in the voice of “Dr. Noitall.” An heir to the Levi Strauss jeans fortune with an estimated wealth of $800 million, Koshland funded numerous enter-

prises aimed at improving science education;

he donated

$25 million

for a

science museum at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and $23 million to Haverford (Pa.) Col-

lege for the construction of a new science centre. He was the recipient of the 1998 Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science, a 1990 National Medal of Science, and

the 2006 Welch Award in Chemistry. Kovacs, Laszlo, Hungarian-born Amer-

ican cinematographer (b. May 14, 1933, Cece, Hung.—d. July 22, 2007, Beverly Hills, Calif.), photographed notable films of the 1960s and ‘70s that represented the rise of a new independent cinema, beginning with Easy Rider (1969), in which he made the landscape

a vital part of the movie. Kovacs studied at Budapests Academy of Drama and Film Art but fled Hungary in 1956, smuggling filmed footage of the antiSoviet uprising, and settled in the U.S. the next year. Kovacs began his Hollywood career shooting B movies, among them

several

biker

films,

which

led

Dennis Hopper to hire him as cinematographer for Easy Rider Of the more than 70 movies that Kovacs filmed,

his most

acclaimed

cluded

photography

work

in-

on director Bob

Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970) and

Former soviet KGB leader Vladimir

Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov form programs. Kryuchkov studied law and diplomacy, and in 1955 he was posted to the Soviet embassy in Budapest, where, working under Yury Andropov, he helped to suppress the Hungarian uprising. When Andropov was named

head

of the

KGB

in

1967,

Kryuchkov accompanied him to Moscow. On Aug. 18, 1991, Kryuchkov and seven coconspirators put Gorbachev under house arrest, but three

days later the putsch collapsed when Boris Yeltsin rallied support for the government. The plotters were charged with high treason but were freed. The short-lived coup was credited with accomplishing the direct opposite of what Kryuchkov and his allies sought by strengthening Yeltsin at Gorbachev's expense and hastening the breakup of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov's reputation was partially rehabilitated under

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper

Pres.

Moon (1973), and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). Kovacs was

Kuhn, Bowie Kent, American sports executive and lawyer (b. Oct. 28, 1926, Takoma Park, Md.—d. March 15, 2007, Jacksonville, Fla.), strove to uphold the

honoured in 2002 with a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers. Kryuchkov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich,

Soviet intelligence officer (b. Feb. 29, 1924, Tsaritsyn, U.S.S.R. [now Volgograd, Russia|—d. Nov. 23, 2007, Moscow, Russia), as the hard-line head (1988-91) of the KGB, led the State

Committee for the State of Emergency, which in 1991 engineered a coup against Pres. Mikhail Gorbachev in an attempt to forestall the president’s re-

Vladimir

Putin,

another

former

KGB official.

integrity

of Major

League

Baseball

(MLB) while serving as its commissioner (1969-84). Kuhn’s tenure was a stormy one, however, and five MLB

work stoppages occurred while he was at the helm. In a memorable confrontation, Kuhn rejected player Curt Flood’s objection to a 1969 reserve clause that tied a player to a team until

the

team

released

him,

which

prompted Flood to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Flood’s antitrust 137

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Robert Gilhooly—epa/Corbis

litigation challenging the reserve clause was unsuccessful but led ultimately to the clauses demise. Kuhn was at the forefront of the movement to bring night games to the World Series, an action that resulted in millions of dollars in TV and advertising revenue. He was also noted for the many fines and suspensions he imposed, including a twoyear suspension (reduced to 15 months)

for New

York Yankee

formation about the molecular structure of various solids and liquids. Lauterbur realized that if the magnetic field was deliberately made nonuniform, information contained in the signal distortions could be used to create two-dimensional images of a sample's internal structure. This discovery laid the groundwork for the development of MRI as Mansfield transformed Lauterbur' work into a practical medical tool. Noninvasive and lacking the harmful side effects of X-ray and computed tomography (CT) examinations, MRI became widely used in medicine.

owner

George Steinbrenner and fines on Oakland Athletics owner Charles O. Finley and Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner. Kuhn barred superstars Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle in 1979 and 1983, respectively, for their promotional work

L'Engle, Madeleine (MADELEINE L'EN-

with a casino, but both bans were lifted in 1985. For almost 20 years prior to his appointment as commissioner,

Kuhn was among the National League's attorneys. After he left baseball, he returned to the legal profession. He was elected in December to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

GLE

CAMP;

MADELEINE

American author (b. Nov. 29, 1918, New York, N.Y.—d. Sept. 6, 2007, Litch-

field, Conn.), wrote imaginative juvenile literature that was often concerned with such themes as the conflict of good and evil, the nature of God, indi-

Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa

vidual responsibility, and family life. In her best-known

Kurokawa,

Kisho

(NORIAKI

KURO-

KAWA), Japanese architect (b. April 8, 1934, Nagoya, Japan—d. Oct. 12, 2007, Tokyo, Japan), was a cofounder (1960)

of the Metabolist movement, a Japanese-based group of radical architects, and emerged during the 1960s and ‘70s as one of the group’s most radical members. He studied architecture under Kenzo Tange at the University of Tokyo

(M.A.,

1959; Ph.D.,

City Museum of Contemporary Art (1988-89), it was the first art museum

built there since World War II. From the late 1980s, Kurokawa increasingly received international commissions, including Melbourne Central (1986-91),

an office and retail space in Australia; the Sporting Club (1987-90) in Chicago; and an addition to the Van Gogh

Museum

(1990-98)

in Amster-

dam. In his later work he emphasized 138

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

that buildings could have a multiplicity of influences, a philosophy given form in his design for the Kuala Lumpur International

Airport

(1992-98).

Kuro-

kawa’s numerous books on architecture included Metabolism in Architecture (1977), Rediscovering Japanese Space (1988), and Kisho Kurokawa: From the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life

(1998).

Lauterbur,

chemist

Paul Christian,

(b.

May

6,

1929,

American

Sidney,

Ohio—d. March 27, 2007, Urbana, Ill.),

won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2003, together with British physicist Sir Peter Mansfield, for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a computerized scanning technology that produces images of internal body structures, especially those comprising soft tissues. Lauterbur received

a Ph.D.

(1962) in chem-

istry from the University of Pittsburgh. He served as a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1969 to 1985, when he accepted the position of professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of its Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory. In the early 1970s Lauterbur began using nuclear magnetic

resonance

(NMR),

which

is

the selective absorption of very-highfrequency radio waves by certain atomic nuclei subjected to a strong stationary magnetic field. NMR is a key tool in chemical analysis, using the absorption measurements

to provide in-

work,

the

1963

New-

bery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time (1962), LEngle introduced a group of young children who engage in a cosmic battle against a great evil that abhors individuality. Their story continues in A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and Many Waters (1986). L'Engle attended boarding schools in Europe and the United States and graduated with honours from

1964) after

receiving his undergraduate degree from Kyoto University in 1957). Believing in a machine-age aesthetic, the Metabolists favoured prefabrication and mass-produced architectural elements. Kurokawa became an advocate for buildings with a central core onto which modules and capsules could be attached. He realized this organic view of architecture in buildings such as the Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970-72) in Tokyo and the Sony Tower (1972-76) in Osaka. In the 1980s Kurokawa lost interest in the radically futuristic aspects of the Metabolist movement and sought to create work with a deeper sense of meaning. When he built the Hiroshima

FRANKLIN),

Smith

College (B.A.,

pursued a career in publishing her first Rain (1945), a novel pianist who chooses sonal relationships. first children’s

book,

1941). She

the theatre before book, The Small about an aspiring her art over perAfter writing her And

Both

Were

Young (1949), she began a series of juvenile fictional works about the Austin family—Meet the Austins (1960), The Moon by Night (1963), The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas (1964), The Young Unicorns (1968), and A Ring of Endless Light (1980). LEngle also wrote several books of fiction and poetry for adults. She discussed her life and writing career in A Circle of Quiet (1972), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1977), Walking on Water (1980), and Two Part Invention (1988). Levin, Ira Marvin, American author (b. Aug. 27, 1929, New York, N.Y.—d. Nov. 12, 2007, New York City), thrilled

readers with his best-selling Gothic and suspense novels, most famously A Kiss Before Dying (1953) Rosemarys Baby (1967), and The Stepford Wives (1972).

Obituaries

Though his works were not considered fine literature, they were page-turners, and nearly all of them were adapted into films, which in turn served as in-

spiration for a spate of sequels and other horror movies. Levin wrote only seven novels in 40 years, but he also produced a number of plays, notably Deathtrap, which ran for nearly 1,800 performances on Broadway and was later made into a film. In 2003 the Mystery Writers of America conferred on him the Grand Master Award. LeWitt,

Sol

(SOLOMON

LEWITT),

American

sculptor,

printmaker,

and

draftsman Conn.—d.

(b. Sept. 9, 1928, Hartford, April 8, 2007, New York,

N.Y.) was credited with helping to usher in conceptual art and minimalism as major movements of the postWorld War II era with wall drawings that featured basic geometric forms (the triangle, sphere, or quadrilateral) and four basic colours (red, yellow, blue, and black); he allowed his assis-

tants to execute his works from written instructions that resulted in one-of-akind creations that might be erased when the walls on which they were painted were primed for another exhibition. LeWitt’s sculptures—or structures, as he preferred to refer to them— were often made of baked white enamel cubes and included such clas-

casinos, several hotels, a theme park, a

golf course, and a convention centre. The government of Malaysia honoured Lim with the title Tan Sri in 1979. Lépez Michelsen, Alfonso, Colombian politician (b. June 30, 1913, Bogota, Colom.—d. July 11, 2007, Bogotá), won

election in 1974 as president of the country in a landslide victory for the centrist Liberal Party and took immediate steps to curb inflation and raise taxes on high incomes. The elimination of price subsidies and a rise in unemployment, however, led to a surge in labour unrest, land seizures by peasants, and guerrilla activity, and in 1975 López Michelsen declared a state of siege. By the end of his term in 1978, the López Michelsen government was being accused of corruption involving the illegal-drug trade and of taking repressive measures to deal with a wave of political violence. He stood again in the 1982 presidential election but lost to Conservative candidate Belisario Betancur. López Michelsen was the son of Alfonso López Pumarejo, who twice served (1934-48 and 1942-45) as pres-

ident of Colombia. After leaving politics López Michelsen was a political analyst for El Tiempo newspaper and was often called upon as an unofficial mediator for the government in conflicts involving various Colombian armed factions.

sics as Forty-seven Three-Part Variations

on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967;

Loyde,

Lobby

reconstructed in 1974, with 56 variations), Large Modular Cube (1969), and

LYDE),

Australian

Cubes with Hidden Cubes (1977). After LeWitt moved from New York to Italy during the 1980s, his style took a radical shift. He began using colour prodigiously; he added ink washes, which allowed him to create new colours; and

he introduced curves and free forms. His later works were shown at a 2000 retrospective that was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to several major cities, including New York City and Chicago. Lim Goh Tong, Malaysian entrepreneur

(JOHN rock

BASLINGTON musician

(b.

May 18, 1951, Longreach, Queen., Aus-

tralia —d. April 21, 2007, Melbourne,

Australia), championed the loud, aggressive musical style that dominated

Australian pub rock and influenced such heavy metal bands as AC/DC and the American punk rockers Nirvana. Loyde fronted his own alternative bands—Purple Hearts and the psychedelic Wild Cherries—before joining (1969) the Aztecs,

led by fellow rock

icon Billy Thorpe (q.v.), who credited Loyde with giving the band’s sound a harder edge. In 1972 Loyde left the Aztecs to found the more intense Coloured Balls, but two years later he moved to the U.K., where he joined the punk rock scene. After returning to Melbourne in the late 1970s, he played with Southern Electric, Rose Tattoo, Dirt, and the re-formed Coloured Balls.

Loyde also recorded solo albums, notably Obsecration

(1976),

and

in the

1980s served as record producer for the Sunnyboys, Painters and Dockers, and other groups. Loyde was inducted into the Australian Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 2006. Lustiger,

Jean-Marie

Cardinal

(AARON LUSTIGER), French cleric (b. Sept. 17, 1926, Paris, France—d. Aug. 5, 2007, Paris), converted from Judaism

to Roman Catholicism at the age of 13 and went on to become archbishop (1981-2005)

of Paris, the head of the

Roman Catholic Church in France. Lustiger always thought of himself as a Jew and worked throughout his career for Jewish-Christian reconciliation. At the same time, he was theologically conservative and sought to reenergize the church

in France;

in 1997 he or-

ganized a World Youth Day in Paris.

Australian pub rock musicians Lobby Loyde (right) and Billy Thorpe (q.v.)

Chinese-born (b. April 16,

1917, Anxi, Fujian province, China—d. Oct. 23, 2007, Subang Jaya, Selangor,

Malay), built the highly successful Genting Highlands casino and resort a short distance from Kuala Lumpur and diversified his holdings into a worldwide empire worth more than $4 billion. He founded the Genting Group in 1965 to build the hilltop resort, which opened with a single hotel in 1971 and expanded to include, in addition to Bob King—Corbis

139

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Michael Salas—Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Shortly before the German occupation

In 1977 the two men and Heeger, collaborating at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to introduce impurities into the polymer much as in the doping process used to tailor the conductive properties of semiconductors. Doping with iodine increased polyacetylene’s electrical conductivity by a

of France in 1940, his Polish Jewish im-

migrant family sent him to take refuge with a Roman Catholic family in Orléans, and Lustiger was baptized there. He was ordained a priest in 1954 and appointed bishop of Orléans in 1979. Pope John Paul II named him to the College of Cardinals in 1983. Lustiger was elected in 1995 to the Académie

factor of 10 million, which made it as

conductive as some metals. The discovery led scientists to uncover other conductive polymers. These polymers contributed to the emerging field of molecular electronics.

Française.

MacCready,

Paul

Beattie,

American

aerodynamicist (b. Sept. 29, 1925, New Haven, Conn.—d. Aug. 28, 2007, Pasadena, Calif.), headed a team that

designed and built both the first manpowered aircraft and the first solar powered aircraft capable of sustained flights. MacCready was a national champion model-plane builder in the 1930s and received his pilot’s license at the age of 16. He graduated with a B.S. degree in physics (1947) from Yale University and earned an M.S. degree in physics (1948) and a Ph.D. in aeronautics (1952) from the California Institute

of Technology. MacCready started sailplaning in 1947 and was American soaring champion in 1948, 1949, and 1953 and international champion in 1956. From 1970 he headed his own firm,

AeroVironment,

in

Pasadena,

Calif., working on the improvement of air quality, the conservation of energy, and the derivation of power from wind and water. On Aug. 23, 1977, at Shafter Airport near Bakersfield, Calif., Mac-

Cready's Gossamer Condor, pedaled and piloted by Bryan Allen, a bicyclist and hang-glider enthusiast, completed the course required to win the Kremer Prize of £50,000 (then about $95,000).

The total distance flown was

1.85 km

(1 km - about 0.62 mi) in 6 min 27.05

sec. The 32-kg (1 kg = about 2.2 Ib) plane had a 29-m (1 m = about 3.3 ft)

wingspan. Allen pedaled and piloted a more streamlined MacCready plane, the Gossamer Albatross, on June 12, 1979, from near Folkestone, Kent, Eng., to Cape

tance

Gris-Nez,

France,

of 37 km, in 2 hr 49 min.

a dis-

This

Macquarrie, the Rev. John, British theologian (b. June 27, 1919, Renfrew, Scot.—d. May 28, 2007, Oxford, Eng.),

American engineer Paul Beattie MacCready with some of his inventions

Scot. He was ordained in 1945, and after

serving as an army chaplain (1945-48) speed of about 48 km/h and a cruising altitude of 3,350 m. The plane, piloted by Stephen Ptacek, was powered by

140

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

turned to Glasgow to complete his Ph.D. (1954). He remained

there on the fac-

nion), and in 1965 he was ordained an

to maximizing bicycle speed. In 1991 MacCready was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Episcopal priest. He served as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and

connected

to

two

electric motors, weighed 95 kg, and had a wingspan of 14.3 m. MacCready’s later inventions included Sunraycer, a solar-powered car that in 1987 won a 3,006-km

race

in Australia.

He

was

canon

of

Christ

Church,

Oxford

awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 (together with Alan J. Heeger

(1970-86), before taking the post of Martin Heidegger Professor of Philosophical Theology at the Graduate Theological Foundation in South Bend, Ind., where the John Macquarrie Library was established in early 2007. Macquarrie’s seminal works included

and Hideki Shirakawa) for the discov-

his doctoral

ery that certain plastics can be chemically modified to conduct electricity almost as readily as metals. After earning Ph.D.’s in chemistry at the University

tialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (1955; reprinted 1979); the expansive Twentieth Century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology (1963; rev. 1981); Studies in Christian Existentialism (1965); and Principles of Christian Theology (1966; rev. 1979). He also translated Martin Heidegger’s Being and

MacDiarmid, Alan Graham, New Zealand-born American chemist (b. April 14, 1927, Masterton, N.Z—d. Feb. 7, 2007, Drexel Hill, Pa.), was

of Wisconsin

at Madison

(1953)

and

MacDiarmid

258 km, in 5 hr 23 min at an average

he re-

Powered Vehicle Association, dedicated

cells

7, 1981, the Solar Challenger,

Air Force Base, in Kent, a distance of

(1948-53),

president of the International Human

solar

the University of Cambridge (1955), MacDiarmid joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, becoming full professor in 1964 and Blanchard Professor of Chemistry in 1988. During a visit to Japan in the mid-1970s,

powered plane designed by MacCready, flew from the Pointoise Cormeilles airport, near Paris, to the Manston Royal

and parish minister

ulty until 1962, when he was named a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. While in the U.S., Macquarrie converted from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland to the Episcopal Church (part of the Anglican Commu-

16,128

flight won the £100,000 Kremer Prize for the first man-propelled flight across the English Channel. The plane had a wingspan of 28.6 m, weighed 32 kg, and was constructed of Mylar, polystyrene, and carbon-fibre rods. On July a solar-

melded existential philosophy with orthodox Christian thought to create a structural and systematic analysis of Christian theology. Macquarrie studied philosophy (M.A., 1940) and divinity (B.D., 1943) at the University of Glasgow,

met

Shirakawa,

who

re-

ported that he and his colleagues had synthesized polyacetylene, a polymer that was known to exist as a black powder, into a metallic-looking material that still behaved as an insulator.

dissertation,

An

Existen-

Time (1962; reissued 1973). Madilu System (JEAN BIALU MADILU),

Congolese musician (b. May 28, 1950, Matadi, Belgian Congo—d. Aug. 11, 2007,

Kinshasa,

Dem.

Rep.

of the

Congo), was a singer and a composer who reached near legendary status in

Obituaries

Africa, notably in duets with Franco Luambo Makiadi, including "Mario" and "Reponse de Mario" in 1985 and "La Vie des hommes" in 1986. Madilu's career in music began in 1969, but he achieved wide fame as a distinctive vocalist and composer after he was discovered by Franco, founder and leader of the long-renowned TP OK Jazz band. After Francos death in 1989, Madilu embarked on a successful solo career,

releasing several well-received albums; the final one, La Bonne

Humeur,

was

released in July 2007.

Kubitschek, but when a military coup ousted Kubitschek from office, Magalhades supported the military, which rewarded him with the mayoralship of Salvador. In 1985, after 21 years of military rule, Magalhães switched his alliance to a civilian presidential candidate and helped found the PFL. As governor of Bahia he secured public funding for roads, buildings, and an airport, but he was branded “Evil Tony” by opposition leaders who suffered under his harsh treatment. A scandal involving the disclosure of electronic voting records forced Magalhães to leave

Madsen, Michael, Haitian business ex-

the Senate

ecutive and politician (b. Aug. 27, 1942,

his seat the following year.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti—d. March 24, 2007, Kenscoff, Haiti), became a pow-

erful figure in Haiti as the founder of the Haitian National Brewery, which introduced the country's first national beer (Prestige), and as the founder in 2004 of

the Haitian Liberal Party, which he launched following the overthrow of Haitian Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Madsen, the grandson of a Danish entrepreneur who arrived in the country in 1889, was a member

of the handful of

families who remained among the richest in Haiti. Madsen studied in France and later attended Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., before returning to Haiti to help run the family firm. Madsen supported the brutal regime of Frangois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier and that of his son, Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"),

and when the latter was overthrown in

in 2001, but he won

back

Mailer, Norman Kingsley, American novelist and journalist (b. Jan. 31, 1923, Long Branch, N.J.—d. Nov. 10, 2007, New York, N.Y.), was best known

for using a form of journalism—called New Journalism—that combines the imaginative subjectivity of literature with the more objective qualities of journalism. Mailer graduated (1943) from Harvard University with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Pacific until 1946. While he was enrolled

at the

Sorbonne,

in Paris,

abuses, but fellow businessmen

main-

Hard-hitting journalist and novelist Norman Mailer

CARLOS

PEIXOTO

DE

(AN-

MAGAL-

1990-94)

Moon

(1970). In 1969 Mailer ran un-

successfully for mayor of New York City. Among his other works were his essay collections The Presidential Papers (1963) and Cannibals and Christians (1966); The Executioners Song (1979), a

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; and Harlots Ghost (1991), a novel focusing on the CIA. Mailer’s final two novels were The Gospel According to the Son (1997) and The Castle in the Forest (2007). In 2003 Mailer published two works of nonfiction: The Spooky Art and Why Are We at War? On God

(2007)

recorded

about religion between scholar Michael Lennon.

conversations

Mailer

and

Maiman, Theodore Harold, American

vice that produces monochromatic coherent light, or light in which the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase. The laser found numerous practical uses, ranging from delicate surgery to measurement of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. After

Laboratories,

LLC), where

he became interested in a device developed and built by Charles H. Townes and colleagues and known as a maser (acronym for “microwave [or molecular] amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”). Maiman

pragmatic power broker who became a regional force as the governor and

a National Book Award. Other works in the journalistic vein included Siege of Chicago (1968) and Of a Fire on the

(now HRL

1927, Salvador, Bahia state, Braz.—d. July 20, 2007, Sado Paulo, Braz.), was a

1979-83,

a Pulitzer Prize and

with the Hughes Research Laboratories

HAES), Brazilian politician (b. Sept. 4,

(1970-74,

obedience; it won

receiving a Ph.D. (1955) from Stanford University, Maiman accepted a position

to 1,500,000 cases, 98% of which were Prestige.

TONIO

same respect for his fiction that he received for his journalism. The Armies of the Night (1968) was based on the Washington peace demonstrations of October 1967, during which Mailer was jailed and fined for an act of civil dis-

Calif.—d. May 5, 2007, Vancouver, B.C.), constructed the first laser, a de-

tomed to drinking rum, Madsen was able to boost the annual consumption of beer from about 30,000 cases of imports

Carlos,

the

long essay The White Negro (1957). Mailer's subsequent novels included An

destitute Haitians. In a country accus-

António

readers, Mailer did not command

physicist (b. July 11, 1927, Los Angeles,

tained that he provided needed jobs for

Magalháes,

figure whose egotism and belligerence often antagonized both critics and

wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948), hailed immediately as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II. His next important work was a

1986, Madsen's warehouses were looted.

Madsen’s labour practices came under international scrutiny for human rights

he

American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). A controversial

made

de-

sign innovations that greatly increased the practicability of the solid-state maser. He then set out to develop an

of

Bahia state and established a national foothold as the leader of the right-wing Liberal Front Party (PFL) and as pres-

optical maser,

or laser, which is based

on the maser principle but produces visible light rather than microwaves. He operated the first successful laser in 1960 and two years later established Korad Corp. for research, development, and manufacture of lasers. Maiman

ident (1997-2001) of the federal Senate.

Though a physician by profession, Magalháes entered politics in the 1950s as a protégé of Brazilian Pres. Juscelino Sara Krulwich—The New York Times/Redux

141

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

later sold Korad and worked as a consultant at TRW, a technology corporation. His autobiography, The Laser Odyssey, was published in 2000.

Irish music” as he popularized and re-

Award. An extremely prolific director of

juvenated

both feature and Mann collaborated

traditional,

often

sombre,

Celtic music in the U.S. and throughout the world during the 1960s. Makem, the son of traditional Irish vo-

rules

calist Sarah Makem, immigrated to the

football player (b. Dec. 27, 1965, Ger-

U.S. in 1955 to become an actor, but he

aldton, W.Aus., Australia—d. Oct. 1, 2007, Perth, Australia), was one of the Australian Football League (AFL) West

found greater success as a singer, teaming up with the Irish-born Liam, Tom, and Paddy Clancy to form the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. After recording their first two albums, The Rising of the Moon: Irish Songs of Re-

Mainwaring,

Chris,

Australian

Coast Eagles’ most popular and consistent players. During his 13 seasons (1987-99) with the team,

Mainwaring

scored 84 goals in 201 games (including premierships in 1992 and 1994). He played for the Geraldton Rovers of the Great Northern Football League and the East Fremantle Sharks of the Western Australian Football League before being selected as one of the inaugural members of the Perth-based Eagles when the club was formed in 1986. He briefly returned to East Fremantle before retiring in 1999 to work as a radio and television sports journalist. He was a member of the AFL All-Australian squad in 1991 and 1996 and served on the All-Australian selection committee in 2007. Mainwaring, who had been struggling with depression and other personal problems, died of an apparent drug-related heart attack. Makem,

Tommy

(THOMAS

JAMES

MAKEM ), Irish folk musician (b. Nov. 4,

1932, Keady, County Armagh, N.Ire.— d. Aug.

1, 2007, Dover,

the sobriquet

N.H.), earned

"godfather

of modern

evision and film producer (b. May 30, 1915, New York, N.Y.—d. Sept. 28, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), was the creator and sole producer (1956-58) of

(1956-61),

(1975-88) with Liam Clancy before re-

verting to solo work. Makem was awarded the World Folk Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999,

Malietoa Tanumafili II, Samoan head of state (b. Jan. 4, 1912—d. May 11, 2007, Apia, Samoa), was the world’s

oldest reigning monarch and the third longest serving (after King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand and the U.K.’s

a 90-minute

dramatic

anthology series that won

live

six Emmy

Awards in its first season, five of them

for writer Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” starring Jack Palance. Manulis was credited with attracting superb

writers,

directors,

and

actors

even with a limited budget. Under Manulis’s leadership, Playhouse 90 claimed five Emmys in its second season; the show was named outstanding drama four times, twice during Manulis’s tenure. Some of his standout episodes included “The Miracle Worker” and “The Comedian.” He was also involved in the production of TV’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and of the acclaimed film Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

Queen Elizabeth II). He studied in New

Zealand at St. Stephen's College and Wesley College and succeeded to the chiefly title Malietoa after his father, Malietoa Tanumafili I, died in 1939. He

Marceau, Marcel (MARCEL MANGEL), French mime (b. March 22, 1923, Strasbourg, France—d. Sept. 22, 2007, Cahors, France), revived interest in the

1997) achieved independence, and he presided as lone head of state for life after Tupua died in 1963. Samoa’s con-

ancient art of mime through his silent portrayals executed with eloquence, deceptive simplicity, and balletic grace. His most celebrated characterization was the white-faced Pierrot-like Bip— first presented in 1947. Marceau was born into a Jewish family, and during World War II he changed his surname to Marceau and became active in the Resistance. He later studied at the School of Dramatic Art of the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris and with

stitution,

pantomimist

New

Zealand

colonial

administration,

represented Samoan interests at the UN in 1958, and played a large role in the independence negotiations with New Zealand. Malietoa became joint

Western

Samoa

(renamed

however,

Samoa

determined

in

that

Malietoa’s successor would be chosen by the elected legislature and appointed to a five-year term. Mann, Delbert Martin, Jr., American film and television director (b. Jan. 30, 1920, Lawrence, Kan.—d. Nov. 11,

2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), applied the low-budget intimacy of television to the big screen in film adaptations of such teleplays as Marty (1955) and The Bachelor Party (1957), both classics created

by playwright Paddy Chayefsky. Marty, a sleeper hit, won Mann an Academy

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Manulis, Martin Ellyot, American tel-

with Us (1959), the group soared to stardom in 1961 when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. Later that year Makem also produced his debut solo album, The Songs of Tommy Makem. He left the group in 1969 to perform on his own, but he reunited

Tupua Tamasese Meaole, in 1962 when

142

house, an acclaimed live broadcast. He also served (1969-71) as president of the Directors Guild of America.

more than 60 segments of Playhouse 90

head of state (O le Ao o le Malo), with

Janet Knott—Boston Globe/Landov

dramas for the Philco Television Play-

bellion (1956) and Come Fill Your Glass

was appointed (1940) an adviser to the The "godfather of modern Irish music" Tommy Makem

television movies, on more than 100

Etienne

Decroux.

After

his first success, the role of Arlequin in the pantomime Baptiste, Marceau con-

centrated completely on pantomime and formed a mime troupe. Worldwide acclaim came in the 1950s with his production of a “mimodrama” of Nikolay Gogols “The Overcoat” and with successful personal appearances. Thereafter he toured internationally, and in 1978 he founded a school of mimodrama in Paris. Marceau also acted in several movies, including Barbarella (1968)

and

Silent

Movie

(1976),

in

which he had the only spoken dialogue.

Obituaries Catherine Cabrol—Kipa/Corbis

tainment. McNair was a_ nightclub singer in the late 1950s and 1960s. Her first role in a Broadway musical was in The Body Beautiful (1958); she also appeared in No Strings (1962) and a revival of The Pajama Game (1973). Among her recordings, her biggest hit was the 1966 single “You’re Gonna Love My Baby.” In movies McNair appeared in the Elvis Presley vehicle Change of Habit (1969) and opposite Sidney Poitier in They Call Me MISTER

Tibbs! (1970). car

driver

(b. Aug.

5,

the world

rally champithe

a fierce and fearless

1987 and 2004, becom-

ing British rally champion twice (1991 and 1992) and narrowly finishing as the WRC season runner-up three times from the WRC circuit, he participated in the Paris-Dakar Rally twice (2004

1997, and 2001). After retiring

and 2005) and the 2004 Le Mans 24Hour Race, among other events. McRae was made MBE in 1996. Two years

records for 440 yd in 1947 (46.3 sec) and 1948 (46 sec). At both the 1948 and

later he was the inspiration for the popular video game Colin McRae Rally. He was killed, along with his young son

1952. Olympic Games, McKenley claimed the silver medal in the 400-m

British rally champion Colin McRae

he also won

silver in the 100-m event and anchored Jamaica’s gold-medal-winning 4 x 400m relay team. He competed for a year professionally after ending his amateur career in 1953. McKenley served as coach (1954-73)

of Jamaica’s

of Jamaica’s

a new

1978, Menotti

2002). also

cast

A

three

times

prolific

wrote

ballets,

(1963,

composer, cantatas,

symphonic works, and chamber music. He studied at the Milan Conservatory and at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia (1928-33), where he met Samuel Barber, who became his com-

panion and frequent collaborator. Although the pair settled in the U.S., Menotti retained his Italian citizenship. In 1958 he established the Festival of Two Worlds—better known as the Spoleto Festival—in Spoleto, Italy. He cofounded Spoleto Festival USA, an American branch of the summer music and drama festival, in Charleston, S.C.,

in 1977. The Australian Spoleto Festival, staged by Menotti for three years (1986-88), later became the Melbourne

International Arts Festival.

national

track and field team and as president (1978-84)

(1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). His most beloved work, how-

with

he was

track athlete

race. At the 1952 Games,

libretti),

races between

1995;

(1996,

premier 400-m runners of his generation, setting a world record of 45.9 sec in the event in 1948. He also set world

English

competitor, won a then-record 25 WRC

in

McKenley, Herb(ert) Henry, Jamaican 1922, Clarendon, Jam.—d. Nov. 26, 2007, Kingston, Jam.), was one of the

his own

ever, was Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), the story of a lame shepherd boy who gives his crutch to the Three Wise Men asa gift for the Christ child. Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera composed for television, was rebroadcast in the U.S. at Christmas for many years and was revived for TV

(WRC)

youngest driver and the first from the U.K. to take the WRC season title. The son of five-time British rally champion Jimmy McRae, he began driving competitively in 1985 and won his first rally

(b. July 10,

operas that represented a successful combination of 20th-century dramatic situations with the traditional form of Italian opera. He used largely traditional harmonies, while resorting occasionally to dissonance and polytonality to heighten dramatic effect. Menotti composed more than a dozen operas produced several on Broadway, and won Pulitzer Prizes for The Consul

race

in 1988. McRae,

coach

Feb. 1, 2007, Monaco), created realistic

Scottish

onship

and

(b. July 7, 1911, Cadegliano, Italy—d.

(most with

Scot.), won

He retired from performing in 2005. The recipient of numerous honours, Marceau in 1970 was made an officer of the Legion of Honour.

Menotti, Gian Carlo, Italian composer

McRae, Colin (COLIN STEELE MCRAE), 1968, Lanark, Scot —d. Sept. 15, 2007, near Jerviswood, South Lanarkshire,

French mime Marcel Marceau

and two other passengers, when the helicopter that he was piloting crashed.

Amateur

Meredith, William Morris, Jr., American poet (b. Jan. 9, 1919, New York, N.Y.—d. May 30, 2007, New London, Conn.), was awarded (1988) a Pulitzer Prize for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987), a collection that showcased his formal and unadorned

Ath-

letic Association. He was the recipient of both the Order of Merit and the Order of Jamaica. McNair, Barbara Joan, American singer and actress (b. March 4, 1934, Chicago, Ill.—d. Feb. 4, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), starred (1969-71) in the

verse, which was compared to that of Robert Frost. Meredith attended Princeton University (A.B., 1940), where he

television variety program The Barbara McNair Show as well as movies and stage shows and was a recording artist during the 1960s and early 1970s. She was in the vanguard of black performers who broke into mainstream enter-

first began to write poetry and later taught. In 1955 he joined the faculty of Connecticut College, where he remained until 1983, when he suffered a

severe stroke that affected not only his ability to speak but also his ability to use Pascal Guyot—AFP/Getty Images

143

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

language. From 1978 to 1980 he was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (now the poet laureate consultant in poetry). Meredith's first collection, Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), drew on his experiences in the

Pacific praise Ships based

during World War for its eloquence and Other Figures on his experiences

II and won and honesty. (1948) was in the navy,

and several of Meredith's

later works,

such as The Open Sea, and Other Poems (1958) and The Wreck of the Thresher, and Other Poems (1964), also deal with nautical themes and use the sea as a metaphor. Meredith eventually regained his language skills, and Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems (1997) received a National Book Award. His prose works included two lectures he delivered as poetry consultant, published as Reasons for Poetry & The Reason for Criticism (1982), and Poems Are Hard to Read (1991). He translated poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire in Alcools: Poems, 1878-1913 (1964), and he contributed, with Richard Harteis, to The White Island (1998-2000), a bilingual collection of English and Bulgarian poetry.

wife of Jim Bakker and as his cohost on the televised Jim and Tammy Show, which was syndicated on the Praise the Lord Network, founded by the couple in 1974. She was renowned for using heavy makeup and especially for applying mounds of mascara that would flow down her cheeks as she routinely broke down on camera in her prayful appeals. The couple built a $125 million empire that included Heritage USA, a religious theme park, and were often criticized for their lavish spending. In 1987 they lost their TV ministry following a series of sex and money scandals. She and Bakker divorced three years after he was convicted in 1989 of having bilked followers of $158 John Heller—WireImage/Getty Images

eration Urgent Fury, but he succeeded in pulling together some 6,000 troops, which, in just three days, successfully secured the island nation and seized the coup leader, Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard. Among Metcalfs many decorations

French

Pierre

Metzger, Bruce Manning, American biblical scholar (b. Feb. 9, 1914, Middletown, Pa.—d. Feb. 13, 2007, Princeton, N.J.), oversaw the publication (1990) of the New Revised Standard

Version of the Bible—admired for its integrity, accuracy, and elegance—and wrote many books, some of which were regarded as standards in the field of textual criticism. Metzger taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1940, becoming George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature in 1964. He was a member

of the Greek New Testament Project. His books included The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (1964), The Early

Joseph,

Origin,

of the New Transmission,

Testament: and

Their

Limitations

(1977), and Breaking the Code: Under-

politician (b. March 20, 1916, Vincennes, France—d. Aug. 29, 2007, Paris, France), was minister for the armed forces (1960-69) under Pres.

standing the Book of Revelation (1993), and he was coeditor of The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993).

Charles de Gaulle and later prime min-

Michaels, James Walker, American magazine editor (b. June 17, 1921, Buffalo, N.Y.—d. Oct. 2, 2007, New York,

(1972-74)

administrator

Star, the

and

ister

Gaullist

August

the Bronze

Defense Superior Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit.

Versions Messmer,

were

under

Pres.

Georges

Pompidou. Messmer trained as a lawyer and colonial administrator. Af ter France fell to the invading Germans in 1940, however, he became

N.Y.), was credited with having transformed the reporting of business journalism during his service as editor

a hero of

the Resistance, fighting with de Gaulle’s Free French across the Middle East and participating in the liberation of Paris in 1944. After the war he held several posts in colonial administration before de Gaulle appointed him armed forces minister. In that post Messmer helped quell an attempted coup by far-right army officers in 1961 during Algeria’s war for independence from France. He also oversaw development of France’s nuclear weapons program. Messmer left the cabinet after Pompidou’s death

American televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker Messner

in 1974, but he remained active in neo-

Metcalf, Joseph, III, vice admiral (ret.), U.S. Navy (b. Dec. 20, 1927, Holyoke, Mass.—d. March 2, 2007, Washington, D.C.), commanded the

Gaullist party politics. He was elected to the French Academy in 2000. Messner,

LAVALLEY: American

Tammy

Faye (TAMMY

TAMMY

FAYE

televangelist

FAYE

BAKKER),

(b. March

7,

1942, International Falls, Minn.—d. July 20, 2007, near Kansas City, Mo.), was best remembered as the diminutive 144

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(1961—99) of Forbes magazine. Michaels

million. In 1993 she married Roe Messner, a wealthy contractor behind Heritage USA. Although in later years her lifestyle was often parodied on TV, she handled the satire good-naturedly. In her memoir J Will Survive...and You Will, Too! (2003), she spoke candidly about her battle with colon cancer.

full-scale Grenada

U.S. on

military Oct.

25,

invasion 1983,

after

of a

bloody Marxist coup resulted in the execution of the country’s prime minister and 15 of his supporters. Metcalf had less than 36 hours to prepare for Op-

demanded tight, original reporting with a strong and independent point of view, in contrast to the polite stance that was previously in vogue. He was known as an incisive, almost ruthless editor who

personally reviewed much of what appeared in the magazine. Michaels began his career in journalism as a reporter for United Press International in India and in 1954 became a reporter with Forbes. Miller, Stanley, American chemist (b. March 7, 1930, Oakland, Calif.—d. May 20, 2007, National City, Calif.), designed

the first experiment to produce organic molecules from some of the inorganic components of the Earth's prebiotic atmosphere. Millers procedure (which was co-designed by Harold Urey and is known as the Miller-Urey experiment) contained three key elements: a heated

Obituaries Jim Sugar/Corbis

party, and briefly (June 1991-September 1992) prime minister. Milongo pursued advanced studies in France, returning to Brazzaville in 1964 with degrees from the University of Nancy and the National School of Administration. He served

(1964-69)

as Congo’s

national

of water

vapour

methane,

ammonia,

and molecular hydrogen; and storms of "lightning" in the form of continuous electric discharges. After one week, 10-1596 of the system's carbon was found in organic molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Miller's experiment was not only a groundbreaking moment for research into the origin of life on Earth but also a breakthrough that captured the popular imagination and gave rise to the term prebiotic soup. Miller received a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1954. After a one-year fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Miller moved to Columbia University, New York City, for five years and then to the University of California, San Diego, where he remained for the rest of his career. Miller became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and in 1983 was awarded the Oparin Medal by the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Milongo,

André,

Congolese politician

(b. Oct. 20, 1935, Mankondi, near Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa [now

in Republic

of the Congo]—d.

July

22-23, 2007, Paris, France), was a key

figure in his countrys move to independence (1960), leader of the opposition Union for Democracy and Republic

(1991-93) as prime minister of Japan but was unable to unite or control the warring factions within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) or to implement promised

however,

cured his first cabinet position, as director general of the Economic Planning Agency. Subsequently Miyazawa served as minister of international

and was

named

to head the

Mitchell, Parren James, American politician (b. April 29, 1922, Baltimore, Md.—d. May 28, 2007, Baltimore), was

pool of water meant to simulate the primitive Earth's ocean; an atmosphere

(b. Oct. 8, 1919, Tokyo, Japan—d. June 28, 2007, Tokyo), served briefly

treasurer and later joined the boards of governors of the African Development Bank and the World Bank. As transitional prime minister under Denis Sasssou-Nguesso, Milongo laid the groundwork for multiparty elections in 1992. He lost in his own bid for the presidency, National Assembly, where he remained until 1997. Shortly before the 2002 presidential election, Milongo withdrew his candidacy in protest.

Innovative chemist Stanley Miller

Miyazawa, Kiichi, Japanese politician

a liberal Democrat from Maryland who spent eight terms (1971-87) as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and was the first African American since 1898 to be elected to Congress from a state below the Mason and Dixon Line. After losing a U.S. congressional bid in 1968, Mitchell won the seat in 1970. He became a vocal member of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group that formed in 1969, and as head of the Small Business Committee, he was instrumental in es-

tablishing programs owned businesses.

to aid minority-

Miyamoto, Kenji, Japanese politician (b. Oct. 17, 1908, Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan—d.

July 18, 2007,

Tokyo,

Japan), held (1958-77) leadership positions in the Communist Party of Japan (JCP), serving as general secretary

anticorruption

measures.

Miyazawa graduated (1941) in law from Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) and worked (1942-52) as a civilian in the Finance

Ministry. In 1953 he was elected to the Diet (parliament),

and in 1962 he se-

trade and industry (1970-71), of foreign affairs (1974-76), and of finance (1986-88). He also acted as cabinet sec-

retary in the early 1980s and, briefly, as deputy prime minister in Noboru Takeshita’s cabinet. Along with other senior politicians in the ruling LDP, Miyazawa was tainted by the bribery scandals that rocked the Japanese establishment,

and he was

forced to re-

sign as finance minister in December 1988. He soon returned to power, however, and after being elected president of the LDP on Oct. 27, 1991, he took over as prime minister on November 5.

His reascension in the early 1990s tended to mark a return to old-style politics. In June 1993 some LDP factions joined with opposition parties to pass a vote of no confidence. Miyazawa was forced to resign as prime minister, and in the ensuing general elections, the LDP lost control of the Diet for the first time in its 38-year history. He again served as finance minister from 1998 to 2001.

(1958-70) and presidium chairman (1970-97); he renounced violent revolu-

Moiseyev, Igor Aleksandrovich, Russian dancer and choreographer (b. Jan.

tion and instead sought to bring about change by instituting economic, health, and housing reforms. Miyamoto graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) and in 1931 joined the JCP. He spent 12 years in jail after being convicted in 1933 of the beating death of a police officer, a crime he repeatedly denied having committed. Following his release, he was active in the campaign in the 1949 elections, helping the Communists gain 35 seats in the Diet (parliament). At the height of its power in 1979, the JCP commanded 8% of the Diet’s seats. Miyamoto remained opposed to Stalinism and the continued U.S. presence in Japan following World War II.

21 [Jan. 8, Old Style], 1906, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire—d. Nov. 2, 2007, Moscow, Russia), balanced au-

thentic Russian folk dance and unexpected acrobatic elements with traditional ballet techniques as the founding director (from

1937) of the Moiseyev

Ensemble (originally designated the State Academic Folk Dance Ensemble of the U.S.S.R.). Moiseyev spent his early childhood in Paris before studying at the Bolshoi ballet school in Moscow. He graduated to the Bolshoi as a soloist in 1924, but from

1936 he

divided his time between dancing and his position as head of the choreography department at the new Moscow Theatre of Folk Art (which evolved the

145

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries G. Paul Burnett—The New York Times/Redux

next year into the State Academic Folk Dance Ensemble). In 1939 he quit the Bolshoi, though he continued to work with them and with other classical ballet troupes. Moiseyevs many awards in-

Nuxhall pitched that day in the ninth inning of the Reds’ game against the St. Louis Cardinals, giving up five runs before being relieved. He was subsequently sent to the minor leagues but in 1952 rejoined the Reds. He was named an All-Star in 1955 and 1956. Nuxhall was traded to the Kansas City Athletics in 1961 but returned to play

cluded the Lenin Prize (1967) and the Order of Merit (2006), post-Soviet Rus-

sia's highest civilian honour. Morrisseau, Norval (“COPPER THUNDERBIRD”), North American artist (b. March 14, 1931/32?, Sand Point Reserve, Ont.—d. Dec. 4, 2007, Toronto,

for the Reds from 1962 to 1966, when

he ended his playing career. He tallied a career win-loss pitching record of 135-117. Nuxhall was a Reds broadcaster from 1967 until his retirement in

Ont.), was the creator of the pictographic style, which was also known as “Woodland Indian art,” "legend painting,” or “X-ray art.” Morrisseau’s powerful works drew on his Ojibwa heritage and on religious themes (his grandfather, his most important influ-

2004.

O'Brien, (William) Parry American shot-putter (b. Jan. 28, 1932, Santa Monica, Calif.—d. April 21, 2007, Santa

ence, was a shaman, and his grandmother was a Roman Catholic). His

colour-infused works were mainly executed on paper or canvas, using acrylic paint. During the 1970s his imagery began encompassing the supernatural and such Eckankar concepts as soul travel, but he never strayed from his Ojibwa roots. Following his first professional

show

in Toronto

in

1962,

Morrisseau became a central North American figure in the development of indigenous art with works that harkened back to ancient birch-bark scrolls. In 2005 he became a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Murray, Elizabeth, American artist (b. Sept. 6, 1940, Chicago, Ill.—d. Aug. 12, 2007, Granville, N.Y. ), created colour-

infused abstract canvases that blended elements of Surrealism and Cubism with cartoonish elements. Her intricately styled creations gave the illusion of motion and featured flying coffee cups, airborne tables, and Gumby-like forms. Though initially interested in commercial art, Murray was swayed toward painting by a Cézanne still life she passed routinely while pursuing studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a B.A. (1962) in fine arts; she received an M.A. (1964) in fine arts from Mills College, Oakland, Calif.

Together

with

Stella, Brice

Philip

Marden,

Guston, and

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

her work had taken on a lighter tone, and she had begun using white liberally. In 2005-06 she was given a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Muschamp, Herbert Mitchell, American architecture critic (b. Nov. 28, 1947, Philadelphia, Pa.—d. Oct. 2, 2007, New York, N.Y.), was renowned

for the passionate reviews that he wrote for The New Republic and the New

York

Times

(1987-92

and

1992-2004, respectively). In his highly personal style, he exuberantly delineated the emotional qualities evoked by viewing various buildings, and he particularly championed the work of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid before they established their reputations as leading architects.

others, she

from 18 m (59 ft *4 in) to 19.30 m (63

ft 4 in) in that period. In his freshman year at the University of Southern California, O'Brien surpassed all other shot-putters in the school. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, he won the gold medal, setting an Olympic record of 17.41 m. He won 116 straight meet events in the 1950s, including the PanAmerican titles in 1955 and 1959. In 1956 he became the first shot-putter to break 19 m. O'Brien broke the world record 16 times between 1953 and 1959. He won another gold medal at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne and won a silver medal at the 1960 Games

in Rome.

In 1966, in his 19th

season, he improved his distance to 19.69 m. He was inducted into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974 and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1984.

Muschamp was also director (1983-92)

O'Donnell,

of the graduate program in architecture and design criticism at the Parsons School of Design.

DONNELL), American photographer (b.

Frank

expanded the boundaries of the medium during the 1970s, at a time when minimalism flourished. In her early works Murray experimented with monochromatic acrylics on canvasses with rectangular shapes, but by the early 1970s curvy shapes, biomorphic images, and jewel-tone colours in oils distinguished her offerings. By 2000 146

American artist Elizabeth Murray and her subway-station mural

Clarita, Calif), developed a style that revolutionized the event and was ultimately adopted by all shot-putters. The maneuver called for the putter to start with his back to the shot's eventual line of flight and thus turn 180? before the release. He held the world record from 1953 to 1959, increasing the distance

Joe

(JOSEPH

ROGER

O-

May 7, 1922, Johnstown, Pa.—d. Aug. 9, 2007, Nashville, Tenn.), documented

broadcaster (b. July 30, 1928, Hamilton, Ohio—d. Nov. 15, 2007, Fairfield,

the effects of the nuclear bombing in 1945 of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in images that conveyed the widespread devastation. O’Donnell’s official photographs were

Ohio), made his Major League Baseball

taken for the U.S. Marines, but he also

(MLB) debut (on June

amassed a private collection that was shown in Japan in 1995 and appeared

Nuxhall,

HALL),

Joe

(JOSEPH

American

HENRY

NUX-

baseball player and

10, 1944) as a

pitcher with the Cincinnati Reds at the age of 15 years 10 months 11 days, becoming the youngest player to appear in a game in the modern MLB era.

in Japan 1945: A U.S. Marines

Photos

from Ground Zero (2005). In later years O'Donnell, who was haunted by the

Obituaries

memories of his wartime observations and the photos that depicted them, became an activist opposed to the use of nuclear weapons. Oerter,

Al

(ALFRED

OERTER,

JR.),

American discus thrower (b. Sept. 19, 1936, Queens, N.Y.—d. Oct. 1, 2007, Fort Myers, Fla.), won four consecutive

Olympic gold medals (1956, 1960, 1964, and 1968), setting an Olympic record each time; he also set world records four times (1962-64), during

his career. He was the first to throw the discus more than 200 ft with his first world record of 61.10 m (200 ft 5 in).

His best throw in setting a world record was 62.94 m (206 ft 6 in), in 1964; his

best Olympic throw was 64.78 m (212 ft 6 in), in 1968. After taking up weight lifting as a youth to fill out his slender build, Oerter was a football player and sprinter in high school. He discovered his discus-throwing ability when he idly picked up the discus and threw it farther than anyone else on the track team could. He attended the University of Kansas

on a scholarship (1954-58),

and won six national Amateur Athletic Union titles. Oerter retired from Olympic competition after the 1968 Games, but he resumed training in 1976 in an effort to fulfill his dream of winning five Olympic medals. While he narrowly failed to qualify for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, which ultimately did not compete because of a U.S. boycott, he made the longest throw of his career and the world’s longest that year, 69.46 m (227 ft 11 in). Though active at a world-class level into his 40s, he

fell short again in bids for the U.S. Olympic team in 1984 and 1988. He was a world record holder in Masters track-and-field competition in the 1980s. Oerter was in the first class to be

inducted

(1983),

into

the

U.S.

Olympic Hall of Fame. Olds, Robin, brigadier general (ret.), U.S. Air Force (b. July 14, 1922, Honolulu, Hawaii—d. June 14, 2007,

Steamboat Springs, Colo.), was a World War II ace fighter pilot who later flew 152 combat missions during the Vietnam War. Olds was perhaps best known for commanding the air force wing that on Jan. 2, 1967, downed

seven

MiGs

over North Vietnam in the war's biggest air battle. The son of an Army Air Corps (predecessor of the U.S. Air Force), major general, Olds attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point,

where

he earned

All-American

honours in football. After graduating in

1943, he went on to fly 107 combat missions during World War II, shooting down 12 enemy planes. After the war he became a member of the air force’s first jet Aerial Acrobatic Demonstration Team. In 1968 he was awarded the Air Force Cross for his role in the destruction in 1967 of the Paul Doumer Bridge near Hanoi. From 1967 to 1971 Olds served as commandant of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy. After serving two

years

(1971-73),

as

director

Olsen, Tillie (TILLIE LERNER), American author (b. Jan. 14, 1913?, Omaha, Neb.—d. Jan. 1, 2007, Oakland, Calif.),

was known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working women,

and

minorities.

Olsen’s

early adult life was devoted to political activism and to rearing a family. Her first novel, begun at the age of 19, was set aside for 35 years. Though she never finished it, Olsen eventually published the reconstructed manuscript as Yonnondio: From the Thirties in 1974. It tells the story of the Holbrook family, who struggle to survive the Great Depression—working as coal miners, tenant farmers, and meat packers—and finally give in to despair. Olsen’s best-known work, Tell Me a Riddle: A Collection (1961), was a volume of three short stories and a novella, each a mas-

terpiece in its own right. Olsen used rhythmic, metaphoric language to give a voice to otherwise inarticulate characters; her stories captured the tragedy of their lives with poignant clarity. In her later works she addressed feminist themes and concerns, especially as related to women writers. Silences (1978)

contained, among other things, a long essay about the author Rebecca Harding Davis,

whose

career

as

a writer

failed after she married. In 1984 Olsen edited Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: Mothers on Mothering. Ortiz Mena, Antonio, Mexican politician (b. April 16, 1907, Parral, Chihuahua, Mex.—d. March 12, 2007,

Mexico City, Mex.), was credited with fueling Mexico’s phenomenal growth (about 6% annually) while serving as the country’s

finance

minister

its lending

10-fold

(from $4 billion to $40 billion). In ad-

dition, as president he helped diversify financing operations and lobbied for the move by the IDB’s governors to amend the charter to include member countries outside the Western Hemisphere. As a result, membership swelled from 23 countries at the beginning of his tenure to 44 countries in 1987.

of

aerospace safety, Olds retired from the military.

poor,

ble for increasing

(1958-70).

Ortiz Mena, a lawyer by profession, held a variety of government posts before helping to usher in the “Mexican miracle” that elevated millions of Mexicans into the middle class. From 1971 to 1988 he led the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and was responsi-

Ortoli, François-Xavier, French politician (b. Feb. 16, 1925, Ajaccio, Corsica—d. Nov. 30, 2007), was president (1973-77) of the European Commission

(EC; part of what later became the European Union) during a period of social upheaval and the entry of three new member countries (Denmark, Ireland, and the U.K.); he had greater influence, however,

as

(1977-84),

EC

economics

in which

minister

post he laid the

groundwork for the European Monetary System and the ecu (the forerunner of the euro). Ortoli grew up in Hanoi,

French

Indochina

(now

Viet-

nam), and fought in the underground resistance there during World War II. After studying law in Hanoi, he moved to France, where he received a diploma (1948) in finance

from the École Na-

tionale d'Administration. He held several posts in the French government, notably minister of industrial and scientific development

(1969-72),

before

being appointed EC president. In 1984 Ortoli was

named

chairman

of Total,

the partially state-owned oil company. Osman, Aden cian (b. 1908, maliland [now 2007, Nairobi,

Abdullah, Somali politiBelet Weyne, Italian Soin Somalia]—d. June 8, Kenya), served as inde-

pendent Somalia's first president and was the first postcolonial African head of state to voluntarily step down after losing an election. Osman was president of the nationalist Somali Youth League (1954-56 and 1958-60) and of

the Legislative Assembly (later the Constituent Assembly) of the Italian-administered UN trust territory of Somalia (1958-60). After Italian Somaliland

joined with the former British-administered territory to form the independent Somali Republic on July 1, 1960, the National Assembly chose Osman as provisional president. In the country’s first election (1961) under its new con-

stitution, he was elected to a six-year term as president. During Osman’s tenure Somalia had good relations with the Soviet Union, China, and Italy, but

the president struggled to unite Somali147

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

speaking peoples of rival clans in peace and prosperity. When Osman was defeated in the 1967 presidential election, he peacefully handed power over to his

Poland. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Soci-

U.S. security policy, notably the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty (1963) and

ety in 1999.

the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972).

successor.

Paley,

Osterbrock,

writer and poet (b. Dec. 11, 1922, New York, N.Y.—d. Aug. 22, 2007, Thetford Hill, Vt.), was known for her realistic

Donald

Edward,

Ameri-

can astrophysicist (b. 1925, Cincinnati, Ohio—d.

Jan.

11, 2007,

Santa

Cruz,

Calif.), was conducting research as a graduate student when he discovered the spiral-arm structure of the Milky Way, and he later uncovered the processes that show how the Sun retains its shape and size. After joining (1972) the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, he served (1973-81) as director of its Lick Obser-

vatory. Osterbrock was the author of the standard reference work Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae (1974; revised ed., Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei, 2006),

and he was the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Royal Astronomical Societys Gold Medal.

Grace,

American

short-story

seriocomic portrayals of working-class New Yorkers and for her political activism. Paley's first languages were Russian and Yiddish. She attended (1938-39)

Hunter

College,

New

York

City, and then studied with poet W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research, also in New York City. She became involved in the antinuclear movement in the early 1950s and started to write short stories soon thereafter. In 1966 she joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence

College, Bronxville, N.Y. She

was actively involved in the opposition to the Vietnam War and continued her political activism after the war ended,

Parsons, Benny (“B.P.”; “THE PROFESSOR”), American racecar driver (b. July 12, 1941, Wilkes county, N.C.—d. Jan. 16, 2007, Charlotte, N.C.), was named (1988) by the National Association for

Stock Car Auto Racing among the alltime

50 greatest NASCAR

captured 21 NASCAR

drivers. He

titles during his

career (1964 and 1969-88), including two premier races—the Daytona 500 in

1975 and the World 600 in 1980—and was crowned Winston Cup champion in 1973. Parsons, a onetime cab driver,

had a folksy personality that was well suited to his second career as a sports announcer and analyst; in 1996 he won an Emmy Award for his reportage for ESPN. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Stock Car Racing Hall of

turning her attention to U.S.-Soviet relations, Latin America, human rights,

Fame in 1998.

and feminist concerns. Her first volume

Pavarotti,

Paczynski, Bohdan, Polish-born Amer-

of short stories, The Little Disturbances

ican

of Man: Stories of Men and Women

lyric tenor (b. Oct. 12, 1935, Modena, Italy—d. Sept. 6, 2007, Modena), was

astrophysicist

(b. Feb.

8, 1940,

Wilno, Pol. [now Vilnius, Lith.]—d. April 19, 2007, Princeton, N.J.), pio-

neered a novel method for carrying out astronomical observations of distant objects that produce little or no light of their own. The technique makes use of a phenomenon called gravitational microlensing—the focusing of light from a distant object as the light passes through the gravitational field of a nearer object lying directly along the same line of sight. A survey called the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, which he helped establish in the early 1990s, was able to detect small planetlike bodies in orbit around distant stars. Paczynski also made important contributions to the study of stellar evolution, and he was an early proponent of the subsequently confirmed view that the sources of littleunderstood powerful gamma-ray bursts must lie outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Paczynski was raised in Warsaw and as a young teenager had the opportunity to study binary stars at Warsaw University Observatory, where he earned a Ph.D. (1964) in astronomy. Paczynski conducted research and taught at the Institute of Astronomy, Warsaw, later renamed the Copernicus Astronomical

at

Love (1959), was noted for its realistic

dialogue. It was followed by Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), both of which continued her compassionate, often comic, exploration of ordinary individuals struggling against loneliness. All feature the character of Faith,

Paley’s reputed alter ego. The Collected Stories appeared in 1994. Two volumes of her poetry, Leaning Forward (1985) and Begin Again: New and Collected Poems (1992), were followed by Just as I Thought (1998), a collection of her es-

Panofsky, Wolfgang Kurt Hermann (“PIEF”), German-born American particle physicist and arms-control adviser

1982,

when

Concorso

Internazionale,

a

singing

Legendary opera singer Luciano Pavarotti

ing (1942) a Ph.D. from the California

Institute of Technology, worked on the Manhattan

Panofsky Project at

Los Alamos, N.M., and then took a re-

search position at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Stanford University physics faculty in 1951 of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Deeply concerned about the security threat posed by nuclear arms, Panofsky was instrumental in shaping

to

considered one of the finest bel canto opera singers of the 20th century. Even in the highest register, his voice was noted for its purity of tone, while his concerts, recordings, and television appearances—which provided him ample opportunity to display his ebullient personality—gained him a wide popular following. Pavarotti graduated (1955) from a teaching institute in Modena and then taught elementary school for two years. He studied opera privately, mostly in Mantua. After winning the

the building of strong scientific relations with Russia and China to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. After earn-

joined the faculty at Princeton University. Though he became a U.S. citizen in 1991, Paczynski maintained strong professional ties with astronomers in

1962

operatic

(b. April 24, 1919, Berlin, Ger—d. Sept. 24, 2007, Los Altos, Calif.), supported

and later served (1961-84) as director

from

Italian

says, speeches, and other writings.

he

Center,

Luciano

Petros Giannakouris/AP

148

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

competition, he made his professional operatic debut in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 1961. He then played in opera houses throughout Europe and Australia. In 1968 Pavarotti made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and from 1971 he was a regular performer there. He toured the world, performing for as many as

Petersen founded Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines in 1948 and 1949, respectively. The popularity of these magazines grew quickly, and Petersen responded by expanding his media realm to include other specialty magazines, including Car Craft, Rod & Custom, Mo-

ten glib, was nevertheless invariably swinging. In the 1970s he began playing frequent solo concerts and duets, often with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. These proved the most rewarding medium for Peterson’s

torcyclist,

popular jazz pianists of his time. His 1974-75 duet albums with trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Harry Edison, Clark Terry, and Jon Faddis demonstrated generous warmth and sensitivity. Peterson’s recordings won eight Grammy Awards. He was the au-

Guns

& Ammo,

and Photo-

ues, as a solo performer or as one of

graphic. He served as chairman of the board of Petersen Publishing Co. until it was sold in 1996. As a lasting tribute

the

to the

500,000 fans at a time in outdoor ven-

“Three

Tenors”

(with

Placido

Domingo and José Carreras). Among Pavarotti’s many prizes and awards were five Grammy Awards and a Kennedy

Center

Honor

in 2001.

automobile,

Petersen

and

his

wife endowed $30 million to help establish the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

thor of Jazz Exercises and Pieces (1965)

and Oscar Peterson

His

most notable operatic roles included the Duke in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, Tonio in Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (a part remarkable for its demanding sequence of high C’s), and Radamés in Verdi’s Aida. With William Wright he wrote Pavarotti: My Own Story (1981) and Pavarotti: My World

talents, and he became one of the most

Peterson,

Oscar

dian jazz pianist

Emmanuel,

(b. Aug.

Cana-

(1965).

New

Piano

Solos

15, 1925,

Montreal, Que.—d. Dec. 23, 2007, Mississauga, Ont.), was best known for his Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Polanco, Jesús de (JESÚS DE POLANCO GUTIÉRREZ), Spanish media mogul (b. Nov. 7, 1929, Madrid, Spain—d. July 21, 2007, Madrid), cofounded Spain’s

most popular daily newspaper, El País, and built the media empire Promotora

(1995). In 2004 Pavarotti gave his final

de Informaciones

performance on the operatic stage. His last public appearance was in the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, where he sang

ing one of the most powerful and influential men in the country and an ally of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party

his

publishing company Editorial Santillana in 1958. When the government introduced a complete change of curriculum in 1970, Polanco positioned the company to be the only one able to supply the needed textbooks in time. He expanded into Latin America, founding the Timón Group in 1972. Polanco used the profits from his publishing ventures to introduce a liberal newspaper; El País appeared in May

signature

aria,

“Nessun

(PSOE). Polanco founded the textbook-

dorma,”

from Giacomo Puccini's Turandot. Pedersen, Carl-Henning, Danish artist

(b. Sept. 23, 1913, Copenhagen, Den.— d. Feb. 20, 2007, Copenhagen),

significant (1949-51)

figure

was

a

in the short-lived

but influential

COBRA

(an

acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) group of Expressionist painters, with whom he exhibited some of his powerful, brilliantly coloured art. In the early 1970s when Copenhagen declined Pedersen's of-

Grammy Award-winning jazz pianist Oscar Peterson

fered donation of some 3,000 drawings,

paintings, and sculptures because the city had nowhere to house the collection, the town of Herning agreed to build a museum. The Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt Museum, ded-

icated to his work and that of his first wife, a fellow COBRA painter, opened in Herning

in 1976,

two

years

after

Alfelt's death. In January 2007 Pedersen and his second wife donated 35 paintings to the Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark's national gallery. Petersen,

Robert

Einar,

American

publisher (b. Sept. 10, 1926, Los Angeles, Calif—d. March 23, 2007, Santa Monica, Calif.), combined his entrepre-

neurial skills with his interest in cars to establish a multimillion-dollar publishing empire. Inspired by his love of the large, powerful automobiles of the era,

SA (PRISA), becom-

1976, six months after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. PRISA ex-

panded to include newspapers and television and radio stations both in Spain and in Latin America.

dazzling solo technique. In 1949 Peterson went to the U.S., where he appeared in one of jazz promoter Norman Granzs concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Peterson was associated with Granz for most of the rest of his career, touring the world with Granz's all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe and recording prolifically for Granz’s record labels. Art Tatum and especially Nat King Cole were important influences on Peterson's style. Like Cole's early trio, the Oscar Peterson Trio that first became popular featured piano, bass (Ray Brown), and guitar, most no-

Ponti,

Carlo

(CARLO

FORTUNARO

PIETRO PONTI), Italian motion-picture producer (b. Dec. 11, 1912, Magenta, near Milan, Italy—d. Jan. 10, 2007, Geneva, Switz.), was responsible for

producing (or co-producing) more than 150 films, including the Oscar-winning La strada (1954), directed by Federico

Fellini; director King Vidors War and Peace

(1955);

David

Lean’s

Doctor

Zhivago (1965); Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up (1966); and several by director Vittorio De Sica, notably La

tably Herb Ellis (1953-58). When Ellis

ciociara (1960; Two Women), for which Pontis wife, Sophia Loren, won the

left the group, he was replaced by drummer Ed Thigpen (1959-65). Cascades of many notes characterized Peterson’s playing. His earlier work, if of

Academy Award for best actress. Ponti earned a law degree in 1934 and practiced law until he joined the motionpicture industry in the late 1930s. He 149

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

discovered Loren when she was a teenager and signed her to a film contract. Their 1957 marriage (in Mexico by proxy) was declared illegal in Italy, which did not acknowledge Ponti's divorce from his first wife. The resulting scandal and subsequent bigamy charges haunted Ponti and Loren for years. The couple obtained an annulment and lived in exile, eventually settling in France, where he legally divorced

taken

his first wife

French

(who

citizenship

also

had

to expedite

was coauthor of The Technological Or-

the power of the legislature and cut down on the pervasive corruption of the previous regime. He also moved Croatia toward eventual membership

der (1962).

in the

signed (1975) as editor but continued to serve as a member of the board of editors (vice-chairman 1975-79). He

Prigov, Dmitry Aleksandrovich, Russian poet and artist (b. Nov. 5, 1940, Moscow, U.S.S.R.—d. July 16, 2007, Moscow, Russia), was a leading mem-

ber of the Russian artistic avant-garde and of the Moscow conceptualism movement in the 1970s and ’80s. His

the divorce). Ponti and Loren were re-

texts subverted

married in 1966 in Paris.

most were parts of thematic Prigovs work was published

cycles. under-

Poston, Tom (THOMAS GORDON POSTON), American actor (b. Oct. 17, 1921, Columbus, Ohio—d. April 30, 2007, Los Angeles, Calif.), was best remembered

ground

Soviet

for TV roles in which he portrayed a bumbling funnyman, beginning with his Emmy Award-winning role as one of the interviewees (the man who could not remember his name) on The Steve

Allen Show, and he perfected that persona as befuddled drunkard Franklin Delano Bickley on Mork and Mindy and inept handyman George Utley on Newhart. Poston was a regular panelist on the game show To Tell the Truth and enjoyed a 40-year film career, appear-

Socialist Realism,

(as samizdat)

in the

and

Union and openly abroad for years, but his first verse collection was not officially published in his home country until 1990. In addition to more than 30,000 poems, he wrote plays and essays. Seeking to abolish the border between genres, he also combined words and visual actions to create installations as well as performance and video art. Prigov won many awards, among them the 1993 Pushkin Prize. Rabinowitz, Victor, American lawyer (b. July 2, 1911, Brooklyn, N.Y.—d. Nov. 16, 2007, Manhattan, N.Y.), de-

Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004) and Christmas with the Kranks (2004). He

fended a pantheon of left-wing causes and such clients as Department of State official Alger Hiss and Cuban leader Fi-

was

del Castro;

ing in supporting roles in The Princess

married

to

actress

Suzanne

Pleshette. Preece, Warren Eversleigh, American

encyclopaedist (b. April 17, 1921, Norwalk, Conn.—d. April 11, 2007, Philadel-

phia, Pa.), was general editor of Encyclopedia Britannica in the creation of the 15th edition (1974), which consists

of 30 volumes in three parts (the Propedia, the Micropedia, and the Macropedia). Preece was educated at Dartmouth College (B.A., 1943 [Phi Beta Kappa]), Hanover, N.H., and, af-

ter U.S. Army service during World War II, at Columbia University (M.A., 1947),

New

York

City. He

worked

Rabinowitz

won

the busi-

ness of the latters government over a 1960 chess game with Cuba's revolutionary leader Che Guevara. From 1944 Rabinowitz headed his own law firm and frequently represented leftist labour unions. He was a onetime member of the Communist Party, and during U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anticommunist

crusade,

Rabinowitz

counted 225 suspected Communists among his clients, including acclaimed noir novelist Dashiell Hammett. In 1937 Rabinowitz helped found the National Lawyers Guild, and he became its president in 1967.

in Con-

copy editor and then taught English for a time before becoming public relations director in the 1956 campaign of

Racan, Ivica, Croatian politician (b. Feb. 24, 1944, Ebersbach, Ger.—d. April 29, 2007, Zagreb, Croatia), as prime minister (2000-03) of Croatia,

U.S. Sen. Thomas Dodd (Connecticut). Britannica’s publisher, William Benton, also of Connecticut, hired him in 1957

moved the country away from the nationalistic authoritarianism of Pres. Franjo Tudjman, the country’s first

as secretary to the encyclopaedia’s board of editors. Preece subsequently served (from 1964) as the editor of Bri-

leader (1991-99) after independence, and toward a more liberal Western-oriented future. Racan introduced eco-

tannica and was a key figure in the development of the 15th edition. After publication of the new edition, he re-

nomic reforms, including the privatization of large state monopolies, as well as political reforms that increased

necticut

as

a newspaper

150

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

reporter

and

European

Union.

Racan

was

born in a Nazi labour camp, where his Croatian parents were interned (his father died). From the early 1970s he rose through the ranks of the League of Communists of Croatia, becoming president in 1982; in that position he abandoned the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1990 to prevent greater centralization of power in Belgrade. Racan’s insistence on democratic multiparty elections in independent Croatia led to the election of Tudjman’s Croatian Democratic Union in 1990 and again in 2003. Rademakers, Fons (ALPHONSE MARIE RADEMAKERS), Dutch filmmaker (b. Sept. 5, 1920, Roosendaal, Neth.—d. Feb. 22, 2007, Geneva, Switz.), for his

poignant drama De Aanslag (1986; The Assault),

became

the

first from

The

Netherlands to win an Academy Award for best foreign language film. Nearly 30 years earlier, Rademakerss debut feature, Dorp aan de rivier (1958; Village by the River), had been the first motion picture by a Dutch director to be nominated for an Oscar In his Academy Award acceptance speech, Rademakers famously chided American audiences to be more accepting of subtitled films. His last motion picture, the courtroom drama

The Rose Garden

(1989), how-

ever, was released in English. Reinhart,

Tanya Miriam,

Israeli aca-

demic and writer (b. July 23, 1943, Kyriat Haim, British-mandated Palestine— d. March 17, 2007, Montauk, N.Y.), was

best known for her critical analyses of Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians— which she compared unfavourably to South African apartheid—and her political activism in favour of Palestinian rights. Reinhart studied literature and philosophy at Hebrew University (B.A., 1967; M.A., 1969) and earned a Ph.D. (1976) at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), where linguist-political activist Noam Chomsky was her thesis supervisor. Reinhart wrote extensively on linguistics and served on the faculties of Tel Aviv University, MIT, Columbia University in New York City, the University of Paris, the University of Utrecht, Neth., and New York Univer-

sity. Her political books included Zsrael/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (2002) and The Road to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003 (2006).

Obituaries

Remington, Charles Lee, American entomologist (b. Jan. 19, 1922, Reedville, Va.—d. May 31, 2007, Hamden, Conn.), spent his entire career, beginning in 1948, at Yale University,

where he instilled in students his passion for butterflies and moths and established one of the nation's premier collections of specimens (numbering more

than 2.5 million)

as curator

of

Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. While pursuing graduate studies at Harvard

University

(Ph.D.,

1948),

Remington and fellow graduate student Harry

K. Clench

founded

(1947)

the

Lepidopterists’ Society; by 2007 the scientific organization’s membership had swelled to 10,000 in 60 countries. Rem-

ington established the first nature preserve for the Magicicada, near his home in Hamden, and in 1996 he captivated television audiences with his entertaining and educational stories about this cicada, which emerges by the millions

the King (1993), and The Final Cut (1995). Richardson portrayed the sardonic, villainous “FU” with sly wit and made his conspiratorial “You might very well think that—I couldn't possibly comment" a much-quoted catchphrase. Other noteworthy roles included JeanPaul Marat in the stage (1965) and film (1967) versions of Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade, Bill Haydon in the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Henry Higgins in a 1976-77 Broadway revival of My Fair Lady, and the imposing chancellor in the BBC’s Bleak House (2005). Richardson was made CBE in 1989. Rieveschl, George, American chemical engineer (b. Jan. 9, 1916, Lockland, Ohio—d. Sept. 27, 2007, Cincinnati, Ohio), invented the chemical com-

Richardson, Ian William, British actor (b. April 7, 1934, Edinburgh, Scot.—d. Feb. 9, 2007, London, Eng.),

pound used in the antihistamine Benadryl. Though not a medical doctor, Rieveschl brought relief to millions of allergy sufferers through his synthesis of beta-dimethylaminoethylbenzhydryl ether hydrochloride, the active ingredient in Benadryl. After earning (1940) a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University

was

of

every 17 years.

an

accomplished

actor

and

a

Cincinnati,

Ohio,

Rieveschl

re-

mained at his alma mater to teach. While testing the beta-dimethyl compound for muscle-relaxant capabilities, Rieveschl realized its potential as an antihistamine. His compound was significant because it caused less drowsiness than its competitors. In 1943 he went to work for pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis, where he refined and patented his discovery.

Empics—PA Photos/Landov

nickname “Scooter” for his short legs and his swift motion from shortstop to second base. When Rizzuto retired in 1956, he left the majors with a lifetime batting average of .273 and five All-Star game appearances (1942, 1950-53). He moved directly from the field to a long stint in the Yankees

broadcast

booth,

where he delighted fans with the catchphrase “Holy cow!” Rizzuto was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994. Roach,

Max

(MAXWELL

ROACH),

American jazz drummer and composer (b. Jan. 10, 1924, Newland, N.C.—d. Aug. 16, 2007, New York, N.Y.) was

one of the most influential and widely recorded modern percussionists. Roach began performing with innovative musicians—notably Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—at such nightclubs as Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, New York City. Their jam sessions gave rise to bebop, a style that moved the fixed pulse in jazz from the bass drum to the ride cymbal and created a polyrhythmic, percussive texture by exploiting the flexibility of the trap-drum set. By carefully developing thematic ideas on his drums, Roach elevated the percussionist to the equal of melodic improvisers. He participated in recordings by Parker’s quintet in 1947-48 and in the Miles Davis sessions that were later collected in the album Birth of the Cool (1957). In 1954 Roach became coleader

of a quintet with

trumpeter

Clifford

Brown, but after the latter’s death in 1956, Roach formed other ensembles.

In 1960 he composed, with lyricist OsRizzuto, Phil (FIERO FRANCIS RIZZUTO; “SCOOTER”), American baseball

(b. Sept. 25,

car Brown, Jr., “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite” for his future wife (vocalist Abbey Lincoln), a chorus, instrumental

1917, New York, N.Y.—d. Aug. 13, 2007, West Orange, N.J.), was a stellar

soloists, and ensemble. In the early 1970s he established an all-percussion

defensive shortstop and a team leader for the New York Yankees and played an integral role in turning the team into a dominating force, with eight

ensemble,

joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1980 he embarked on a series of duets with such

World Series crowns (1941, 1943, 1947,

avant-garde improvisers

and 1949-53). Rizzuto joined the Yan-

cil Taylor

kees in 1941, but his career was inter-

Braxton. Roach, who continued to tour

rupted for service (1943—45) in the navy during World War II. He returned to baseball in 1946 and soon became a superior bunter and solid contact hitter; in 1949 he excelled as the consummate leadoff man, hitting .275 with 22 doubles and 72 walks. Rizzuto won the American Leagues Most Valuable Player award in 1950. In addition to his

into the early 21st century, also performed with rappers and accompanied authors’ readings.

player and broadcaster

British actor Ian Richardson

founding

member

(1960-75)

of the

Royal Shakespeare Company, but he gained international recognition for his BAFTA-winning performance as the charismatic Machiavellian politician Francis Urquhart in the BBC television trilogy House of Cards (1990), To Play

offensive

contributions,

Rizzuto

was

noted particularly for his defensive skills at shortstop, and he earned the

M’Boom,

and

and

in

1972

he

as pianist Ce-

saxophonist

Anthony

Roberto, Holden Alvaro, Angolan independence leader (b. Jan. 12, 1923, Sao Salvador [now M'banza Congo], Angola—d. Aug. 2, 2007, Luanda, An-

gola), founded Angola’s first nationalist movement in 1956 and five years later led the first attack on colonial settlers

in Angola. Roberto’s Union of Angolan 151

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

Peoples (UPA) drew its main support from his Bakongo ethnic group. In 1962 he transformed the UPA into the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), which operated mainly from Zaire (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In 1975 Roberto and the leaders of the other two independence movements in Angola reached an agreement with Portugal and signed a peace treaty that led to the country's independence. Fighting immediately broke out between the three factions, however, and the FNLA, backed by sev-

eral Western countries, was decisively defeated in 1976 by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which was supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Roberto spent the next 15 years in exile, returning to Angola in 1991 to play a marginal role in politics.

tional

Football

Fame

members

League Willie

were

Hall

Davis,

of

Willie

Brown, and Buck Buchanan. Surpassing Bear Bryant’s record for wins, Robinson earned his 324th career victory on Oct. 5, 1985. At the end of the 1997 season, he retired with a lifetime

record of 408-165-15. Robinson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1997. Roddick, Dame Anita (ANITA LUCIA PERELLA), British entrepreneur (b. Oct. 23, 1942, Littlehampton, West Sussex, Eng.—d. Sept. 10, 2007, Chichester, West Sussex), as the founder of the

Body Shop cosmetics

chain, champi-

Eddie

ROBINSON),

American

(EDWARD

sufficiency for less-developed countries,

Rorty, Richard McKay, American pragmatist philosopher and public in-

and other causes that she deemed wor“=

GAY

ball coach (b. Feb. 13, 1919, Jackson, La.—d. April 3, 2007, Ruston, La.), set

the record in 1997 for most career wins (408); the mark was surpassed in 2003

by John Gagliardi of St. John’s University. Robinson spent his entire head(La.) State

University. On Oct. 7, 1995, having guided Grambling to a 42-6 win over Mississippi Valley State, he became the first coach to claim 400 victories. Robinson attended Leland College, Baker, La., where he played quarterback and led the team to a combined 18-1 record over the 1939 and 1940 seasons. During his final two years at

Industrial

Institute)

E Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop

guided the team to a perfect 8-0 record. Robinson's Grambling Tigers went on to have two more perfect seasons, cap-

thy—as much as she did the natural botanical-based beauty products that she extensively researched and marketed. After attending Newton Park

ture 17 conference titles, and win sev-

College of Education in Bath, Avon, she

eral National Negro championships. In

taught secondary school, traveled the

the 1960s, after several decades

world,

of 3-5. The

next season,

however,

he

when

football at historically black colleges went largely unnoticed by most football fans, Robinson’s Grambling teams gained fame for sending more players into professional football than any other school except Notre Dame. Among the more than 200 of his players who went on to compete in the Na152

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

was noted for his wide-ranging critique of the modern conception of philosophy as a quasi-scientific enterprise aimed at reaching certainty and objective truth. In politics he argued against programs of both the left and the right in favour of what he described as a meliorative and reformist “bourgeois liberalism.” Rorty attended the University of Chicago and Yale University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1956. Following two years in the army, he taught philosophy at Wellesley College (1958-61)

ment

hired

Robinson to coach football and basketball and teach physical education. In his first season he had no assistants and no budget for replacing equipment. That season his team posted a record

tellectual (b. Oct. 4, 1931, New York, N.Y.—d. June 8, 2007, Palo Alto, Calif.),

fore accepting a position in the department of humanities at the University of Virginia. From 1998 until his retire-

an assistant coach. In 1941 Grambling (then known as Louisiana Negro Norand

in 2003.

and Princeton University (1961-82) be-

Leland (B.A., 1941), he also served as

mal

conventional (and allegedly less ethically concerned) French cosmetics company LOreal. Roddick published her autobiography, Body and Soul, in 1991. She was made OBE in 1988 and DBE

collegiate foot-

coach career at Grambling

£652 million ($1.14 billion) to the more

oned social issues—such as environmental awareness, animal rights, self-

Adrian Brooks—PA Photos/Landov

Robinson,

thorizing franchises across Europe and personally promoting both her product line and her crusading social philosophy. The company went public in 1984. From 1990 Roddick divided her time between the company and the charitable Body Shop Foundation. She stepped down from day-to-day management in 2002, but she was back in the news in 2006 when she sold the Body Shop International PLC for some

and ran small businesses

with

her husband. In her travels Roddick admired the skin and hair of local women who used nothing more than indigenous plants. She worked to develop these and other natural ingredients into products for a broader audience and in 1976 opened the first Body Shop in Brighton. By the late '70s she was au-

in 2005, Rorty taught compara-

tive literature at Stanford University. In epistemology he opposed foundationalism, the view that all knowledge can be grounded, or justified, in a set of basic statements that do not themselves require justification. According to his "epistemological behaviourism," no statement is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no statement is ever justified "finally" but can be justified only relative to some circumscribed and contextually determined set of additional statements. In the philosophy of language, Rorty rejected the idea that sentences or beliefs are "true" or "false" in any interesting sense other than being useful or successful within a broad social practice. He also opposed representationalism, the view that the main function of language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejected both realism and antirealism,

or idealism,

as prod-

Obituaries Pierre Verdy—AFP/Getty Images

ucts of mistaken representationalist assumptions about language. Because Rorty did not believe in certainty or absolute

truth, he did not advocate

agement to his brothers son, Baron Eric. Rothschild also held a share in the family banking interests under the direction of his cousin Baron Guy de

the

philosophical pursuit of such things. Instead, he believed that the role of philosophy is to conduct an intellectual "conversation" between contrasting but equally valid forms of intellectual inquiry—including science, literature, politics, religion, and many others— with the aim of achieving mutual understanding and resolving conflicts. Rorty defended himself against charges of relativism and subjectivism by claiming that he rejected the crucial distinctions these doctrines presuppose. Rorty's publications included Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Rothschild (g.v.). Rothschild, Guy

icized for occasional overromanticism,

de

ALPHONSE

(BARON PAUL

DE

branch of the Rothschild international banking dynasty, restored his family’s fortunes after their holdings were confiscated during the World War II Nazi occupation of France. Rothschild joined the investment bank Rothschild Fréres in 1931 and also was involved in the holding company Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord. When France fell to Germany in 1940, the Rothschilds were stripped of French citizenship, and their assets were seized under anti-Jewish laws. Rothschild joined the Free French forces based in

Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich,

century’s finest cellists as well as an outspoken defender of artistic freedom and human rights. Although sometimes crit-

EDOUARD

Guy

ROTHSCHILD), French banker (b. May 21, 1908, Paris, France—d. June 12, 2007, Paris), as the scion of the French

(1989).

Russian cellist and conductor (b. March 27, 1927, Baku, Azerbaijan, U.S.S.R. [now Azerbaijan]|—d. April 27, 2007, Moscow, Russia), was one of the 20th

Baron

Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav

Leopoldovich Rostropovich viet government deprived the couple of their citizenship in 1978 but reversed that decision in 1990. Composers who

London,

but he returned

to Paris

in

1944, reviving the bank and diversifying into industries such as mining, shipping, and oil. In 1968 he restructured the bank as the Banque de Rothschild,

which

was

later

nationalized

(1981-84) by the Socialist-led government. Rothschild was also a successful owner-breeder of Thoroughbred racehorses, notably Exbury, winner of the 1963 Prix l'Arc de Triomphe, and he worked closely with his cousins Baron Alain and Baron Elie de Rothschild (q.v.), who was responsible for the postwar restoration of the family’s wine estate Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

Rostropovich was admired for his keen musicianship, both in contemporary works and in the established concert repertoire. His exploitation of the tonal resources of the cello was considered exceptional. He was born into a musical family and trained with his mother (a pi-

wrote works for him include Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian,

anist) and his father (a cellist who had studied under Pablo Casals) before entering the Moscow Conservatory in

Rothschild, Baron Elie Robert de, French winemaker (b. May 29, 1917,

1943. Rostropovich resigned in 1948 when two of his teachers, composers Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostako-

Scharnitz, Austria), took charge (1946)

Rrurrambu,

of the family wine estate Chateau Lafite

riginal rock musician

Rothschild,

winku, N.Terr, Australia—d. June 10, 2007, Galiwinku), was the charismatic

vich, were censured, but he later (1956)

returned to become a professor of cello at the conservatory. He began touring abroad as a cellist in the 1950s, though he also performed as a pianist in recitals with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. In 1968 he made his debut as a conductor. When in 1970 Rostropovich made clear his support of the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the government sharply curtailed his ability to travel. In 1974, however, Rostropovich and_ Vishnevskaya were permitted to leave the country, and the next year they announced their decision not to return to the Soviet Union. In 1977 Rostropovich became music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., a post he held until 1994. The So-

Benjamin Britten, and Witold Lutoslawski. Rostropovich, the recipient of numerous awards, was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987.

Paris,

France—d.

which

Aug.

had

6, 2007,

been

near

confis-

cated during the World War II Nazi occupation of France, and restored the chateau and its wine to their former grandeur. Rothschild and his elder brother, Baron Alain (died 1982), were

serving in the cavalry when the war broke out; they were both captured and spent several years in German

prison

camps, separately and—later—together. After the war the family entrusted Rothschild with the reconstruction of the reclaimed Lafite estate. He restored the neglected vineyards and buildings, rebuilt Lafite’s finances, and released acclaimed vintages in 1947, 1949, 1955, 1959, and 1961. As a cofounder (1950)

of the Commanderie du Bontemps Médoc guild, he actively promoted Bordeaux wines around the world. In 1974 he retired and turned over Lafite man-

George,

Australian Abo-

(b. 1957,

Gali-

front man of the popular Warumpi Band, the first Australian rock group to have a hit song in an indigenous language. Rrurrambu and three other men formed the multiracial band in the early 1980s, and it toured throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory. In 1983 the Warumpi Band released the Luritja-language single “Jailanguru Pakarnu" ("Out from Jail"),

which brought it national attention. The group's debut album, Big Name No Blankets (1984), featured the popular song “Blackfella/Whitefella,” and the 1986

follow-up,

“My Island unofficial band broke Rrurrambu

Go

Bush,

contained

Home,” which became an anthem in Australia. The up in 2000, the same year released his first solo al153

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

bum, Nerbu Message. Following Aboriginal custom he was given the surname Burarrawanga after his death. Rule, Jane Vance, American-born Canadian novelist, essayist, and shortstory writer (b. March 28, 1931, Plainfield, N.J.—d. Nov. 27, 2007, Galiano Island, B.C), was known for her

exploration of lesbian themes. Upon graduation (1952) from Mills College,

O'Leary, but Ryan remained

on board

as chairman (1996-98) and director (1996-2007). He amassed a personal fortune of some $2 billion. Saffir, Herbert Seymour, structural engineer (b. March New York, N.Y.—d. Nov. 21, ami, Fla.), was an expert on

American 29, 1917, 2007, Mihurricane

University College, London, and Stanford University. After moving in 1956 to

damage to buildings, and about 1969 he began to devise a five-category scale for ranking hurricanes to clarify the destructive potential of their winds. Robert H. Simpson, then director of

Canada, she served (1959-72) as a lec-

the

turer in English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where she also taught women’s groups. She began to write full-time in 1974. Rules characters were usually rewarded for following their hearts and punished for emotional cowardice. Desert of the Heart (1964; filmed as

added storm surge (flooding) information for each category, and the SaffirSimpson hurricane scale, as it became known, quickly proved to be a valuable tool for describing storm intensity. Saffir received a civil-engineering degree

Oakland, Calif, Rule studied briefly at

Desert Hearts, 1984), Rules first, bestknown novel, was considered a classic of lesbian literature; it traced the lives

of two women, separated by age and background, who meet at a boardinghouse and fall in love. In contrast, This Is Not for You (1970) was written as an (unmailed) letter to the narrators best friend, whose love she denies at the

cost of her own happiness. Rule's other novels included Against the Season (1971), The Young in One Another's Arms (1977), Contract with the World (1980), Memory Board (1987), and After the Fire (1989). She also published

three volumes of short stories and two collections of essays. Ryan, Tony (THOMAS ANTHONY RYAN),

Irish aviation entrepreneur (b. Feb. 2, 1936, Thurles, County Tipperary, Ire.— d. Oct. 3, 2007, Celbridge, County Kildare, Ire.), founded (1985) Ryanair,

which by 2007 was one of Europe's most successful budget airlines, with over

500 routes

across

the continent.

U.S.

(1940)

National

from

Hurricane

the Georgia

Center,

Institute

of

Technology. In 1959 he established his own structuralengineering firm in Coral

Gables,

Fla., where

he worked

until shortly before his death. During many surveys of hurricane damage, he learned how structures failed in hurricane winds, and he helped write and advocate building codes for stormresistant

construction

in hurricane-

prone areas. Saffir also designed about 50 bridges. Salmona, Rogelio, Colombian architect (b. April 28, 1929, Paris, France— d. Oct. 3, 2007, Bogotá, Colom.), was

regarded as one of Latin America's preeminent architects, though his structures (which evoked pre-Hispanic edifices and cities) were largely built in Bogotá. Salmona apprenticed with Swiss architect Le Corbusier in Paris before returning to his hometown, where in 1959 he co-designed the El Polo apartment building. The Park Towers apartment complex (1964-70) brought him international notice and made use of his signature red brick.

After working (1956-75) as a manager with Aer Lingus, Ireland’s national carrier, Ryan borrowed money from his employer and the merchant bank Guinness Peat Group to establish an aircraft

Salmona, a four-time recipient (1977, 1986, 1988, and 1990) of the National Architecture Prize, was honoured for

leasing company,

Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his Quimbaya Cultural

Guinness

Peat Avia-

tion (later changed to GPA). Although GPA collapsed in 1993 after a failed stock offering, its phenomenal early success provided Ryan with the funds to start Ryanair, which initially consisted of one 15-seat turboprop plane flying between Waterford, in southeastern Ireland, and London. In the early 1990s he turned the company over to his hand-picked successor, Michael 154

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

his

House

(1978-82),

for

Illustrious

built

Centre in Armenia,

in

Guests

Cartagena

for

Colom. Another of

his best-known buildings was Bogotá's Virgilio Barco Public Library (2001). Salmona was awarded the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2003. Saunders,

Justine

Florence,

Aus-

tralia—d. April 15, 2007, Windsor, near

Sydney, Australia), rejected being typecast in stereotypical Aboriginal roles and instead played a wide range of strong women over a 30-year career (1974-2004). Her best-known charac-

ters were

in the television miniseries

Women of the Sun (1981) and the films The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and The Fringe Dwellers (1986); the lat-

ter earned her a best actress nomination from the Australian Film Institute. She was also a cofounder of the indigenous Black Theatre and the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust. Saunders, a member of the Woppaburra people, was forcibly removed from her home at age 11 and sent to a teaching convent for several years as part of a government resettlement program. She received the Order of Australia in 1991 for services to the performing arts, but in 2000 she reluctantly returned it to protest the federal government’s insensitive handling of “the stolen generation” and the cruel treatment of her distraught mother, who had spent years searching for her “stolen” daughter. Savoy,

Gene

(DOUGLAS

EUGENE

Savoy), American explorer and amateur archaeologist (b. May 11, 1927, Bellingham, Wash.—d. Sept. 11, 2007, Reno, Nev.), claimed to have discovered

more than 40 Incan and pre-Incan cities in Peru and was credited with establishing the theory (now supported by most scholars) that Vilcabamba, rather than Machu Picchu, was the last

refuge for Incas seeking to escape from the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century Savoy was dubbed “the real Indiana Jones" by the popular press because of his flamboyant style and Stetson hat. He left school at age 17 to enlist in the U.S. Navy. After World War II he worked briefly as a journalist in Portland, Ore., but he became eager to

begin exploring after reading Hiram Binghams Lost City of the Incas (1952). Long fascinated with religion, in 1959 Savoy established the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, which teaches that the Second Coming is occurring now.

Savoy wrote 4 books about his adventures and more than 60 volumes on religious topics. Schirra, Wally (WALTER MARTY SCHIRRA, JR.), U.S. astronaut (b. March 12, 1923, Hackensack, N.J.—d. May 3, 2007, La Jolla, Calif.), manned the Mer-

tralian Aboriginal actress (b. Feb. 20,

cury Sigma 7 (1962) and was command

1953, near Rockhampton,

pilot of Gemini

Queen., Aus-

6 (1965), which made

Obituaries Caroline Penn/Corbis

the first rendezvous the only astronaut to Gemini, and Apollo Schirra began flying a naval aviator after from the U.S. Naval

in space. He was fly in the Mercury, space programs. at 13 and became graduating (1945) Academy, Annapo-

lis, Md. He flew 90 missions in the Ko-

rean War. A test pilot, he was one of the original seven astronauts named in 1959 and was the fifth to go into space. On

Oct.

3, 1962,

Schirra

orbited

the

Earth six times in Sigma 7. His scheduled flight with Thomas P. Stafford in Gemini 6 was postponed twice because of technical problems but was finally

Schlesinger a special assistant for Latin American affairs. Schlesinger’s study of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965), also won a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1966 he began teaching history at the City University of New York, becoming professor emeritus in 1994. His

other books included The Bitter Heritage (1967), The Imperial Presidency (1973), Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), and War and the American Presidency (2004), which decried the for-

eign policy of Pres. George W. Bush.

launched on Dec. 15, 1965, 11 days af-

Selberg, Atle, Norwegian-born Ameri-

ter Gemini 7. Schirra successfully rendezvoused with Gemini 7, maneuvering

can mathematician (b. June 14, 1917, Langesund, Nor.—d. Aug. 6, 2007, Princeton, N.J.), was awarded the

to within

one

foot (30.5

cm)

of the

craft. He commanded the Apollo 7 flight (Oct. 11-22, 1968), accompanied by Donn Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham, on the first manned Apollo mission. They tested the guidance and control systems and the restarting capability of the rocket engines for future lunar flights. Schirra retired from the navy and the space program in 1969. In 2000 he was inducted into the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor. Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr. (ARTHUR BANCROFT SCHLESINGER), American historian, educator, and public official (b. Oct. 15, 1917, Columbus, Ohio—d. Feb. 28, 2007, New York,

N.Y.), reinterpreted the American era of Jacksonian democracy in terms of its cultural, social, and economic

aspects

as well as its strictly political dimensions in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson (1946). Schlesinger’s major historical work was The Age of Roosevelt, whose three separate volumes were entitled The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (1960). In these books he de-

scribed and narrated Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from a sympathetic standpoint. Schlesinger graduated from Harvard University in 1938, and he achieved initial notice with his biography Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress (1939). After serving in the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, he became a professor of history at his alma mater in 1946, teaching there until 1961. Throughout his life Schlesinger was active in liberal politics. He was an adviser to Adlai Stevenson and subsequently to John F. Kennedy during their presidential campaigns, and the latter appointed

Fields Medal in 1950 for his work in number theory, and in 1986 he shared (with

Samuel

Eilenberg)

the

Wolf

Prize. Selberg attended the University of Oslo

(Ph.D.,

1943)

and

C

,

Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembéne

remained

there as a research fellow until 1947. He then became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., and was a member of the faculty there from 1949 until his retirement in 1987. In the 1990s he became a U.S. citizen. Selberg’s work in analytic number theory produced fundamental and deep results on the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. He also made contributions in the study of sieves—particularly the Selberg sieve—which are generalizations of Eratosthenes’ method for locating prime numbers. In 1949 he gave an elementary (but by no means simple) proof of the prime number theorem,

i

a result that theretofore

had required advanced theorems from analysis. Many of Selberg’s papers were published in Number Theory, Trace For-

in 1942. After demobilization he remained in France, working as a docker in Marseille and becoming a militant trade unionist. Sembéne taught himself to read and write in French and in 1956 published his first novel, Le Docker noir (Black

Docker),

based

on

his experi-

ences in Marseille. After a spinal disorder forced him to give up physical labour,

he made

literature

his liveli-

hood. Among the works that followed were

Gods

Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (1960;

Bits of Wood)

and Xala

(1973),

which also provided the subject of one of his best films

(1974). About

1960

Sembène determined that cinema was the best way to reach an African popular audience. After studying at the Moscow

Film

School,

he returned

to

mulas and Discrete Groups (1989). The

Africa and made three short-subject films, all reflecting a strong social com-

publication

mitment. His La Noire de ... (1966; Black

two

of his Collected Papers in

volumes

(1989

and

1991)

gave

mathematicians access to many of his previously unavailable works.

Girl), considered the first major motion picture produced by a sub-Saharan African filmmaker, won the French Prix

Jean Vigo. Sembéne, Ousmane, Senegalese writer and film director (b. Jan. 1, 1923, Ziguinchor-Casamance, Senegal, French West Africa [now in Senegal]—d. June 9/10, 2007, Dakar, Senegal) was the

first

internationally

filmmaker

and was

known

African

celebrated

for his

use of historical and political themes. Sembéne began as a fisherman on the Casamance coast. He studied at the School of Ceramics at Marsassoum and

then worked in Dakar as a bricklayer, plumber, and apprentice mechanic until he was drafted (1939) into the French

army. He joined the Free French forces

Sembéne

decided

to film

Mandabi (1968; "The Money Order") and Ceddo (1977; "Outsiders") in the

Wolof language; the latter, considered by many to be his masterpiece, was banned in Senegal. Moolaadé (2004; "Protection") received the prize for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Festival. Serrault, Michel, French actor (b. Jan. 24, 1928, Brunnoy, France—d. July 29, 2007, Honfleur France), appeared in more than 130 motion pictures over a

50-year career, but he won the hearts of fans worldwide (and the first of three César Awards for best actor) for 155

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

his portrayal of the flamboyant temperamental but tenderhearted queen Albin/Zaza in La Cage folles—beginning with some 1,500

and drag aux per-

Shekhar, Chandra, Indian politician (b. July 1, 1927, Ibrahimpatti, Uttar Pradesh, British India—d. July 8, 2007, New Delhi, India), served as prime

mained in office as a caretaker until Congress (I) regained a majority in parliamentary elections in May and June. Shekhar continued to be active in pol-

formances (1973-78) at the Théátre du

minister of India from November 1990 to June 1991. Shekhar received a master's degree in political science from AIlahabad University. He was a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of

itics, and in 2004 he was elected to his

Palais Royal in Paris and then in the 1978 movie and its two sequels. Serrault left à Roman Catholic seminary to study acting in Paris and in the early 1950s formed a cabaret act with actorplaywright Jean Poiret, who wrote La Cages aux folles and starred opposite Serrault onstage though not in the hit films. Serraults other screen roles included a suspected child killer in the thriller Garde à vue (1981) and the ag-

ing ex-magistrate in the May-December romance Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995),

both

of which

earned

Parliament)

from

1962

to 1967—as

a

leading member of the Socialist Party before he joined the ruling Congress Party in 1964—and he held a seat in the Lok

Sabha

(lower

house)

during

1977-84 and from 1989. He split with the leader of the Congress Party, Indira Gandhi, in 1975 and spent time in prison during the national emergency

him

Césars. He was appointed to the Legion of Honour in 1999.

B. Mathur—Reuters/Landov

eighth term in the Lok Sabha. Sheldon,

Sydney

(SIDNEY

SCHECH-

TEL), American writer (b. Feb. 11, 1917, Chicago, Ill.—d. Jan. 30, 2007, Rancho

Mirage, Calif.), won one

a Tony Award

of the writers of Redhead

as

(1959),

starring Gwen Verdon; an Academy Award for best original screenplay of 1947 for The Bachelor and the BobbySoxer; and an Emmy Award in 1967 for the television sitcom I Dream of Jeannie before he launched into a successful career as the best-selling author of a string of page-turners, many of which were adapted for the screen. His 18 novels, which sold 300 million copies,

included

Shackleton, Derek (“SHACK”), English cricketer (b. Aug. 12, 1924, Todmorden, Yorkshire, Eng.—d. Sept. 27, 2007, Canford Magna, Dorset, Eng.), was one of the most accurate, consistent, and

The Naked

Face

(1970), The

Other Side of Midnight (1973), Rage of Angels (1980), and Nothing Lasts Forever (1994). He also wrote nearly every episode of The Patty Duke Show, which aired on TV from 1963 to 1966. Sheldon’s memoir, The Other Side of Me, appeared in 2005.

effective bowlers of the post-World War II era. He took 2,857 career wickets (av-

erage 18.65) in 647 first-class matches (with a best bowling analysis of nine wickets for 30 runs), ranking him sevwas a right-hand batsman and rightarm medium pace bowler. He began his

Sherrin, Ned (EDWARD GEORGE SHERRIN), British writer, director, producer, and raconteur (b. Feb. 18, 1931, Somerset, Eng.—d. Oct. 1, 2007, London,

career in the Yorkshire and Lancashire

Eng.), created a new genre of television

leagues as a batsman who bowled a few leg breaks. When he joined Hampshire

comedy

enth

on

the

all-time

list. Shackleton

sons (1948-69), and in each of 20 consecutive seasons (1949-68), he took at

least 100 wickets. Competition was stiff for bowling places in the England side in the late 1940s and ‘50s—with such as Alec Bedser, Fred Trueman, Brian

Statham, and Frank Tyson getting the call—so, despite his stellar county record, Shackleton had little success in Test cricket. He made his Test debut in

1950 against West Indies and played in one Test against South Africa (1951) and one against India (1951-52). He was recalled in 1963 for four matches

against the powerful West Indies team. In addition to his first-class 2,857 wickets, Shackleton scored 9,574 runs in

852 innings (average

under

Prime

Minister Morarji Desai. In 1988 Shekhar’s party merged with several other opposition parties to form the Janata Dal Party (JDP) under the leadership of V.P. Singh, who took power when the JDP defeated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's Congress (I) Party in elections the next year. After leading an internal rebellion against Singh, Shekhar broke with

the

JDP

on

Nov.

director,

and

TW3, fronted by David Frost, skewered

she subsequently declared. In 1977 Shekhar became president of the new Janata Party, which headed a coalition (1977-79)

creator,

5, 1990,

and

all and sundry without hesitation and served as the model for later satiric programs in Britain and the U.S., including an American version of TW3 (1964—65), again featuring Frost, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (from 1999). Sherrin was made CBE in 1997. Shoulders,

Jim

(JAMES

ARTHUR

SHOULDERS),

American rodeo cowboy

(b. May 13, 1928, Tulsa, Okla —d. June 20, 2007, Henryetta, Okla.), was a fear-

less and fierce competitor who notched 16 world championship titles (allaround, 1949, 1951, 1954-59;

1956-59; bull and bareback

riding, riding,

221 catches. In seven Test matches, he took 18 wickets (average 42.66), with a

quickly formed the Janata Dal-Socialist faction. With the support of Congress (D, he replaced Singh as prime

best bowling analysis of four wickets

minister on Nov. 10, 1990, as head of a

for 72 runs. In 1959 Shackleton was one of Wisden’s five Cricketers of the

weak minority government, but he reafter Con-

ing ride came when he broke a hand during competition, switched to the

Year.

gress (I) withdrew its support. He re-

other hand, and won the title. After re-

156

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

14.61) and took

Chandra Shekhar, former prime minister of India

government

the

producer of the wildly popular, irreverent BBC “news” program That Was the Week That Was (November 1962-December 1963). The groundbreaking

in 1948, he converted to medium pace,

swinging the ball both ways. Shackleton played for Hampshire for 21 sea-

as

signed

on

March

6, 1991,

1950, 1956-58) despite injuries that resulted in a raft of broken bones: both arms (twice), collarbone (three times), and face (27 breaks). His most amaz-

Obituaries Bettmann/Corbis

earned a Ph.D. (1944) in physics from the University of Stockholm. In 1951 he was appointed professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and in 1954 he moved to the University of Uppsala, where he taught until his retirement in 1984. In his prizewinning

American rodeo champion Jim Shoulders

tiring from the rodeo circuit in 1970, Shoulders worked his ranch and provided livestock to rodeos. He also established the first rodeo riding school and invented a mechanical bucking machine. Besides serving as a spokesperson for jeans and boots, Shoulders appeared for more than 15 years in print ads and television commercials

work, Siegbahn formulated the principles underlying the technique called ESCA (electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis) and refined the instruments used in carrying it out. ESCA depends on a fundamental phenomenon, the photoelectric effect, which is the emission of electrons that occurs when electromagnetic radiation strikes a material. Siegbahn’s achievement was to develop ways to measure the kinetic energies of the emitted electrons accurately enough to permit the determination of their binding energies. He showed that chemical elements bind electrons with characteristic energies that are slightly modified by the molecular or ionic environment. During the 1970s ESCA was adopted all over the world for analyzing materials, including the particles in polluted air and the surfaces of solid catalysts used in petroleum refining. Sills, Beverly (BELLE MIRIAM

MAN), American

operatic soprano and

administrator (b. May 25, 1929, Brooklyn, N.Y.—d. July 2, 2007, New York, N.Y.), won international fame with her

lilting voice many years before her Metropolitan Opera debut at age 46. At age three, as “Bubbles” Silverman, she

for beer; in one commercial,

in the 1980s, he was famously paired with scrappy New York Yankees manager Billy Martin. In 1955 Shoulders was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, and in 1979 he became a charter member of the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colo.

SILVER-

Operatic soprano Beverly Sills

first appeared on Rainbow House, a Saturday morning radio program, and she became a regular. She also made a few motion picture shorts and became a fixture on Major Bowes Capitol Family Hour and, later, on the radio soap opera Our Gal Sunday, on which she played a “nightingirl of the mountains.” At age 12 she left the show to complete her education in public schools and at the Professional Children’s School in New York, from which she graduated in 1945. She made her operatic debut in 1947 with the Philadelphia Civic Opera, and in 1955 she became a member of the company of the New York City Opera, making her debut as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus. Sills married journalist Peter B. Greenough in 1956. She left the stage in 1961 to focus on her children,

one

of whom

was

born

deaf and the other of whom was autistic. She returned in 1963 to sing in Don Giovanni, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Il Trittico. Her performance as Cleopatra in the New York City Opera company’s 1966 production of George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare brought her to international prominence as a performer of the florid repertoire and made her a celebrity. Sills then made several appearances in European opera houses, including La Scala in Milan (1969) and Covent Garden in London (1970). Her Metropoli-

tan Opera debut, as Pamira in Gioachino Rossinis The Siege of Corinth in 1975, was a phenomenal success. She wrote two autobiographies: Bubbles: A Self-Portrait (1976) and Beverly (1987). Besides serving (1979-89) as director of the New York

City Opera, where she introduced the use of supertitles (a projection of the English-language translation of the lyrics onto a screen above the stage), Sills was chairman of the board (1994-2002)

of New

York’s

Lincoln

Center and chairman of the board (2002-05) of the Metropolitan Opera.

Siegbahn, Kai Manne Bórje, Swedish physicist (b. April 20, 1918, Lund,

Sippy, G.P. (GOPALDAS

Swed.—d. July 20, 2007, Angelholm, Swed.), was awarded one-half of the

PARMANAND

Sippy), Indian filmmaker (b. Sept. 14, 1914, Hyderabad, British India—d. Dec. 25, 2007, Mumbai [Bombay], In-

1981 Nobel Prize for Physics (corecipients Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Leonard Schawlow of the U.S. shared

dia), was

responsible

for producing

the other half). The three men were ho-

Sholay (“Flames,” 1975), the most com-

noured for their revolutionary work in spectroscopy, particularly the spectroscopic analysis of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter. Siegbahn’s father, Karl Manne Sieg-

mercially successful Bollywood film ever released. Sholay, which was inspired by Hollywood's The Magnificent Seven

(itself a version of Akira Kuro-

sawa's

Japanese [Seven

film

Shichinin

Samurai],

was

no

bahn, had received the Nobel Prize for

samurai

ad-

Physics in 1924 for his discoveries relating to X-ray spectroscopy. Siegbahn

mired as Bollywood’s first “curry western” and reportedly earned at least $60 Wally McNamee/Corbis

157

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries John Downing—Express/Getty Images

million. Although Sholay was Sippy's most significant achievement, he pro-

Smith, Roger Bonham, American business executive (b. July 12, 1925, Columbus, Ohio—d. Nov. 29, 2007, near Detroit, Mich.), served as chairman and CEO (1981-90) of the General

duced or directed a score of other mo-

tion pictures, and in 2000 he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival, Mumbai.

Motors (GM) Corp. during one of the company’s most volatile periods. After serving (1944-46) in the U.S. Navy, Smith began working in 1949 for GM as an accounting clerk while completing his M.B.A. degree (1953) from the University of Michigan. He climbed the corporate ladder at GM, becoming

Smith, Anna Nicole (VICKIE LYNN HOGAN), American celebrity (b. Nov. 28, 1967, Mexia, Texas—d. Feb. 8, 2007,

Hollywood, Fla.), engaged in a lifestyle that frequently captured tabloid headlines, especially when she married 89year-old Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II in 1994, at the age of 26. His death 14 months later led to a highprofile legal struggle for his estate be-

public relations departments (1974). As CEO, Smith instituted vast changes in

tween

an

Smith

and

Marshalls

son,

in federal court.

Smith,

and executive vice president over the financial,

E.

Pierce Marshall. In 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court granted the sometime actress the right to pursue Marshall’s millions

treasurer (1970), vice president (1971),

lan Smith, former prime minister of Southern Rhodesia

was working as a topless dancer when Playmate of the Year by Playboy magazine. Smith remained in the news when her 20-year-old son died suddenly while visiting her a few days after she gave birth to a daughter in 2006. The uncertain paternity of her daughter led to more legal wrangling. Smith, Ian Douglas, Rhodesian politician (b. April 8, 1919, Selukwe, Rhodesia [now Shurugwi, Zimb.]—d. Nov. 20, 2007, Cape Town, S.Af.), was the first

attempt

to return

profitability

who

she met Marshall, had a brief career as a model, and in 1993 she was named

government

Rhodesia’s independence. The UN Security Council applied economic sanctions against Rhodesia, which then severed all ties with the Commonwealth of Nations. The country’s economy suffered as Smith’s government fought the steady increase in black guerrilla activity, accompanied by a flow of white emigration. In 1977 Smith finally began to negotiate on a transfer of power to the black majority. He remained prime minister until May 1979 and then served

(May-November

1979)

in the

1980 was

(GM’s

relations,

the company

operating

build vehicles, introduced the front-wheel-drive midsize cars,

closed

11 assembly

those

in

Flint,

plants,

Mich.,

launched (1990) the Saturn line of ve-

hicles. Despite his efforts, GM’s domestic market share had tumbled from

Snyder,

parties opposed to Pres. Robert Mugabes policies. Smith's memoirs were published in 1997.

American television newsman

sity, Smith

was

elected

(1948) to the

Southern Rhodesian Assembly. He joined the governing Federal Party in 1953, and by 1958 he had become chief government whip in Parliament. When the Federalists supported greater parliamentary representation for black Africans,

Smith

founded

(1961)

the

right-wing Rhodesian Front. Promising independence from the U.K. with a white minority government, his party unexpectedly won the 1962 election. In April 1964 Smith became prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, and on Nov. 11, 1965, he unilaterally declared

158

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

some

30,000 jobs were lost. The latter action inspired the Michael Moore documentary film Roger & Me (1989), in which Moore hounds Smith in an attempt to make him account for the plant closures and job losses in Flint. In an enduring effort to keep GM competitive with the Japanese automakers, Smith

United Front, a multiracial coalition of

46% to 35% by 1990. Tom

(THOMAS

SNYDER),

(b. May

12, 1936, Milwaukee, Wis.—d. July 29, 2007, San Francisco, Calif.), served as

host

Calif.), performed for 17 years with the Dance Theater of Harlem, becoming a principal dancer known for his strength, dramatic expressiveness, and imposing presence. Smith was best remembered for his brooding and restive interpretations of such characters as Stanley Kowalski in the adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire and Dysart in Equus: The Ballet. Prior to joining the Dance Theater of Harlem at the age of 22, Smith worked with the Eglevsky Ballet and studied with the Joffrey Ballet. He also taught numerous dance programs in Los Angeles and New York City, as well as at the Royal Ballet of London.

first and

including

where

and an ardent advocate

Smith, Lowell Dennis, American dancer (b. June 5, 1951, Memphis, Tenn.—d. Oct. 22, 2007, Los Angeles,

loss in

seeing a reorganization, he implemented robotic technology to help

native-born prime minister of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1965 he declared Rhodesia’s independence, but in the late 1970s he was compelled to oversee the country’s transition to the black majority-ruled Zimbabwe. Smith interrupted his studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, S.Af., to join (1939) the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot in World War II. After completing his work at the univer-

to

$750 million). Besides over-

first black majority government. He remained in Zimbabwe's Parliament until 1987, and in 1992 he briefly led the

of white rule;

and

of NBC's

(1973-82)

The

Tomorrow

Show

and helped to establish the

popularity of the late-night talk-show format. Snyder was best known for his ability to connect with audiences in an intimate way and for his unusual questions and no-nonsense style of interviewing an array of guests, including such celebrities as political figures, rock musicians,

and

notorious

crimi-

nals. He began his television career as a news anchor and morning talk-show host in Philadelphia before venturing to Los Angeles, where he hosted The Tomorrow Show. In 1974 Snyder moved with the program to New York, where it aired four times weekly; while hosting that show, he also anchored the evening

news

on

NewsCenter4

and

served as anchor on NBC's national newscast on Sunday nights. Snyder ap-

Obituaries

peared on late-night cable TV during the early 1990s before returning to network TV to host (1995-99) The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder. Soe Win, Myanmar military leader (b. 1948, Burma—d. Oct. 12, 2007, Yangon [Rangoon], Myanmar [Burma], was

prime minister of Myanmar from 2004 and was associated with two bloody suppressions of the democracy movement. Soe Win was one of the commanders in charge of the violent crackdown in 1988 on a pro-democracy uprising in which some 3,000 protestRolex dela Pena—epa/Corbis

which flourished during the 1960s and featured words arranged on a page to create a visual graphic. For her most notable poem, “Forsythia,” the design was fashioned from the letters of the name of the flowering shrub and the Morse Code equivalents of each letter. After earning a B.A. (1941) in English literature from the Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of North-

(1966),

and

she

edited

and

Austria-Hungary—d. Dec. 31, 2007, Milan, Italy), brought bold colours, con-

temporary style, and ironic wit to everyday items, creating strikingly postmodern

furniture, electronic gear, and

domestic

accessories.

(1958-80)

for

Às a consultant

Olivetti,

he

designed

some of his most memorable products, including the Elea 9003 computer (1959)

and

the

red plastic Valentine

portable typewriter (1969), which he dubbed his “anti-machine machine.” Sottsass graduated

sobriquet "the butcher of Dipeyin." He was elevated to the position of prime minister when his predecessor, the more moderate Khin Nyunt, was purged. Solt, Mary Ellen (MARY ELLEN BOTTOM), American poet (b. July 8, 1920, Gilmore City Iowa—d. June 21, 2007,

and to penalize overly aggressive tacklers. Stingley, who maintained a positive attitude despite his paralysis, published the book Happy to Be Alive in 1983.

and theoretician of electronic and serial music who strongly influenced avant-garde composers from the 1950s through the '80s. Whereas composers such as Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg had confined the serial principle to pitch, Stockhausen, beginning with his composition Kreuzspiel

Sottsass, Ettore, Italian industrial designer (b. Sept. 14, 1917, Innsbruck,

dered the attack, which earned him the

receivers

tive literature, and she remained there

Poetry: A World View (1953).

tional League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (briefly not under house arrest) undertook a journey with her supporters out of the capital, but the convoy was brutally attacked in Dipeyin, and dozens of people were killed. Soe Win was believed to have or-

to protect

Stockhausen, Karlheinz, German composer (b. Aug. 22, 1928, Módrath, near Cologne, Ger—d. Dec. 5, 2007,

wrote the introduction that expounded on the emerging art form in Concrete

junta in 1997. On May 30, 2003, Na-

rules

University of Iowa, Solt taught high school for several years. In 1970 she joined the faculty of Indiana University as an associate professor of compara-

Concrete

ers were believed to have been killed. He became a member of the ruling

to institute

ern Iowa) and an M.A. (1948) from the

until her retirement in the 1990s. Her poetry was published in Flowers in

Former prime minister of Myanmar Soe Win

an intentionally brutal tackle by Oakland Raiders safety Jack (“the Assassin") Tatum. Stingley was left a quadriplegic; his injuries prompted the NFL

(1939) in architec-

ture from the Turin (Italy) Polytechnic, and after his World War II military service, he settled in Milan, where

he

was commissioned to design furniture for postwar public housing. After being introduced to Pop art during a 1956 trip to the U.S., he joined Olivetti. In the early 1980s he founded the Memphis group of international postmodern designers and architects. Sottsass’s striking and often whimsical work was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (1994),

the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006), the Design Museum in London (2007), and venues in Trieste, Italy

(2007-08).

(1951), extended serialism to other mu-

sical elements. He also began using tape recorders and other machines in the 1950s to analyze and investigate sounds through the electronic manipulation of their fundamental elements, sine waves. His Studie I (1953) was the

first

musical

piece

Ill.—d. April 5, 2007, Chicago), was

a

promising wide receiver (1973-77) for the New England Patriots of the Na(NFL), but his

composed

from

sine-wave sounds, while Studie II (1954) was the first work of electronic

music to be notated and published. In general, Stockhausen’s works were composed of a series of small, individually characterized units, either “points” (individual notes), “groups” of notes, or “moments”

(discrete musical

sections), which did not necessarily form part of a larger dramatic line or scheme of musical development. In some works, such as Klavierstiick XI (1956; Piano Piece XI), he provided a

choice of several possible sequences in which to play a given collection of individual moments (since they were equally interesting regardless of their order of occurrence). Virtually all of his compositions from 1977 through 2003 formed part of the grandiose seven-part operatic cycle LICHT, which he intended to be his masterpiece. In 2005 the first parts of another ambitious series, KLANG—in

Stingley, Darryl Floyd, American football player (b. Sept. 18, 1951, Chicago,

tional Football League

Kürten, Ger.), was an important creator

segments

that corre-

spond to the 24 hours in a day—were premiered. Stockhausen studied at the State Academy for Music in Cologne and the University of Cologne (1947-51); in Paris (1952-53), with the

composers Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud; and at the University of Bonn

career was ended on the gridiron dur-

(1954-56),

Santa Clarita, Calif.), was a leading fig-

ing a preseason game on Aug. 12, 1978,

ure

after what many believed to have been

knowledge of phonetics, acoustics, and information theory. From 1953 he was

in the concrete

poetry movement,

where

he

expanded

his

159

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

associated with Cologne's celebrated electronic music studio Westdeutscher Rundfunk, where from 1963 to 1977 he

served as artistic director. Stockhausen lectured widely and returned to the State Academy for Music as professor of composition (1971-77).

Sun Yun-liang, Chinese general (b. 1904, Sichuan province, China—d. May 25,

2007,

Taipei,

Taiwan),

was

cele-

brated for leading the successful battle in 1932 to defend Shanghai against invading Japanese forces. In 1937 his troops, despite suffering heavy casualties, again prevented the Japanese from capturing Shanghai. Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, Sun led Nationalist troops in the civil war against the Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This time, however, he was far less successful; in 1948 his forces were

decisively beaten by the PLA in a major battle that heralded the end of the Nationalist presence in mainland China. Sun escaped with the remnants of the Nationalist army to Taiwan in 1949 and retired from the military shortly thereafter.

Takamoto, Iwao, American animator (b. April 29, 1925, Los Angeles, Calif.— d. Jan. 8, 2007, Los Angeles), worked at

peal began to fade in 1959 after an incident in which four members were arrested. Taylor grabbed the spotlight

Walt

classic

again in 1968, however, when she was

films as Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and 101 Dalmatians (1961), and created for Hanna-Barbera Productions the lovable

one of three women professing to be the widow and heir of pop idol Frankie Lymon. She was portrayed by Halle Berry in the Lymon biopic Why Do

but clumsy

Fools Fall in Love (1998).

Disney Studios

on

Scooby-Doo,

such

a cowardly

Great Dane featured on the TV series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969-72). He also contributed to such TV cartoons as The Flintstones and The Jet-

Teoctist (TOADER ARAPASU), Romanian prelate (b. Feb. 7, 1915, Tocileni, Rom.—d. July 30, 2007, Bucharest,

sons.

last big production

Rom.), was patriarch of the Romanian

was the successful feature film Charlotte’s Web (1973). The Animation Guild honoured him with its Golden Award in

Orthodox Church from 1986; he was also the first head of an Orthodox

2005.

Bogdan Cristel—Reuters/Landov

Takamoto’s

Tambo, Adelaide (ADELAIDE FRANCES

TSHUKUDU), South African political activist (b. July 18, 1929, near Vereeniging, S.Af—d. Jan. 31, 2007, Johan-

rector (b. May 24, 1914, Budapest, Aus-

nesburg, S.Af.), was a prominent figure in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. As a teenager she joined the black nationalist African National Congress (ANC) Youth League, where she met Oliver Tambo. They were married in 1956 and went into exile when the ANC was banned in 1960. For the next 30 years, while her husband traveled and directed the ANC from exile in

tria-Hungary

Zambia, she lived with their three chil-

Tabori,

George

(GYORGY

TABORI),

Hungarian-born writer and theatre di-

July 23,

[now

2007,

in Hungary]—d.

Berlin,

Ger),

crafted

dren in England, where she worked as a nurse and campaigned against apartheid. The Tambos were at last reunited in South Africa in 1990. After

plays, novels, and screenplays, many of which limned the emigrant experience and explored Germany’s relationship with the Jewish people. Tabori, who

her husband’s

was Jewish, in the mid-1930s left Hun-

Mama)

Tambo,

gary and settled in London, where he

known,

served one

worked for the BBC

the democratically elected multiracial Parliament.

and wrote novels,

among them Beneath the Stone (1945),

Companions

of the Left Hand

the U.S. in 1947. There he wrote screenplays, notably for I Confess (1953), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and The Journey (1959). He also be-

came acquainted with Bertolt Brecht, whose plays he translated, and in the early 1960s he compiled the stage anthology Brecht on Brecht. Tabori moved to West Berlin after his play The Cannibals was produced there in 1969, and thereafter he wrote and directed for the Berliner Ensemble and other German and Austrian theatres. Among his other plays were Flight into Egypt, which was produced on Broadway in 1952; My Mothers Courage (staged in 1979; Goldberg

1991).

based on his own War II travails; and

Variations

160

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

as

in 1993, Ma

she term

was

(or

widely

(1994-99)

in

(1946),

and Original Sin (1947). He relocated to

filmed 1995), mother’s World

death

(performed

in

Taylor, Zola, American singer (b. March 17, 1934/38, Los Angeles, Calif.—d. April 30, 2007, Riverside,

Calif.), was the only female member of the Platters, a vocal ensemble that be-

came one of the foremost singing groups of the early days of rock and roll and was often associated with the doo-wop style. Taylor a sweet-voiced contralto, joined (1954) principal Platters members Tony Williams, David Lynch,

Paul

Robi,

Herb

Reed,

and

Sonny Turner after Reed heard her rehearsing with the Coasters, an all-female band. The next year the Platters scored their first hit, “Only You”; they added

two

more

hits—“(You’ve

Got)

The Magic Touch” and “The Great Pretender,” which topped the pop and rhythm-and-blues charts—in 1956. Other hits followed, but the group’s ap-

Teoctist, patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church church to host the Roman Catholic pontiff (during Pope John Paul II's visit to Romania

in

1999).

He

entered

a

monastery in 1928 and took the name Teoctist in 1935 when he was tonsured as a monk. After being ordained a priest in 1945, he rose steadily though the church hierarchy. The Romanian Orthodox Church was traditionally loyal to the country's government, and Teoctist was particularly enthusiastic in his allegiance to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. monastery

Teoctist after

retired

Ceausescu

was

to

a

over-

thrown in late December 1989 but was reinstated as patriarch in April 1990. Tetley, Glen (GLENFORD ANDREW TETLEY, JR.), American dancer, choreographer, and ballet director (b. Feb. 3, 1926, Cleveland, Ohio—d. Jan. 26, 2007, Palm Beach, Fla.), revitalized ballet

with performances

and

compositions

Obituaries

that integrated elements of modern dance and classical ballet. In 1946 Tetley began training in modern dance with Hanya Holm and Martha Graham. He soon expanded his studies to include classical ballet, enrolling at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School to work with Margaret Craske and Antony Tudor. Between 1946 and 1962 he danced in musical productions on Broadway—including Kiss Me, Kate (1948) formed

and Juno (1959)—and perfor television, as well as with

dance companies that included the Joffrey Ballet, the Martha Graham Company and American Ballet Theatre. After shifting to choreography, he formed his own company and created Pierrot Lunaire, a work focusing on the interaction of three commedia dell’arte characters and set to the atonal song cycle of the same name by the experimental composer Arnold Schoenberg. Its success gained Tetley a position as guest artist with the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague. He staged several innovative works there, including The Anatomy

brace

Lesson

(1964)

Tiger and Return

and Em-

to Mountain

(1968), which incorporated movements

from the ancient Chinese exercise tai chi chuan. Tetley became the co-director of the company in 1969, the same year that he disbanded his own company. Mutations (1970) was among the most-discussed works he created during this period, largely because of his controversial use of nudity. For the Stuttgart (Ger.) Ballet he staged Voluntaries (1973), which led to his serving

(1974-76) as director of the company. After creating Alice (1986) for the Na-

tional Ballet of Canada, Tetley worked

Angels,” an answer song that also hit the top spot and launched the career of Kitty Wells. Many hits followed, including “Rub-a-Dub-Dub,”

“A Fooler, a

Faker,” and “Waiting in the Lobby of Your Heart.” His hit songs of the 1960s, such as “A Six-Pack to Go,” “On Tap, in the Can, or in the Bottle,” and “Smoky

the Bar,” reflected Thompson’s signature sound, developed and refined during his tours of the dance halls of the Southwest. His last top 20 hit was “Gotta Sell Them

Chickens”

(1997), a

Fame in 1989.

bomb tests, and he later did a tour of

Thorn, Gaston Egmond,

duty with NATO in France. After leaving the air force in 1966, he worked in

Luxembour-

gian politician (b. Sept. 3, 1928, Luxembourg city, Lux.—d. Aug. 26, 2007, Luxembourg), pursued his longtime advocacy of European integration throughout a distinguished career that extended far beyond the borders of Luxembourg. Thorn, a member of the Liberal Democrat Party, held several posts in Luxembourg's government, including foreign minister (1969-80) and prime minister (1974—79). He was also

president of the UN General Assembly during the 1975—76 session. In 1981 he was appointed president of the Commission of the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union), a post he held until 1985. After leaving the commission, Thorn became head of CLT Multi-Media.

Thompson,

THORPE), British-born Australian rock icon (b. March 29, 1946, Manchester,

THOMPSON),

American

singer

and

songwriter (b. Sept. 3, 1925, Waco, Texas—d. Nov. 6, 2007, Keller, Texas), was a pioneering country music star

who created his own sound by blending western swing and honky-tonk; he sold more than 60 million records during a career that spanned six decades. Thompson recorded several regional hits in the late 1940s and then hit the national scene in 1948 with “Humpty Dumpty Heart,” the first of 48 of his songs that would make the top 20 on the country music charts. His heyday was the 1950s. Thompson had the number one country song of 1952, “The Wild Side of Life," which inspired "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk

World War II, Tibbets became

nical

adviser

commercial

Eng.—d.

Bill

(WILLIAM

Feb. 28, 2007,

RICHARD

Sydney, Aus-

tralia), as front man for the Aztecs, was

regarded as the father of Australian pub rock. Thorpe was known as much for his showmanship as for his musicianship, and the band’s shows were marked by high energy and great volume. Thorpe formed his first band, the Planets, in 1957 in Brisbane, Queen. At

the age of 17 he moved to Sydney, where he formed the beat combo Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs; their first major pop hit was a cover of “Poison Ivy” in 1964. The band broke up in 1967 but reformed one year later, with Thorpe on guitar as well as vocals. During this period, guitarist Lobby Loyde (q.v.) joined the Aztecs, adding a new, harder

for the U.S.’s

a tech-

nuclear

aviation, retiring in 1985.

His awards included the Distinguished Service Cross, the Legion of Merit, and

the Distinguished Flying Cross. Tomasi Kulimoetoke II, Wallisian monarch (b. July 26, 1918, Mata-Utu, Wallis [Uvea] Island—d. May 7, 2007, Mata-Utu), as the 50th lavelua (paramount chief, or king, of Wallis) was the

longest-serving traditional leader in the French South Pacific island dependency Wallis and Futuna. He was a prominent member of a local farming clan when in 1959 he was selected as lavelua. Two years later, after a referendum on the dependency’s status, he signed a pact with France formally establishing Wallis and Futuna as a French

Thorpe, WILLIAM

Tibbets, Paul Warfield, Jr., brigadier general (ret.), U.S. Army Air Forces (b. Feb. 23, 1915, Quincy, Ill.—d. Nov. 1, 2007, Columbus, Ohio), was a colonel

when he piloted the B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay, which on Aug. 6, 1945, dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Following

the company. (HENRY

(ARIA) Hall of Fame in 1991.

duo with Junior Brown. Even as his success on the charts waned after the 1960s, Thompson continued to perform more than 200 live shows annually. His band, the Brazos Valley Boys, won Billboard magazine’s award for top touring band 14 years in a row. Thompson was elected to the Country Music Hall of

(1987-89) as an artistic associate with

Hank

edge to their music. A high point was the group’s performances (1972-73) in Victoria at the Sunbury Music Festival, memorialized in the album Aztecs Live! At Sunbury, which contained their biggest hit and Thorpe’s signature song, “Most People I Know (Think that I’m Crazy).” He was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association

Overseas

Territory.

Tomasi

often drew criticism for autocrat rule. In 2005 his attempt to protect his grandson from being arrested over a fatal traffic accident triggered riots by reformists who named a new lavelua and demanded Tomasi’s removal. French authorities intervened and ultimately confirmed his position. Troyat, Henri (LEV ASLANOVICH TARASOV), Russian-born French writer (b. Nov. 1, 1911, Moscow, Russia—d. March 4, 2007, Paris, France), was ad-

mired by legions of enthralled readers for his clear, lucid style and rich historical detail in his more than 100 literary works, including novels, shortstory collections, biographies, and plays. His first novel, Faux jour (1934), won the Prix du Roman Populiste, and his

fifth, L’Araigne

(1938;

The

Web, 161

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

1984), was awarded the Prix Goncourt.

cation of cosmetics. His work for the

Troyats family settled in Paris after having fled from Russia during the Revolution, and although he wrote exclusively in French, many of his works dealt with Russian history and with the

film

emigrant

experience.

In

1959

Troyat

was inducted into the French Academy. Turner,

Ike

(IZEAR

JR.), American

LUSTER

TURNER,

rhythm-and-blues

and

soul performer (b. Nov. 5, 1931, Clarksdale, Miss.—d. Dec. 12, 2007, San Marcos, Calif.), fronted the Kings of

7 Faces

of Dr.

Lao

(1964)—in

which actor Tony Randall was featured as such disparate characters as Merlin, Medusa,

and

the

Abominable

Snow-

man—earned Tuttle an honorary Academy Award in 1965, 16 years before Oscars were bestowed on makeup artists. Tuttle also founded his own makeup line,

Custom

Cosmetics,

best remembered

as

part of the electrifying singing duo of Ike and Tina Turner. Turner, who began playing piano as a child, performed with leading blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta region. His band’s first record, “Rocket 88”—recorded

at Sam

Phillipss Memphis (Tenn.) Recording Service but released on the Chess label—was a number one rhythm-andblues hit in 1951, though it was credited to saxophonist Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. After moving (1956) to St. Louis, Mo., Turner expanded a new

lineup of the Kings of Rhythm to include Anna Mae Bullock, a vocalist who

was rechristened Tina. The couple married

in

1958,

and

the

Ike

and

Tina

Turner Revue thrived because of her fiery stage presence and his rubberfaced guitar-playing antics. They won a national following with the release on the Sue label of a series of records— "Fool in Love" (1960), *I Idolize You" (1960), and "Its Gonna Work Out Fine"

(1961). Repositioning themselves to appeal to the growing rock market in the late 1960s, Ike and Tina began to sell records with their energetic reworkings of other artists songs, most notably John Fogertys "Proud Mary" (1971), which, along with "Nutbush City Limits" (1973), proved to be their last ma-

jor success. When the couple divorced in 1976, Tina alleged beatings, cocaine addiction, and infidelity on his part. Ikes career was hurt by Tina's accusations, and after imprisonment for cocaine possession, he made a comeback. In 2007 he won a Grammy Award for the album Risin' with the Blues. Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Cervantes Prize in 2000.

Valenti, Jack Joseph, American public

with

Motion Picture Association of America,

and

false noses

gist (b. July 27, 1938, London, Eng.—

was a lobbyist and publicist industry and the brainchild creation of the film-rating assigned labels (currently

d. June

brought

13, R, or NC-17) for audience suitabil-

about a revolution in the way that archaeological study was approached and founded the World Archaeological Con-

ity. Valenti, who worked on the Texas vice presidential campaign of Lyndon

gress (WAC). In the 1980s Ucko, then

ately as Johnson's special aide after the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy.

without the actor’s being present.

Rhythm band (which he formed in high school) but was

and Trilogía de Madrid (1984). Umbral's awards included the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 1996 and the

manufactured more than 100 customfit plaster masks that he could modify wrinkles,

and

noche que llegué al Café Gijón (1977),

figure (b. Sept. 5, 1921, Houston, Texas—d. April 26, 2007, Washington, D.C.), as president (1966-2004) of the

scars,

Color

cism. Umbral's books included Las ninfas (1975), Mortal y rosa (1975), La

Ucko,

Peter John, British archaeolo14, 2007,

London),

British secretary of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences

(IUPPS),

was

asked

to plan

the organizations 11th congress, scheduled to take place in 1986 in Southampton, Eng. He broke with tradition and made arrangements to include indigenous archaeologists from Third World countries, whose participation historically had been omitted. When Ucko agreed to observe a boycott of archaeologists from South Africa because of that countrys institution of apartheid, the IUPPS withdrew from the congress, and he reorganized it as the first WAC. (The WAC eventually became larger and more successful than the IUPPS.)

As director

the Australian Studies

Institute

in Canberra,

(1972-80)

of

of Aboriginal

Ucko

instituted

the study of contemporary indigenous communities as part of the proper scope of archaeology and brought in Aboriginal participation, and when he left, he insisted on being succeeded as director by an Aborigine.

for the behind system G, PG,

film the that PG-

B. Johnson, was hired almost immedi-

Besides

his memoir,

This

Time,

This

Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood (2007), Valenti penned several other books, including one about Johnson’s White House years. Viertel, Peter, German-born novelist and screenwriter (b. Nov. 16, 1920, Dresden, Ger—d. Nov. 4, 2007, Mar-

bella, Spain), was wholly or partly responsible for the scripts of such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942); The African Queen (1951), for which he wrote the dialogue; White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), which he adapted from his own 1953 novel of the same name; and the screen versions of the Ernest

Hemingway novels The Sun Also Rises (1957) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958). In addition to his film scripts and novels, Viertel was well known for

his close associations with Hemingway, director John Huston, and other celebrities. Viertel died less than a month after his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr (q.v.).

Umbral, Francisco (FRANCISCO PEREZ

MARTÍNEZ), Spanish writer (b. May 11,

Viljoen, Marais, South African politi-

1935, Madrid, Spain—d. Aug. 28, 2007, Madrid), was known for his incisive wit

cian (b. Dec. 2, 1915, Robertson, S.Af.—d. Jan. 4, 2007, Pretoria, S.Af.), was the fifth president (1979-84) of

and use of both classical language and contemporary slang in work that included magazine essays, newspaper columns, and more than 80 books. Um-

South Africa and the last to serve as a purely ceremonial head of state before the revised constitution of 1984 gave his successors

makeup artist (b. April 13, 1912, Jack-

bral was almost entirely self-educated. He began his career in 1958 as a journalist for the Valladolid newspaper E Norte de Castilla. He went on to write

sonville, Fla.—d. July 27, 2007, Pacific Palisades, Calif.), transformed the ap-

columns for, among others, El País, Diario 16, and, from 1989, El Mundo, for

elected to Parliament in 1953, and af-

pearances of actors performing for MGM studios with his masterful appli-

which he produced “Los placers y los

Tuttle,

William

Julian,

162

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

American

días,” a column

of acerbic social criti-

greater power.

In 1937

he joined the staff of the Afrikaans newspaper Die Transvaler, which was edited by H.F. Verwoerd. Viljoen was ter Verwoerd became prime minister in 1958, he appointed Viljoen to the first of several cabinet posts. Viljoen was

Obituaries

president of the Senate from 1976 (briefly serving as acting president when Nicolaas Diederichs died in office

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr, American novelist (b. Nov. 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Ind.— d. April 11, 2007, New York, N.Y.), was

in 1978) until June 1979 when he was

noted for his pessimistic and satiric novels that used fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. Vonnegut studied at Cornell University,

elected to replace Pres. B.J. Vorster, who had resigned in the midst of a government scandal. Villamizar, Alberto, Colombian politician and diplomat (b. 1944, Cücuta, Colom.—d. July 26, 2007, Bogotá,

Colom.) crusaded alongside the Liberal Party presidential candidate Luís Carlos Galán to limit the power, political influence, and wealth of the Medel-

lín cocaine cartel headed by Pablo Escobar. Villamizar was instrumental in the passage of the National Narcotics Statute of 1985, the first general legislation against drug trafficking. After Villamizar narrowly escaped an assassination

attempt

in

1986,

he

was

named ambassador to Indonesia. When he returned to Colombia, he supported Galan’s candidacy, but in 1989 the latter was assassinated. When Villamizar’s wife and sister were kidnapped in 1990, he spent five months negotiating their release. The incident and eight subsequent kidnappings were the subject of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez's Noticia de un secuestro (1997; News of a Kidnapping). Escobar, impressed with Villamizars negotiating skills, recruited him to help arrange his own surrender in 1991. Vogt,

born

Marguerite

American

Maria,

biologist

German-

(b.

1913,

short stories, chief among Welcome

of of

which was

to the Monkey House

(1968).

His other novels included Mother Night

Air Force in World War II. Captured by

(1961), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1983), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), and

the Germans,

he was

one

of the sur-

vivors of the fire bombing of Dresden, Ger., in February 1945. After the war he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. In the late 1940s he worked as a reporter and as a public relations writer. Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), visualized a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scientists and workers in a New York factory town. The Sirens of Titan (1959) was a quasiscience-fiction novel in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accident attendant on an alien planet's search for a spare part for a spaceship. In Cats Cradle (1963), some Caribbean islanders adopt a new religion consisting of harmless trivialities in response to an unforeseen scientific discovery that eventually destroys all life on Earth. In Slaughter-

Timequake (1997). In 2005 he published A Man Without a Country, a collection of essays and speeches. Vyroubova, Nina, Russian-born French ballerina (b. June 4, 1921, Gurzuf, Crimea, Ukrainian S.S.R. [now in Ukraine|—d. June 25, 2007, Paris,

France), was regarded as among the best dancers of her generation in Europe, excelling in both classical and contemporary ballets. Vyroubova’s family immigrated to France when she was a child,

and

she

made

her debut

in

Caen in 1937, dancing Swanilda in Coppélia. In 194144 she appeared in a series of recitals in Paris, where she be-

house-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969), Vonnegut drew on his Dresden

came acquainted with dancer-choreographer Roland Petit, and in 1945 she joined his new company, Les Ballets des Champs-Elysées. Vyroubova was

experience; the book used that bomb-

the leading ballerina (1949-57) with the

American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Paris Opéra Ballet, where the roles created for her included La Dame in

1975 Nobel Prize-winning scientist Renato Dulbecco, who pioneered the growing of animal viruses in culture in the 1950s and investigated how certain viruses gain control of the cells they infect. The pair showed that polyomavirus, which produces tumours in into the DNA

Wanda June (1970); several works nonfiction; and several collections

Ithaca, N.Y., before serving in the U.S.

Berlin, Ger—d. July 6, 2007, San Diego, Calif.), conducted research with

mice, inserts its DNA

ing raid as a symbol of the cruelty and destructiveness of war down through the centuries. Vonnegut also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday,

Dramma per musica (1950) and the Queen in Blanche-neige (1951). As a member (1958-62) of the Grand Ballet

du Marquis de Cuevas, she danced the lead in George Balanchine’s Sonnambula and partnered Rudolf Nureyev in The Sleeping Beauty in his first performance

after

his defection

(1961)

from the U.S.S.R. Vyroubova also appeared in four documentaries by filmmaker Dominique Delouche, notably

of

the host cell. Vogt earned a medical degree (1937) from the University of Berlin. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 to work with Dulbecco at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and in 1963 joined him in San Diego at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. While at Caltech they showed how the poliovirus forms plaques in cell cultures; this discovery contributed to the development of a polio vaccine. Vogt was a dedicated scientist and a mentor to legions of young scientists, including future Nobel laureates, but she herself won no professional awards for her work.

Les Cahiers retrouvés roubova (1996). Wagoner,

Porter

singer (b. Aug. Plains, Mo.—d. Nashville, Tenn.),

de

Wayne,

12, 1927,

Nina

Vy-

American

near

West

Oct. 28, 2007, was noted for his

flashy rhinestone suits and showy white hairdo as a star of the Grand Ole Opry and was credited with helping to launch the career of Dolly Parton, with whom he recorded 14 songs that reached the top 10. Wagoner who placed 81 singles on the country music charts,

had his first hit in 1954 with

“Companys

Comin’.”

The

following

Marty Reichenthal—AP

163

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries Mitchell B. Reibel—Ai Wire/Landov

year "A Satisfied number

Mind"

one spot. He was

ber (1955-56)

reached

the

a cast mem-

of the television

show

Ozark Jubilee before moving to Nashville, where in 1957 he joined the Opry. In 1960 he became the host of his own

television

program,

The

Porter

Wagoner Show, which ran for 21 years and at its peak of popularity reached more than three million viewers. Wagoner hit the charts regularly throughout the 1960s with songs that included “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Misery

Loves Company,” and “Sorrow on the Rocks.” During that decade he won three Grammy Awards for gospel music he recorded with the Blackwood Brothers Quartet. Wagoner’s concept albums, such as the prison-themed Soul of a Convict (1967), were among the first in the country music genre. In 2007 he released the critically acclaimed album Wagonmaster. Wagoner was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2002. Waldheim, Kurt Josef, Austrian diplomat and statesman (b. Dec. 21, 1918, Sankt Andrd-W6rdern, Austria—d. June 14, 2007, Vienna, Austria), served

two terms as the fourth UN secretarygeneral (1972-81) and one as president of Austria (1986-92)

tional scandal complicity in World War II tional pariah

until an interna-

concerning his Nazi atrocities made him an and ended his

alleged during internacareer.

Austrian statesman Kurt Waldheim

Waldheim served (1936-37) in the Aus-

trian army before studying for a diplomatic career. He was soon conscripted

into the German

army,

however,

and

served on the Russian front until 1941,

when he was wounded. Waldheim’s later claims that he spent the rest of the war studying law at the University of Vienna were contradicted by the rediscovery in 1986 of documents suggesting that he had been a German army staff officer from 1942 to 1945. After the war Waldheim entered the Austrian diplomatic service and held a variety of posts, including ambassador to Canada

elected In that fective efforts

UN secretary-general in 1972. position Waldheim oversaw efand sometimes massive relief in Bangladesh, Nicaragua, the

Sudan-Sahel

area

of

Africa,

and

Guatemala, as well as numerous peacekeeping operations. He was reelected in 1976 despite some opposition, but a third term was vetoed by China in 1981. His candidacy for president of Austria in 1986 became controversial following the dissemination of wartime and postwar documents that pointed to his having been an interpreter and intelligence officer for a German army unit that engaged in brutal reprisals against Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported most of the Jewish population

of

Salonika

(Thessaloniki),

Greece, to Nazi death camps Waldheim admitted that he been candid about his past claimed all knowledge of or tion in wartime

in 1943. had not but disparticipa-

atrocities, and in June

1986 he won the presidential election. An international commission cleared Waldheim of complicity in war crimes, but the “Waldheim affair” continued to provoke criticism, and he chose not to run for reelection in 1992. Walsh, Bill (WILLIAM ERNEST WALSH), American football coach (b. Nov. 30, 1931, Los Angeles, Calif.—d. July 30, 2007, Woodside, Calif.), was the architect of the "West Coast offense," which

featured short passes and quick slanting pass routes by receivers and running backs. This ball-control offense, which changed professional football during the 1980s and helped build the San Francisco 49ers into a powerhouse National Football League (NFL) team,

resulted in coverage mismatches and space for the backs and receivers to break long runs. Walsh coached on the high-school, junior college, and college Chris Niedenthal—Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

164

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

COLMAR

(1958-60), ambassador to the UN (1955, 1964-68, 1970-71), and foreign minister (1968-71), before being

Celebrated American football coach

Bill Walsh level before becoming (1968) an assis-

tant coach for the NFL Cincinnati Bengals. There he served as end and quarterback coach under Paul Brown through 1975, earning praise for developing Ken Anderson into a star quarterback. When Brown retired, Walsh

was disappointed not to be named his successor. Walsh then joined the San Diego Chargers staff, where he was credited with turning Dan Fouts into a Hall of Fame quarterback. In two seasons (1977-78) as head coach at Stan-

ford University, Walsh led the team to two victories in bowl games. In 1979 he returned to the NFL as head coach of the 49ers. The team struggled to a 2-14 record in his first season but by 1981 had emerged as NFL champions with a victory in Super Bowl XVI. Under Walsh the 49ers also won Super Bowls XIX (1985) and XXIII (1989) and reg-

istered a record of 102-63-1. Among Walsh’s most celebrated players were quarterback Joe Montana and receiver Jerry Rice, holder of nearly every professional pass-catching record. After retiring in 1989, Walsh worked asa television analyst before returning in 1992 to

Stanford,

where

he

coached

for

three seasons. He later served as a consultant to the 49ers. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.

Wearne, (Alice) Eileen Australian ath-

lete (b. Jan.

30,

1912,

Sydney,

Aus-

Obituaries

tralia—d. July 6, 2007, Sydney), was only the second woman to represent Australia in track and field at the Olympic Games. After winning the triathlon (100-m sprint, high jump, and javelin) at the New South Wales athletics championships in 1931, Wearne qualified to compete in the 100-m event at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, where she finished fourth in her heat and failed to reach the final. Six years later, at the 1938 Empire Games (later renamed

the

Commonwealth

Games)

in Sydney, she earned a bronze medal in the 220-yd event and a gold medal in the 4 x 110-yd relay. Wearne retired in 1940, but she remained active in the

Olympic movement, and at the time of her death she was her country’s oldest living Olympian.

(1949),

the

steel-and-leather

(1960),

and

a curved,

“Ox”

three-legged

stacking chair (1988). Weizsücker, Carl Friedrich Freiherr (Baron) von, German theoretical

physicist and philosopher (b. June 28, 1912, Kiel, Ger—d. April 28, 2007, Starnberg, Ger), was a member of the

team that sought to develop an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany; he later was one of the "Góttingen 18," scientists who in 1957 signed a manifesto opposing the proposed acquisition of atomic weapons by the Federal Republic of Germany. After studying physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the Universities of Berlin, Góttingen, Copenhagen, and Leipzig (Ph.D., 1933), Weizsácker taught physics at the University of Leipzig (1934-36), the Kaiser Wilhelm

Webb,

Kate

(CATHERINE

MERRIAL

WEBB),

New

Zealand-born

journalist

Institute (1936-42), the University of Strasbourg (1942-44), and the Max

Christchurch,

Planck Institute in Góttingen, where he

(b.

March

24,

1943,

N.Z.—d. May 13, 2007, Sydney, Australia), in her role as a reporter

was

(1967-71) and Phnom Penh bureau chief (1971—77) for United Press International (UPD, was one of the few

nuclear reactive generation of energy in stars (which led to the so-called BetheWeizsäcker formula), and the mecha-

women war correspondents to cover the Vietnam War. In 1967 she flew to Saigon and offered her services to UPI as a freelance correspondent. Captured in Cambodia by North Vietnamese forces in April 1971, Webb was reported to have been killed but unexpectedly emerged from the jungle after 23 days as a captive. She later recalled this harrowing experience in On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong

nisms behind gradual planetary forma-

(1972).

From

1977

worked

for British

to

2001

Webb

publications

and

department

head

(1946-57).

He

initially studied subatomic energy, the

tion,

but

he

later

focused

more

on

philosophical issues. In 1957 he joined the philosophy department at the University of Hamburg, where he remained until 1969. From 1970 to 1980 he was founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences in Starnberg. Weizsäcker wrote more than 30 books. His many awards included the Max Planck Medal (1957), the Erasmus Prize (1969), and the Templeton Prize

for Progress in Religion (1989).

Agence France-Presse.

Wilson,

Bertha

(BERTHA WERNHAM),

Canadian jurist (b. Sept. 18, 1923, Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire, Scot.—d. April 28, 2007, Ottawa, Ont.) was appointed (1982) the first woman to serve on the

Supreme Court of Canada, a post she held until her retirement in 1991. Wilson graduated with an M.A. (1944)

from the University of Abderdeen, Scot., and in 1949 she immigrated to Canada with her husband, an ordained minister. After Wilson earned a law degree (1958) from Dalhousie

University, Halifax, N.S., she spent 16 years with Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, where she rose to become the first woman partner in a major Canadian law firm. In 1975 she became the first

woman to be appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal. While sitting on the Supreme Court, Wilson was the author of the courts 1988 decision that overturned Criminal Code of Canada restrictions on abortion, and she wrote

the judgment in 1990 that recognized the battered-wife syndrome as a valid self-defense. Woodiwiss, Kathleen (KATHLEEN ERIN HOGG), American romance novelist (b. June 3, 1939, Alexandria, La.—d. July 6, 2007, Princeton, Minn.), was the

author of 14 hefty bodice rippers, and she was credited with being the first to salt historical fiction with steamy sex scenes. Her paperbacks, beginning with The Flame and the Flower (1972), sold more than 35 million copies in 13 countries. In 1988 Woodiwiss was the recipient of the Romance Writers of America’s lifetime achievement award. Her final book, Everlasting, was published posthumously.

Willis, Bill (WILLIAM KARNET WILLIS),

Wegner,

Hans

Jorgen,

Danish furni-

American

football

player (b. Oct.

5,

ture designer (b. April 2, 1914, Tender, Jutland, Den.—d. Jan. 26, 2007, Copen-

1921, Columbus, 2007, Columbus),

hagen, Den.), designed sculpturally elegant yet functional chairs, each of which epitomized the beauty and superb craftsmanship of the Danish Modern style. Wegner created his first chair in 1931 while serving as an apprentice

first African American players in pro-

cabinetmaker

He

designed

(1940-42)

Ohio—d. Nov. 27, became one of the

fessional football’s modern era when he joined (1946) the Cleveland Browns of

800-m race at the 1936 Berlin Olympic

the newly formed All-America Football

running last) finish that established him as a world-class runner. His victory

Conference

(AAFC).

Willis, a lineman

on both offense and defense, played for the Browns

until 1953. He earned all-

league honours three times in the AAFC

furniture for the architects Arne Jacobsen and Erik Mgller before opening his own office in 1943. Wegners caneseated "Round Chair" or simply "the

and four times in the National Football League (NFL), which in 1950 absorbed the Browns and several other AAFC

Chair”

(1949),

“the

teams. Willis appeared in the first three

world's

most

chair" by the

Pro Bowl games (1950, 1951, and 1952) and was inducted (1977) into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was also named to the NFLs 1940s All-Decade

American

was

declared

beautiful

magazine

Interiors

in 1950

and was famously used in the 1960 U.S. presidential debates. Other significant chairs included the Y-backed “Wishbone” (1949), a hangable folding chair

Woodruff, John Youie, American track and field athlete (b. July 5, 1915, Connellsville, Pa.—d. Oct. 30, 2007, Fountain Hills, Ariz.), won gold in the Games in a come-from-behind (he was

and those of Jesse Owens and other African American teammates embarrassed German leader Adolf Hitler. At

the

time

of his

Woodruff was

Olympic

a freshman

triumph, at the Uni-

versity of Pittsburgh. During his college years he won the Amateur Athletic Union 800-m championship in 1937 and the 880-yd National Collegiate Athletic Association title for three years

Team by members of the Hall of Fame

(1937-39). Woodruff was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of

selection committee.

Fame

in 1978.

165

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

Woolmer,

WOOLMER),

Bob

(ROBERT

English

ANDREW

cricketer

and

coach (b. May 14, 1948, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India—d. March 18, 2007,

Kingston, Jam.), was a respected player (he was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year

in 1976) and coach who was a pioneer in the use of computers to analyze player performance. His sudden death, the night after the Pakistani cricket team that he coached was eliminated from the World Cup, led to numerous rumours and conspiracy theories when the Jamaican police announced that it was being treated as “suspicious.” Though a local medical examiner initially indicated that death occurred by strangulation, a British Home Office pathologist, joined by the Jamaican police, later ruled that Woolmer died of natural causes. As a cricketer, Woolmer

was most associated with the ballets Harlequinade and Giselle. Wright joined

Wright joined London

Festival Ballet

guard of the Taiwanese New Wave, a 1980s movement that brought international attention to the island state with films that probed political, economic, and social issues in Taiwan’s rapidly changing environment. Yang made his full-length-film debut in 1983 with Haitan de yitian ("That Day on the

(now English

Ballet), where

Beach"), which chronicled the reunion

she created the lead roles in Frederick Ashton’s Vision of Marguerite, Michael Charnley’s Alice in Wonderland, and Vladimir Bourmeister’s The Snow Maiden. She danced in 1956 for the celebration of the marriage of Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly. Af

of two women after a 13-year separation and how their reminiscences help free them from their pasts. His next

Ballet Rambert

(now Rambert

Dance

Company) in 1945 and first gained attention there in the so-called peasant pas de deux in Giselle. After two years with

ter

Roland

she

Petit’s

Ballet

National

left Festival

Ballet

de

in

Paris,

1962,

Wright was a guest with several companies and toured the world under the auspices of the British Council.

was a stylish right-handed opening batsman and a useful medium-pace bowler. In English county cricket he made his first-class debut for Kent in 1968 and won his cap in 1970. He made his England Test debut in 1975 against Australia and played in Test se-

Wyman,

ries against the West Indies (1976), India (1976-77), and Australia (1976-77

(1940-48) of former president Ronald Reagan. Wyman was a singer on the ra-

and 1977) before deserting Test cricket for Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket. Woolmer was recalled to the England side for two matches each against the West In-

dio, appeared in the choruses of movie musicals and in bit parts, and starred in a number of B movies before her portrayal of an alcoholic's girlfriend in

dies (1980) and Australia (1981) with-

her breakthrough as a dramatic actress. After starring in The Yearling (1946), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination, Wyman won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a deaf rape victim in Johnny Belinda

out notable success. His participation in the 1981-82 rebel tour to South Africa brought his Test career to a close, and a back injury led to his retirement as a player in 1984. In his first-class career, Woolmer played in 350 matches, scoring 15,772 runs at an

average of 33.55, with 34 centuries and a high score of 203; he also took 420 wickets (average 25.87) and 239 catches. In 19 Tests he scored 1,059 runs (average 33.09), with 3 centuries

and a high score of 149; took 4 wickets (average 74.75); and made

10 catches.

He immigrated to South Africa, where he coached a club side before returning to England to coach Kent (1987) and then Warwickshire

2000-02). He moved

(1991-94

and

up to Test level,

coaching South Africa (1994-99) then Pakistan (from 2004).

and

Jane (SARAH JANE MAYFIELD;

SARAH JANE FULKS), American actress (b. Jan. 5, 1917, St. Joseph, Mo.—d. Sept. 10, 2007, Rancho Mirage, Calif.),

had a long, distinguished career in film and television, but she was perhaps equally well known as the first wife

The Lost Weekend (1945) proved to be

(1948);

she

also won

Oscar

nomina-

two

films,

Qingmei

Zhuma

(1985;

"Taipei Story") and Kongbu fenzi (1986; "The Terrorizers"), explored social change. Yang's Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian (1991; A Brighter Summer Day) focused on the street-gang culture of the 1960s and won numerous awards. Yang also taught at the National Institute for the Arts in Taipei and collaborated with his students and former students on such films as Duli shidai (1994; “A Confucian Confusion”) and Majiang (1996; "Mahjong"). At the 2000 Cannes Festival, Yang won the best director award for Yi yi (Yi Yi: A One and a Two. . .), an intricate family saga seen from various perspectives.

At the time of his death, Yang was working with actor Jackie Chan on The Wind, an animated kung fu film. Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich, Russian politician (b. Feb. 1, 1931, Sverdlovsk [now Yekaterinburg], Russia, U.S.S.R.—d. April 23, 2007, Moscow,

Russia),

as independent

Russia's first

Russian politician Boris Yeltsin

tions for her roles in The Blue Veil (1951) and Magnificent Obsession (1954). Other notable films included The Glass Menagerie (1950) and All That Heaven Allows (1955). Wyman then

branched out into television with the anthology series Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955-58); she often hosted and starred in various episodes of the show. She semiretired but made a few more motion pictures, including Pollyanna (1960), and occasional guest appearances

on television. Wyman

re-

turned to prominence and found a new audience with the TV series Falcon Crest (1981-90), in which she starred as

Wright, Belinda British ballerina

(BRENDA (b. Jan.

WRIGHT), 18, 1929,

the domineering Channing.

matriarch

Angela

Southport, Lancashire [now in Merseyside], Eng.—d. April 1, 2007, Zürich, Switz.), excelled in classical roles, in

which she was known for her sparkling technique and lightness in jumps. She

Yang, Edward (YANG DECHANG), Taiwanese film director (b. Sept. 24, 1947, Shanghai, China—d. June 29, 2007, Beverly Hills, Calif.), was in the vanVitaly Armand—AFP/Getty Images

166

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Obituaries

popularly elected president (1991-99), guided the country through a stormy decade of political and economic retrenching, but he was plagued by recurrent heart problems, an ongoing war with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, the failure of his free-market reforms to spur economic growth, and erratic behaviour (some of which

was later confirmed to be related to excessive alcohol consumption). Yeltsin attended the Urals Polytechnic Institute and worked

(1955-68) in construction

until he began full-time work in the Communist Party, which he had joined in 1961. In 1976 he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk oblast party committee. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to national power, he chose Yeltsin

Vladimir Putin, who granted him immunity from future prosecution. Zahir Shah, Mohammad, Afghan monarch (b. Oct. 15, 1914, Kabul, Afg.—d. July 23, 2007, Kabul), as

Afghanistan’s (1933-73),

last

provided

reigning an

era

king

of stable

government while maintaining a neutral position for his country in international politics. Zahir Shah ascended the throne at age 19, after the assassination of his father in November 1933, having previously served as a cabinet minister. For a number of years his relatives ran the government, but he asserted his power through the constitution of 1964,

which

established

a constitu-

coup, Gen. Mohammad Daud Khan (the king’s brother-in-law), proclaimed Afghanistan a republic with himself as its president. Zahir Shah formally abdicated on Aug. 24, 1973, and went into

exile in Italy. Following the U.S. overthrow

of the Taliban,

he returned

to

Afghanistan in 2002. Zahir Shah, who publicly opposed the restoration of the monarchy and declined to run for president, was later given the honorary title Father of the Nation.

Zaret, Hy (HYMAN HARRY ZARITSKY), American

lyricist (b. Aug.

21,

1907,

New York, N.Y.—d. July 2, 2007, Westport, Conn.), collaborated with com-

poser Alex North

to create

the song

“Unchained Melody” (1955), which be-

Politburo (as a nonvoting member). As

came one of the most enduring and most performed songs of all time; it was covered by more than 300 artists, notably Lena Horne, Elvis Presley, Joni

the mayor

Mitchell,

(1985) to clean out the corruption

in

Keystone/Getty Images

the Moscow party organization, and the next year he elevated Yeltsin to the of Moscow,

an able and determined

Yeltsin proved

whose 1965 rendition became a pop music classic. Zaret’s other hits included the songs “Dedicated to You” (with Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin), “So Long, for a While” (with Alex

reformer, but

he began condemning the slow pace of reform, challenging party conservatives, and criticizing Gorbachev. Yeltsin was forced to resign from the Moscow party leadership (1987) and from the Politburo

won

(1988).

In March

a seat in the new

1989

Kramer),

Soviet parlia-

ters),

during the brief coup against Gorbachev by hard-line communists, Yeltsin rallied resistance in Moscow while calling for the return of Gorbachev. Yeltsin emerged as the countrys most powerful political figure, and when the Soviet Union collapsed on December 25, the Russian government under his leadership assumed many of the former superpowers responsibili-

Afghan monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah

ties. By the late

forms seemed to have little effect outside the Kabul area. In the early 1970s the country suffered drought and famine. Pashto tribes along the Pakistan border continued to press for autonomy, and the political structure in the capital was unable to deal with the countrys economic problems. In a bloodless coup on July 17, 1973, Zahir Shah was deposed. The leader of the

events in Chechnya, lagging economic reforms, and political maneuvering dominated much of the government. In 1999 the Duma

(parliament)

initiated

an impeachment drive against Yeltsin but was unable to secure the necessary votes to proceed. Yeltsin announced his resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, naming as acting president Prime Minister

and

“My

Sister

Vienna, Austria—d.

(June 1991) was seen as a mandate for economic reform. Two months later,

the

(with Lou

and

Sis-

I” (with

Austrian jazz musician (b. July 7, 1932,

first direct popular elections for the presidency of the Russian republic

however,

Ball”

Zawinul, Joe (JOSEF ERICH ZAWINUL),

His victory in the

1990s,

Meat

Kramer and Joan Whitney).

ment of the Russian S.ES.R. elected him president of the republic against Gorbachevs wishes. Yeltsin took steps to give the Russian republic more autonomy, declared himself in favour of a market-oriented economy and a multiparty political system, and quit the Party

“One

Singer; a vehicle for the Andrews

he

ment, and on May 29, 1990, the parlia-

Communist

and the Righteous Brothers,

tional monarchy and prohibited royal relatives from holding public office. Zahir Shah undertook a number of economic-development projects, including irrigation and highway construction, backed by foreign aid (largely from the U.S. and the Soviet Union), but his re-

Sept. 11, 2007, Vi-

enna), was a leading composer and keyboardist in jazz-rock fusion music, most famously in the combo Weather Report, which he and soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter led (1970-85). Zawinul was a successful jazz pianist in Europe before moving (1959) to the U.S. He became noted during his years (1961-70) playing in Cannonball Adderley’s bluesy hard-bop Quintet, and he composed Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (1967). Zawinul also played electric piano on Miles Davis’s pioneering fusion albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (both 1969). With Weather Report, Zawinul played synthesizer and composed most of the combo' abstract, atmospheric repertoire; their popular albums included I Sing the Body Electric, Heavy Weather, and the Grammy Award-winning 8:30 (1979). He continued to ex-

periment with electronic instruments and with African and Latin rhythms in the Zawinul Syndicate, the fusion combo that he formed in 1987. In later years he also operated a nightclub in Vienna. 167

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

í

—

King penguins congregate around a chunk of floating ice off the coast of South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Melting ice on the island was giving rise to concerns over global warming. Momatiuk-Eastcott/Corbis

—

W—

n

ML

x

» >

s

~ =

-— b

e

aan

n

Climate Change—

The Global Effects by John Streicker n 2007

the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

released

its Fourth

Assessment

Report. Previous assessments (1990, 1995, 2001) had provided

strong indications that by various measures the Earth's climate was becoming warmer, but with the latest report the picture had become clearer: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average

air

and

ocean

temperatures,

widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level." The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization (a UN agency) in recognition of the potential importance of climate change. The IPCC is charged with reviewing comprehensive scientific climate-change studies and pro-

viding an objective understanding of climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation. Hundreds of climatologists, meteorologists, and other scientists from around the world are involved in the preparation of IPCC reports as authors, contributors, and expert reviewers. The fourth assessment was compiled by three IPCC working groups, and an overview of their findings is provided in the sections that follow. Climate undergoes natural changes and cycles. In order to understand the Earth's overall warming, therefore, sci-

entists examine the balance of the energy that reaches the Earth from the Sun and the energy that is radiated away from the Earth. They then identify radiative forcings—that is, human or natural factors that drive the energy balance up or down. The fourth assessment established that anthropogenic

(human) activity is responsible for most of the current global warming, with radiative forcing from anthropogenic sources being over 10 times larger than all natural components combined. The primary anthropogenic source is the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which is produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels. (Greenhouse gases are gases that allow sunlight to pass through but trap heat radiated from the Earth as it is warmed by the sunlight.) Land-use change, such as the burning or clearing of forests, provides a lesser contribution. Effects on the Physical World The Fourth Assessment Report documented that 11 of the past 12 years have been the warmest

on record since

1850

(when

global instrumental record keeping began). Over the past 100 years, the global annual average surface temperature has risen by 0.74 °C (1.3 °F), with most of

The melting and retreat of Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana, is documented in this series of photographs taken in 1938, 1981, and 2006 (from left to right). In 1938 Grinnell Glacier filled the area at the bottom of the image. (The narrow glacier above it is Salamander Glacier.) By 2006 Grinnell Glacier had largely disappeared from this view.

170

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(Left) T.J. Hileman/Glacier National Park Archives; (centre and right) Carl Key/USGS

this warming coming in only the past 50 years. The world has not been warming uniformly as climate changes, however. In general, average land surface temperatures have been increasing more rapidly than ocean surface temperatures (although the oceans absorb 8096 of the heat that the world is gaining) The Arctic has been the region with the most rapid rate of warming— two to three times the global average. In contrast, surface temperatures of Antarctica have not risen significantly. With warmer surface temperatures and warmer oceans, more water evaporates and the moisture in the atmosphere increases. Storms with heavy precipitation have occurred with more frequency and intensity. Extreme events such as hurricanes and cyclones are not more frequent globally, but there is evidence of an increase in the strength and duration of the storms since 1970 that is consistent with increases in ocean temperature. Increases in the extent of spring melting and in storms with heavy precipitation have resulted in more flooding in some ar-

A polar bear leaps between ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. Arctic sea ice serves as a prime polar bear habitat.

mean more rapid drying, however, and some areas have experienced more periods marked by drought. With the advent of satellite imagery in the late 1970s, it became possible to

Effects on Biological Systems As temperatures rise and precipitation and storm patterns shift, there have been accompanying changes in the biological world. The fourth assessment states: “Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.” Some land plant and animal species have shifted their ranges poleward

monitor

(northward

eas.

Warmer

snow

temperatures

can

and ice coverage

also

on

a

global scale. Snow pack, sea ice, and glaciers have been melting, and the rate of melt has been increasing in recent decades. Permafrost (ground that normally stays frozen yearround) in the Northern Hemisphere is also beginning to melt, and the ice sheets of Greenland

and Antarctica are losing mass. The most visible expression of climate change has been the seasonal retreat of Arctic sea ice. The summertime sea-ice

minimum in the Arctic has shown a declining trend, and in 2007 the minimum was 23% less than the record minimum

that was

set in 2005.

(See

Map on page 230.) The melting of land-based ice and the expansion of the oceans as they have become warmer account about equally for observed increases in sea level. (Melting of sea ice does not raise sea level, since floating ice already displaces its equivalent in melt water.) Sea level has risen by 17 cm (7 in) in the

past 100 years. Although this is a relatively small amount, historical data indicate that mean sea level had been virtually unchanged for the previous 2,000 years. (Top) Greenpeace—EPA/Corbis; (bottom) Stephen Frink/Corbis

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in

the

Northern

Hemi-

sphere and southward in the Southern Hemisphere), and some have moved upslope to higher elevations, where it is cooler. Boreal

forests, for example,

have been observed encroaching northward on the Arctic tundra at a rate

of 12 km

(7.5

mi)

per year. In general, mid- to highlatitude regions have had earlier springs and a longer growing season. Other changes that have been reported include earlier leaf production in trees, earlier egg hatching in birds,

and

an

restrial habitats. Climate change is thought to play a role in the population decrease and ultimately the extinction of some species by such mechanisms as constricting habitat, affecting reproductive patterns, and providing an advantage to competing species. Particu-

larly at risk are species that have a restricted range and a low adaptive capacity.

Some marine and freshwater biological ecosystems have also shifted poleward, apparently because of rising water temperatures, loss of ice cover, and

changes in ocean circulation and water chemistry. Examples of affected organisms include algae, plankton, and fish

This staghorn coral in the Caribbean Sea shows signs of bleaching, the loss of symbiotic microscopic algae that the coral needs to survive.

earlier

awakening from hibernation by mammals. The timing varies for different species, however, depending on their specific behaviour and ability to adapt to change. As climate and some ecosystems have shifted, there has been some loss and fragmentation of ter171

in high-latitude regions and in high-altitude lakes. Warming of the southern oceans has been associated with a decline in the population of krill (a small crustacean of the open sea), which in turn has been linked to a decrease in seabird and seal populations in the region. Loss of habitat is also expected to affect those species that are dependent on Arctic sea ice, such as the polar bear,

walrus,

and

several

species

of

seals and seabirds. Overall biological abundance in the oceans is difficult to determine, but satellite imagery of chlorophyll levels (from marine plant life) indicates that primary ocean production has gone down 696 globally since the early 1980s. Another potential impact on marine life is related to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because some of the gas is absorbed by the oceans. The extra dissolved carbon dioxide in seawater has made it more

acidic (meas-

ured as an average decrease in pH). There is evidence that the acidity may be exacerbating the coral bleaching already caused by ocean warming. Effects on Human Society The effects of climate change are beginning to appear in the human sphere, although in general they are not as evident as the impacts on the natural world. Problems related to water supply are projected to increase in many regions as the result of shrinking glaciers and snowpack, drought, evaporation, and the infiltration of salt water in low-lying areas through rising sea levels. Lack of access to usable water is a key vulnerability, especially in less-developed countries

Forests of the Northern Hemisphere would benefit from an extended growing season but might also experience adverse effects from other factors. For example, forests from British Columbia to Alaska have been subjected to severe infestations of tree-killing beetles that have proliferated with a warmer regime. Dead trees in turn increase the risk of wildfires. Coastal cities and infrastructure,

a higher incidence of malnutrition. The hardest hit areas are likely to be those with low capacity for adaptation—in other words, regions that do not have spare economic resources and that are subject to various kinds of stress in addition to any created by climate change. Responses to Climate Change In order to project future climate change, the IPCC employs computer-based climate

es-

models, which over several decades of

and

storms. À rise in sea level together with

development “have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of significant climate warming in

more

response

pecially low-lying

delta

small

vulnerable

islands, intense,

are or

regions

extreme,

to

sea

weather

could combine to create severe damage. The costs associated with such damage are not necessarily incremental, because its severity could suddenly become much greater when structures are subjected to forces that exceed what they have been designed to withstand. Climate change might have adverse effects on human health. There is evidence that the ranges of mosquitoes and other disease vectors have increased, although there is no clear indication of any corresponding increase in the incidence of the diseases they transmit. Cold-related injury and deaths are projected to decrease, but heat-related increases would outweigh them. Heat waves can be very serious, as shown by the 2003 heat wave in Europe,

in which

35,000

excess

deaths

were recorded. Increased stress on water and food resources would result in

to

increasing

greenhouse

gases.” The greatest uncertainties in the climate models lie in predictions of human behaviour (for example, predictions concerning

economic

and popu-

lation growth) that affect greenhousegas emissions and their cumulative concentration. For this reason the IPCC used several different emissions scenarios, based on different assumptions concerning global and regional development.

For the six major

emissions

scenarios, the range of the projected rise in global average annual temperature was 1.8 to 4 °C (3.2 to 7.2 °F) over

the next century if no measures are taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Despite these uncertainties, all of the models predict that the currently observed changes to the physical world brought on by global warming will continue and will accelerate over the coming decades.

A worker lays down hay in a grid pattern to stabilize a sand dune and help prevent desertification in the Ningxia Hui region of northwestern China.

(LDCs).

Climate change is expected to have a mixed impact on agriculture. With spring

occurring

sooner

in mid-

to

high-latitude regions, a longer growing season would benefit crop yields. Agricultural productivity, however, is vulnerable to other potential consequences of climate change, such as heat waves,

floods, and droughts. Agricultural production in low-latitude regions has already been adversely affected by global warming. The Sahel region of Africa has seen crop failures because of intense and more frequent droughts. The situation has resulted in famines and has been exacerbated by other stresses in the region. Unfortunately, crop yields are expected to continue to drop in coming decades as a result of climate change. Like agriculture, forestry is expected to be positively and negatively affected. 172

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Michael Reynolds—EPA/Corbis

Some climate-change impacts present opportunities, while others pose risks, but climate change in general is projected to be disruptive, with an overall negative impact on both society and the environment. Although regional and local uncertainties about the effects of climate change remain, the general trends are now fairly well understood. The largest unknown is how people and governments will respond to the

Projections of Surface Temperature Changes (relative to 1980-99 and based on a midrange emissions scenario)

2020-29

situation.

People and other living beings have experience adapting to change. Human adaptation can be achieved through a variety of means, such as technology, management, modification of behaviour, or social policy. Adaptation is a way of addressing the immediate consequences of climate change, and some adaptation is already taking place on an ad hoc basis. According to the fourth assessment,

however,

2090-99

“more ex-

tensive adaptation than is currently occurring is required to reduce vulnerability to climate change. There are barriers, limits and costs, which are not

fully understood.” Climate change is projected to bring severe stress on the capability of supplying such necessities as water, food, and health care. In ac-

cepting the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC, the organization's chairman—R.K. Pachauri—stated that climate change “raised the threat of dramatic population migration, con-

"Co

05

10

15

20

25

30

35

7.2

9.0

108

12.6

40

50

60

70

Adapted from the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC

€ 2008 EB Inc.

flict, and war over water and other re-

sources as well as a realignment power among nations.”

of

sentially began with the industrial era

of green architecture to design buildings that make efficient use of energy and water (see Special Report on page

two centuries ago. Emissions increased

192) and the use of biofuels as a re-

with the growth of industrialization that followed World War II, and they increased by more than 70% between 1970 and 2004. In order to stabilize the climate change that is being driven by global warming, mitigation efforts seek to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In the words of the IPCC, “Mitigation efforts over the next two to three decades will have a large impact on opportunities to achieve lower stabilization levels.” Mitigation can be approached through demand-side management (such as behavioral changes to conserve energy), alternate sources of energy (with reduced or zero emissions, including renewable sources of energy), technologies that improve energy efficiency, and carbon capture and storage. One form of mitigation is an emphasis on sustainable development, including the use

newable energy source (see Special Report on page 174). Another important

Human

greenhouse-gas emissions es-

carbon. By assigning costs to carbondioxide emissions and placing a value on the reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions, a carbon market can operate in which carbon credits are bought and sold to provide economic incentives to

they would very likely outweigh the cost of mitigation (for example, 1—596 of GDP globally, with the cost rising as high as 2596 of GDP for LDCs). By the end of 2007, all major developed countries with the exception of the U.S. had ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty for developed nations to begin to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. The protocol mandated restrictions of greenhouse-gas emissions for the period 2008-12. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in December

meet emission regulations.

2007 in Bali, Indon., delegates used the

The IPCC has attempted to assess the potential costs of mitigation. Although the question is complex, there is some agreement that it would be on the order of 1% of global GDP. Some studies have also tried to assess the economic cost to society from the impacts of climate change with the assumption that no mitigation attempts are made. Although there is less certainty about these costs, there is agreement that

findings of the IPCC fourth assessment to discuss what would succeed the protocol. Although many issues remained, the delegates reached a consensus on the course that would be followed to

mitigation strategy to promote the conservation of energy is to put a price on

negotiate

a post-Kyoto

agreement

to

address climate change. John Streicker is a Professional Engineer and a Climate-Change Consultant and Speaker who lives in the Yukon Territory, Canada.

173

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The Next Great Source of Energy? by Clarence Lehman boom in the production of biofuel was under way in 2007, especially in the United

which

States, where in Janu-

percentages.

ary about 75 refineries for producing the biofuel ethanol from corn (maize) were being built or

expanded. This construction, not including additional facilities on the drawing board, was expected to double existing capacity, and the demand for corn pushed its price so high that U.S. farmers planted more land to the crop than they had in a generation. Biofuel was perceived as a beneficial alternative to petroleum and other fossil fuels as the price of petroleum rose during the year to record levels and worldwide concern increased about how greenhouse-gas emissions from petroleum-derived fuels were contributing to climate change in the form of global warming. Despite its perceived economic and environmental benefits, however, many critics were expressing con-

has

ceptance

found

in Europe,

greatest

ac-

is used in

diesel engines, usually blended with petroleum diesel in various Other biofuels include methane gas, which can be derived from the decomposition of biomass in the absence of oxygen, and methanol, butanol, and dimethyl

ether, which are in development. Much focus is on the development of methods to produce ethanol from biomass that has a high content of cellulose. This cellulosic ethanol could be produced from abundant low-value material, including wood chips, grasses, crop residues, and municipal waste. The mix of commercially used biofuels will undoubtedly shift as these fuels are developed, but the range of possibilities presently known could furnish power for transportation, heating, cooling, and electricity. In evaluating the economic benefits of biofuels, the energy required for producing them has to be taken into account. For example, in growing corn to produce

cerns about the scope of the exAt a plant in Ipoh, Malay., a worker pumps palmpansion of certain biofuels beoil-derived biodiesel into a tanker. cause of their potential to create ethanol, fossil fuels are connew problems. Biofuels are fuels that are derived greatest production is ethanol (an alsumed in farming equipment, in fertilcohol), which is made by fermenting from biomass—that is, plant material izer manufacturing, in corn transportaor animal waste. Since such materials starch or sugar. In the United States— tion, and in ethanol distillation. In this can be replenished readily, biofuels are the leading producer—ethanol biofuel respect ethanol made from corn repreis made primarily from corn grain, and a renewable source of energy, unlike sents a relatively small energy gain; the fossil fuels, such as petroleum, coal, it typically is blended with gasoline to energy gain from sugarcane is greater and natural gas. Some long-exploited produce a fuel that is 10% ethanol. In and that from cellulosic ethanol could Brazil, which had been the leading biofuels, such as wood, can be used dibe even greater. Biofuels supply envirectly as a raw material that is burned producer until 2006, ethanol biofuel is ronmental benefits but, depending on to produce heat. The heat, in turn, can made primarily from sugarcane, and it their implementation, can also have sebe used to run generators in a power is commonly used as 100% ethanol fuel rious drawbacks. As a renewable energy plant to produce electricity. A number or in gasoline blends containing 85% source, plant-based biofuels in principle of existing power facilities burn grass, ethanol. The second most common liqmake little net contribution to the wood, or other kinds of biomass. uid biofuel is biodiesel, which is made greenhouse effect because the carbon Liquid biofuels are of particular inprimarily from oily plants (such as the dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) that terest because of the vast infrastructure soybean or oil palm) and to a lesser exenters the air during combustion will already in place to use them, especially tent from other sources (such as cookhave been removed from the air earlier for transportation. The liquid biofuel in ing waste from restaurants). Biodiesel, when the combustible material grew. 174

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Zainal Abd Halim—Reuters/Landov

restore fertility to degraded lands. Such biofuels could be burned directly to generate electricity or converted to liquid fuels as technologies develop. The proper way to grow biofuels to serve all needs simultaneously will continue to be a matter of much experimentation

and

debate,

but

the

fast

growth in biofuel production will likely continue. In the European Union, for example, 5.75% of transport fuels are to be biofuels by 2010, with 10% of its vehicles to run exclusively on biofuels by 2020. In December 2007, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandated the use of 136 billion litres (36 billion gal) of biofuels annu-

A cutting machine on a plantation in southeastern Brazil harvests sugarcane, the primary source of ethanol biofuel in the country.

ally by 2020, more than a sixfold increase over 2006 production levels. The legislation required, with certain stipulations, that 79 billion litres (21 billion

gal) of the amount

be biofuels

other

than corn-derived ethanol. In addition,

Such a material is said to be carbon neutral. In practice, however, the industrial

carbon dioxide as the plant matter it contained decays. Some of the disadvantages apply mainly to low-diversity biofuel sources—corn, soybeans, sugarcane, oil palms—which are traditional agricultural crops. An alternative recently proposed would use high-diversity mixtures of species, with the North American tall-grass prairie as a specific example. Converting degraded agricultural land presently out of production to such high-diversity biofuels could in-

the law continued government subsidies and tax incentives for biofuel production. Some observers hoped that the law would encourage the commercialization of technology for producing cel-

production of agricultural biofuels can result in additional emissions of greenhouse gases that can offset the benefits of using a renewable fuel. These emislulosic ethanol, for which there were a sions include carbon dioxide from the number of pilot plants in the United burning of fossil fuels to produce the States. In March the U.S. Department biofuel and nitrous oxide from soil that of Energy announced that it would be has been treated with nitrogen fertilizer. investing as much as $385 million in In this regard, cellulosic biomass is consix refineries for cellulosic ethanol. sidered to be more beneficial. The distinctive promise of biofuels not Land use is also a major factor in shared by other forms of renewable enevaluating the benefits of biofuels. crease wildlife area, reduce erosion, ergy, such as solar power, is that in comCorn and soybeans are important cleanse waterborne pollutants, store bination with an emerging technology carbon dioxide from the air as carbon foods, and their use in producing fuel called carbon capture and storage, can therefore affect the economics of compounds in the soil, and ultimately biofuels are capable of perpetually refood price and availability. In moving carbon dioxide from the 2007 about one-fifth of U.S. corn atmosphere. Under this vision, A worker unloads kernels of corn from a truck into a output was to be used for biobiofuels would remove carbon delivery chute at a bioethanol plant in Nevada, Iowa. fuel, and one study showed that dioxide from the air as they grew, even if all U.S. corn land was energy facilities would capture used to produce ethanol, it could that carbon dioxide when the bioreplace just 12% of gasoline confuels were later burned for power, sumption. Crops grown for bioand then the captured carbon fuel can also compete for the dioxide would be sequestered world’s natural habitats. For ex(stored) in long-term repositories ample, emphasis on ethanol desuch as geologic formations berived from corn is shifting grassneath the land, in sediments of lands and brushlands to corn the deep ocean, or conceivably as monocultures, and emphasis on solids such as carbonates. With biodiesel is bringing down anproper planning, therefore, biocient tropical forests to make fuels have the potential to help way for palm plantations. Loss create the conditions necessary of natural habitat can change hyfor a sustainable world. drology, increase erosion, and Clarence Lehman is an Adjunct generally reduce biodiversity and Professor in the Department of Ecology, wildlife areas. The clearing of Evolution, and Behavior at the land can also result in the sudUniversity of Minnesota. den release of a large amount of (Top) Andre Penner/AP; (bottom) Jason Reed— Reuters/Landov

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

175

Advances in by Peter Saracino tudies of historical casualty rates have shown that about one-half of military personnel killed in action died from the loss of blood and that up to 80% of those died within the first hour of injury on the battlefield. This time period has been dubbed the “golden hour,” when prompt treatment of bleeding has the best chance of preventing death. Recent developments in military medicine have focused on treatment to stop bleeding quickly and the provision of prompt medical care. In the wars being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, these developments, together with the use of advanced body armour and helmets, have led to survival rates of coalition troops higher than survival rates in previous wars. Through mid-2007 about 40% of coalition casualties in Iraq had been caused by improvised explosive devices, such as explosive vests used by suicide bombers, hand grenades rigged with trip wires, and sophisticated roadside bombs detonated by remote control. Another 30% of

casualties had been caused by gunfire. The remaining 30% of casualties had various causes such as mortar attacks,

vehicle crashes, and stabbings. Modern body armour and helmets have reduced the incidence of lethal penetrating wounds to the torso and head. As a result, however, more casualties have sur-

vived with debilitating injuries, such as the loss of one or more limbs. All troops are trained in the basics of first aid, including how to stop bleeding, splint fractures, dress wounds and burns, and administer pain medication. Combat troops are issued a first-aid kit that includes a tourniquet that can be applied with one hand. (Though the use of tourniquets was previously considered undesirable, the military now regards them as lifesaving tools for severe limb wounds.) Also, new pressure dressings have been issued that can clot severe bleeding within seconds of being applied. These dressings include HemCon, which is made with chitosan (an

extract from shrimp shells), and Quik-

Combat medic trainees at the Medical Simulation Training Center at Fort Drum, New York, practice with a mannequin to learn how to treat a wounded soldier in preparation for rapid evacuation from the battlefield.

Clot, which is made with inorganic zeolite granules. Within every military unit, there are personnel specially trained to provide medical assistance to the wounded in order to stabilize their condition until they can be treated by a physician. For example, a typical U.S. Army battalion of 650-690 combat soldiers has 20-30 such medics (called corpsmen in the U.S. Marines), who are trained in the

identification and assessment of different types of wounds as well as in advanced first aid, such as administering intravenous fluids and inserting breathing tubes. Modern medic training makes use of sophisticated lifelike mannequins programmed to simulate various injuries and to respond to treatment. Some training can also involve the use of mammals anesthetized under the supervision of veterinarians so that the medic gains experience with real injuries on live tissue. As soon as the situation permits, the wounded are taken from the scene of the battle to their unit’s closest treatment facility, which serves as a collection point for casualties and is maintained as close to the battlefield as possible. The facility, which may be a battalion aid station or regimental aid post, is staffed by one or more physicians whose task it is to stabilize patients further and to assess them for transfer to better-equipped facilities. The rapid evacuation of wounded personnel to medical facilities for higherlevel care is crucial to saving lives within the “golden hour.” Helicopters provide the most important means of medical evacuation. The new HH-60M

(Blackhawk)

helicopter used

by the U.S. Army has environmentalcontrol and oxygen-generating systems,

patient monitors, and an external rescue hoist. In 2005 the U.S. Army began deploying to Iraq a new variant of the eight-wheeled Stryker armoured vehicle to be used as a medical evacuation vehicle. It is faster and better protected than previous military ambulances, and it can 176

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

AP

Seriously wounded personnel receive medical treatment at a U.S. Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. carry up to six patients while its crew of three medics provides medical care. The mobile army surgical hospital (MASH)

was used by U.S. forces dur-

ing the Korean War in the 1950s and was still in service during the Persian Gulf

War

(1990-91).

MASH

units—

which had 60 beds, required 50 large trucks to move,

and took 24 hours to

set up—were deemed too cumbersome to keep up with fast-moving armoured and airmobile forces, and they were supplanted by the smaller Forward Surgical

Team

(FST).

The

FST

com-

prises 20 persons, including 4 surgeons, and it typically has 2 operating tables and 10 litters set up in self-inflating shelters. It can be deployed close to the battlefield and made operational in one and a half hours. FSTs are designed not to hold patients for any length of time but to stabilize them enough to be transported to a larger facility with more specialized staff and equipment. For most U.S. casualties the first fully equipped surgical facility they reach is the Combat Support Hospital (CSH). The CSH staff includes specialists such as orthopedic and oral surgeons and psychiatrists. The CSH is modular in design and can be configured in sizes from 44 to 248 beds as needed. It is assembled from metal shelters and climatecontrolled tents, complete with water and electricity. The facility has an

factor VII to treat severe bleeding, despite some medical evidence that linked it to deadly blood clots. Military medicine is also benefiting from advances in digital technology. For example, military hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq have CT scanners and ultrasound machines with Internet links to medical specialists to allow military doctors to consult with the specialists about detailed diagnosis and treatment. Also, patients can have their medical records transmitted electronically to any hospital to which they are transferred for further treatment. Once treated at a CSH, the most serious American casualties are trans-

ported by fixed-wing aircraft to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, a 10-12-hour flight from Iraq or Afghanistan. For even higher-level care, they are then transported to military hospitals in the United States.

Wounded personnel who cannot be returned to duty receive extended care and rehabilitation. By 2007 the number of wounded U.S. veterans who had returned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was straining the military health care system. Notably, the best-known U.S. military hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., came under scrutiny early in the year over substandard outpatient treatment, and a presidential commission was established to examine the quality of health care provided to veterans. One of the challenges facing military medicine is the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychological damage resulting from service in a war zone. According to some studies, up to one-third of U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have at least one mental health problem. With many soldiers now surviving the loss of an arm or a leg, there is also the challenge of developing better prosthetics. One example is the bionic hand called i-Limb, which became available to amputees in 2007. The prosthetic has five fully and independently functional fingers and is controlled by a computer chip connected to electrodes that detect electrical signals from surviving arm muscles. Also during the year new rehabilitation centres that provide advanced care for amputees opened at Walter Reed Medical Center and at Brooke Army Medical Center near San Antonio, Texas.

Peter

Saracino

is

a

Freelance

Defense

Journalist.

Below: The i-Limb is a prosthetic that is activated by electrical signals from arm muscles and has independently functional fingers to provide dexterity. Right: A pair of prosthetic legs are recharged as a U.S. Army amputee undergoes rehabilitation at the Comprehensive Combat Casualty Care Center in San Diego in March 2007.

intensive-care unit, operating theatres, a

radiography section (with X-ray machine and CT scanner), pharmacy, and laboratory for banking whole blood. AIthough the use of fresh whole-blood transfusions declined in civilian hospitals after the 1950s, it is still used to treat

combat casualties because it retains its ability to clot far better than frozen stored blood. In 2004 military doctors began using an experimental blood-clotting drug called recombinant activated (Top) Benjamin Lowy/Corbis; (bottom centre) Touch EMAS Limited; (bottom right) AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

177

by R. Scott Appleby he division of Islam into two major

groups,

Sunni

and

Shi'ite, has its origins in the struggles over the proper line of succession to the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, who died in 632 CE. Muslims em-

ulate Muhammad’s words and deeds (his “way,” or sunna, which is codified in the Hadith) and consider him, as the

recipient of the Qur'an (“the recitation” delivered

to Muhammad,

on the Ara-

bian peninsula, in Arabic, by the angel Gabriel), to be the Final Prophet—that is, the bearer of Allah's full revelation.

They do not claim that he was divine, however, merely the most perfect and exalted of all human beings. On these basic affirmations the Sunnis, who con-

stitute approximately nine-tenths of the worldwide Muslim population, and the Shiites, most of whom southern Iraq, Lebanon,

live in Iran, and Bahrain,

agree. Both groups also affirm the unity of God (tawhid), believe in the doctrine

of Divine Judgment, and practice the five pillars of the common faith: its profession, the shahada (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad

is his Mes-

senger”); salat (obligatory prayers, performed five times daily); zakat, the paying of tithes, or alms, for the poor; the

observation of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan; and, if physically and financially feasible, the hajj, a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, Muhammad's birthplace. The early Islamic community parted ways politically and theologically, however, in the struggle to define Islamic polity, or governance structure. Muhammad did not directly appoint his successor. Some of his followers thought it best to preserve the Prophet's special relationship to God (Allah) by recognizing his family as the inheritors of his authority. They envisioned rule of the Muslim community by a religious figure like Muhammad,

whose

178

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Muslim pilgrims participating in the annual hajj pray at the Haram Mosque in the holy city of Mecca.

charismatic

au-

thority, holy example, and inspired reading of the Quran would embody the Muslim code of conduct (Shari‘ah, the

Islamic law derived from the Qur’an and the Hadith). Accordingly, when it came time to anoint Muhammad’s successor as leader of the Muslim community, they supported his cousin and son-inlaw ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. This party henceforth was

known

as the Shi‘ites

“partisans” of ‘Ali). The majority, however—those became

known

as the Sunnis

(the

who

(ahl al-

sunnah wa al-jama‘ah, “the people of custom and community”)—preferred a system built around an institution (the caliphate) and an elected leader who would oversee the enforcement of the Shari‘ah via a predetermined system of rules and practices. Following the tradition laid down by the Prophet in a precise and conservative way was more important to them than the leadership of a charismatic religious virtuoso. These alternative views of qualifications for authority led the majority to

select Muhammad's friend and adviser Abu Bakr to be the first caliph (khalifah, the “successor” who would govern according to the Quran and the practice of the Prophet). ‘Ali was passed over twice more before finally being selected caliph in 656, but the harmony did not last long. The Shi'ites, having rejected the first three caliphs as illegitimate, were outraged when ‘Ali was murdered in 661. Heightening their anxiety was the majority's preference for the governor of Syria, Mu‘awiyah

I, as the successor

to ‘Ali,

rather than ‘Ali’s son Hasan. The Shiites’ growing conviction that the tide of history was moving against them was confirmed definitively when Husayn, Hasan’s younger brother, was murdered, together with his family, in 680 by the forces of the Umayyad ruler Yazid following the Battle of Karbala in Iraq. (Husayn's beheading is commemorated annually during the Shi‘ite feast of Ashura, when mourners flagellate themselves in a ritualistic expression of Ali Haider—epa/Corbis

grief.) With the death of Husayn, the closest descendants of Muhammad were vanquished. Husayn was seen as a martyr to be revered, and his death sealed the division between the Shi'ites and the Sunni majority. The tragedies surrounding the deaths of ‘Ali and Husayn made a lasting mark on Shi‘ite consciousness. From that time forward, they were the minority party within Islam, overshadowed and often persecuted by hostile rulers, including forces aligned with the Sunni caliphate. In response to this predicament, Shi‘ism diverged in at least two significant respects from the belief and practice of mainstream Sunnism. First, the Shi'ites, notwithstanding

rare periods in which they were favoured by Persian imperial power, adopted the worldview of the underdog and came to see history as an extended era of suffering and persecution that would be reversed only with the return, at the end-time

of fulfillment,

of the

Hidden Imam, who disappeared from a mosque in Samarra’ around the year 875 CE. The 12th imam in succession from ‘Ali, he is the divinely guided leader (Mahdi) who will return to es-

tablish justice on earth. Second, the leadership structure of Shi‘ism revolves around learned teachers (imams), especially the ayatollahs, who are interpreters of the religious

Muslims observing the holy month of Ramadan break their fast after sunset at the al-Safa mosque in Dubai, U.A.E., on September 17.

law and seen by their respective groups of disciples as “sources of imitation” (marja-a-taglid). This reliance on authoritative and charismatic ayatollahs gives Shi'ism, if not exactly a hierarchy of religious authority, certainly moreconcentrated power than the decentralized, more numerous, and geographically more-dispersed Sunnis. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose supporters overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979 and ushered in the reign of the supreme ayatollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran, embodied both of these distinctive Shi'ite traits: he was a powerful charismatic leader who was awarded political as well as spiritual reign in the belief that the long nightmare of Shi'ite suffering was nearing or at an end. Some Iranians, as well as other Shi'ites worldwide, even re-

ferred

to Khomeini

himself

as

"the

Imam," returned at last from centuries

of occultation. The Sunnis were empire builders from the beginning. Abu Bakr, the first caliph, ensured that Islam would be a religion of conquest, beginning with the Arabian tribes who had renounced the teaching of the Prophet. After subduing them and gaining their support, Abu Bakr challenged the powerful empires of the East: the Sassanians in Persia and the Byzantines in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. His successor,

Umar

I, contin-

ued to demonstrate the viability of the Muslim state by extending Islam’s temporal rule over Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Persia. Within four years of the death of the Prophet, the Muslim state had extended its sway over all of Syria and eroded the power of the Byzantines. The Ottoman Empire, defeated in World War I, was the last great Sunni stronghold; Sunnism entered its own period of crisis in the 1920s after the new ruler of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, abolished the caliphate and made Turkey a secular state. In the 1990s Osama

bin Laden, the architect of al-

Qaeda, launched a jihad (holy war) against what he saw as the insidious forces of secularism, including Europe and the United

States, which

he held

responsible for subjecting and humiliating the once-proud Sunni Muslims. Relations between Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims fell to a low point in Iraq after the U.S.-led defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the subsequent occupation of the country. When

elections

were

held

in 2005,

Sunni parties boycotted them, and the Shi‘ite parties won overwhelmingly, (Bottom) Ali Haider—epa/Corbis; (top) AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Shiites march near Damascus on January 30 to commemorate the

martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Husayn’s death at the hands of rival Muslim forces in 680 is traditionally mourned with self-flagellation. gaining control of the government after more than a millennium of feeling oppressed by the Sunni majority. The Sunni majority resented what it perceived to be arrogant policies of the Shi'ites in power and worried about revenge against their ranks for years of domination of the Shi'ite minority. The Shi'ites filled the ranks of the police and military raising accusations from Sunni neighbourhoods of abuses of power and of killings. Some Sunnis, including those displaced from jobs in the security forces and police, responded by forming militias. Attacks took the form of bombings, and one group in 2006 blew up a Shi'ite mosque and holy place at Samarra'. The repercussions for Sunnis were bloody. The two groups continued to exchange violent attacks in 2007. In the broader Middle

East,

ethnic

tensions

rose

as

Arab leaders from nearby states saw Shi'ite Iran as having the ambition to control Iraq and gain wider influence over the Middle East. R. Scott Appleby is a Professor of History and John M. Regan, Jr, Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

179

The Perils of China's

by Dorothy-Grace Guerrero he China of 2007 was indeed a far cry from the country that in the 1950s Swedish Nobel Prize-winning economist Gunnar Myrdal predicted would remain mired in poverty. In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing was undergoing a huge makeover that would show how fast change could happen in a country of 1.3 billion people. New subway lines were close to completion, and more skyscrapers were being added each month to the landscape to replace the fastdisappearing hutongs (“residential alleyways”). As the world’s fourth largest economy and third largest trading country, China accounted for approximately 5% of world GDP and had recently graduated in status to a middleincome

country.

Beijing

was

also

emerging as a key global aid donor. In terms of production, China supplied more than one-third of the world’s steel, half of its cement, and about a third of

its aluminum. China’s achievements in poverty reduction from the post-Mao Zedong era, in terms of both scope and speed, were impressive; about 400 million people had been lifted from poverty. In addition, the standard of living for many Chinese was improving, and this led to a widespread optimism that the government’s goal of achieving an overall well-off, or Xiaokang, society, was possible in the near future. The figures that illustrated China’s remarkable

economic

achievements,

however, concealed huge and outstanding challenges that, if neglected, could jeopardize those very same gains. Many local and foreign-development analysts agreed that China’s unsustainable and reckless approach to growth was putting the country and the world on the brink of environmental catastrophe. China was already coping with limited 180

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Cranes crowd the skyline of Beijing as new construction is undertaken in the Chinese capital. Robust economic growth in China was helping to fuel a realestate boom in the city, with new skyscrapers being added each month. natural resources that were fast disappearing. In addition, not everyone was sharing the benefits of growth—about 135 million people, or one-tenth of the population, still lived below the international absolute poverty line of $1 per day. There was a huge inequality between the urban and rural population, as well as between the poor and the rich. The increasing number of protests (termed mass

incidents in China) was

attributed to both environmental causes and experiences of injustice. If these social problems remained, it could imperil the “harmonious development,” or Hexie Fazhan, project of the government and eventually erode the Communist Party of China’s continued monopoly of political power. The Challenge of Environmental Sustainability. China consumed more coal than the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined and was about to surpass, or had already surpassed, the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Beijing was also the biggest emitter of sulfur

dioxide,

which

contributes

to

acid rain. Chinese scholars blamed the

increase

in emissions

on

rapid

eco-

nomic growth and the fact that China relied on coal for 70% of its energy needs. More than 300,000 premature deaths annually were attributed to airborne pollution. The changing lifestyle of the increasing number of middleclass families also contributed to the problem. In Beijing alone, 1,000 new cars were added to the roads every day. Seven of the 10 most polluted cities in the world were located in China. The UN 2006 Human Development Report cited China’s worsening water pollution and its failure to restrict heavy polluters. More than 300 million people lacked access to clean drinking water. About 60% of the water in China’s seven major river systems was classified as being unsuitable for human contact, and more

than one-third

of industrial wastewater and two-thirds of municipal wastewater were released into waterways without any treatment.

China had about 7% of the world’s water resources and roughly 20% of its population. In addition, this supply was severely regionally imbalanced—about AP

four-fifths of China's water was situated in the southern part of the country. The Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River delta, two regions well developed owing to recent export-oriented growth, suffered from extensive contamination from heavy-metal and persistent organic pollutants. The pollutants emanated from industries outsourced from the developed countries and electronic wastes that were illegally imported from the U.S. According to an investigation of official records conducted by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a domestic environmental nongovernmental

ganization,

34 multinational

or-

corpora-

tions (MNCs) with operations in China

had violated water-pollution-control guidelines. These MNCs included PepsiCo, Inc., Panasonic

Protesters block bulldozers during a property dispute in the village of Huanggansi, Henan province, on April 4. Rural land in China was being increasingly claimed by urbanization.

Battery Co., and

Foster's Group Ltd. The IPE' data were based on reports by government bodies at local and national levels. China was beginning to realize, however, that its growth path was not costfree. According to the State Environmental Protection Administration and the World Bank, air and water pollution was costing China 5.896 of its GDP. Though the Chinese government carried the responsibility for fixing the overwhelming environmental consequences of China's breakneck growth, help, if offered, from the transnational

companies and consumers from industrialized countries that benefited greatly from China's cheap labour and Traffic congestion and poor air quality in Beijing raised serious concerns among many environmentalists.

polluting industries could also be utilized in the challenging cleanup task. When the Chinese government in 2004 began setting targets for reducing energy use and cutting emissions, the idea of adopting a slower growth model and the predictions about the looming environmental disaster were not received with enthusiasm at first. By 2007, however, targets had been established for shifting to renewable energy, for employing energy conservation, and for embracing emission-control schemes. The target was to produce 16% of energy needs from alternative fuels (hydro and other renewable sources) by 2020. The Social Justice Challenge. Inside China, people were more concerned about issues related to the problem of widespread inequality than they were about showcasing the upcoming Olympics. The Gini coefficient (which indicates how inequality has grown in relation to economic growth) had increased in China by 50% since the late 1970s. Less than 1% of Chinese households controlled more than 60% of the country’s wealth. This inequality was more pronounced when seen in urban versus rural per capita income. In the countryside, life was harsh, and people were poor. The ratio of urban versus rural per capita income grew from 1.8:1 in the early 1980s to 3.23:1 in 2003. (The world average was between 1.5:1 and 2:1.) Added to the problem of low income,

Chinese

rural

residents

also

shouldered disproportionate tax burdens while having less access to public services, such as education and health

care. Recently, the government abolished a number of taxes to help address poverty in the countryside. (Bottom) Teh Eng Koon—AFP/Getty Images; (top) AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The temporary migration from rural areas to the cities of 100 million-150 million Chinese peasants was not an easy transition. The rural migrant workers who kept factories and construction sites running were denied access to urban housing and to urban schooling for their children. Women migrant workers faced triple discrimination for being poor unskilled labour, female, and rural in origin. The anger and bitterness that set off riots and protests (reportedly more than 80,000 in 2006) in the countryside was not so much about poverty as it was about fairness. Agricultural land in China was communally owned. (In theory each village owned the land around it, and each family held a small tract of land on a long-term lease.) In the past 20 years, however, urbanization had claimed 6,475,000 ha (about 16 million

ac) of farmland; people saw their land being taken from them and then turned into homes that were sold to the new rich for several million dollars, and they witnessed local officials lining their own pockets. Meanwhile, they received little compensation in return and spent years away from home to live tenuous hand-to-mouth existences as factory or construction

workers.

Many

were

cheated of their wages by unscrupulous bosses. Given the reports of mass public protests, it was evident that many in China were clamouring for a more equitable distribution of China’s bounty from its two-decades-long growth. Dorothy-Grace Guerrero is a Senior Research Associate of Focus on the Global South, a special project of Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute in Bangkok. 181

Remembering the After 400 Years

by David A. Price

been dominated by the Spanish since the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century. Much had changed in Virginia and Great Britain since the celebration of the 350th anniversary in 1957. For this anniversary, the once-downplayed roles of the Native Americans and African

Americans

were

acknowledged, and their descendants were involved in the planning. In recognition of the perspective of

. rLIA

the Native American representatives, the organiz-

ers in 2007 eschewed the word celebration, calling the anniversary event a commemoration instead.

An estimated 63,000 people attended parts of the three-day event marking the 2007 anniversary. Among the festivities were costumed

Visitors to Jamestown Colony’s 400th anniversary weekend in May tour a replica of the Susan Constant, one of the three ships that took the first European settlers there.

reeanactments,

its 400th anniversary. On May 14, 1607, three ships landed at

this spot on the James River, not far from present-day Williamsburg, Va. The founding of the colony gave England its first firm foothold in the European competition for the New World, which had 182

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

were

A contingent of approximately 105 colonists departed England in late December 1606 in three ships—the Susan

Constant,

the

Godspeed,

and

the

Discovery—under the command of Christopher Newport. They reached Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. Soon afterward the captains of the three ships met to open a box containing the names of members of the colonys governing council: Newport; Bartholomew

ied

hind-the-scenes initiators of the Virginia Company; Edward-Maria Wing-

musical

events,

fire-

works, storytelling, and visits by U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. (The queen had also attended the Jamestown festivities

in

1957.) In broader gestures, the state of Virginia issued special license plates, the U.S. government printed distinctive postage stamps, and an artifact was taken on a space shuttle trip (in symbolic recognition of the common spirit of exploration). In many forms, Americans

Orient.

living history exhibits, var-

anniversary

n 2007 the first permanent English settlement in North America, the Jamestown Colony, had

Origins (1606-07). The colony was a private venture, financed and organized by the Virginia Company of London. King James I granted a charter to a group of investors for the establishment of the company on April 10, 1606. During this era, “Virginia” was the English name for the entire East Coast of North America north of Florida. The charter gave the company the right to settle anywhere from roughly presentday North Carolina to New York state. The company’s plan was to reward investors by locating gold and silver deposits and by finding a river route to the Pacific Ocean for trade with the

given

the

opportunity

to

deepen their understanding of a crucial chapter in history.

Gosnold,

one

of the be-

field, a major investor; John Ratcliffe;

George Kendall; John Martin; and Captain John Smith, a former mercenary who had fought in the Netherlands and Hungary Wingfield became the colonys first president. Smith had been accused of plotting a mutiny during the ocean voyage and was not admitted to the council until more than a month later, on June 10.

After a period of searching for a settlement site, the colonists moored

the

ships off a peninsula (now an island) in the James River on the night of May 13 and began to unload them on May 14. The sites marshy setting and humidity Kevin Dietsch—UPI/Landoy

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush, accompanied by costumed historical interpreters, tour the Jamestown Colony on May 13 in commemoration of its founding in May 1607. At right, on May 4 Queen Elizabeth II of the U.K. visits the reconstructed armoury. would prove to be unhealthful, but the site had several apparent advantages at the time the colony’s leaders chose it: ships could pull up close to it in deep water for easy loading and unloading; it was unoccupied; and it was joined to the mainland only by a narrow neck of land, which made it simpler to defend.

drive the attackers away only with cannon fire from the ships. However, when Newport left for England on June 22 with the Susan Constant and the Godspeed—leaving the smaller Discovery behind for the colonists—he took with him a positive report from the council

The settlement, named for James I, was

The colony's leaders wrote, and probably believed, that the colony was in good condition and on track for success. The report proved too optimistic. The colonists had not carried out the work in the springtime needed for the long haul, such as building up the food stores and digging a freshwater well. The first mass casualties of the colony took place in August 1607, when a combination of

colonists accidentally started a fire that leveled all of the colony’s living quarters. The fire further deepened the colonys dependence on the Indians for food. In accord with the Virginia Companys objectives, many of the colony's efforts in 1608 were devoted to searching for gold. Newport had brought with him two experts in gold refining (to determine whether ore samples contained genuine gold), as well as two goldsmiths. With the support of most of the colonys leadership, the colonists embarked on a lengthy effort to dig around the riverbanks of the area. Councillor John Smith objected, believing that the quest for gold was a diversion from needed practical work.

bad water from the river, disease-bear-

"There

ing mosquitoes, and limited food rations created a wave of dysentery, severe fevers, and other serious health prob-

worke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold," one colonist remembered. During the colonys second summer, President Ratcliffe ordered the construction of an overelaborate capitol building. This structure came to symbolize the colonys mismanagement in the minds of some settlers. With growing discontent over his leadership, Ratcliffe left office; whether he resigned or was overthrown is unclear. John Smith took his place on Sept. 10, 1608. To impose discipline on malingering

known variously during its existence as James Forte, James Towne, Cittie.

First

Years

(1607-09).

and James

Most

Indian

tribes of the region were part of the Powhatan empire, with Chief Powhatan as its head. The colonists' relations with the local tribes were mixed from the beginning. The two sides conducted business with each other, the English trading their metal tools and other goods for the Native Americans' food supplies. At times the Indians showed generosity in providing gifts of food to the colony. On

other

tween

the

occasions,

colonists

encounters

and

the

be-

tribes

turned violent, and the Native Ameri-

cans occasionally killed colonists who strayed alone outside the fort. On

May 21, 1607,

a week

after the

colonists began occupying Jamestown, Newport took five colonists (including Smith) and 18 sailors with him on an

expedition to explore the rivers flowing into the Chesapeake and to search for a way to the Pacific Ocean. On returning, they found that the colony had endured a surprise attack and had managed to (Left) Jason Reed—Reuters/Landov; (right) AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in Jamestown to the Virginia Company.

lems. Numerous

colonists died, and at

times as few as five able-bodied settlers were left to bury the dead. In the aftermath, three members of the council— John Smith, John Martin, and John Rat-

cliffe—acted to eject Edward-Maria Wingfield from his presidency on September 10. Ratcliffe took Wingfield’s place. It was apparently a lawful transfer of power, authorized by the company’s rules that allowed the council to remove the president for just cause. Shortly after Newport returned in early January 1608, bringing new colonists and supplies, one of the new

was

colonists,

no

Smith

talke,

no

hope,

announced

a

no

new

rule: “He that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled).” Even so, the colony continued to depend on trade with the Indians 183

way out of Chesapeake Bay, however, they encountered an incoming fleet of three ships under Thomas West, 12th baron de la Warr, who ordered them to

turn around. West had with him 150 new settlers, ample provisions for the colony, and orders from the company naming him governor and captain-general of Virginia. In his initial message to Chief Powhatan, West demanded

LI]

MI

Costumed historical interpreters demonstrate activities of daily life at Jamestown Settlement, an outdoor museum that re-creates 17th-century life in the colony. The complex also features a replica of a Powhatan village as well as educational exhibits.

for much

of its food supply. During

Smith’s administration, no settlers died

of starvation, and the colony survived the winter with minimal losses. In late September 1608, a ship brought a new group of colonists that included the first women in Jamestown: Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras.

In London, meanwhile, the company received a new royal charter on May 23, 1609, which gave the colony a new form of management, replacing its president and council with a governor. The company determined that Sir Thomas Gates would hold that position for the first year of the new charter. He sailed for Virginia in June with a fleet of nine ships and hundreds of new colonists. The fleet was caught in a hurricane en route,

however,

and

Gates’s

ship was

wrecked off Bermuda. Other ships of the fleet did arrive in Virginia that August, and the new arrivals demanded that Smith step down. Smith resisted, and finally it was agreed that he would remain in office until the expiration of his term the following month. His presidency ended early nonetheless. While still in command, Smith was seriously injured when his gunpowder bag caught fire from mysterious causes. He sailed back to England in early September. A nobleman named George Percy, the eighth son of an earl, took his place as the colony's leader. The Starving Time and Near Abandonment (1609-11). In the autumn of 1609, after

Smith

left, Chief Powhatan

184

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

began

a

campaign to starve the English out of Virginia. The tribes under his rule stopped bartering for food and carried out attacks on English parties that went in search of trade. Hunting became highly dangerous, as the Powhatan Indians also killed Englishmen they found outside the fort. Long reliant on the Indians, the colony found itself with far too little food for the winter. As the food stocks ran out, the settlers

ate the colony's animals—horses, dogs, and cats—and then turned to eating rats, mice,

and shoe

leather.

In their

desperation, some practiced cannibalism. The winter of 1609-10, commonly known as the Starving Time, took a heavy toll. Of the 500 colonists living in Jamestown

in the

autumn,

fewer

than one-fifth were still alive by March 1610. Sixty were still in Jamestown; another 37, more

fortunate, had escaped

by ship. On May 24, 1610, two ships, the De-

liverance and the Patience, unexpectedly arrived. The colonists who had wrecked on the Bermuda Islands all had survived and managed to rebuild the two ships to carry them onward. Those colonists, led by Gates (the new governor) and George Somers, assumed that they would find a thriving colony. Instead they found near-skeletal survivors. Gates and Somers had brought only a small food supply, so Gates decided to abandon the colony. On June 7 all the colonists boarded four small ships to head home. On their

that he re-

turn some stolen English tools and weapons and also turn over the perpetrator of the recent murder of an Englishman. Powhatan replied with “proud and disdainful answers” (as one colonist put it), telling West to either keep the colonists within the Jamestown peninsula or leave the country. The exchange brought about a state of war. West left Virginia in March 1611, after struggling with a series of diseases, but the hostilities between the Indians and the English continued. Peace and the Onset of the Tobacco Economy (1613-14). Sir Samuel Argall, a mariner who had taken West back to England, returned to the colony and became acquainted with Japazeus, the chief of the Patawomeck tribe. The Patawomeck were located along the Potomac River, beyond Chief Powhatan’s empire. In March 1613 Argall chanced to learn that Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas was staying with Japazeus. Argall resolved to kidnap her and ransom her for English prisoners held by the Powhatan Indians and for English weapons and tools the Powhatan had taken. After persuading Japazeus to cooperate, Argall seized Pocahontas and took her to Jamestown. He sent a messenger

to Chief Powhatan with his demands. Powhatan freed the seven Englishmen he had held captive, but an impasse resulted when he did not return the weapons and tools and refused to negotiate further. Negotiations finally broke down altogether. Pocahontas was taken to an English outpost called Henricus, near present-day Richmond, Va. Over the following year, she converted to Christianity and became close to an Englishman named John Rolfe, a pioneering planter of tobacco. Rolfe asked for and received permission from the colonys leaders to marry Pocahontas; the wedding took place in April 1614. As the colony's leaders had anticipated, the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas brought about peaceful relations between the Powhatan Indians and the English, which lasted almost eight years. Marilyn Angel Wynn—Nativestock Pictures/Corbis

Rolfes experiments with tobacco quickly transformed the settlement. By replacing native Virginia tobacco with more-palatable plants from the West Indies, he was able to raise a product that could compete with Spanish tobacco in the British market. After Rolfe sent his first barrels to England in 1614,

other colonists

observed

his lu-

crative results and imitated him. By the end of the decade, the colony had virtually a one-crop economy. Representative Democracy and Slavery (1619). In the summer of 1619, two sig-

nificant changes occurred in the colony that would have lasting influence. One was the company’s introduction of representative government to English America, which began on July 30 with the opening of the General Assembly. Voters who resided in each of the colonys four cities, or boroughs, elected two burgesses to represent them, as did residents of each of the seven plantations. There were limitations to the democratic aspects of the General Assembly, however. In addition to the 22 elected burgesses, the General Assembly included six men chosen by the company. Consistent with the British practice of the time, the right to vote was most likely available only to male property owners. The colony's governor had power to veto the assembly's en-

actments, as did the company itself in London. Nonetheless, the body served as a precedent for self-governance in later British colonies in North America. The second far-reaching development was the arrival in the colony (in August) of the first Africans in English America. They had been carried on a Portuguese slave ship traveling from Angola to Veracruz, Mex. While the Portuguese ship was sailing through the West Indies, it was attacked by a Dutch man-of-war and an English ship out of Jamestown. The two attacking ships captured about 50 slaves—men, women,

and children—and

took them

to outposts of Jamestown. More than 20 of the African captives were purchased there. Records concerning the lives and status of these first African Americans are very limited. It can be assumed that they were put to work on the tobacco harvest, an arduous undertaking. English law at this time did not recognize hereditary slavery, and it is possible that they were treated at first as indentured servants (obligated to serve for a specified period of time) rather than as slaves. Clear evidence of slavery in English America does not appear until the 1640s. Dissolution of the Virginia Company (1622-24).

Chief Powhatan’s

successor,

An 1870 lithograph portrays a momentous event from 1607 in which Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan, saves the life of Capt. John Smith. Captain Smith wrote of the episode, although some historians doubt aspects of his story. =

TA

a m

"

Opechancanough, carried out a surprise attack on the colony on the morning of March 22, 1622. The attack was strongest at the plantations and other English outposts that now lined the James River The main settlement at Jamestown received a warning of the attack at the last minute and was able to mount a defense. Some 347 to 400 colonists died; reports of the death toll vary The deaths that day represented between one-fourth and one-third of the colony population of 1,240. The outcry in London over the attack, combined with political disagreements between James I and the company’s leaders, led the king to appoint a commission in April 1623 to investigate the company’s condition. Predictably, the commission returned a negative report.

The king’s advisers, the Privy Council, urged the company to accept a new charter that gave the king greater control over its operations. The company refused. On May 24, 1624, motivated in

part by domestic political differences with the company’s leadership, the king dissolved the company outright and made Virginia a royal colony, an arm of his government. Jamestown remained the colonial capital until Williamsburg became the capital in 1699. Modern Developments. The site of the Jamestown Colony is now administered by the U.S. National Park Service (as the Colonial National Historical Park) and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.

Since 1994 archaeological excavations have uncovered the location of the colony’s original fort and thousands of artifacts. Nearby is a historical park, Jamestown

Settlement,

founded

in

1957 and operated by the JamestownYorktown Foundation. Jamestown Settlement includes reproductions of the colonists’ fort and buildings and a Powhatan village, as well as full-size replicas of the ships that made the first Jamestown voyage. In 2003 archaeologists with the Werowocomoco Research Group reported that they had identified the probable site of Chief Powhatan’s capital village, known as Werowocomoco,

on the York River. The

Jamestown Colony, especially the characters of John Smith and Pocahontas,

has been the subject of numerous novels, dramas, and motion pictures, many

of them highly fanciful. David A. Price is the author of Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation. The Granger Collection, New York

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

185

Ten Years of Progress Toward a World Free of by Jody Williams producing states has dropped from 54 to 13, and not all of those are actively producing mines today. Only two states—Russia and Burma—have consistently used land mines during these 10 years.

MINE RISK EDUCATION

The signatory states (states parties) collectively have destroyed more than 39.5 million antipersonnel mines. Seventy-four states parties have completed destruction, and another 64 have never possessed mines. This “preventative mine action” ensures that these weapons will never take a life or a limb. States have also been working to demine and return to productive use large tracts of land, educate mineaffected communities about the dangers of antipersonnel mines, and provide support to and protect the rights of land-mine victims. Mine action activi-

i VICTIM ASSISTA

ties are ongoing in at least 60 countries

Cambodian land-mine victim Yan Lay, holding her baby, looks at the mine-action exhibit during a September 2003 meeting in Bangkok of the states party to the Mine Ban Treaty. s those in the movement to ban antipersonnel land mines

(the ban movement)

celebrate this 10th anniversary year of the successful negotiating and signing of the Mine Ban Treaty and the Ottawa Process that brought it about, we recognize that the accomplishments fueled by the “people’s movement”—the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)— are still a “success in progress.” When we take a moment to consider the events of 1997, we are humbled by having kick-started an unprecedented diplomatic process, which required courage and vision and the political will to put human lives first in making the decision to eliminate a conven186

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

tional weapon that had been used by many fighting forces around the world for decades. This process led to the Mine Ban Treatys negotiation in Oslo in September 1997 and then to its signing by 122 countries in Ottawa in De-

cember 1997. Just a few days after the signing, the ICBL and I, as the ICBLs then

coordinator,

were

awarded

the

Nobel Peace Prize for promoting and achieving the treaty. Accomplishments Since 1997. In these 10 years, there have been undeniable advances. Today 155 states—more than three-quarters of the world's countries—are

party

to

the

Mine

Ban

Treaty. There has been virtually no trade in these indiscriminate weapons since the mid-1990s. The number of

and 7 territories. None of this would have occurred without a powerful, comprehensive treaty guiding states' way. On the other hand, the success of the treaty was by no means assured. In the land-mine movement,

most of us believe that the

near universal implementation and compliance with the treaty would not have been achieved without the continued commitment and activity of the ICBL. At the same time, states parties

have the responsibility to ensure other states parties compliance with treaty provisions and to set up the appropriate mechanisms to this end, including the operationalization of Article 8 on compliance—which they have been actively reluctant to do. The Challenges Ahead. Two of the biggest challenges facing the mine ban community

in the next

10 years

are

meeting the treaty obligation of mine clearance

and, harder still, addressing Pornchai Kittiwongsakul—AFP/Getty Images

of it would be the best way to ensure that the world becomes free of land mines. Thirty-nine countries remain outside the treaty, including major stockpilers, producers, or users such as Burma, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the

United States. Two of the original signatories, the Marshall Islands and Poland,

Both human children and voung animals are especially vulnerable to the scourge of antipersonnel land mines. At left, after losing both legs in a land-mine accident, Cambodian Khan Keo, age 13, sits in a wheelchair during her hospital stay. At right, an eight-month-old elephant named Mocha walks on an improvised prosthesis at the Friends of the Asian Elephant facility in Thailand; she and her mother were injured on the heavily mined Myanmar (Burma)-Thailand border.

the lifelong needs vivors.

than

Land

mines

78 countries

of land-mine remain

and

sur-

in more

7 territories.

States parties to the treaty appear not

to be on course to fulfill their obligation to clear all mines from all known mined areas "as soon as possible" and no later than 10 years after joining the treaty. These include at least 13 of the 29 states parties with 2009 or 2010 deadlines. While they can seek deadline extensions

to continue

the clearance,

such extensions must not be a shield for states that do not make the best possible effort to meet their obligations. The international community has been much more willing to contribute to mine

have not yet ratified the treaty. While ef forts to engage armed nonstate actors have been fruitful, they must be broadened and deepened to ensure that these groups give up the use of land mines, even if they cannot sign the treaty. Many challenges remain, and we cannot afford to rest. Although the success of the ban movement and the Mine Ban Treaty have continued to inspire the world, committed political leadership, financial and technical cooperation and assistance, and full and timely compliance with the treaty are crucial to ensure that the Mine Ban Treaty can truly make a difference in the lives of all individuals and communities affected by mines. We've come a long way toward achieving our goals, but there is still a long way to go.

states are to complete mine clearance in time.

The ban movement must keep up the pressure on states that remain outside the treaty. Even though many nonsignatories have de facto followed the obligations of the Mine Ban Treaty, being part

Jody Williams and the ICBL received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. She is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Global Justice at the University of Houston and is coauthor, with Shawn Roberts, of After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines (1995).

Colombian soldiers who lost limbs to land mines play soccer at a military base in Bogotd. Although Colombia is a party to the Mine Ban Treaty, antigovernment forces there have continued to use antipersonnel mines in the 21st century.

action than to survivor assis-

tance, perhaps because the destruction of a land mine is an immediate and lasting "success." The needs of survivors, on the other hand, are complex

and lifelong; wheelchairs or prosthetic devices alone will not solve their problems, and it is not simple to declare success. There are wonderful individuals helping land-mine victims, such as Australian

Chris

Minko,

who

has

worked since 1996 with disability groups in Cambodia; but programs for survivors are inadequate in 48 of the 58 countries which recorded new mine casualties in 2005. Clearly, more resources must be devoted to the survivors, yet the funding for global mine action will also need to increase if (Top left) Doug Niven—AFP/Getty Images; (top right) Paula Bronstein/Getty Images; (bottom) William Fernando Martinez/AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

187

Redefining the Library in the by George M. Eberhart

A reader uses sophisticated "page-turning" technology in 2002, moving a hand across the screen to turn a page of the digital version of the 700-vear-old Sultan Baybars’ Quran at the British Library, London.

photographs, and video and audio materials presented more problems. Choosing sustainable formats for digital files, for example, was an ongoing challenge. Early documents that had been “preserved” by using proprietary formats could in too many instances no longer be read as the hardware or software became obsolete. In 2007 the tagged image file format (TIFF) was the de facto standard for archival image masters. The Joint Photographic Experts Group’s JPEG 2000 standard, however, though not supported by most Web browsers, offered improved compression and richer metadata embedding and was a candidate to supplant TIFF files for archiving. Audio formats remained in a state of flux, although waveform files were common for masters and MP3 files were often used for listening. When considering the host of options, librarians could refer to materials provided by the American Library Association and the National Information Standards Organization. Some institutions with extensive ongoing programs,

y 2007 most libraries in the developed world had an online

catalog,

a Web

site,

dozens of public-access computers, and electronic resources that their patrons could use around the clock from home. Many public, academic, and school libraries offered wireless Internet, answered ref-

erence questions by e-mail or instant messaging, and maintained blogs and collaborative Web sites to keep users informed. Some libraries even circulated portable media devices loaded with local content,

created

their own

timely podcasts and Web videos, and digitized their unique image collections and made them available online. In the midst of this rising sea of electronic

data,

libraries

nonetheless

re-

tained their traditional mission to collect, organize, preserve,

and distribute

information, and they continued to advise patrons on how best to make use of it. Books and periodicals were still 188

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

on the shelves, and (often redesigned)

buildings were as important as ever. Librarians continued to reshape their roles with new tools and skills as they learned to offer resources beyond the traditional ink-on-paper variety. Goals and Challenges. Obtaining or subscribing to digital content from other organizations and providing that content to a librarys users were often very expensive, and libraries confronted formidable obstacles as they digitized their collections. The process demanded time and money in a realm of limited resources. Once a project was funded, librarians had to make numerous decisions regarding the selection of materials, the means of scanning or converting them into digital files, the format of those files, the nature and extent of metadata (i.e., descriptive information)

tagging, the conventions for naming files, and many other technical matters. The process was fairly straightforward for books,

but

historical

documents,

such as the University of Maryland, published useful tips on applying metadata and managing projects. Colorado’s Collaborative Digitization Program offered guidance to librarians planning to launch a digital project. Digital Libraries. Broadly defined, a digital library is any collection of texts, sounds, or images stored in a digital format. The Digital Library Federation, a group of research libraries actively working on digitization projects, defined them more strictly as “organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, in-

terpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works.” Digital libraries were developed by specialists to preserve and provide access to cultural objects for a specified audience. Project Gutenberg, which began in 1971, was one of the earliest digital libraries. By early 2007 the project offered Stephen Hird—Reuters/Landov

at no charge more than 22,000 publicdomain e-books—mostly literary, historical, and scientific works—scanned,

proofread, and uploaded by hundreds of volunteer contributors. The Google Book Search Library Project became perhaps the best-known digital library. The project was begun in 2004 by search-engine company Google in cooperation with a large international group of research libraries, despite concerns by opponents over copyright issues. Using sophisticated equipment, the company scanned public-domain books from the libraries’ collections and made them available online—full-text and fully searchable. Works still in copyright appeared only in fragmented “snippet” form; publishers and authors fought in court any uncompensated use of copyrighted material. The nonprofit Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Internet entrepreneur Brewster Kahle as an online collection of Web and multimedia resources. The archive operated the Wayback Machine, which offered snapshots of at least 85 billion Web pages from 1996, and hosted the Open-Access Text Archive, a collection of more than 250,000 freely accessible books, arti-

Rows of workers in Los Angeles in October 2007 scan books for the OpenAccess Text Archive, a growing collection of more than 250,000 books,

articles, and texts hosted by the nonprofit Internet Archive and contributed by research libraries and individuals.

cles, and texts contributed by research libraries and individuals. The Library of Congress (LC) actively curated digital multimedia, beginning with

its American

Memory

project,

which started as a pilot in 1990 and which by 2007 contained more than nine million items in some 100 thematic collections that document American history and culture. Many images found in LC’s Prints and Photographs Division were also retrievable online. From 2000 the library played a leadership role in the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, a collaborative effort to ensure that digital materials remained accessible as technologies changed. In January 2007 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded LC a $2 million grant to digitize at-risk brittle books in its general collection as well as such important American imprints as county, state, and regimental (Civil War) histories. Even with additional funds, how-

ever, perhaps only 10% of the library’s vast collection was expected to be digitized in the foreseeable future. Laying the groundwork for a European digital collection was the European Library, a consortium of national institutions that offered varying degrees of access to their collections. One member, the British Library, independently digitized many of its rare holdings, including quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays and the oldest printed book, the Diamond Sutra, produced in China in 868. Online Serials. As scholarly journals became more expensive and accumulated, consuming vast amounts of shelf space, many libraries were forced by shrinking budgets to cancel print subscriptions and discard bulky bound volumes. Services such as the nonprofit JSTOR offered full-text search and access to hundreds of scholarly journal backfiles; the subscribing institutions offered their communities digital access to these. Libraries usually paid an annual access fee for such services. Another

service,

Project MUSE, offered aggregations of current electronic subscriptions to journals and reference works from participating publishers. No single service suited all scholarly and reference needs, and associations and publishers not infrequently changed services or offered plans limited to their own publications. Changes in circumstances could mean the loss of access to materials that had been previously available. Libraries retained control over digital (Bottom) Ann Johansson—The New York Times/Redux; (top) AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a

Rachel Frick, head of bibliographic and digital access services at the Boatwright Memorial Library of the University of Richmond, holds open a bound volume of Richmond’s Daily Dispatch from 1861 to signal the entry of the newspaper into a digital archive beginning in 2005. Behind Frick is a digitally archived article from a 1987 issue of the universitys newspaper, the Collegian.

subscriptions through the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program—free open-source software developed by Stanford University Libraries and released in 2004. LOCKSS (and a companion program, CLOCKSS, or

Controlled LOCKSS) generated local copies of journal content to ensure that libraries, with the permission of participating publishers, retained the right to preserve access to journals even after an electronic subscription was canceled. It also allowed for format migration, so that digital content would not become trapped in obsolescent data formats. Libraries in the digital age expanded vastly beyond their walls to become an ever-growing part of the virtual world while retaining their brick-and-mortar homes. New challenges arose as essential funding remained scarce and digital formats continued to evolve and leave behind unreadable artifacts. Nevertheless, libraries and allied organizations remained dedicated to providing access to information resources in all their forms, creating more digital assets, and ensuring their preservation. George M. Eberhart is Manager of Online News Resources for American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association.

189

Moving in from

the Margins by Colin Rhodes ne of the most talkedabout exhibitions of 2007 showcased the work of Mexican-born Martín Ra-

porary art, and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. On

mírez

sider art continued to circulate among specialist

(1895-1963),

who

worked entirely within the confines of the California psychiatric hospital where he was a patient for the greater part of his adult life. His work was long known and highly prized among those interested in outsider art, and in 2007

nearly 100 of his amazing large and sophisticated works were introduced to a much wider audience, first at the Amer-

ican Folk Art Museum in New York City and subsequently at the Milwaukee (Wis.) Art Museum. The New York Times

described the exhibit as "one of the best shows of the season" and went so far as to declare Ramírez "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century." In late October the nearmiraculous survival of another 144 drawings from the last years of Ramírezs life was reported. Outsider art comes from the hands of artists who do not play the art game— not by choice but by circumstance. The "classic" figures of outsider art were socially or culturally marginal figures. They were usually undereducated; they almost invariably embraced unconventional views

of the world,

sometimes

alien to the prevailing dominant culture; and they often had been diagnosed as mentally ill. These people nevertheless produced—out of adversity and with no eye on fame or fortune—substantial high-quality artistic oeuvres. The showing of Ramirez’s work in Milwaukee confirmed a general move since the mid-1990s toward the wider acceptance of outsider art into mainstream galleries and museums and a recognition of its worthiness for serious art-world attention on its own terms. Other notable examples include exhibitions in 2005 at Kiasma, Helsinki’s museum

190

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of contem-

the whole,

however,

out-

dealers, collectors, and gal-

leries. In New York City, for example, dealers could be found in the Chelsea, Midtown, and SoHo districts;

Martin Ramirez's drawing of a rider is one of the newly discovered 144 works of the artist that came to light in October.

the annual New York Outsider Art Fair celebrated its 15th year in 2007, attracting 33 dealers

and Visionary Worlds,” was held June 2007-January 2008 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.;

works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part. . . These artists derive everything. . .from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to the completely pure artistic op-

one of the featured environments,

eration,

from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. A landmark exhibition of outsider, or “vernacular,” environments, “Sublime Spaces

Nek

Chand's Rock Garden of Chandigarh, celebrated its first 30 years in November with an international symposium and festival in Chandigarh, India. Well-established major private and public collections continued to showcase outsider art, most famously the Collection

de l'art brut

in Lausanne,

Switz., amassed by French artist Jean Dubuffet, who is commonly regarded as outsider art's foundational figure. In the 1940s he began collecting works of art made

in unusual

contexts;

he consid-

ered these more authentic than the works of trained artists. In particular, he was intrigued by the art of psychiatric patients such as Heinrich Anton

raw,

brute,

and

entirely

re-

invented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists' own impulses." Outsider art had its origins in the psychiatric collections of 19th-century European mental hospitals. The works in these collections were solicited from patients and organized for the purpose of medical teaching and analysis. In about 1900 some of these artists and psychiatrists came to see such works not as medical evidence but as art. Two of the doctors produced early, influential books on the subject: Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthalers A Mental Patient as Artist (1921), which provided

spiritualist mediums such as Augustin Lesage and Madge Gill; and other self taught social isolates such as Gaston Chaissac and Scottie Wilson. Dubuffet

the first monograph of an outsider artist, Adolf Wolfli, a long-term patient whose oeuvre the Surrealist writer André Breton considered one of the three or four best of the 20th century; and the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally

coined the term art brut “raw” or “un-

Ill (1922), which became something of

refined” art) as the descriptor for such work. He defined the term in 1949 as follows: “We understand by this term

a touchstone for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst, as well as for Dubuffet and subsequently many others.

Müller, Alotse Corbaz, and Carlo Zinelli;

Mary Altaffer/AP

The term outsider art itself was introduced into the lexicon in 1972 by British writer Roger Cardinal as an English-language equivalent of the French l'art brut. By the 1980s, however,

the term

had expanded to encompass a much greater range of vernacular and “marginal” arts. This broadening was particularly important in the U.S., where a rich vein of art that reflected

racial,

religious,

and localized histories rather than psychiatric or spiritualist ones had grown independently from art brut. Known successively—and at times concurrently—as “popular painting,” “modern primitive art,” “self-taught art,”

and

“contemporary

art,

works

from

folk the

Part of a 3-m (10-ft) -long watercolour painting by Henry Darger, one of the hundreds of illustrations for his saga In the Realms of the Unreal.

American scene were first made visible and analyzed in the 1930s by curator Holger collector Sidney Janis, and Some of the first such American to be identified were Horace William

Edmondson,

Cahill, others. artists Pippin,

and Morris

Hir-

shfield. Although none of these artists The figure of a woman covered with broken washroom tiles is one of the many sculptures constructed from waste materials at Nek Chand’s Rock Garden of Chandigarh in Chandigarh, India.

conformed to the European idea of pathological artists, they were viewed in much the same way—as naïfs whose creative strength lay in some presumed innocence and authenticity. Later these artists would be joined by others, including Joseph Yoakum, Minnie Evans, Bill Traylor, James Castle, and, perhaps most famous of all, Henry Darger, a janitor from Chicago whose 15,000-page saga In the Realms of the Unreal came to public notice only after his death. Outsider art further benefited from the addition at the end of the 20th century of figures such as the impressive fibre artist Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and was deaf; Dwight Mackintosh, who was cognitively disabled and began drawing after his release from years of confinement in psychiatric hospitals; and Roy Wenzel, an autistic Dutch artist who developed a distinctive approach to colour and visual narrative. The artists Dubuffet chose to put in his category of art brut were socially marginalized—often denied not only their liberty but also their status as adults. Nevertheless, even the most dis-

tant of them—who were autistic or resided in other realities—did not create art out of nothing. For example,

hospital, both before and after confinement, that were formative in their art-

work and important aspects of its content. For other outsider artists, such as

Howard Finster or Traylor, content and context were uppermost in their work. One of the threads connecting the groups within the outsider art category is the tendency of the artists to be “straight talking” (even if that talk is straight from a radically different worldview).

Outsider

art used

to be

seen as a kind of evolutionary prototype for much of modernist practice, but considered by itself, it was valued for its essential difference from that practice. By 2007 the work of outsiders could often look like an awkward version of what Dubuffet scathingly called the "usual art"—that is, the accepted and acceptable production of the contemporary mainstream. The confusion was more likely to result from "outsiderish" trends among trained artists than from any wish of outsiders to fit in. Because outsider art tends to concern itself primarily with its message, the works often seemed more readily accessible and visually coherent to audiences in 2007 than those of the mainstream artists whose spaces it had begun to invade.

Wolfli and Ramírez, who had been held

up as paragons of uninfluenced creativity, in fact had deep connections with culture outside the psychiatric (Bottom) Aman Sharma/AP; (top) Donald Stampfli/AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Colin Rhodes is the Dean of the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and the author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives.

191

Green Architecture: Building for the 21st Century by James Wines reen design was a pervasive topic in boardrooms and living rooms in 2007, particularly as the costs of maintaining the status quo became apparent. The building of shelter (in all its forms) consumes more

than half of the world’s resources— translating into 16% of the Earth’s freshwater resources, 30-40% of all en-

ergy supplies, and 50% of all the raw materials withdrawn from the Earth’s surface by weight. Architecture is also responsible for 40-50% of waste deposits in landfills and 20-30% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, too many architects working since the post-World War II building boom have been content to erect emblematic civic and corporate icons that celebrate profligate consumption and omnivorous globalization. More recently, however, designers and users have begun to evaluate a building on its environmental integrity, as embodied in the way it is designed and operated. The green movement is changing the message of architecture

ing one of ecologys most important principles: that interdependent elements work in harmony for the benefit of the whole. Influential pioneers who supported a more integrative mission during the 1960s and early ’70s included architectural critic and social philosopher Lewis Mumford, landscape architect Ian McHarg, and scientist James Lovelock. They led the way in defining green design, and they contributed significantly to the popularization of environmental principles. For example, in 1973 Mumford proposed a straightforward environmental philosophy: “The solution of the energy crisis would seem simple: transform solar energy via plants and produce enough food power and man-

power in forms that would eliminate the wastes and perversions of power demanded by our high-energy technology. In short, plant, eat, and work!”

McHarg, who founded the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, laid the ground rules for green architecture in his seminal book Design with Nature

(1969).

Envisioning the role of human beings as stewards of the environment,

he advo-

cated an organizational strategy, called “cluster development,” that would concentrate living centres and leave as much natural environment as possible to flourish on its own terms. In this regard McHarg was a visionary who perceived the Earth as a self-contained and dangerously threatened entity.

Inhabitants of Colorado’s Drop City, an early experiment in eco-sensitive communal living, go about their daily work in 1967. The geodesic dome structures are inexpensive and sturdy.

from egocentric to ecocentric.

The Rise of Eco-awareness. Environmental advocacy, as an organized social force in the U.S., gained its first serious momentum as part of the youth movement of the 1960s. In rebellion against the perceived evils of high-rise congestion and suburban sprawl, some of the earliest and most dedicated ecoactivists

moved

to

rural

communes,

where they lived in tentlike structures and geodesic domes. In a certain sense, this initial wave of green architecture was based on admirable characteristics of Native Americans’ lifestyle and its minimal impact on the land. At the same time, by isolating themselves from the greater community, these youthful environmentalists were ignor192

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Carl Iwasaki—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

ee

This ^whole Earth" concept also became the basis of Lovelocks Gaia theory. Named after the Greek goddess of nature, his hypothesis defined the entire planet as a single unified organ-

The 1980s and early ’90s brought a new surge of interest in the environmental movement and the rise to prominence of a group of more socially responsive and philosophically oriented

ism,

green

continuously

maintaining

itself for survival. He described this process as "a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet." During the 1970s Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess proposed a theory of "deep ecology" (or "ecosophy"), asserting that every living creature in nature is equally important to the Earth's precisely balanced sys-

fect, of a structure

Meanwhile,

the

American architect William McDonough, a pioneer of green architecture, visits the offices that he designed for Gap, Inc., in San Bruno, Calif. He developed the principles of “cradle-to-cradle” design.

1973

OPEC oil crisis brought the cost of energy into sharp focus and reminded the global community that it depended on a very small number of petroleum-producing countries for its supplies. This crisis, in turn, brought into relief the need for diversified sources of energy and spurred corporate and government investment in solar, wind, wa-

ter, and geothermal sources of power. Green Design Takes Root. By the mid 1980s and continuing through the '90s, the number of environmental advocacy societies radically expanded; groups such as Greenpeace, Environmental Action, the Sierra

Club,

Friends

of the

Earth, and the Nature Conservancy all experienced burgeoning memberships. For architects and builders a significant milestone was the formulation in 1994 of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards,

established and administered by the U.S. Green Building Council. These standards provided measurable criteria for the design and construction of environmentally responsible buildings. The basic qualifications are as follows. * Energy. Conserve energy, for example, by orienting buildings to take full advantage of seasonal changes in the Ted Thai—Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ar-

that is sur-

rounded by earth creates an almost invisible architecture and a green ideal. As Wells explained, this kind of underground building is “sunny, dry, and pleasant” and “offers huge fuel savings and a silent, green alternative to the asphalt society.”

tem. Working in exact opposition

sil fuels.

American

chitect Malcolm Wells opposed the legacy of architectural ostentation and aggressive assaults on the land in favour of the gentle impact of underground and earth-sheltered buildings—exemplified by his Brewster, Mass., house of 1980. The low impact, in both energy use and visual ef-

atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the

to this philosophical view, the destructive politics and economics of the decade accelerated the development of green awareness. The lack of business regulation in the U.S. meant that there were no limits to the consumption of fos-

architects.

sun's position. Use diversified and regionally appropriate sources of energy, which may, depending on geographic location, include solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, water, natural

gas, and even, if necessary, petroleum and nuclear. Materials. Build with recycled, renewable, or low-embodied-energy materials that are locally sourced and free from harmful chemicals. Evaluate supplies on the basis of their entire production cycle—including nonpolluting raw ingredients, durability of product, and potential for recycling. Materials should be thoroughly evaluated in terms of their distance from origin,

taking

consumed

Water.

into

account

energy

and

monitor

water

usage and supplies. Gray water (i.e., previously used, as for laundry) should be cleansed and recycled, and building-by-building catchments for rainwater should be installed. Context. Whenever possible, reuse existing buildings and preserve the surrounding environment. Incorporate earth shelters, roof gardens, and ex-

tensive planting around buildings.

Lovins,

physicist his wife,

founded

Mountain

the

Amory Hunter

Rocky

Institute in 1982 as a

research centre for the study and promotion of the ^whole system" approach favoured by McHarg and Lovelock. Years before the LEED standards were published, the institute, which was housed in an energyefficient and aesthetically appealing building, formulated the fundamental principle of authentic green architecture: to use the largest possible proportion of regional resources and materials. In contrast

to the

conventional,

inefficient practice of drawing materials and energy from distant, centralized sources, the Lovins team chose to fol-

low the "soft energy path" for architecture—i.e., drawing from the now-familiar list of alternative energy sources: wind, solar, water, geothermal, etc.

In 1975 American architect Pliny Fisk III launched the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (Max Pot) in Austin, Texas. In the late 1980s the

in transport.

Conserve

American Lovins and

throughout

and

centre joined with others to support an experimental agricultural community called

Blueprint

Farm,

in

Laredo,

Texas. Its broader mission—with applications to any geographic location— was to study the correlations between living

conditions,

botanical

life, the

growing of food, and the economic-ecological imperatives of construction. This facility was built as an integrative prototype,

recognizing

thrives

diversity;

on

that

nature

Fisk concluded 193

that single-enterprise and one-crop territories were environmentally dysfunctional—meaning, for example, that all of the crops predators converge, natural

defenses

are

overwhelmed,

and

chemical spraying to eliminate insects and weeds becomes mandatory In every respect Blueprint Farm stood for diversified and unpredictable community development. The crops were varied, and the buildings were constructed of steel gathered from abandoned oil rigs and combined with such enhancements

as earth berms,

sod roofs, and

straw bales. Photovoltaic panels, evaporative cooling, and wind power were incorporated in this utopian demonstration of the symbiotic relationships between farming and green community standards. American architect William McDonough rose to green-design fame in 1985 with his Environmental Defense Fund Building in New York City. That structure was one of the first civic icons for energy conservation resulting

from the architect’s close scrutiny of all of its interior products, construction technology, and airhandling systems. Since then, McDonoughs firm has established valuable planning strategies and built numerous green buildings— most significantly, the Herman Miller factory

and

offices

(Holland,

Mich.,

1995), the corporate offices of Gap, Inc. (San Bruno,

Calif., 1997), and Oberlin

Colleges Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental

Studies (Oberlin, Ohio,

2001). (See photograph on page 193.) McDonough’s main contribution to the evolution of sustainable design was his commitment to what he has called “ecologically intelligent design,” a process that involves the cooperation of the

architect,

corporate

leaders,

and

scientists. This design principle takes into account the “biography” of every aspect

of manufacture,

use,

and

dis-

posal: the choice of raw ingredients, transport of materials to the factory, fabrication process, durability of goods produced, usability of products, and recycling potential. McDonough’s latest version of the principle—referred to as "cradle-to-cradle" design—is modeled after natures own waste-free economy and makes a strong case for the goal of reprocessing, in which every element that is used in or that results from the manufacturing process has its own built-in recycling value. Principles of Building Green. The advances in research and in building techniques achieved by the above-men194

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

tioned green-design luminaries have been compiled into a reliable database of environmental construction methods and sustainable materials—some of which have been in use for thousands of years yet remain the basis for contemporary advances in environmental technology. The following list includes the essential green-design principles for private residences in the new millennium. * Energy sources. Whenever feasible, build homes and communities that supply their own power; such buildings may operate entirely off the regional power grid, or they may be able to feed excess energy back onto the grid. Wind and solar power are the usual alternatives. The quality of solar collectors and photovoltaic panels improves almost daily; practical considerations for choosing one supplier over another include price, durability, availability, delivery method, technology, and warranty support. * Energy conservation. Weatherize buildings for maximum

protection against

the loss of warm or cool air. Major chemical companies have developed responsibly manufactured, extremely dependable moisture-resistant insulating materials that do not cause indoor humidity problems. Laminated glass has also been radically improved in recent years; some windows provide the same insulation value as traditional stone, masonry, and wood construction. In regions that experience extreme heat, straw-bale or mud-brick construction—used since ancient times—is a good way to save money

and energy. * Reuse of materials. Do the research to find recycled building materials. Although such products were scarce in the early 1990s, today numerous companies, which can be easily located on the Internet, specialize in salvaging refuse from demolition sites. Safety of materials. Thoroughly research the chemical composition and off-gassing characteristics of all products to be used in construction. The online service of the U.S. Department of Energy is one of the most reliable sources of information on this subject. Siting. Consider using underground or earth-sheltered architecture, which

can be ideal for domestic living. Starting at a depth of about 1.5 m (5 ft) below the surface, the temperature is a constant 52 degrees—which makes the earth itself a dependable source of climate control.

Individual, corporate, and governmental efforts to comply with or enforce LEED standards, engage in recycling at the household and community level, construct smaller and more

effi-

cient buildings, and encourage off-thegrid energy supplies are all potentially valuable contributions to a sustainable future. Such efforts alone cannot preserve the global ecosystem, however. On the most basic level, the ultimate

success of any globally sanctioned environmental movement will depend as much on its social, psychological, and aesthetic appeal as on its use of advanced technologies. The environmental movement in the 21st century will meet resistance to the extent that proponents appear to ask populations to scale back the benefits of industrialization. The ultimate success of green architecture is likely to require that advocates achieve a broadbased philosophical accord and provide the same kind of persuasive catalyst for change that the Industrial Revolution offered in the 19th century. This means

The Fondazione Pietro Rossini Pavilion in Briosco, Italy, represents the integration of structure, landscape, and function. Most of the pavilion’s materials were obtained locally; the building is earth-sheltered and cooled naturally. instance, communities might encourage

rl shaping a truly global (as well as optimistic and persuasive) philosophy of the environment. The architecture profession will have to abandon the past century's specialization and reliance on technology. Integrative thinking in the building arts can produce a productive checklist of grass-roots-originated, community-oriented, and globally unifying objectives. In the words of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, “The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” Challenges to Architecture. If architecture is to become truly green, then a revolution of form and content—including radical changes in the entire look of architecture—will have to occur. The building arts need an infusion of new ideas that can be translated into a more contextually integrative, socially responsive, functionally ethical, and visually germane architectural language. Designers

in the

21st

century

can

make better use of ideas from larger SITE c/o James Wines

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

fields of environmental science and technology. Already there exists a rich reservoir of ideas from science and nature—cybernetics, virtual reality, biochemistry, hydrology, geology, and cosmology, to mention a few. Furthermore, as the Industrial Revolution was a generator of change in many fields in the 19th century so can the information revolution, with its model of integrated systems, serve as a conceptual model in the 21st century for a new, fully integrated approach to architecture and design in the broader environment. Context has meaning well beyond the siting of individual structures. Once community governments have used their legislative power to insist on stateof-the-art green standards, they should do everything possible to encourage appropriate artistic responses to such re-

gional attributes as surrounding topography, indigenous vegetation, cultural history, and territorial idiosyncrasy. The most progressive approach to the goal of contextual green design would require new modes of integrative thinking. For

innovative fusions of architecture with landscape—where trees and plants become as much a part of architectural design as construction materials—so that buildings and their adjacent landscapes essentially merge. In such thinking, buildings are not interpreted as isolated objects. Perhaps it is time to challenge traditional barriers between inside and outside and between structure and site. Green architecture in the 21st century has similar obligations to the psychological and physical needs of its inhabitants. Buildings are most successful when they respond to multiple senses— meaning that truly green design engages touch, smell, and sound as well as sight in the design of buildings and public spaces. Continuing advances in environmental technology have significantly strengthened the goals of sustainable architecture and city planning over the last decade, but there is still a tendency for many people to feel that the environmental crisis is far beyond their comprehension and control. At the same time, if the message of the gurus of green technology encourages the public to transfer all responsibility to engineering and science, then the social and psychological commitment needed for philosophical unity is threatened as well. Technological solutions must be viewed as only one contributive factor in the green crusade. Increasing numbers of people are seeking new symbiotic relationships between their shelter and the broader ecology. This growing motivation is one of the most promising signs of hope in the development of a consensus philosophy of the environment. If successful, it will confirm anthropologist Margaret Mead’s optimistic observation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” James Wines is a Professor of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University, President of SITE (an architecture and environmental arts

organization),

and

the

author

of Green

Architecture (2000).

195

by Laura Brunell he third wave of feminism emerged in the mid-1990s. Generation Xers, born in the

1960s and '70s in the developed world, came of age in a media-saturated,

diverse world; they

possessed significant legal rights and protections that had been obtained by first- and second-wave feminists. In some

ways,

however,

third-wave

femi-

nism can be viewed as a reaction to the positions and unfinished work of second-wave feminism. Background. The first wave of feminism (1848-1920) focused primarily on obtaining the full legal personhood and the political enfranchisement of women. The second wave of feminism (1963-1991) continued these struggles through the ultimately unsuccessful push for an Equal Rights Amendment to the

1923,

U.S.

Constitution

approved

(introduced

by the Senate

1972,

failed ratification 1982) and the found-

ing of durable political organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and NARAL Pro-Choice

America (originally National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws; later the National Abortion Rights Action League). Activists sought the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, established in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and sex equality through legislation such as Title IX of the Federal Education Amendments of 1972. The streets and the courts were common venues for spreading the word and seeking redress for inequities. 196

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

AND.

CATHERINE ZETA-JONES

JN

The Guerrilla Girls make their first U.K. appearance Nov. 24, 2005, at an Amnesty International art exhibition focusing on violence against women, at the Bargehouse, London. Feminism originated in critiques of the ways in which power and autonomy have historically been denied to women and to other people, purely on the basis of who they are. First-wave feminism focused on obtaining legal and political status—essentially personhood in the public sphere. As women became better educated and were accepted more fully as participants in the larger society, second-wave feminism

focused on expanding women’s economic power. Although protecting women’s reproductive rights and expanding their educational and athletic opportunities were ends in themselves, second wavers also viewed them as the means

to achieving

greater

economic

power for women who were still largely absent from the upper echelons of power in the business, governmental, and academic spheres. David Wimsett—Photoshot/Landov

Foundations. The third wave was made possible by the greater economic and professional power and status achieved by women of the second wave, the massive expansion in opportunities for the dissemination of ideas created by the information revolution of the late 20th century, and the coming of age of Generation X scholars and activists. Some early adherents of the new approach were literally daughters of the second wave. Third Wave Direct Action Corporation (organized in 1992) became in 1997 the Third Wave Foundation, dedicated to supporting "groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, economic,

tice"; both were

and

founded

social jus-

by (among

others) Rebecca Walker (b. 1969), the

daughter of the novelist and second waver

Alice

Walker

(b. 1944).

Jennifer

Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), were both

born in 1970 and raised by second wavers who had belonged to organized feminist groups, questioned the sexual division of labour in their households,

and raised their daughters to be selfaware,

empowered,

articulate,

high-

feminists, therefore, “sexual liberation,”

a major goal of second-wave feminism, was expanded to mean a process of first becoming conscious of the ways one’s gender identity and sexuality have been shaped by society and then intentionally constructing (and becoming free to express) one’s authentic gender identity. Manifestations. Third wavers inherited a foothold of institutional power created by second wavers, including women’s studies programs at universities, long-standing feminist organizations, and well-established publishing outlets such as Ms. magazine and several academic journals. Nonetheless, these outlets became a rather small part of the culture of the third wave. In expressing more recent concerns, third-wave feminists actively subverted, co-opted, and played on seemingly sexist images and symbols. This was evident in the double entendre and irony of the language commonly adopted by people in their self-presentations. Slang used derogatorily in most earlier contexts became proud and defiant labels. The spirit and intent of the third wave shone through the raw honesty, hu-

stereotypes and fight discrimination against female artists. In reaction and opposition to images of women as passive, weak, virginal, and faithful, the third wave redefined

women and girls as assertive, powerful, and sometimes promiscuous. In popular culture this redefinition gave rise to icons of powerful women and girls that include the singer Madonna and the Disney heroines Mulan (1998) and Giselle (Enchanted, 2007) as well

as the women depicted in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Sex and the City (1998-2004) and the sassy self-expression of “Girl Power” merchandise. The increasing ease of publishing on the Internet meant that e-zines and blogs became ubiquitous. Many serious independent writers, not to mention organizations, found that the Internet of fered a forum for the exchange of information and the publication of essays and videos that made their point to a potentially huge audience. The Internet radically democratized the content of the movement with respect to participants, aesthetics, and issues.

Controversies. Predictably, third wavers faced critics. As the third wave found its voice in the early 1990s, some writers were declaring themselves postfeminist and arguing that the movement had lived beyond its usefulness. Mean-

achieving women. mour, and horror of Eve Ensler’s The These women and others like them Vagina Monologues, the righteous anger grew up with the expectation of of punk rock's riot grrrls, and the playachievement and examples of female fulness, seriousness, and subversion of success as well as an awareness of barGuerrilla Girls, women who don gorilla riers. They chose to battle sexism by while, masks in an effort to expose female standing sexist symbols on their heads, to fight patriarchy with irony, to answer violence with Eve Ensler screams as part of the performance of stories of survival, and to comher play The Vagina Monologues in January 1999 bat continued exclusion with at the King’s Head Theatre, London. grass-roots activism and radical democracy. Rather than becoming part of the machine, third wavers took steps to both sabotage and rebuild the machine itself. Influenced by the postmodernist movement in the academy, third-wave feminists have sought

established feminists of the ear-

to question, reclaim, and redefine the ideas, words, and media

lier generation argued that the issues had not really changed and that the younger women were not adding anything of substance. Some writers from inside and outside the movement rushed to declare the wave broken by about 2000. In addition, questions of sexualized behaviour raised debate on whether revealing clothing, designer-label stiletto heels, and amateur pole dancing represented true sexual liberation and gender equality or old oppressions in disguise. Fissures and

that

disagreements

have

transmitted

ideas

present

of feminism.

in

about womanhood, gender, sexu-

each

ality, femininity, and masculinity, among other things. There has been a decided shift in favour of viewing gender as existing along

third wave, like the first and sec-

a continuum. Each person is not

der, ethnic, and class identities, experiences, and interests.

simply male or female but rather

wave

were

The

ond waves before it, is a plural and

multifaceted

movement,

comprising people of many gen-

is seen as possessing, expressing,

and suppressing the full range of traits commonly associated with males or females. For third-wave Robbie Jack/Corbis

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Laura Brunell is an Associate Professor

of Political Science at University, Spokane, Wash.

Gonzaga

197

A 10-Year Retrospective jor revolutions of our time,” including globalization. Perhaps the most coherent view about Blair’s search for the Third Way was that it was an endeavour to discover a form of progressive politics, distinguishing itself from the conservatism of both left and right. Meanwhile, Blair frequently looked for advice from businessmen who had come to prominence under Conservative former prime minister Margaret

British Labour Party leader Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie Booth, campaign in April 1997, one month before Blair led the party to victory in the general election.

by Tom Gallagher n May 10, 2007—almost exactly 10 years after he became Britain's youngest prime minister since the Napoleonic wars—Tony

Blair announced that he would officially tender his resignation in June. Blair’s long-anticipated departure triggered deliberation over his place in British history after a decade in power. Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born in Edinburgh on May 6, 1953. He attended Fettes College in Edinburgh (a school often viewed as “Scotland’s Eton”) and St. John’s College, Oxford,

where he combined the study of law with interest in religious ideas and popular music, but he displayed little enthusiasm for politics until he met his future wife, Cherie Booth.

Blair was elected in 1983 to the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Sedgefield, a tight-knit former mining district in northeastern England. By 1988 he had been promoted to the shadow cabinet, and over the next six years he was a Labour Party spokesman. He played a growing role in boosting the party’s image as a modern force that could be 198

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

trusted with government. When party leader John Smith died suddenly in May 1994, Blair seized the opportunity, and on July 21 he was elected leader with 57% support. Blair sought to position Labour firmly in the political centre, abandoning the party's stated commitment to the nationalization of the economy, reducing links with trade unions, and rebranding the party as “New Labour.” The strategy worked, and on May 1, 1997, he won a landslide victory over Conservative Prime Minis-

ter John Major after having waged a triumphant campaign that centred on the promise that “things can only get better.” The next day Blair was sworn in as prime minister, armed with the biggest parliamentary majority in the history of the Labour Party and the largest for any party since 1945. Inspired by sociologist Anthony Giddens, Blair described his philosophy of government as “the Third Way.” He claimed that his policies were designed to enable social democracy to respond to the challenges of the worldwide market economy and to equip citizens to cope with what Giddens called “the ma-

Thatcher. Private firms were given an important role in financing state infrastructure projects, despite widespread criticism that this financing was on terms often disadvantageous to the taxpayer The health service, the police, and many other agencies saw the rise of a new managerial elite who imposed efficiency targets that often failed to raise standards but left these organizations burdened by expensive bureaucracies. Blair gave control of the economic agenda to Gordon Brown (see BIOGRAPHIES), his chancellor of the Exchequer and eventual successor. All other members of his government and the permanent civil service were sidelined in the policy-making process. Blair gave important powers to unelected advisers, notably spin doctor Alistair Campbell. The marketing image they adopted was known as “Cool Britannia,” the suggestion that Britain was a dynamic and successful country that had reinvented itself after years of decline and internal division. New Labour eagerly sought the approval of the mass-circulation press by embracing celebrity culture as well as respect for traditional values, including the monarchy. Public funding for the arts was paltry, while vast sums were found for the construction of the Millennium Dome (which turned out to

be an expensive folly that was finally sold in 2002 to a private investor). As a new election approached, Blair was starting to be viewed skeptically by the population as it became clear that his government remained highly centralized and that he had no plans for overdue reforms in the public services. Sean Dempsey/AP

-

— 98x. ATUS

f

k

g

m

SS :

a

Va “Y

\

(Left) Prime Minister Blair (left) examines a model of the controversial Millennium Dome. (Right) Blair acknowledges

supporters in May 2007 after announcing his resignation, effective in June. Opinion polls found that there was public concern regarding financial misbehaviour in government, manipulation of the media, the granting of honours to individuals who contributed to Labour Party funds, nepotism, and other actions that put the interests of business before ordinary citizens. Facing a deeply unpopular opposition, however, Blair was easily reelected in May 2001—with the lowest voter turnout since 1918. His second term was dominated by international affairs. In the late 1990s he had won praise by mounting peacekeeping operations in the Serbian province of Kosovo and in Sierra Leone. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, Britain played a key role in forming an international coalition that succeeded in driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Blair’s reputation as a global statesman was badly damaged, however, by his enthusiastic support for the U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq in 2003. He enjoyed a

good relationship with Pres. George W. Bush but fell out with key European allies and was unable or unwilling to influence U.S. strategy in Iraq.

At home, many people in Britain felt that the country was in the grip of a serious malaise. Social cohesion seemed to be collapsing in much of urban Britain, as shown by a steep rise in violent crime and open drug dealing. Public officials in the police, civil service,

and education sectors were unable to grapple effectively with the social crisis as they struggled to meet bureaucratic targets and to display political correctness. After Islamic extremists exploded bombs in London on July 7, 2005, killing 54 people, Blair began to emphasize the need for a common public culture, and former multicultural policies that encouraged ethnic groups to separate into different communities were repudiated. In May 2005 Blair took Labour to an unprecedented third straight electoral (Top left) Sean Dempsey—PA Photos/Landoy; (top right) Owen Humphreys—PA/AP; (bottom) Stephen Hird— Reuters/Corbis

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

victory but with a sharply reduced majority. Simmering revolt in the Labour Party over both Iraq and Blair's rejection of core Labour policies led him to promise that he would resign before the next election. At the Labour Party conference in September 2006, he declared that he would be gone before the next annual conference. True to his word, he retired as prime minister on June 24, 2007.

Blair’s decade in office was marked by uninterrupted economic growth and a more independent Bank of England. Blair also preserved much of Thatcher's market radicalism while managing to place greater emphasis on social justice. Numerous minority groups found his government more sympathetic to their

concerns,

notably

homosexuals,

who by 2004 were allowed to enter into civil partnerships recognized by the law. Scotland and Wales received their own devolved parliaments. Peace appeared to have finally been restored to Northern Ireland, and many believed that this advance would come to be seen as his most enduring political legacy. Throughout, Blair showed a remarkable ability to convey optimism In July 2005, after terrorist bombs in London left more than 50 people dead, Blair wrote this message in the city hall’s official book of condolences. lu Hh nug hv

all

Whe

fade

Hue

i bini

dia al Mal! etnia: f ane

ll

without managing to overcome a range

of social ills, particularly rising crime and drug use. The economy grew steadily, but it was burdened by low productivity and growing volumes of personal and state debt. Citizens were heavily taxed, and Britain lost much of its remaining manufacturing base, becoming more dependent on financial services and low-skilled sectors for progress. Blair was criticized for exposing the economy to the forces of globalization more than any other large Western country, allowing millions of mainly low-skilled migrant workers to settle in the country. The biggest cloud hanging over his reputation was the failure to ensure that British involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in policies capable of preventing that country from becoming a disastrous source of instability in the Middle East.

Nonetheless,

Blair

was

not

ready to retire from the world scene. This was evident in his decision to accept the appointment as the official Middle East envoy of the Quartet group (the U.S., the UN, the EU, and Russia).

d ; tad fin,

lios

and energy in the face of adversity caused not least by the failure in Iraq. Critics of his record argued that instead of using his parliamentary majority to reform the institutions of state, he pursued incoherent short-term policies that left Britain ill-governed in important areas. The state became more intrusive and even more authoritarian

(^l uy 6v ho he

History could judge his premiership more kindly in the future. In 2007, however, Blair was widely viewed as a lucky politician with exceptional talents that enabled him to be a successful vote winner but ultimately lacking the ability to be a noteworthy reformer at home or a stabilizing force in a world facing the resurgence of dangerous divisions. Tom Gallagher is Professor of Ethnic Peace and Conflict at the University of Bradford, Eng.

199

Anthropology and Archaeology Researchers presented findings on the origins of human BIPEDALISM and described an early member of the gorilla clade. Archaeologists uncovered rings of post molds at FORT ANCIENT and identified a pre-Inca SOLAR OBSERVATORY. Other discoveries included a VIKING HOARD and early evidence of WINEMAKING and. BEEKEEPING.

material (consisting of 32 bones) dating to 1.77 million years ago from Dmanisi (Georgia). The remains contained a

partial skeleton of an adolescent and bones from three adults, including the first complete fossil hominin tibia, which was part of the most complete lower limb of any early Homo individual. The postcranial anatomy showed a surprising combination of primitive features (such as small body size and low degree of torsion of the humerus) and derived traits (such as modern hu-

ANTHROPOLOGY ey developments in 2007 in the field of physical anthropology included new evidence for contrasting hypotheses for the origins of human bipedalism. A research team from the United Kingdom proposed a revisionary hypothesis for the evolutionary history of human bipedalism based on an analysis of Sumatran orangutan positional behaviour and locomotion. The researchers observed that hand-assisted bipedality gave orangutans access to multiple slender, flexible supports that could not otherwise be used and that climbing orangutans adjusted to the flexibility of branches by increasing knee and hip extension just as humans do when running on a springy surface. Their study suggested that hand-assisted arboreal bipedality and upright posture provided a selective advantage by providing the greatest safety when reaching for food with one hand and in crossing from the branches of one tree to another to reach additional food resources. It also hypothesized that handassisted bipedality was the most likely evolutionary precursor to straightlimbed human walking. Thus, according to this decidedly unconventional scenario, human bipedalism was an evolutionary retention from a common great ape ancestor rather than a hominin

innovation,

whereas

the

quadrupedal knuckle-walking exhibited by chimpanzees and gorillas was an evolutionarily derived mode of locomotion in response to the fragmentation of Miocene forest canopies. In

contrast,

an

American

research

team adopted the conventional assumption that the last common ancestor between apes and hominins was a 202

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

quadrupedal knuckle walker, and they used a treadmill to test the energy efficiency of human bipedalism in comparison with chimpanzee quadrupedalism and bipedalism. Consistent with the long-standing hypothesis that bipedalism evolved to reduce locomotor energy costs, the researchers found that human walking was approximately 75% less costly in terms of oxygen consumption than either quadrupedal or bipedal walking in chimpanzees. Al though the energy costs for the two forms of chimpanzee locomotion did not differ when the chimpanzees were analyzed as a group, four of the five chimpanzees in the study did exhibit statistically significant differences. For three of the four, quadrupedal locomotion was less costly; however, for one—

a 33-year-old female—bipedalism was less costly than quadrupedalism. This finding was both unexpected and theoretically important. In comparison with her fellow subjects, the 33-year-old female presented a longer foot-ground contact time for each step, and her knee and hip flexion were relatively similar during both kinds of locomotion. In an evolutionary context, the authors speculated that variation in hindlimb

extension,

hind-limb

length,

foot-ground contact time, and step length among individuals in the last common ancestral population of the hominin and chimpanzee lineages could have provided the critical selection pressure for the development of the highly efficient bipedalism seen in more recent members of the genus Homo.

Extensive fossil evidence pertaining to bipedalism in early members of the genus Homo was also recently uncovered. An international research team reported newly excavated postcranial

manlike body proportions and lower limb morphology). Long legs, a forward-pointing big toe, and the presence of both transverse and longitudinal foot arches indicated that biomechanical efficiency for long-distance walking and energy expenditure for running would have been equivalent to that exhibited by modern humans. The length of the legs, similar to that of modern humans,

probably reflected

selection

for loco-

motor efficiency in Horno, since energy

expenditure for locomotion is inversely proportional to leg length in bipeds. A Japanese-Ethiopian research team discovered nine gorilla-like teeth (one canine and eight molars) from deposits in the Afar Rift of Ethiopia. Dated at 10 million-10.5 million years old, the teeth represented at least three individuals from the newly defined extinct ape species, Chororapithecus abyssinicus. The large molars were specialized both for shredding fibrous vegetation and for chewing hard, abrasive food items. The authors proposed that Chororapithecus might have been a basal member of the gorilla clade or, alternatively, a large ape whose dental adaptations were convergent with those of modern gorillas. The protogorilla hypothesis, if correct, would push back the date for the gorilla species split to between 10.5 million and 12 million years ago, at least 2 million years earlier than indicated by recent genetic-based dates. Because no African ape fossils dated between 7 million and 12 million years ago had previously been found (with the exception of the 9.5 million-year-old Samburupithecus from Kenya), some paleoanthropologists speculated that after apes first evolved in Africa over 20 million years ago, they migrated to Eurasia and eventually returned to Africa, where they gave rise to the gorilla, chimpanzee,

and hominin clades.

Anthropology and Archaeology Simon Maina—AFP/Getty Images

ing to Ronald Hicks of Ball State University, Muncie, Ind. Dated to between 1000 BC and AD 400 and measuring some 80 m (260 ft) in diameter, the en-

closure was of a type known from other royal sites in Ireland. The enclosure was found during initial construction work on the controversial M3 motorway, which was being built to ease commuter traffic in Dublin. Local citizens had protested construction of the superhighway, which upon completion would cut through Tara. A 7,000-year-old dwelling mound was discovered during highway construction near Oberróblingen, Ger. Dwelling mounds were the result of continuous human habitation atop an ever-growing accumulation of earlier building material and domestic debris. They were well known from the Middle East, the Balkans, and even South America, but

A study that included this 1.55-million-vear-old fossil Homo erectus skullcap from Kenya indicated that the species overlapped chronologically with H. habilis.

this was the first such mound to be found in Western Europe. Excavated by Robert Ganslmeier and a team from the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Ger, the oval-shaped mound, which measured 100 x 60 x 2 m (330

The

new

dental

data,

however,

effec-

tively negated the need for this postulated Eurasian sojourn for the ancestors of modern African apes. An international research team described two African fossil hominin specimens from the Koobi Fora formation near Lake Turkana at Tleret, Kenya,

that produced an unexpected chronology for the early members of the genus Homo. One specimen was a H. erectus calvaria (skullcap). It exhibited features of both Asian and African H. erectus,

which thereby caused some paleoanthropologists to question whether the African specimens should continue to be placed in the separate taxon H. ergaster. The estimated age of the calvaria was 1.55 million years, and the estimated cranial capacity was only 691 cu cm

(42.2 cu in), the smallest

known

adult cranial vault attributed to H. erectus. In overall appearance it most resembled the calvaria of an earlier Dmanisi juvenile and of a later specimen from Sambungmacan, Indon. The extremely small cranial dimensions of the new specimen indicated that H. erectus and H. habilis actually overlapped in size and that H. erectus might have displayed marked sexual dimorphism (given that the new specimen was female). The other described specimen was a H. habilis partial right max-

two extremely important evolutionary implications. First, the two species both lived in the Lake Turkana basin and overlapped chronologically for about

x 200 x 7 ft), yielded abundant finds. Among these were pottery vessels, the grave of a child, and the remains of two ritually sacrificed young people and of

500,000 years.

several

Second,

H. habilis was

unlikely to be directly ancestral to H. erectus through anagenesis (that is, a linear succession without branching), in contrast to numerous published phylogenies of hominins. (STEPHEN L. ZEGURA)

ARCHAEOLOGY Eastern Hemisphere. In January 2007 David Whelan and his son Andrew retrieved what was hailed as the largest and most important Viking hoard found in Britain in 150 years. They found the treasure as they used metal detectors to search a muddy field on the outskirts of Harrogate in northern England. Thought to have been buried by a wealthy Viking about AD 927, the treasure consisted of 617 silver coins (some of which were struck in Afghanistan, Russia, and Scandinavia)

and 65 other items, including a gold armband, ingots, and pieces of scrap silver—all of which had been placed inside an early 9th-century-AD French gilt-silver vessel. The largest-known prehistoric ceremonial enclosure in Ireland was found

illa that was dated at 1,440,000 years—

at Lismullin (County Meath, Ire.) near

a full 200,000 years later than any other H. habilis specimen. This date carried

Tara—a low hill that was the fabled birthplace of the Irish nation—accord-

animals,

including

a horse,

a

calf, and numerous dogs. Some 2,460 charred grape seeds and 300 grape skins that were discovered within the remains of a 6,500-year-old house at the Neolithic site Diliki Tash appeared to provide the earliest-known evidence for winemaking in Greece. According to Tania Valamoti of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, analysis of the grape remains confirmed that they were the result of wine pressings and that the grapes had come from either wild plants or a very early cultivar. In the northern part of Athens, contractors who were digging foundations for a new building in the Menidi area came upon 13 rows of stone bleachers, which were thought to have been part of the famed 2,500-year-old amphitheatre of Acharnes. It was one of seven ampitheatres now known to have surrounded the city. The earliest-known evidence for the colonization of Cyprus, and—perhaps more important—for maritime activity in the Mediterranean Sea, was found at

Aspros on the Akamas Peninsula. Archaeologists recovered an assortment of pre-Neolithic chipped stone tools, which were dated to 14,000 years ago; the discovery pushed back by 2,000 years the earliest-known date for human 203

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Anthropology and Archaeology Marc Waelkens/Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project

activity on the island. A subsequent rise in sea level inundated part of the an-

moved the heads of their dead and placed them in household shrines, a practice followed by their precolonial descendants in part of Melanesia. DNA analysis and other tests of the bones were expected to confirm whether—as many scholars contended—the Lapita originally came from Southeast Asia

cient settlement, the remains of which stretched more than 100 m (330 ft)

from shore. Excavations

at Sagalassos,

a Greco-

Roman city in south-central Turkey, yielded fragments of an extraordinary white marble statue of the Roman em-

via Indonesia, the Philippines, and, last, Taiwan. (ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER)

peror Hadrian (ruled AD 117-138) that included a head, a sandal-clad foot, and

part of a leg. Discovered by Marc Waelkens and a team from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belg., the original statue was estimated to have been 4-5 m (13-16 ft) tall.

The many about stone Ombo

discovery of engraved figures— of them of wild bulls—chiseled 15,000 years ago into the sandcliffs near Qurta on the Kom Plain

about

640

km

(400 mi)

south of Cairo pushed back the earliest-known art in Egypt by some 7,000 years. According to Dirk Huyge of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, the largest of the more than 160 images found to date was nearly 2 m (7 ft) wide. Prior to the discovery, the

earliest-known rock art in Egypt had been found at the 8,000-year-old site of el-Hosh. The oldest wall painting in the Middle East was found at the 11,000-yearold Neolithic settlement of Dja'de alMughara (Ja‘dat al-Magharah) in northern Syria on the Euphrates River, according to Eric Coqueugniot of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. Geometric in design and painted in red, black, and white pigments, the work was 2 sq m (22 sq ft) in area and graced the wall of what was once a large circular communal dwelling with a wooden roof. Amihai Mazar and a team from Hebrew University of Jerusalem recovered 30 clay-and-straw beehives at Tel Rehov, in Israel's Bet She'an Valley. The hives were made some 3,000 years ago and were the earliest-known evidence for commercial beekeeping. A 35,000-year-old obsidian mining site on Mt. Takaharayama in Japan’s Tochigi prefecture yielded hundreds of stone tools, including eight trapezoidal stones that were thought to have been used for preparing animal hides. Previously, such mining activities were thought to have begun in Japan much more recently, during the Jomon Pe-

This head of a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian was excavated at Sagalassos, a site in Turkey. gion nearly 8,000 years ago. According to Yonggiang Zong of Durham (Eng.) University, residents of the Stone Age community, who lived in wooden stilt houses perched atop the marshlands, built dams from burned and felled trees to retain seawater in rice paddies. An ancient dugout canoe and pottery made with wild rice as a binder were also recovered at the site. An enormous sandstone slab with 42 etched figures was found in Australia’s Wollemi National Park. Paul Tacon and a team of researchers from Griffith University in Queensland who studied the figures believed that they had been carved less than 2,000 years ago and identified them as a pantheon of important and powerful Aboriginal ancestral beings. The sandstone slab was 100 m (330 ft) long and 50 m (175 ft) wide.

More than 70 headless skeletons that were unearthed in a 3,000-year-old cemetery at Teouma on the island of Efate in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu might reveal the mysterious origin of the seafaring Lapita, who were thought to be the earliest-known ancestors of the Polynesians. The Polynesians were known to have colonized

Western Hemisphere. Numerous archaeological discoveries made in 2007 ranged across the Americas and spanned much of the time that those continents had been inhabited by humans. Eighteen thousand years ago a site in northeastern Nevada known as the Bonneville Estates Rockshelter lay near the high-water mark of Lake Bonneville, which was then a huge inland sea. For thousands of years from about 11,000 BC, small groups of hunter-gatherers visited the rockshelter at irregular intervals and left behind a well-preserved record of their activities. Archaeologist Ted Goebel and his colleagues uncovered bone needles, nets for trapping rabbits, and other fragile artifacts preserved in the dry layers of the site. The Paleo-Indian and Archaic inhabitants of the rockshelter were not big-game hunters as previously believed. They lived on a varied diet of game such as pronghorn sheep, plant foods, and insects such as grasshoppers and then abandoned the site between 9000 and 6000 BC during a prolonged arid period. Later occupants were more sedentary than their predecessors and relied heavily on plant foods, especially edible grasses. Human occupation at Bonneville Estates continued until as recently as AD 1350. Fort Ancient in southwestern Ohio was an important ceremonial complex in the Hopewell culture. A remote-sensing survey conducted in preparation for an erosion-control project at the site revealed subsurface anomalies that were investigated in 2006 and 2007. A team led by archaeologist Robert Riordan discovered two concentric rings of post molds (markings in the soil where posts once stood). The outer ring, about 60 m (200 ft) in diameter, would

have

been

made

up

of about

200

wooden posts about 23 cm (9 in) thick

and set in place with rocks in a shallow trench. Each post might have stood

riod, about 13,000 to 3,000 years ago.

Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa about 3,000 to 4,000 years

between

Recent analysis of sediments from the site of Kuahuqiao at the mouth of the Yangtze River indicated that Chinese farmers began cultivating rice in the re-

ago. According to Matthew Spriggs of the Australian National University, Canberra, seven skulls were found. He suggested that the Lapita might have re-

high. The inner circle was about 3.5 m inside the outer ring, and it would have held shallower lower posts. At the centre of the circle was a fire pit that

204

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

3 and 3.5 m

(10 and

15 ft)

Anthropology and Archaeology © Ivan Ghezzi

contained burned soil. The purpose of the circles was unknown, but radiocar-

bon dating suggested that they were made between AD 60 and 240 and that the fire pit remained in use between AD 250 and 420. Ancient Panamanians were eating domesticated corn (maize), manioc, and arrowroot as early as 7000 BC. Using a

new technique known as starch grain analysis, University of Calgary, Alta., researcher Ruth Dickau recovered identifiable microscopic traces of plants from the stone tools used to process them. Dickau's work showed that the humid tropical areas of Panama were an important land bridge for the southward spread of corn farming from the more arid regions in Mexico and for the northward spread of manioc and arrowroot from South America. Human skeletons found at an archaeological site called Tecuaque, near Mexico City, provided grisly confirmation of Aztec practices of human sacrifice. The site was a flourishing Aztec community of 5,000 Zultepec Indians at the time of the Spanish conquest, and conquistador Hernán Cortés gave it the name Tecuaque, which means “where people were eaten.” Archaeologists unearthed the remains of some 550 victims who had been sacrificed and dismembered by Aztec priests. According to Mexican archaeologist Enrique Martinez, Aztec warriors briefly fought and then captured a caravan that included mestizos, mulattos, Maya, and Caribbean Indians

who were serving the conquistadors. Martinez said that the prisoners were sacrificed a few at a time and that knife and teeth marks on some of the bones hinted at ritual consumption of human flesh. When the Zultepec learned that the Spaniards were coming to avenge the killings, they threw their victims’ bones and possessions into wells, concealing all material evidence of the sacrifices until those items were unearthed by archaeologists centuries later. Ancient Andean Indians tracked the rising and setting of the sun and the movements of stars to monitor the passage of the seasons. The heavens provided a calendar for planting, harvest, and other agricultural activities. Peruvian archaeologist Ivan Ghezzi and British archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles identified an ancient observatory in the Casma-Sechin basin of the coastal Peruvian desert 386 km (240 mi) north of Lima. Thirteen towers from 1.8 to 6 m (6 to 20 ft) high extend over a distance of 30.5 m (100 ft) along

a ridge. The towers, known as the Thir-

A study of the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo in north coastal Peru revealed that the towers at either end mark where the sun rises at the June and December soltices when viewed from the observation point at lower right. teen

Towers

of Chankillo,

are

visible

from a nearby complex of concentric masonry walls enclosing ceremonial buildings built in about 300 BC. Ghezzi and Ruggles determined how ancient astronomers would have measured the passage of the seasons by observing the rising and setting of the sun behind the towers from observation points on either side of the ridge. Iron was a valuable commodity in the American

colonies,

which

made

the

early 2007 discovery of the first blast furnace in North America one of unusual importance. The site, near Richmond, Va., first came to light when am-

ateur archaeologist Ralph Lovern spotted building timbers eroded from the banks of Falling Creek. A subsequent geophysical survey at the location revealed a large magnetic anomaly that was consistent with the remains of an iron furnace. No signs of the water wheel, bellows, and flume had come to

light, however. Historical documents recorded that the ironworks were established in 1619 and that the blast furnace would have been capable of processing up to 600 tons of ore per year.

Although the furnace was destroyed and its ironworkers killed in attacks by Powhatan

Indians

in

1622,

the

site

marked the beginnings of heavy industry in North America. Some of the most interesting discoveries came from sites for which historical documents amplified the archaeological finds. A recently discovered 1830s document indicated that Abra-

ham Lincoln owned his first property in New Salem, IIL, the log-cabin village where he initially worked as a clerk at the Offutt Store. Lincoln and another clerk, Charles Maltby, appeared to have purchased the store in 1832. In an ef fort to locate and learn about the property, excavations

were

carried

out

at

New Salem in 2006. The excavations uncovered part of the original Offutt Store cellar and yielded several objects, including glass items and a slate pencil, that might have been part of the store’s inventory. Archaeologists hoped to confirm the shape and size of this and other original buildings at New Salem, one of which may have been more than 9 m (30 ft) long.

A long-term excavation of Hare Harbour, an archaeological site at fle du Petit Mécatina, about 965 km (600 mi)

northeast of Quebec, revealed a busy seasonal harbour and shoreline workshop that were used by Basque fishers during the 17th century. Originally thought to be a whaling settlement, Hare Harbour was in fact a trading station where Basques fished for cod and traded timber. In addition to glass beads dating to between 1675 and 1750, excavators found two soapstone whale-oil lamps and a cooking pot, which suggested that the Basques may have employed Inuit women to help with the work. Additional investigations

were

to

venture

underwater,

where large earthenware jugs and 18thcentury gin bottles had been found. (BRIAN FAGAN) 205

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Architecture and Civil Engineering The new FEDERAL BUILDING in San Francisco was noted for its

GREEN ARCHITECTURE. A chapel designed more than 40 years earlier by LE CORBUSIER was built in France. Other highprofile buildings included a U.S. COURTHOUSE, a MUSEUM ADDITION, a RESIDENTIAL TOWER, and a CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS.

the Kimbell (Texas) Art Museum, which

ARCHITECTURE growing

trend

in architec-

ture in 2007 was interest in green architecture. Green, or sustainable, architecture

referred to buildings that were designed for the efficient use of resources, especially energy, building materials,

was finally built, and it turned out to be a memorable concrete building with a boldly sculptural shape that slightly resembled Corbusier's famous chapel of Ronchamps, France. In London came a complete renovation and redesign of the Royal Festival Hall, which was the centrepiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain and was originally designed by noted British architect Sir Leslie Martin. Italian architect Renzo Piano was commissioned to create an addition to

and water.

(Most architects

who designed green buildings also tried to incorporate the colour green into their work, such as with green indoor plantings or gardens.) One aim of green architecture was to reduce carbondioxide (greenhouse-gas) emissions, which were believed to be contributing to global warming, and some green buildings even produced much of their own energy, thanks to technology that used sunlight or wind power to generate electricity. (See Special Report on page 192.) Green architecture was taking root worldwide. Near Shanghai, for example, an area called Dongtan was planned to be what developers called "the world's first truly sustainable new urban development." It was to have 80,000 inhabitants by 2020 and would be designed to not produce carbondioxide emissions. Europe had been the leader in the green movement, but by 2007 many U.S. cities were

plenty of natural daylight, and a system of exterior sunshades and screens was designed to help keep the building cool in hot weather. The sunshades and screens gave the building an unusual appearance—as if it were pulling a metal poncho over itself against the weather—and it instantly became an architectural landmark in the city. Another trend in architecture was a growing interest in many of the masterpieces of the Modernist Period of the 1940s-1960s. The most remarkable example was in France. A chapel for the town of Firminy was designed in 1963 by the great 20th-century Swiss architect Le Corbusier. In 2007 the building

was considered to be one of the masterpieces of 20th-century architecture by American architect Louis Kahn. Kahn's art museum at Yale University was also given a long-needed restoration, as was Yale’s Art and Architecture

Building by American architect Paul Rudolph. In June a famous Modernist house, the Glass House designed by American architect Philip Johnson for himself, was opened as a museum to the public by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The house, in New Canaan, Conn., had been willed to

the trust by Johnson, who died in 2005. Awards. The 2007 Pritzker Prize went to British architect Richard Rogers. He

Steven Holl’s Bloch Building, an addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., had translucent walls and an adjacent reflecting pool.

requir-

ing that new commercial buildings attain a so-called LEED ("leadership in energy and environmental design") rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. One notable new green building in the United States was the Federal Building in San Francisco. Designed by American architect Thom Mayne, the building saved energy by minimizing its use of electric lighting and by not having air conditioning. Tall windows and high ceilings allowed in Tom Uhlenbrock—St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Landov

206

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Architecture and Civil Engineering Richard Clement—Reuters/Landov

first became known for the astonishing Pompidou

Centre in Paris, a vast mu-

seum and cultural complex that he designed in partnership with Piano in 1971,

when

both

architects

were

in

their 30s. The structural frame and mechanical pipes, wires, and ducts of a building were usually hidden deep inside it, but at the Pompidou they were instead brightly coloured and displayed all over the facade. Rogers went on to design an office tower for the insurance company Lloyd’s of London, a major terminal at Madrid Airport, and other buildings. He also became a noted advocate for the revival of cities. German architect Frei Otto received the Praemium Imperiale award. The Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects was awarded to Edward Cullinan, and the Stirling Award for the best building by a British architect went to David Chipperfield’s Museum of Modern Literature in Germany. The Aga Khan Award, given only once every three years to works of architec-

The Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse in Eugene, Ore., by Thom Mayne, was notable for its environmental and energy-enhancing features.

ture in the Muslim world, was awarded

to nine projects. They ranged from the large, such as the rehabilitation of parts of the cities of Nicosia, Cyprus, and Shibam, Yemen, to the small, such as a

modest park with a pond in Beirut. The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, given for lifetime achievement, was awarded to Piano. Piano, 70, was best known for his art museums, such as the Menil Collection in

Houston,

the Beyeler Foundation

and

the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland,

and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Among other notable Piano buildings were the vast Kansai Airport in Os-

aka and the recently opened New York Times tower in New York City. The AIAs 25-Year Award, given to a building that had proved its worth over time, went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Maya Lin. Her design was chosen in a national design competition for the memorial in 1981, when she was still an undergraduate student at Yale. Commonly called the Wall, the dark granite memorial was engraved with the names of about 58,000 Americans who were killed or missing in action. The AIA also commissioned a professional poll of Americans to determine their best-loved buildings. The winner was the Empire State Building in New York City. The White House in Washington, D.C., took second place. Notable Buildings. Perhaps the most widely published and admired building of the year in the U.S. was the Bloch Building, an addition to the Nelson-

Atkins Museum Mo.

The

of Art in Kansas City,

architect,

American

Steven

Holl, created a design in which a series of glass-topped art galleries spilled informally down a sloping green lawn filled with sculptures. At night the galleries, illuminated from inside, looked

like a row of UFOs that had just landed. Visitors were able to wander freely in and out among the interior galleries and the exterior sculpture lawns. The modernist crisp glass architecture worked as a foil to the heavier traditional limestone architecture of the older Nelson-Atkins building. The Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse in Eugene, Ore., by Mayne, was a very

contemporary building, surfaced in stainless steel in bold curving shapes that gave it a streamlined look. A series of terraces and stairs in front of the building were intended to provide protection against potential car bombings, while the building itself remained open and welcoming to the public. As with Mayne’s Federal Building in San Francisco, the courthouse was designed with many green strategies and achieved a high LEED rating. Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry created a new headquarters

for JAC/InterActiveCorp

in New

York City on a site across the street from the Hudson River. The building featured surfaces of glass that billowed out toward the water and were intended to suggest a sailing ship. (See photograph on page 210.) The glass

was subtly whitened to cut the glare from sunlight, and it gave the interiors a beautiful, slightly snowstormlike feeling. On the Bowery in New York City, the Japanese firm SANAA, a partnership of two women architects, designed the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a memorable building that resembled six or seven glass boxes piled into a tower. Aluminum screening, suspended about 4 cm (1.5 in) from the solid aluminum

facades, cov-

ered all the surfaces and made the building look as if it were made of gray vapour. Also on New York City’s Lower East Side was a new residential tower known as “Blue,” by Swiss and French architect Bernard Tschumi, a freely shaped and very blue glass tower. It was one of many residential buildings by “name” architects that were sprouting in old New York City neighbourhoods such as SoHo and the Meatpacking District and providing expensive new housing in a city that was already very costly. American architect I.M. Pei designed a museum

for

paintings,

ceramics,

jade, and wood carvings in Suzhou, China, the city of his ancestors. The museum was arranged around a walled traditional garden of simple water and rocks, and its architecture sought to be contemporary while retaining a memory of traditional Chinese architecture. Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind added a “glass courtyard” to the {continued on page 210)

207

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Architecture and Civil Engineering

Notable Civil Engineering Projects (in work or completed, 2007) Year of completion

Location

Name

Airports

Notes

Terminal area (sq m)

Beijing Capital (new Terminal 3) Changi (new Terminal 3) Tripoli (Tarabulus) International

northeast of Beijing mostly on landfill at eastern tip of Singapore south of Tripoli (Tarabulus), Libya

Miami International South (S) and North (N) terminals Barcelona International (El Prat) (South Terminal) Berlin-Brandenburg International

northwest of central Miami

Benito Juárez International (Terminal 2) Cairo International (new Terminal 3)

east of central Mexico City

southwest of Barcelona

2008 2008 2009

(S) 158,000 (N) 316,000 300,000

2007 2010 2009

? 220,000* 214,000

2011

northeast of Cairo

164,000

2008

New Doha International (phases 1 and 2) New Indianapolis Airport Heathrow (new Terminal 5 complex)

near Doha, Qatar west of Indianapolis southwest of London

140,000 116,000 70,000

2009 2008 2008

Maktoum International

at Jebel Ali, south of Dubai, U.A.E.

(new Dubai airport) Detroit Metro (North Terminal)

Schönefeld airport, southeast of Berlin

904,000 380,000 360,000

?

near Romulus, Mich.

Bridges

?

2007

To be the world’s largest airport terminal New terminal in Asia’s 6th busiest airport in passenger traffic 360,000 equals total area of 2 new international passenger terminals; new metro/rail links to be constructed. New South Terminal formally opened Nov. 30, 2007; original terminal is being remodeled and expanded to become the North Terminal New second terminal to be located midfield Schönefeld to be expanded; other Berlin airports to close in 2008 and 2011, respectively; *gross floor space Latin America’s largest and busiest airport; Terminal 2 became operational in November 2007; formal opening will be in 2008 Africa’s 2nd busiest airport; will have most technologically advanced airport operational systems at opening Being built on 11 sq mi (28 sq km) of Persian Gulf landfill New midfield terminal to replace old terminal Biggest construction project in the U.K. from 2002; to include world's ist personal rapid transit system and underground links to 2 rail lines

2015

World's largest runway (4.5 km x 50 m), completed in November 2007;

2008

to become largest commercial airport in the world Will be the 2nd new terminal at Detroit Metro in 6 years

Length (main span; m)

Manifa Causeway Hangzhou Bay Transoceanic 1-95 (Woodrow Wilson #2; inner span) Xihoumen

in Persian Gulf offshore of Manifa, Saudi Arabia near Jiaxing, China-near Cixi, China Alexandria, Va.-Md. suburbs of D.C.

Stonecutters (Angchuanzhou)

Zhoushan archipelago, China (linking Jintang and Cezi islands) Nantong, China (100 km from Yangtze mouth) Tsing Yi-Sha Tin, Hong Kong

Tacoma Narrows (#3)

the Narrows of Puget Sound,

Sutong

Second Incheon (Inch'on) Chaotianmen ("Face the Sky")

John James Audubon Chenab River Caiyuanba Margaret Hunt Hill Penobscot Narrows Colorado River

Tacoma, Wash. near Incheon (Inch'on), S.Kor.

36km 2008 1,852? 2008 1,650

2008

1,088

2008

1,018

2009

853

2007 2009 2008

New Roads-St. Francisville, La. (across the Mississippi) between Katra and Laole, Jammu and Kashmir, India Chongqing, China (across the Yangtze) Dallas (across the Trinity)

483

2010

480

2009

420 365

2007 2009

the mouth of the Penobscot River, near Bucksport, Maine Ariz.-Nev. border (just south of Hoover Dam)

354

2007

323

2010

Includes 20 km of laterals from main causeway to drilling islands; will enable massive oilfield redevelopment S-shaped; to be world's longest transoceanic bridge/causeway 2 bascule spans forming wider inverted V shape for ships; outer span opened June 10, 2006 To be world's 2nd longest suspension bridge Cable-stayed bridge to set world records for length of main span, height of main bridge tower, and depth of foundation piers To be world’s 2nd longest cable-stayed bridge; links container terminals Built over collapsed TN #1; longest suspension bridge to be built in U.S. since 1964; opened to traffic July 16, 2007 To be world's 5th longest cable-stayed bridge

To be world’s longest steel arch bridge; designed to resemble the Sydney Harbour Bridge (completed 1932) To be longest cable-stayed bridge in North America To be world’s 5th longest steel arch bridge; bridge will be 359 m above the river, making it the highest railroad bridge in the world Opened Oct. 29, 2007; world's longest tied arch span Cable-stayed bridge; first of 3 bridges in Dallas to be designed by Santiago Calatrava Fully opened May 7, 2007; Ist bridge to use cable-stayed bridge cradle system; has world’s tallest public bridge observatory (128 m high) Final component of Hoover Dam Bypass Project; to be world's 4th longest concrete arch bridge

Height (rooftop; m)

Dubai, U.A.E.

Russia Tower

2011

800 552

Chongqing, China (across the Yangtze)

Buildings, Observation/Television Towers Burj ("Tower") Dubai

41 km!

643

Moscow

2009

612

2012

610

2009

Claimed to be world's tallest building on July 21, 2007, world’s tallest

structure on Sept. 13, 2007; height with spire = c. 818 m Construction began Sept. 18, 2007; to be world’s 2nd tallest building upon completion To be world's tallest observation/television tower; construction to end 2009; formal opening in 2010 Construction began June 25, 2007; will be North America’s tallest structure and the world’s tallest all-residential building Construction began April 27, 2006 Begun 1997, resumed 2003; to be world's tallest building (to rooftop;

Guangzhou TV & Sightseeing Tower

Guangzhou, China

Chicago Spire

Chicago

“2,000 ft” (609.6 m)

2011

Freedom Tower Shanghai World Financial Center

New York City Shanghai

“1,776 ft” (541.3 m) 492

2011 2008

Abraj Al Bait Hotel Tower

Mecca, Saudi Arabia

485

2008

International Commerce Centre

Hong Kong

484

2010

To be world's 2nd tallest building (to rooftop; in 2008); height with spire - 595 m; 6 residential/hotel towers to house 65,000 people To be Hong Kongs tallest (in 2010) and have world's highest hotel

Dubai Towers Doha

Doha, Qatar

400

2009

To be Middle East's 3rd tallest (in 2009); height with spire - 439 m

360 300

2009 2010

To be tallest building in Europe; height with spire - 506 m One of 4 buildings in the Costanera Centre complex; will be tallest building in Latin America (to rooftop)

25,400

2008

To protect city from tidal storm surges; incorporates discharge sluices Final stage completed Dec. 21, 2007; created world's largest reservoir (660 km long) and world’s largest hydroelectric complex by power capacity Largest dam of controversial 30-dam project; drinking and irrigation water for Gujarat

East Tower of Federation Tower Gran Torre Costanera

Moscow Santiago

Dams and Floodgates

in 2008)

Crest/embankment length (m)

St. Petersburg Flood Protection Barrier

Gulf of Finland embankment, Russia (Gorskaya-Bronka via Kotlin Island)

and navigation channels; begun 1980, halted 1987, resumed 2003

Three Gorges (3rd of 3 phases)

west of Yichang, China

2,309

2007

Sardar Sarovar (Narmada) Project

Narmada River, Madhya Pradesh, India

1,210

2009

Merowe (earth core rockfill) Dam

on Nile, 350 km north of Khartoum, Sudan

841

2008

To contain 20% of Nile annual flow; to double The Sudan’s power capacity

Bakun Hydroelectric Project Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project

Balui River, Sarawak, Malay. 2 glacial rivers to the northeast of Vatnajökull icecap, Iceland 184 km upriver of Yibin, China Nam Theun River, central Laos Caroní River, northern Bolívar, Venez.

750 730

2008 2009

To be largest concrete-faced rockfill dam in the world Generation of electricity began Nov. 5, 2007; energy to be used by new aluminum smelter on Iceland’s east coast First of 4-dam scheme that will generate more electricity than Three Gorges Hydroelectricity to be sold to Thailand Final unit of world's 3rd largest hydroelectric complex

Xiluodu (part of Upper Yangtze Nam Theun 2 Manuel Piar (Tocoma) (4th of 4-dam Lower Caroní Development scheme) Project Moses (flood-protection plan) 1 m=3.28 ft; 1 kmz0.62 mi

lagoon openings near Venice

‘Length of entire causeway.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

?Length of each span.

698 2015 325 2009 ? 2010 -

2011

Rows of 79 20-m-wide submerged gates in 3 lagoon openings will rise in flood conditions; controversial plan was begun in 2003

Architecture and Civil Engineering

Notable Civil Engineering Projects (in work or completed, 2007) continued Name

Location

Highways

Year of completion

Notes

Length (km)

Interoceanic Highway

Ifapari (at Brazilian border)-Ilo/Matarani/

2,603

2009

To be paved road for Brazilian imports/exports from/to Asia via 3

East-West Economic Corridor

San Juan de Marcona, Peru Danang, Vietnam—Moulmein, Myan.

1,450

2008

Peruvian ports All-weather gravel road linking the Pacific and Indian oceans; economic

East-West Highway (across northern Algeria) Highway 1

(via Laos and Thailand) Tunisian border (near Annaba)Algerian border (near Tlemcen) Kabul-Kandahar-Herat, Afg.

1,216

2010

development of more remote areas of Southeast Asia expected To facilitate economic development and trade across North Africa

1,048

2008

Egnatia Motorway Transylvanian Motorway Trans-Labrador Highway (phase III)

Igoumenitsa-Kipoi, Greece Brasov-Bors, Rom. Happy Valley-Goose Bay to Cartwright

670 415 250

2008 2013 2009

Final, 556-km Kandahar-Herat section 81% completed by August 2007; remaining section stalled owing to security concerns First Greek highway at int] standards; 74 tunnels, 1,650 bridges To link Romania and Hungary and open Transylvania to tourism Final phase of all-weather gravel road through heavily forested wilderness

2012

Phase I residence handover began 2006; land of 3 other PG developments

2014

was partially to mostly reclaimed in late 2007 Groundbreaking Sept. 3, 2007; will include new wider and longer 3-chamber locks

Junction, Labrador, Can.

Land Reclamation, Canal

Area (sq km)

Palm Jumeirah

in Persian Gulf (PG), off Dubai,

Panama Canal Expansion

U.A.E. between Panama City and Colón

Railways (Heavy)

c.25

Length (km)

Benguela Railway (rehabilitation; closed 1975-2002) Xinqiu-Bayan UI Railway North-South Railway (in part)

Benguela-Luau, Angola (at DR Congo border) Xinqiu, Liaoning-Bayan UI, Inner Mongolia, China Araguaína, Tocantins-Palmas,

1,301

2010

487

2010

361

2009

Tocantins, Braz.

Kashmir Railway

area of interior north Brazil expected

Udhampur-Baramula, Jammu and Kashmir India Baku, Azer.-Kars, Tur. (via Georgia)

KATB rail project Bothnia Line (Botniabanan)

Nyland-Umea, Swed.

North Luzon railway project

Caloocan (north Metro Manila)Clark international airport, Philippines

Railways (High Speed)

Chinese-financed rehabilitation will enable resumption of copper exports from DR Congo and Zambia To be important for coal transport; future link to Mongolia expected Rail exports of agriculture, forestry, and mineral products from vast

292

2012

8096 bridges or tunnels in mountainous terrain; first 45-km section scheduled to open in February 2008 Caspian Sea to Turkey link, bypassing Armenia; 98 km of new rail, remainder modernized; new transport outlet for Georgia

258

2010

190

2010

Along north Swedish coast; difficult terrain with 25 km of tunnels

84

2011

To accelerate development of central Luzon

Length (km)

Spanish high speed Turkey high speed Eastern France high speed

Madrid to France (via Barcelona) Ankara-Istanbul eastern Paris-near Strasbourg

719 533 406

2009 2010 2007

Operational to Barcelona suburbs from mid-2007 To connect capital with largest city Opened June 10, 2007; gives Paris a high-speed link to the major

Taiwan high speed

Hsi-chih-Tso-ying, Taiwan

345

2007

125 125 115

2008 2009 2008

Opened Jan. 5, 2007; links Taiwan's 2 largest cities (Taipei and Kao-hsiung) along west coast Enables high-speed links with Brussels, London, and Paris

109

2007

80

2010

centres of eastern France

HSL-Zuid Italian high speed Beijing-Tianjin high speed

The Hague/Amsterdam-Belgian border Turin-Milan section Beijing-Tianjin

High Speed 1 (Channel Tunnel rail link) Gautrain

near Folkestone-central London Johannesburg-Pretoria

Subways/Metros/Light Rails

Length (km)

Delhi Metro (Phase II) Shanghai Metro

Delhi Shanghai

Dubai Metro (Red/Green lines) Airport Railway Express

Dubai, U.A.E. Incheon (Inch'on) International AirportGimpo International Airport, S.Kor. Singapore Bangalore, India Phoenix-Tempe-Mesa Beijing Algiers

Circle MRT Bangalore Metro Arizona Light Rail Beijing Metro (Line 5) Métro d'Alger (Line I)

Laying of track completed Dec. 16, 2007; to be completed for 2008 Olympic Games Refurbished St. Pancras station opened Nov. 14, 2007; provides high-speed train travel from London to Paris and Brussels To link the capital with the commercial centre

118.6 96.0

2010 2007

69.7 37.6

2009/2010 2007

Many extensions/new lines under construction between 2007 and 2010 96.0 = length of 3 new lines (lines 6, 8, and 9) and 2 extensions; all became operational on Dec. 29, 2007 To be world's longest fully automated driverless transport system Service began March 23, 2007; South Korea's first private railway

33.3 33.0 32.2 27.6 16.3

2010 2011 2008 2007 ?

To connect 3 existing MRT lines 2 lines to be built; construction began in 2007 To be Arizona’s first light-rail system Became operational Oct. 7, 2007; first north-south line Algiers’s [st metro; Ist 9-km section to open in 2008

Toulouse Metro (Line B)

Toulouse, France

15.0

2007

Opened June 30, 2007; all underground

Budapest Metro (Line 4) North-South Line

Budapest Amsterdam

10.5 9.8

2010 2013

First southwest-to-northeast line Links north Amsterdam and South railway station via the central city; risky excavation in waterlogged soil under historic buildings

Tunnels

Length (m)

Apennine Range tunnels (9) Lótschberg #2 Guadarrama

Bologna-Florence (high-speed railway) Frutigen-Raron, Switz.

73,400 34577

2008 2007

Longest tunnel (Vaglia, 18.6 km); tunnels to cover 9396 of railway Opened June 15, 2007, for freight traffic and Dec. 9, 2007, for passengers; world's 3rd longest rail tunnel

50 km north-northwest of Madrid

28,377

2007

Opened March 30, 2007; contains Valladolid high-speed link

Zhongnanshan

Qingshan-Shangluo, China

18,040

2007

East and West tunnels of A86 ring road

western outskirts of Paris

10,000/7,500

2008

Opened Jan. 20, 2007; Asia's longest road tunnel and 2nd longest road tunnel in the world Two tunnels under Versailles and nearby protected woodlands

7,797

2007

Breakthrough Feb. 1, 2007; to be world’s deepest underwater tunnel (287 m under water surface)

western Indian Ocean between South Africa — 13,700 and The Sudan near Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, in the — Norwegian Arctic

2009

Langeled (natural gas) pipeline

Nyhamna, Nor.-Easington, Eng.

1,200

2007

Dolphin (natural gas) pipeline

Ras Laffan, Qatar-Taweelah, U.A.E.

364

2008

To be Ist underwater fibre-optic cable in Indian Ocean, providing Internet and communications services to 250 million people in Africa 1,000 km south of the North Pole; capable of storing 3 million types of seeds in perpetuity and guarding them against disease, war, and other catastrophes; to open February 2008 Q ene Oct. 6, 2007; world’s longest underwater pipeline (850-1,100 m eep. Began shipping natural gas from Qatar's North Field to U.A.E. in July 2007; full opening to take place in early 2008

Eiksund

@rstan—-Hareid, Nor.

Miscellaneous

Length (km)

East Africa Submarine Cable System Svalbard Global Seed Vault

1 mz3.28 ft; 1 kmz0.62 mi

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

'Length of entire causeway.

*Length of each span.

2008

Architecture and Civil Engineering John Gollings—Arcaid/Corbis

(continued from page 207)

Jewish Museum in Berlin, its glass roof supported by a treelike cluster of white steel branches. Future Buildings and New Commissions. An incredible pace of construction continued in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which had been

converting itself into a world tourist destination. One project, touted as the world’s largest cultural development, involved the expansion of a coastal island and was to have structures designed by a roster

of famous

architects.

(See

WORLD AFFAIRS: United Arab Emirates: Sidebar.)

In London a design was announced for an addition to the Tate Modern gallery on the south bank of the Thames River. Designed by Herzog & DeMeuron

of Switzerland,

the

new

wing was described by one magazine as “an off-kilter stack of glass boxes.” Robert A.M.

Stern, known

for his de-

signs in traditional styles, was selected as the architect for the future George W. Bush presidential library, which was to be built on a college campus in Texas. In San Francisco a team led by Cesar Pelli won a competition to design a new bus-and-train terminal with a mixed-use tower that was expected to become the city’s tallest building. Exhibitions, Controversies, and Preservation. The most significant exhibition of the year was probably a triple-threat showing of the work of Robert Moses, the powerful official who dominated city planning in New York City through much of the 20th century. Three New York museums documented the Moses

Frank Gehry designed IAC/InterActiveCorp’s headquarters, whose form evoked eight wind-filled sails, for a site near the Hudson River in New York City. years, when he built innumerable bridges, parks, roads, and swimming pools throughout the city. The gist of the shows was to argue that although Moses was often ruthless and dictatorial in forcing through his improvements despite opposition by the neighbourhoods they sometimes damaged, the city needed most of what he did. Moses often clashed with the writer Jane Jacobs,

an opponent of centralized planning whose views came to dominate in the post-Moses era. New York's Municipal Art Society mounted a counter-Moses exhibit, The glass-covered courtyard at the Jewish Museum "Jane Jacobs and the Fuin Berlin was the site of a press conference for its ture of New York." Also in opening on September 25. New York City was "The Park at the Center of the World," an exhibit of proposals by five teams of designers for the future of Governors

Island,

a for-

list included motels on Route 66, now

bypassed by interstate highways, and Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, now threatened by rapid gentrification and new construction.

Deaths. Kisho Kurokawa, Japanese architect and theorist, died at the age of 73. Early in his career Kurokawa cofounded

the

Metabolist

movement,

Architecture

ures who died during the year included Giorgio Cavaglieri, a leading architect in the American preservation

of the year.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

crete appearance, in the so-called Brutalist style of architecture, had gone out of fashion. The U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation announced its annual list of the 11 most endangered places. The

which sought a machine-age aesthetic. (See OBITUARIES.) Herbert Muschamp, who had been a controversial architecture critic of the New York Times from 1992 to 2004, died at age 59.

Institute, ex-

am Rhein, Ger, at the end

210

chitects and historians, but its raw con-

mer military and U.S. Coast Guard post in the middle of New York Harbor. “Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture," sponsored by the Netherlands hibited more than 450 drawings and other works by the architect. The exhibition opened in Rotterdam and moved to Weil

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Controversy surrounded a proposal by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to build a new city hall and abandon the one built in 1967 by architects Kallmann and McKinnell. The building had been voted the seventh greatest building in U.S. history in a 1976 poll of ar-

(See OBITUARIES.)

movement,

Other

notable

Colin St. John Wilson,

fig-

ar-

chitect of the 1997 British Library, and Russell Johnson, a leading performance

acoustician. (ROBERT

CAMPBELL)

Art and Art Exhibitions Art auctions set numerous SALES RECORDS in 2007, and MONEY figured in many of the year's art-related stories. LARGE-SCALE installations were mounted in and out of museums, and the GLOBAL interconnection of the art world was apparent. EVERYDAY SUBJECTS were transformed in the work of notable artists in many media, and the STATUS of art photography was confirmed.

ART he influence of the market continued unabated in 2007, culminating in a much-discussed New York magazine article by critic Jerry Saltz that posed the question on everyone's mind: “Has Money Ruined Art?” In New York City, Aaron Young’s widely panned spectacle Greeting Card seemed to signal for Saltz and many others that the end was near. The event was held at the Seventh Regiment Armory and was financed by the

Art

Production

Fund,

Target,

Sotheby's, and Tom Ford, among others. In a choreographed pattern, a dozen motorcyclists spun their wheels and skidded for 10 minutes over blackcoated plywood panels to reveal shades of fluorescent orange underneath. Panels from the finished piece, thinly reminiscent of the Jackson Pollack masterpiece of the same name, were offered for sale. In London Damien Hirst confronted the question of the relationship between money and art head on by creating a far more compelling spectacle: a cast platinum human

skull covered in 8,601 fine di-

amonds weighing 1,106.18 carats, including a single pink pear-shaped stone weighing 52.4 carats set into the forehead. (See photograph on page 28.) This work, For the Love of God,

was the centrepiece of Hirst’s aptly titled exhibition “Beyond Belief” at White Cube Gallery; after three months the diamond-encrusted skull sold to a consortium

cluding Hirst himself,

of investors,

in-

for an uncon-

firmed sum of £50 million (£1 = about

$2)—the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.

traordinary 1950 White

sale was Mark Rothko’s Center (Yellow, Pink and

Lavender on Rose), which shattered all

auction records for a contemporary work, bringing down the hammer at $72.8 million

and obliterating its $40

million presale high estimate. Following suit and surpassing already inflated expectations, Christie’s held the most successful contemporary auction to date with a spring sale that totaled more than $384.6 million. Although record prices were set for Jasper Johns’s 1959 painting Figure 4 ($17.4 million) and for Agnes Martin’s 1965 painting The Desert ($4.7 million), Andy Warhol was by far the star of the evening; his Lemon Marilyn (1962)

Luxury goods of another sort figured prominently in David Hammonss searing comment on the current state of affetched $28 million (far above its $18 fairs, shrewdly displayed at New York million estimate), and his Green Car Citys L&M Arts, a secondary-market Crash (Green Burning Car 1) (1963) was gallery (ie., one that in general does not directly represent artists) on the Mark Rothko’s painting White Center (Yellow, Pink posh Upper East Side. and Lavender on Rose) (1950) sold at a Sotheby's The show—a collaboraauction on May 15 for $72.8 million, a new record tion with his wife, Chie for a contemporary work. Hammons—consisted of six full-length fur coats, hung on vintage dress forms and vandalized with

paint,

varnish,

and

even a blowtorch. The commentaries on art

and money were appropriate in 2007, an extraordi-

nary year in sales at auction houses and art fairs. Sothebys got the season off to a banner start with the sale of Cezanne’s Still Life with Green Melon (1902-06),

a watercolour

that brought $25.5 million, the highest price ever paid for a work on paper and far above its $18 mil-

lion high estimate. Fifteen artist’s records were established at Sotheby's contemporary sale, including those for Francis Bacon’s 1962 Study from Innocent X ($52.7

Michel Untitled

million),

Jean-

Basquiat’s

1981

($14.6

and Robert berg’s 1959 ($10.7 same

RauschenPhotograph

million). event

million),

the

At

the

most

exTimothy A. Clary—AFP/Getty Images

211

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Art and Art Exhibitions AFP/Getty Images

bought by an anonymous bidder for a staggering $71.7 million—

A number of cash prizes were awarded in 2007. Edgar Arceneaux received the annual

more than double its $35 million

high estimate. Christie’s June sale brought in the highest total art sales in Europe to date at £237 million. Highlights from Sotheby's June sale included the record auction price set for a living artist: £9.6 million for Hirst's Lullaby Spring (2002). The year’s records were not limited to contemporary work. In July Raphael’s portrait of Lorenzo It de’ Medici garnered £18.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for the work of an Italian Old Master. Dealer and gallery owner Ira Spanierman had bought the painting in 1968

$25,000

ing controversies

in 2007.

Massachusetts Museum temporary Art (MASS North

Adams,

made

The

of ConMoCA),

Foundation

A silk-screen print on canvas by British artist Banksy was one of a series of six portraits of supermodel Kate Moss created in the style of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe series.

headlines

and the artist

could not agree on how to finish the work, and they ended up in court. Although the museum won the right to show the unfinished installation, critics

and scholars had sided with the artist. Meanwhile,

Büchel filed his own

law-

suit, citing the Visual Artists Rights Act, which affords artists fundamental rights to the integrity of their work; he claimed that the museum had not formally agreed upon a budget or a strategy for proceeding if the money were to run out. Ultimately MASS MoCA decided to dismantle the parts of the work that had been installed. At the core of yet another money-related controversy were questions of ownership, preservation, and competing interests. Faced with depleted endowments and a lack of operating cash, universities and public institutions were tempted by high art prices to sell parts of collections that had been donated to them. In 2007 an agreement to sell (for $30 million) a half interest in

101 works from a collection donated to Fisk University, Nashville, by artist Georgia O’Keeffe in 1949 seemed im212

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

for

a

grants for $500,000

each. For the first time since its inception, the Turner Prize exhibition was held outside London at the Tate Liverpool. Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson, and Mark Wallinger were short-listed for the prize, which was awarded in December to Wallinger. A six-month residency in Italy and an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery made up the award for the second biannual Max Mara Prize

when it went public with its private disagreement over an exhibition with Swiss artist Christoph Biichel. Biichel had begun work on a large-scale installation called Training Ground for Democracy, made up of actual buildings, vehicles, and other objects that were to evoke a village in wartime. As costs rose, the museum

award

black artist working in the U.S. Whitfield Lovell and Joan Snyder were awarded MacArthur

for about $325, before the work

was identified as Raphael's. Money was at the heart of one of the art world’s more interest-

Johnson

minent. The sales agreement involved the university and Crystal Bridges Museum

of American

Art, an

founded by Wal-Mart Walton

in Bentonville,

institution

heiress Alice L. Ark., that was

scheduled to open in 2009. Because the terms of the original gift included a proviso not to “sell or exchange any of the objects,” the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., sought to block any such arrangement. Similar challenges arose when Randolph College (formerly Randolph-Macon Woman's College), Lynchburg, Va., made plans to sell part of its renowned collection in order to raise

money

to

cover

the

operating

costs of the college. In general, experts frowned upon selling artworks for any purpose other than the purchase of new works to improve an art collection. Art of a different form made headlines during the year as street art made a bid for legitimacy with sold-out gallery shows and a magazine profile on the anonymous artist Banksy (see BIOGRAPHIES). Banksy gained notoriety for his searing social commentaries in the form of clandestinely painted city

murals,

interventionist

actions,

spray paint and stenciled graffiti, and painted canvases. An "underground" show staged in 2006 at a warehouse in Los Angeles drew more than 30,000 viewers. At auction, Banksy’s work drew astounding prices, including £288,000 for Space Girl and Bird, which

sold at Bonham’s.

for Women; the short cluded Yasmeen Al

list inAwadi,

Georgie Hopton, Melanie Jackson, Lisa Peachey, and Hannah Rickards. The year was bracketed by the opening of new buildings, both architectural marvels, for two cuttingedge art institutions. In December 2006 Diller Scofidio + Renfro unveiled their first project in the U.S. with their commission for the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, which featured 1,700 sq m (18,000 sq ft) of gallery space cantilevered over the waters of Boston Harbor. In New York City in December 2007, the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened its building by Tokyobased Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA. Consisting of 5,600 sq m (60,000 sq ft) in seven stories stacked like off-kilter boxes,

the museum

was

the first art

museum to be built from the ground up south of 14th Street in Manhattan. (JENNY MOORE)

ART EXHIBITIONS In 2007 the art world was engrossed with the once-a-decade convergence of three major international exhibitions: the Venice

Biennale,

Documenta,

the Miinster

Sculpture

Projects.

52nd

Biennale,

titled

Venice

and

The

“Think

with the Senses—Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense,” was organized for the first time by an American curator, Robert

Storr.

Featured

artists

in-

cluded Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Yang Fudong, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke,

and Francis Alys. The show was dominated by somber installations by single artists—such as Sophie Calle of France,

Art and Art Exhibitions

construction of a sprawling clear-plastic-enclosed pavilion in which the work of some 60 artists was displayed. The most critically acclaimed exhibition of the three was the Münster Sculpture Projects, an event that takes place every 10 years. Organized by Brigitte

Franzen,

Kasper

König,

and

Carina Plath, the exhibition was presented at both indoor and outdoor venues across the city of Münster and included the work of 33 artists. Bruce Nauman’s large-scale sculpture Square Depression, originally proposed for the first exhibition, in 1977, was realized in 2007, as was a minisurvey—quite liter-

ally, in 1:4 scale—by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster of selected works from the past three Sculpture Projects exhibitions. The notion of sculpture was interpreted very broadly in the work of Pawel Althamer, who cut a path nearly 1 km (0.6 mi) long through meadows and fields on the outskirts of the town;

An installation by Felix GonzalezTorres, who was chosen to represent the U.S. at the 52nd Biennale in Venice, June-November 2007.

Guillermo Kuitca of Argentina, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres of the U.S.—and for the first time there were official pavilions representing Africa and Turkey The Hungarian pavilion, featuring Andreas Fogarasi, received the Golden Lion for best national participation, and Emily Jacir received the Golden Lion for an artist under 40 in the international exhibition or national pavilions. The curators

of Documenta

12 (the

latest occurrence of the quintennial event) posed three questions: "Is modernity our antiquity?" "What is bare life?" “What is to be done?” Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack presented a conceptually and historically wideranging exhibition that included 16thcentury Persian calligraphy, 17th-century Chinese lacquer work panels, and a

19th-century

Iranian

carpet

another “sculpture” was presented by Susan Philipsz, who created an environment in which a moving passage from Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman sounded from under a bridge. The international biennial procession continued throughout the year with shows in Athens, Moscow, Al-Shariqah (United Arab Emirates), Lyon (France),

and Istanbul. Art and architecture made for an inspired pairing at the in-

augural

Monumenta,

a new

art event

that presented work by a single artist created especially for installation in Paris’s Grand Palais. Anselm Kiefer was the first artist selected for the honour. Feminism, both past and present, was the theme of two major exhibitions in 2007. “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” curated by Connie Butler and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, billed itself as the first comprehensive exhibition to focus on feminist activism and art making during the crucial period from 1965 to 1980. The international survey included the work of 120 artists and featured such seminal pieces as Magdalena Abakanowiczs

Abakan

Red (1969), an

enormous red woven vaginal form; Dara Birnbaum’s Technology, Transformation:

Wonder

Woman

(1978-79);

Lynda Benglis’s Artforum magazine “intervention” (1974), a provocative photo of herself placed as an advertisement; Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment (1972);

and

Mierle

Laderman

Ukeles’

public performances. Covering the 1990s through the present, “Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contem-

porary Art” was presented at the Brooklyn Museum in celebration of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s canonical sculpture The Dinner Party (1974-79). The work of more than 80 international

Dancers perform as part of the installation Floor of the Forest by artist Trisha Brown, at Documenta

"^ cadi

a

Nd

Ben

12, Kassel, Ger., on June 15.

y Due

juxta-

posed with more contemporary offerings by such artists as Trisha Brown, Cosima von Bonin, John McCracken, Nasreen Mohamedi, Nedko Solakov,

and Alina Szapocznikow. All but one of the more than 500 works by more than 125 artists were displayed in Kassel, Ger; Documentas "G Pavilion," however, was on the Costa Brava in Spain— chef Ferran Adrià's restaurant, elBulli,

reputedly the world's best. The distinctiveness of Buergel and Noack's curatorial choices was further demonstrated by the use of coloured walls and plush curtains in exhibit spaces and by the 213

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Art and Art Exhibitions Ruth Fremson—The New York Times/Redux

-F

1970s to the present and included the infamous work from which the exhibition took its title: Prince’s 1983 rephotographed image of Garry Gross’s notorious photo of a nude prepubescent Brooke Shields. Earlier in the year, the Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase, presented “Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard

Prince,

1974-77,”

an

un-

sanctioned exhibition of the artist's work that raised questions about the responsibility of art institutions to comply with artists' wishes. Among those from the art world who died in 2007 were three major figures: seminal Conceptualist and Minimalist Sol LeWitt, the spirited and celebrated painter Elizabeth Murray, and the influential and indomitable art dealer Ileana Sonnabend.

Kara Walkers Slavery! Slavery! (1997) was among the more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, shadow puppets, video animations, and light projections included in “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” a touring exhibit of Walker's work that was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, October 2007-February 2008. emerging and midcareer artists was included to give perspective on recent feminist practice in art making. The guiding principle of two notable exhibits was to present art that was representative of a certain time and place. In New York City the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s" presented (November 2006-February 2007) 100 paintings and drawings by artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement, including

Otto

Dix,

Christian

Schad,

and George Grosz. "Eden's Edge: Fifteen LA Artists," organized by Gary Garrels, the newly appointed chief curator of the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, showcased (from May to September 2007) work from the past decade in a variety of media. One of the most widely anticipated shows of the season was Richard Serra's (see BIOGRAPHIES) glowingly reviewed monographic survey presented

snaked back and forth over a distance of about 22 m

(72 ft); Sequence,

two

torqued ellipses connected by an Sshaped passage; and Torqued Torus Inversion, two circular forms that curved

in on themselves. Also in New York City, the Jewish Museum’s retrospective of Louise Nevelson's work was another exceptional monographic sculpture survey. The museum brought this important artist back into the spotlight with an inspired installation that emphasized the intense energy of her totems, arrangements, reliefs, and chambers.

In other

sculpture shows, Robert Gober’s sculptural work from 1976 to 2007 was celebrated in an exhibition presented at the Schaulager (Basel, Switz.), as was

work in lead, rubber, and neon,

high-

Gordon Matta-Clark’s tragically brief but prolific period of production from 1971 to 1977 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Also presented at the Whitney—although it originated in February at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis and was on view during the summer at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—was Kara Walkers midcareer survey of her racially and sexually charged cut-paper

lighted by the groundbreaking

Prop

works, drawings, and films.

at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),

New York City. Spanning 40 years, the exhibition commenced with his earliest

(1968) and the unnerving Delineator (1974—75). The exhibit culminated with

the presentation of three massive pieces that were created in 2006 specifically for MoMAS second-floor galleries: Band, an enormous ribbon of steel that 214

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Richard Prince was honoured with two survey exhibitions in 2007. At the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, “Richard Prince: Spiritual America” gathered photographs, paintings, sculptures, and drawings from the late

(See OBITUARIES.) (JENNY MOORE)

PHOTOGRAPHY "The Art of Lee Miller" a major retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Sept. 15, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008), marked the 100th

anniversary of the birth and the 30th anniversary of the death of the American-born photographer The show featured about 150 black-and-white photographs—including vintage prints and contacts,

short

films,

and

extracts

of

her work as a photojournalist on assignment for Vogue magazine during World War II. The exhibition and allied book confirmed Miller's position as one of the 20th centurys most influential female photographers. Magnum Photos, the agency established by Robert Capa, George Rodger, David Seymour, and Henri CartierBresson,

celebrated

its 60th

anniver-

sary. The innovative photographers' cooperative allowed its members to retain ownership of their negatives, a practice that spread to other agencies and became standard. Eventually, however, power shifted away from photographers as giant online image libraries such as Corbis and Getty Images were able to dictate less-favourable terms for the reproduction of their work. One of Getty's significant acquisitions in 2007 was an archive of images belonging to the Princess Diana Memorial Trust, featuring the work of British royal photographer Jayne Fincher. The acquisition proved timely, coming just months before the 10th anniversary of the princess’s death. Another 20th-century icon, the Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider, was the subject of a

Art and Art Exhibitions

special exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of her death, "Romy Schneider" at Camera Work Gallery, Berlin (from May 19 to June 23); Will

McBride’s images of the film star were the result of a single day's shoot in Paris in 1964, when

the actress, who

was renowned for her beauty, was 25. The most iconic of actresses, Marilyn Monroe, was the subject of "Marilyn and the '60s" at Beck & Eggeling In-

les, in April 2006,

the show

traveled

around the country until December 2007. This midcareer assessment showed how Simpson, who was still in her 40s, repeatedly broke new ground as a photographer and filmmaker, examining realities of race and class in fresh ways. Another young American, Taryn Simon, had her works exhibited in the solo show “An American Index of the Hidden

and Unfamiliar,” which

Ger.

traveled in 2007 from the Whitney Mu-

(July 19-August 28). Laurence Schiller’s photographs were taken on the set of

seum of American Art, New York, to the Museum ftir Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.

ternational

Monroe's

Fine

Art, Diisseldorf,

unfinished

last film,

Some-

things Got to Give (1962); this exhibition represented Schiller’s first release outside the United States of his signed limited-edition prints of the Monroe photographs. A 20-year retrospective of the work of American Lorna Simpson (see BIOGRAPHIES) was an important event in the year for the museums that hosted the exhibit. Having originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Ange-

Photography continued to attract a growing number of collectors in 2007. Swann Galleries, New York City, hosted

an

Fine

Pho-

Times Square when victory over Japan

was

declared

$10,000,

Cyndie French holds her son, Derek Madson, who is treatment.

“100

tographs,” on February 14—the centre of attention belonging to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s beloved photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York City’s

One image from the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning series “A Mother’s Journey,” by photographer Renée C. Byer for the Sacramento Bee: in May 2006 suffering from the effects of cancer and its

auction,

but

in

1945.

It sold

for

two

other

lots—André

Kertész's Behind the Hotel de Ville 1930 and a set of 25 issues of Alfred Stieglitzs landmark magazine Camera | Work— shared the highest bids of the day, each selling for $50,000.

The

auction,

which included prints by such luminaries as Edward Hine,

and

S. Curtis, Lewis Harry Callahan,

Margaret

Bourke-

White, raised $798,100.

In April, Christie’s New York held a week of sales that realized $11.2 million, including $2.5 mil-

lion in the first-ever auction devoted to the work of Horst P. Horst. The record

Margaret,

Noël Coward,

Salvador Dalí, and Lau-

rence Olivier—as well as his gritty journalistic studies of mental illness and poverty in the 1960s. Albert Watson, the subject in 2007 of an eponymous book, was one of the world’s most widely published photographers; he took hundreds of magazine cover photographs for such publications as Time, Rolling Stone, and especially Vogue. In 2007 his work was shown at Guy Hepner Contemporary, London (February 5-10), and at the

Young

Gallery, Brussels

tember

12). His

$100,000.

In a celebration of photography away from the studio, Photo 4 Gallery in Paris hosted an exhibition, "Blanche et

noire est la rue" (February 15-March 30), in which scenes of ordinary life on the streets were depicted through several decades by different generations of artists, including celebrated masters Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis,

and Ralph Gibson. Paris also provided the setting for one of the years most surprising and refreshing displays—an exhibition of 300 vintage prints featuring landscapes and nudes (both male Canets

the for

(September 19-December

$396,000 Woman

of Irving Penn's in Moroccan

Palace. The American photographer influenced several generations of fashion, portrait, and still-life

photographers, as was demonstrated in “Homage to Irving Penn” at the Aplanat Galerie für Fotografie, Hamburg (held June 16-August 4), where “Penn-inspired” works of

1993

print of a nude Kate Moss sold at Christies London for more than

An-

highlight of was the sale

(June 8-Sep-

limited-edition

Corset,

1939.

Diana,

princess of Wales, Rudolf Nureyev, Sir

was set for his Mainbocher Paris,

of $288,000

portraits—Princess

and and

other week

price

42 European photographers were on display. British photographer Lord Snowdon received a rapturous ovation at his first New York City exhibition. The event, at Godel & Co. Fine Art (March 1-April 21), was organized by the Chris Beetles Gallery, London, following the huge success of his first selling show there the previous autumn. Snowdon's career spanned more than 50 years, and the exhibition of more than 80 pictures included some of his best-known society

female) Nudes

from Tunisia, “Portraits 1904-1910,” at Nicole

Galerie

au Bonheur

du Jour

1).

At the Venice Biennale, Malian photographer Malick Sidibé received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in recognition of his years of documentary photography in his home country. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Pulitzer Prizes in 2007 went to Oded Balilty of the Associated Press for breaking news photography and to Renée C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee for feature photography. German Bernd Becher and American Joe O'Donnell were among the losses to the photography community in 2007. (See OBITUARIES.)

(KEITH WILSON)

Renee C. Byer—MCT/Landov

215

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Business Overview The prices of OIL and GOLD continued to rise sharply, and a crisis in SUBPRIME mortgages roiled credit markets. Toyota briefly TOPPED General Motors in world sales, and American AUTOMAKERS reached agreements for union-run TRUST FUNDS to pay retiree health costs. CONSOLIDATION was a major trend, particularly in the METALS sector.

he collapse of the subprime mortgage market by mid2007, though long predicted, wreaked havoc on both the housing and financial industries (several major banks posted mortgage-related losses in the billions of dollars) and resulted in a major credit crunch that impaired many businesses' ability to secure short-term financing. (See Sidebar: UNITED STATES.)

The Big Three achieved a major restructuring of their employee health care obligations, which had been a major cost burden on the companies. After a two-day strike in September against General Motors by the United Auto Workers, GM reached an agreement on a new contract with the UAW in which the company would shift liabilities for UAW-retiree health care into an independent trust. The trust, known as a voluntary employee beneficiary association

eign rivals; it made a mere $65 in profit per car sold, compared with the $1,200

per car netted by Toyota and Honda. For the third quarter of 2007, GM reported a loss of about $39 billion, its

largest loss ever. A symbolic moment occurred in October for Chrysler when DaimlerChrysler, its former owner, officially changed its name to Daimler. The change marked the epilogue to a contentious decadelong partnership that had come to an end. Daimler spun off Chrysler in July to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, which hired former Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

as chair-

man and Toyota’s top American executive, James Press, as vice-chairman and

president. Ford, after having posted a $12.7 billion loss in 2006, faced repeated setbacks

in 2007;

every month

its sales

were

down

of the year except

No-

vember, for a total decline of 12%. Its

In 2007 automakers suffered through most critical redesign, the F-Series (VEBA), would be administered by the a bad summer of sales—the worst in a pickup, was not expected to reach dealUAW. Chrysler and Ford subsequently erships until late 2008. Ford did expedecade—for which they blamed the chilling effect of the subprime mortgage rience some improvement, as it posted reached similar agreements with the UAW in creating VEBA trusts, and tocrisis and high gasoline prices. Lighta $468 million net profit in the first half vehicle sales in the U.S. ended the year gether the three companies would transof 2007. For the year, however, Ford's at 16.1 million after almost a decade of reported U.S. annual sales figure of fer about $100 billion in current and fuannual sales of about 17 million. As a ture health care liabilities to the trusts. 2.57 million vehicles was surpassed by possible sign that consumers were conGM appeared to turn a corner with Toyota's 2.62 million, which meant that vinced that oil prices would remain Ford had slipped from its long-held pothe restructuring of its employee health high, in May more cars than light trucks care obligations, but it still had to close sition as the number two American carwere sold in the United States for the a major profitability gap with its formaker. Ford looked to bow out of the first time since 2002. luxury-car market. It sold off AsThe Big Three American auton Martin in March, put Jaguar Aston Martin chairman David Richards (centre) tomakers continued to face the and Land Rover up for sale, and appears with his new investment partners, Kuwaiti erosion of their once-dominant even considered selling its Volvo businessmen Adnan A. al-Musallam (left) and grip on the U.S. market. In July car unit. These brands made up Mustafa E. al-Saleh, following the sale of the famed the combined share of the Big Ford's Premier Automotive sports car firm by the Ford Motor Co. in March. Three’s traditional American Group, which as of July 2007 brands fell below 5096 for the had posted losses of $4.8 billion first time. There were signs since 2004. everywhere of the diminishing Japanese carmakers, in conpresence of the top automakers. trast, continued to thrive even in For example, in the wake of the the face of sales declines. Toyota, bankruptcies of Tower Automoin the first quarter of 2007, betive and Delphi, several autocame the world’s largest carparts manufacturers wound maker in terms of sales, besting down businesses that catered exlongtime champion GM. For the first nine months of the year, clusively to automakers. They included

PPG

sought

to

business,

Industries,

however,

which

sell its windshield and

Motorola,

which

million

in 2009, which, if accomplished,

would make Toyota the first auto Max Nash—AFP/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

sold 7.06

vehicles to Toyota’s 7.05 million. Toyota said that it planned to sell 10.4 million vehicles worldwide

sold its automotive sensorandcontrol business to Germany’s Continental. 216

GM

Business Overview Kryuchkov Nikita—ITAR-TASS/Landov

company to sell more than 10 million vehicles in one year and would beat GM's record of 9.55 million set in 1978. Toyota posted a 3296 rise in net profits in its fiscal first quarter, ended June 30,

while its sales for the first nine months of 2007 were up by 7%. The two other major Japanese automakers, Honda and Nissan, also soared. Honda, which

sold more than half of its cars in North America,

made

$1.8 billion in net in-

come in the quarter ended September 30 (a 63%

increase),

and

Nissan

in-

creased its operating profit by 12% in the same period, largely because of increased sales in Russia and China. European automakers also generally prospered. Fiat, for example, had a greater market value than GM and Ford combined, although the two American companies each made three times as many cars. Fiat, having recovered from the collapse of its partnership with GM in 2005, signed new alliances in the U.S. and India and accelerated the rollout of its new minicar, the 500. German carmakers such as BMW (which

planned to increase worldwide sales by 40% in the next 12 years) and Volkswagen stepped up U.S.-based production, in part as a hedge against currency-exchange rates in the face of a weakened dollar. All automakers were watching developments in India and other emerging markets. India could soon become the fastest-growing car market, and India's Tata Motors was close to rolling out a $2,500 "people's car" China's stateowned SAIC hired the head of GM's Chinese operations to step up production; SAIC intended to have 30 differ-

ent models on the market by 2010. Chrysler aimed to double its sales in China in 2007, and Honda planned to launch a new brand of car by 2010 with its Chinese partner, Guangzhou Automobile Group. By then China could have surpassed the U.S. as the largest vehicle market in the world. The single-most-dominant factor in the energy sector—the price of crude oil—leapt from benchmark to benchmark. Crude oil hit $70 per barrel in July $80 per barrel in September, a

which in some cases made a pretax profit of $30 per barrel of oil in the production of gasoline, were in part to blame for the price inflation. The global *supermajor" oil companies continued to post substantial earnings but faced an erosion of their dominance as they contended with rising costs for oil extraction and slipping volume in production. ExxonMobil, the world's largest energy company, posted a $10.2 billion profit in the second quarter of 2007. Though enormous, the figure was, nevertheless,

a decline from the same

period in 2006. For a total of $373 million, BP settled a number of legal claims,

including a U.S. criminal probe into alleged price manipulation of propane and lawsuits that were brought in the aftermath of the 2005 explosion at BP's Texas City Texas, refinery BP, which was lagging behind its peers (its thirdquarter profit was down 2996 to $4.41 billion), overhauled its corporate structure and reduced the number of its major business segments by incorporating its natural-gas and renewable-energy units into its exploration and production unit and its refining and marketing unit. The supermajors, confronted with aggressive tactics from less-developed countries

(LDCs)

that had substantial

oil and natural-gas reserves, generally lost power to state-owned companies across the board. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, for example, were forced out of Venezuela after they refused to sign over majority stakes in development projects to state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela. About 7596 of the world's oil reserves were controlled by national oil companies, according to the International Energy Agency. Indeed, some of the biggest winners of the year were the Russian governmentcontrolled energy colossi. Rosneft, a once marginal state-owned oil company, became a major producer by acquiring most of the assets of bankrupt Yukos (Italian firms Eni and Enel man-

aged to buy some Yukos assets for $5.83 billion). Gazprom continued to show its power when in January it interrupted exports that passed through Belarus to Europe in a move that was reminiscent

and

of its January 2006 temporary cutoff of

almost reached $100 per barrel in November. Analysts blamed everything from continued political tensions in the Middle East and the growing role of speculators and traders in oil futures to rising global demand, which shot up to 86 million bbl daily in 2007. OPEC did not increase its production despite the price hikes. It argued that oil refiners,

gas exports to Ukraine. A joint project

record

$90 per barrel in October,

with Eni to build a new trans-European pipeline could give Gazprom even greater leverage over Europe. By contrast, the last of the privately owned Russian energy firms cratered; Mikhail Gutseriev,

owner

of

RussNeft,

the

largest independent energy company in Russia, quit after what he deemed was

Workers for Russian energy giant Gazprom lay part of the North European Gas Pipeline in the Leningrad region of Russia on August 10. harassment by the Russian police and tax authorities, and he eventually fled the country. Russia’s United Company RUSAL planned to purchase RussNeft. In Iraq—whose unproven oil reserves might top 200 billion bbl (second only to world leader Saudi Arabia’s 262 billion bbl)—the large global companies were also scrambling. Shell and Total held off new projects as they waited for the Iraqi political situation to stabilize and for privatization legislation to be enacted. Meanwhile,

smaller firms, in-

cluding France’s Perenco and Canada’s Heritage Oil, signed exploration deals in areas such as the Kurd-controlled region in northern

Iraq. In June,

Iraqi

Pres. Jalal Talabani traveled to China to push Beijing to revive a $1.2 billion oilexploration deal that was signed during the Saddam Hussein era. The utilities sector underwent some consolidation and buyouts. In the United States the most notable deals concerned Washington state’s Puget Sound Energy, which was taken private by Macquarie Group for $6.1 billion, and the Texas utilities firm TXU, which

was acquired by a group of private equity firms that included Texas Pacific Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. The private equity firms paid $32 billion for TXU and took on more than $12 billion in TXU debt, which made it 217

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Business Overview

the largest leveraged buyout in history. The firms sought to deter potential opposition to the buyout from environmental groups and politicians by promising to cancel a majority of TXU's proposed new coal-burning plants and by offering rate reductions to consumers. In Europe, where there had been more than $100 billion of utility mergers since April 2005, further consolidation loomed after the European Union’s power sector was officially deregulated in July. The deregulation allowed utilities in each of the EU’s 27 member countries to sell electricity in any other member country. The potential of heightened competition led to “national” mergers such as that of France’s SUEZ and Gaz de France in 2006 and the $11.8 billion merger between Italys AEM Milano and ASM

purely on gold-mining functions; Newmont,

for example,

discontinued

its

merchant-banking business unit. In the aluminum sector, the top producers spent much of 2007 in a bewildering series of courtships. In May Alcoa made

an unsolicited

$26.9 billion

bid to acquire its rival Alcan, which had rejected Alcoa’s earlier overtures. The prospective merger would have created a company with $54 billion in annual revenues. Alcoa’s takeover bid was trumped, however, by Australia’s Rio Tinto, which eventually prevailed with a $38.1 billion offer. Having lost its attempt to nab Alcan, Alcoa spent the rest of the year considering other partners and selling off noncore businesses such as its 7% stake in Aluminum Corp. of China (Chalco). United

chased Canada’s Algoma Steel for $1.58 billion and Minnesota Steel for an

Company RUSAL, the world’s largest aluminum producer, planned a $9 billion initial public offering, which it abruptly canceled in September because of market conditions. The airlines in 2007 seemed at last to have recovered from the misfortunes of the early 2000s, when many large American carriers fell into bankruptcy.

undisclosed

From

Brescia in 2007.

The global steel industry also had a wave of cross-border mergers: Brazilian steelmaker Gerdau bought American steelmaker Chaparral Steel for $4.22 billion; India’s Essar Global pur-

amount;

and

U.S.

Steel

January

to

August,

however,

bought Canada’s Stelco for $1.1 billion. Steel prices remained relatively high— in July hot-rolled steel was priced at $575 per metric ton, compared with $175 per metric ton in 2001—and demand for steel was expected to grow in 2008 by 4% in most of the world. Dutch ArcelorMittal remained the world’s largest steel company, but it faced challenges from the rising power of the Indian steel industry, including JSW Steel, which was planning to triple production over the next five years, and

more than 25% of domestic flights arrived late, the worst performance since such data began to be collected in 1995. In August alone about 30% of flights were delayed. SkyWests Delta Connec-

Tata

the world's

parent, whose net income rose 76% in

fifth largest steelmaker after its 2007 takeover of London-based steel producer Corus Group. Other emerging global steel powers included Germany’s ThyssenKrupp and South Korea’s Posco, which was considering international acquisitions. Consolidation was also prevalent in other metals sectors. For example, gold, whose price was at 28-year highs (gold hit $787 per troy ounce in September), experienced a wave of mergers, including Newmont Mining’s takeover of Miramar Mining for $1.53 billion in October and Yamana Gold's $3.6 billion purchase of Meridian Gold in September. Newmont and Yamana used the mergers to strengthen themselves against market leader Barrick Gold. Gold producers also looked for ways to simplify operations and focus

the third quarter. Delta Air Lines, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in April, stepped up its international flights, which were its most profitable. More than 33% of Delta’s seat capacity was outside the U.S. as of the end of September, up from 24% in 2005. Delta’s chairman stated publicly that the airline would consider making an acquisition as well as perhaps sell off its Conair subsidiary. Most of the major American airlines were facing a costly upgrade to their aging fleets; the average age of their jets was 12.2 years at

Steel, which

became

218

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

tion had a 5596 on-time arrival rate, the

industry's lowest. AMR, which owned American Airlines, earned $175 million in the third

quarter, up from $15 million in the same period in 2006, a performance in part aided by increased passenger fares. Higher fares also boosted UAL, United's

be the best in the industry. With energy prices having been high for over four years, such hedges eventually lost some of their effectiveness, however.

Many European and Asian airlines considered consolidation. In India four state-owned carriers merged—Air India, Indian, Air India Express, and Al-

liance Air—to form a new airline that would have 121 aircraft and be among the world's 25 largest carriers. In Europe carriers hoped to take advantage of a new "open skies" treaty between the EU and the U.S. in which previously restricted trans-Atlantic routes were opened to competition. The Italian government said that it would sell off its controlling stake of unprofitable Alitalia, and at the end of the year, it

endorsed sales negotiations between the airline and Air France-KLM. The rivalry between the two top global aircraft manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, took a number of twists over the year as recovering airlines at

last began to place substantial orders for new aircraft. Boeing started in strong shape, with its first-quarter profit up 27% as it delivered its largest order of planes in five years and was sold out of new aircraft until 2011. In October, however, Boeing suddenly announced that its new wide-body jet, the 787 Dreamliner, would face delays of at least six months because of parts shortages and other problems. The company, which had promised that the first 787s would be delivered in May 2008, stated that it would deliver 109 planes by the end of 2009. (By October 2007 Boeing had booked 710 orders for the 787 from 50

customers,

and

Delta

Air

Lines

stated that it would consider ordering up to 125 by year’s end.) Many airlines were counting on the 787 as the key to upgrading their fleets in the following decade, since the 787 was reportedly 20% less expensive to operate and maintain than comparable aircraft. Boeing’s delay came almost simultaneously with Airbus’s delivery of its first A380 superjumbo jetliner after it had endured two years of production delays and gone $6.8 billion over budget. Airbus, which had seen five chief executives in 27 months, spent the year struggling to revive its business.

Its

parent

company,

European

the end of 2006. Northwest, for exam-

Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS),

ple, had 109 DC-9s whose average age was 35 years. Southwest Airlines spent the year contending with high fuel costs. Southwest for years had been able to reduce fuel costs via a system of price hedges that were generally regarded to

had experienced a 94% decline in profit in 2006, primarily because of production delays. EADS scrapped its dual French-German

management

structure

in favour of a single CEO and chairman, and Airbus streamlined opera-

Business Overview

tions, increased

outsourcing,

and sold

off some of its production facilities. Airbus also increased investment in the A350, its rival to the Boeing 787, which

was planned to be in service in 2013. The toy industry suffered a wave of recalls and scandals after large numbers of Chinese-manufactured toys were discovered to be hazardous. Most seriously affected

was

Mattel,

which

recalled

more than 21 million Chinese-made toys—including Fisher-Price infant toys and Barbie dolls—because of lead paint and other potential hazards. The recall cost the manufacturer

more

than $40

million worldwide. The violations increased suspicion that the Chinese toy industry, which supplied 80% of the toys sold in the U.S., was not adequately enforcing safety standards and prompted calls in the U.S.,

Canada,

and

other

countries for increased regulation. In March the administration of Pres. George W. Bush took what appeared to be the most aggressive stance against Chinese imports in two decades and said that it would impose steep tariffs on government-supported Chinese exporters. It immediately placed duties on two high-gloss-paper manufacturers, but the duties were later removed

market share. Some drugmakers made major purchases of biotech firms—such as AstraZeneca's acquisition of MedImmune for $15.6 billion—in a sign that brand-name pharmaceutical companies were looking for generic-proof alternatives.

In the post-Vioxx

The tobacco industry contended with many of 2007’s major trends—consolidation and regulation. As the U.S. Congress edged toward granting the FDA the authority to regulate cigarettes, some tobacco companies prepared for the future. In August Altria Group said that it would spin off its Philip Morris

environment,

regulators were quicker to consider shutting down potential problem drugs. For example, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel voted in October to ban cough and cold medicines for children under six years of age, and another FDA panel decided to back a cardiologists claim that GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug Avandia posed possible heart-attack risks. Such decisions often translated into serious hits to drugmakers' bottom lines.

International arm, which would create

a European- and Asian-based manufacturer that would be isolated from any new U.S. regulations and would be able to benefit from rising rates in smoking in countries such as Russia and China. Philip Morris International produced 831.4 billion cigarettes in 2006, compared with Philip Morris USA's 183 billion. Despite skyrocketing oil prices and a widening credit crisis, stock markets in

GlaxoSmithKline, for example, saw Avandia sales (which were $3 billion

most countries

rose in 2007, with the

notable exception of Japan. In the U.S. the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 6.496 after a volatile year that included an all-time-high closing of

worldwide in 2006) fall by 3896 in the third quarter alone. In some cases, drugmakers themselves withdrew their products. In October Pfizer scrapped its inhaled-insulin product Exubera, which had not performed to expectations

14,164.53 on October 9 and the bench-

mark index’s first fourth-quarter decline in a decade. (CHRISTOPHER O'LEARY)

since its 2006 rollout, and took a $2.8

billion charge to kill the product. Selected Major World Stock Market Indexes!

when the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled against them. Meanwhile, the housing slump hurt a number of wood-product manufacturers, such as Weyerhaeuser, whose secondquarter net income fell by 89%. Weyerhaeuser said that it would close three plants by year’s end. Boise Cascade sold its paper, packaging, and newsprint di-

Argentina, Merval

2351

1834

2152

3

Australia, Sydney All Ordinaries

6873

5482

6421

14

Brazil, Bovespa

66,529

41,117

63,866

44

Canada, Toronto Composite

14,647

12,413

13,833

7

China, Shanghai A

6396

2744

5521

96

vision for $1.63 billion to Aldabra 2 Acquisition, a private equity group.

France, Paris CAC 40

6168

5218

5614

1

Germany, Frankfurt Xetra DAX

8152

6437

8067

22

Hong Kong, Hang Seng

31,958

18,659

27,813

39

India, Sensex (BSE-30)

20,376

12,415

20,287

47

Italy, S&P/MIB

44,364

37,184

38,554

-7

Japan, Nikkei 225

18,262

14,838

15,308

-11

Mexico, IPC

32,836

25,783

29,537

12

Pakistan, KSE-100

14,815

10,067

14,077

40

3876

2961

3482

17

31,728

24,012

28,958

16

South Korea, KOSPI

2065

1356

1897

32

Spain, Madrid Stock Exchange

1734

1491

1642

6

Taiwan, Weighted Price

7345

9810

8506

9

6754

5822

6457

4

14,165

12,050

13,265

6

2859

2341

2652

10

10,311

8838

9740

7

856

735

766

-3

1565

1374

1468

4

15,807

13,897

14,820

4

1682

1448

1589

7

American textile companies fought legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress in October that would extend liberalized trade benefits to impoverished countries. The New Partnership for Development Act would grant duty-free and tariff-free access for products from as many as 50 LDCs. American textile

companies worried that the legislation would boost imports from Bangladesh and Cambodia, which already were, re-

spectively, the second and eighth largest sources by volume for U.S. apparel imports. Drug manufacturers in the U.S. faced challenges on a number of fronts—from federal regulators, who gained greater supervisory powers and shot down a number of promising new drugs; from legislators, who voted to allow LDCs greater access to generic drugs; and from generic manufacturers, which continued to prosper by taking away

Percent

2007 range? High Low

Country and Index

Singapore, Straits Times South Africa, Johannesburg All Share

United Kingdom, FTSE

100

United States, Dow Jones Industrials

United States, Nasdaq Composite United States, NYSE

Composite

United States, Russell 2000 United States, S&P 500 United States, Wilshire 5000

World, MS Capital International ‘Index numbers are rounded.

Year-end close

change from 12/31/2006

Based on daily closing price.

Sources: Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, ft.com, bloomberg.com.

219

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Computers and Information Systems New WIRELESS technology appeared, and the use of ONLINE VIDEO exploded. PRIVACY issues received new attention as ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS took off and disparate CONSUMER DATABASES were to be merged. The music industry seemed poised to embrace advertising-supported FREE MUSIC.

ew Technology. The introduction of the Apple iPhone, which was really a handheld computer running a version of the firm's Macintosh operating system (OS), was easily the biggest event of 2007 for consumers. It combined an Apple iPod, touch-screen controls, and a cellular telephone that exclusively used AT&T's wireless network for voice and data. The iPhone went on sale in the United States

at the end

of June,

and more

than one million units were sold in less than three months. It was introduced in Europe late in the year. Apple's initial European agreements were to pro-

vide the iPhone to Germany through TMobile, to the U.K. through O2, and to

France through Orange. One concern was that the iPhone was not technically capable of taking advantage of faster European wireless networks that sped up Internet use.

The iPhone became one of the most quickly marked-down electronic gadgets, undergoing its first price cut— from $599 to $399 for the most popular model with 8 GB (gigabytes) of storage—in only two months. Apple CEO Steven Jobs said that the price cut was intended to increase demand for the iPhone during the all-important holiday shopping season, when sales of consumer electronics products typically hit a peak. Although price cuts generally were popular with consumers, the move angered those American customers who had paid up to $599 for their iPhones immediately after the product was introduced. Apple tried to mollify them with $100 store credits. The number of Internet services delivered to cellular telephones continued 220

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

doubt, however, after the company's CEO resigned. Apple also took advantage of the WiFi trend with its new iPod Touch (es-

tion, plus some smaller players that used the Linux OS. The hottest area

sentially an iPhone without the cellulartelephone capability), which for the first time allowed an iPod to download music directly from Apple's iTunes online music store via a Wi-Fi hot spot. Previous iPods required first downloading a song to a personal computer. Municipal Wi-Fi networks, widely seen as a way to provide ubiquitous broadband in cities and to offer lowercost service that more people could afford, suffered their first setback as highprofile projects in San Francisco and Chicago were dropped over cost issues.

was

Wi-Fi

to grow. The main developers of wireless Internet software were Symbian, Microsoft, Palm, and Research in Mo-

so-called interactive Web

content,

including music, games, and video. More evidence of the broadening Internet-ready cellular-telephone market appeared when RealNetworks said that it would cooperate with MTV to sell songs that were downloaded over the Verizon Wireless cellular-telephone network for use on cellular telephones and handheld smart devices. Some new services,

such

as

Twitter,

were

cross-

overs that served computers and cellular telephones. Twitter provided networks of friends with short messages so that they could stay constantly in touch, via either computerbased instant messaging and Web forms or cellular-telephone text messaging. The iPhone added momentum to the trend of accessing the Internet via Wi-Fi (wireless-fidelity) hot spots, which were

found

in restaurants,

ho-

tels, and coffee shops. Smart telephones equipped with Wi-Fi could reach the Internet at several times the speed of cellular networks. Some experts believed that Wi-Fi Internet access

would

rival cellular access,

both

for data and for voice calls that used Voice

over

Internet

Protocol

(VoIP),

which had begun to catch on with consumers. Sprint Nextel was one cellulartelephone company that took the threat seriously. It planned to spend as much as $5 billion over three years to build a high-speed voice-and-data network that used a next-generation wireless Internet technology called WiMAX, which exceeded the speed and range of Wi-Fi. The status of that strategy was in

network

builder

EarthLink,

which announced internal cutbacks and layoffs, declined to pursue a contract with San Francisco to build a citywide network. Chicago dropped its plan for a citywide network after it was unable to reach an agreement with either AT&T or EarthLink, the two companies bidding to build the network. Meanwhile, municipal Wi-Fi networks were up and running in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Anaheim

(Calif),

and

Corpus

Christi

(Texas) and were being set up in other cities, such as Minneapolis (Minn.).

Microsoft introduced its new Windows Vista PC operating software at the end of January, but after most of a year in the marketplace, it generated so little enthusiasm that Microsoft agreed to keep selling its older Windows XP for several months after it was to have been discontinued. User complaints about Vista included error messages while copying files, OS crashes, and problems with attached printers. Several PC makers, including Fujitsu, provided easy ways for customers to "downgrade" their new computers from Vista to the older XP operating system. Google claimed that the OS made it difficult to use non-Microsoft programs for "desktop searches" (scanning a PC's hard drive for information). To avoid a

lawsuit, Microsoft agreed with the U.S. Justice Department and 17 state attor-

neys general to change Vista so that consumers could more easily use alternative desktop search programs. Two scientists received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery

Computers and Information Systems

of a physical effect that was soon used to reduce the size of computer harddisk drives. Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany in 1988 independently discovered the effect, called giant magnetoresistance. (See NOBEL PRIZES.) Giant magnetoresistance made it possible to read fainter magnetic signals on a magnetic disk, which in turn made it possible to increase the density of data on the disk. The first hard-disk drive that used the discovery was introduced in 1997. Corporations in the U.S. were forced to deal with a potential computer problem created when the country extended Daylight Saving Time by a month. The clocks inside most computers were programmed to recognize the old daylighttime schedule established in 1986. Although no major problems were attributed to computers’ or smart telephones’ being out of sync with official time, publicly traded U.S. corporations spent an estimated $350 million to fix the problem with software patches. The One Laptop per Child Foundation, which was trying to provide less-developed countries with low-cost portable computers that could use a pulley for hand-generated electrical power, said that it planned to begin full production late in the year. The Massachusetts organization said that although initial computer units would cost $200, it ex-

pected the price to drop to $100 per computer by the end of 2008. One reason for the low price was the computer's use of the free, open-source Linux OS,

although it also would be able to run a version of Microsoft Windows XP. Meanwhile, chip manufacturers Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel

continued their competition to put the most processors on a single chip. AMD released its latest Opteron chips—for computer servers—which each contained four processors. Adding more processors per chip increased the chip's calculating speed and energy efficiency. Intel previously had offered Xeon server processors that combined two chips with two processors each. Intel also said that it had made an experimental chip that contained 80 computer processors capable of handling more than one trillion operations per second while using less electricity than an ordinary chip, but the company said that the device was only for research and would not be marketed. The two types of high-definition DVD players, Sonys Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD

DVD,

continued

to

battle

standard, much as VHS videotape recorders competed with Betamax recorders to become the consumer TVrecording standard in the 1980s. Bluray, which offered the greater disc capacity, appeared to be gaining ground in retail disc sales over HD DVD, which of-

fered a simpler manufacturing process. The uncertainty over the outcome continued to slow consumer acceptance of high-definition video recorders. The Internet. Social networking Web sites continued to gain in popularity to the point that e-marketers sought to capitalize on them. (See Sidebar.) Popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook allowed users to tell about themselves and to post public comments on friends’ profile pages,

creating an ongoing discussion

and a growing group of interested participants. Facebook, whose membership more than quadrupled in 2007, went a step farther by enabling searchengine users to find its members— something it had not done before. It did, however, give existing members a choice whether to keep their pages private or make them available to people who used external search engines or Facebook' own search function. Other Facebook plans went less smoothly. In response to protests by privacy advocates, Facebook modified a plan to tell members’ friends what they had bought online. The company said that it would get explicit approval from a user before disclosing his or her Internet shopping. Concerns grew that social networking sites were being used by sexual preda-

tors seeking to contact children. Four families sued News Corp. and its MySpace site in a California court after their underage daughters allegedly were sexually abused by adults whom they had met while using the online service. The suits alleged negligence, recklessness, fraud, and negligent misrepresentation. Under pressure from authorities in several states, MySpace said that it had discovered and deleted more than 29,000 profiles belonging to registered sex offenders. In a settlement with New York’s attorney general, Facebook agreed to post stronger warnings about the risks to children who used its service; the case was based on allegations that Facebook had misled people by minimizing the threat posed by sexual predators. Social networking also created other legal problems. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg (see BIOGRAPHIES), was sued for allegedly having misappropriated the idea from his Harvard University roommates. Three founders

of ConnectU,

a

Facebook

competitor, sued in federal court, alleging that Zuckerberg agreed to help finish their Web site but wound up taking their ideas and creating Facebook. In what amounted to the refiling of a 2004 lawsuit dismissed on a technicality earlier in the year, they alleged fraud, copyright infringement, and misappropriation of trade secrets, and they asked the court to shut down Facebook. Facebook sought to have the case dismissed. Online video took off in 2007, both be-

cause

of the runaway

popularity

of

A computer-information system called Microsoft Surface shows a friendly face that was electronically finger-drawn on its black tabletop surface. The touchsensitive interface could also read bar codes and recognize objects placed on it.

over

which one would become the industry 221

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Computers and Information Systems

Google's YouTube and because conventional TV networks embraced the Internet as a place to showcase their programs after they had already appeared on television. Because video files were larger than e-mail or Web pages, they quickly became a large portion of Internet traffic—more than 40% by some estimates.

For TV networks, streaming shows online helped to build viewer loyalty and, to a lesser extent, to sell more ad-

vertising. (It was advertising that viewers could not skip as they could within TV broadcasts recorded on digital video recorders.)

The

shows

viewed

on

a

computer screen initially featured smaller images than most consumer TV sets produced, but the networks later offered the shows in a larger image size—up to full-screen pictures. New Web-only TV shows also were created. MySpace agreed to showcase a new television-like

series

called

Quarterlife,

about young peoples’ lives after college. Warner Bros. Studios outlined plans for 24 different Internet-based entertainment productions, including games, TV-like shows with episodes, and a short form dubbed “minimovies.” The online video trend was aided by new technology that made it possible to stream TV shows over the Internet in a format that approximated the quality of new high-definition TV sets. Adobe Systems, a software maker known for its free Flash video software that could be used by nearly all personal computers, incorporated a high-definition video format into the Flash player. Apple supported the same high-definition standard in its QuickTime video software, while Microsoft pursued its own proprietary approach to high definition over the Internet called Windows Media VC-9.

Business interests were affecting the flow

of Internet

video,

however.

Via-

com, the corporate parent of the MTV and Comedy Central cable TV channels, sued YouTube and its corporate parent, Google, for intentional copyright infringement and sought more than $1 billion in damages. Previously Viacom had demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 video clips of its copyrighted programming, and YouTube had done so. As the result of a pricing dispute between Apple and NBC, iTunes stopped offering new NBC TV shows in the fall and would remove all NBC shows from its store at the end of the year—a significant decision, since NBC material accounted for about 40% of the iTunes video downloads. 222

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Apple, which sold TV video for $1.99 per episode, said that NBC’s proposed new pricing would have forced the price up to $4.99 per episode. Meanwhile, Amazon.com struck a deal with the federal National Archives and Records Administration to copy and market online some of the thousands of historic films and videotapes held in U.S. archives. Electronics manufacturers continued to offer consumers different ways to combine the two largely separate multimedia worlds of the TV set and the Internet-connected computer. Apple introduced the $299 Apple TV, which allowed up to five computers in a household to stream downloaded video wirelessly to a TV set. The Apple TV unit also could store up to 50 hours of video on its hard drive. Some new cable TV set-top boxes began to provide TV sets with links to Internet Web sites and also functioned as DVD burners. Sony offered the $299.99 BRAVIA Internet Video Link, which enabled some

of its high-definition TVs to view a limited selection of Internet videos, movie trailers, and music videos. Microsoft

said that its Xbox 360 video-game console could display Internet video on TV sets that used a technology called Internet Protocol Television. Cable TV, eager to keep its lead over telephone companies in providing highspeed Internet access in the U.S., pushed for higher speeds. Cable-TV firm Comcast demonstrated a replacement for cable modems that would download data at 150 megabits (million bits) per second, about a 25-fold speed

increase, but the company said that the technology might not be ready to sell for two more years. Meanwhile, a relatively small number of consumers could get from

Verizon

Communications

a

fibre-optic home service called FiOS (fibre-optic service), which operated at 50 megabits per second but had the potential for delivering 100 megabits. Bloggers—persons who voiced their personal opinions by writing regularly on Web sites—became more of a mainstream force in the discussion of national issues. Several U.S. Democratic presidential candidates appeared in Chicago before a conference of selfdescribed “progressive” bloggers called YearlyKos. Some who attended said that the group of 1,500 conventiongoers was hardly a diverse cross-section of society; they mostly tended to be white males. As the role of bloggers in writing highly partisan attacks aimed at political opponents came into question, there were

discussions in blogger circles about creating a voluntary code of conduct that would raise the level of discussion on blogs, or at least set some minimal ground rules, but it was unclear whether the fragmented blogger community could agree on such standards. U.S. politics entered the Internet in a new way when televised presidential debates were sponsored by cable network CNN and YouTube, the most popular Web site for amateur video. Initial questions for the candidates came from uploaded Internet video from the public, while a CNN moderator asked follow-up questions. A more Internet-

Justin Cardinal Rigali (left), archbishop of Philadelphia, is videotaped as he gives a Lenten message for posting on YouTube. The archdiocese was one of many groups using the video-sharing Web site as a communications medium.

Computers and Information Systems

centric approach followed when MTV and MySpace held several live Webcasts with individual presidential candidates as they answered questions submitted live via instant message, text message, or e-mail. The concept of mashups—a term originally used to describe combinations of different songs, which was then extended to combinations of the Google Maps interface with new kinds of demographic information—began to

uted the performance to a "halo effect" from the iPod. Apple also introduced the latest version of its Macintosh operating system, nicknamed Leopard (also known

permeate Internet culture as companies

such

as Yahoo!,

IBM,

and

Microsoft

tried to make a business out of it and increase Web traffic. The idea was to allow users to combine information from different sources for business or entertainment

purposes,

such

as com-

bining a street map with the addresses of places offering Yoga training or the locations on a world map of two people communicating via instant messag-

ing. the ing mal

The companies hoped to increase appeal of mashup software by makit simple to use. People with minitechnical skills were able to com-

bine information as diverse as hobbies,

highway detours, or whale sightings with existing maps, sometimes adding photos,

sound,

and video to the mix.

Even more conventional maps of crime statistics and weather conditions often were the work of amateurs. Widgets were a widely used type of Internet-based consumer software, particularly on social networking sites. In their simplest form, widgets provided such features as YouTube videos, music

players, photo viewers, weather forecasts, or news headlines in a tiny area of a Web page otherwise devoted to social networking, on a personal blog, or on the desktops of some personal computers. As the year drew to a close, several companies had begun to use widgets as an advertising medium. The ever-growing use of e-mail, plus an increase in the number of e-mails with large attachments, caused even large e-mail in-boxes to reach overflowing. That led to yet another round of offers from free e-mail providers of even higher-capacity in-boxes. Google’s original offer of 1 gigabyte of free email storage per in-box was eclipsed in 2007 by Yahoo! and AOL, both of which offered unlimited free e-mail storage, and by Microsoft, which provided 5 GB for its free Windows Live Hotmail. Google’s free e-mail storage limit increased on an ongoing basis and reached 6 GB by year’s end. SunRocket, an Internet phone service provider that used VoIP technology,

Google Earth Outreach, displayed here, was a new mapping service designed to help nonprofit organizations that operated in various parts of the world present their work. closed

suddenly.

The

tomers

without

service

action left cusand,

in some

cases, likely to lose money on their twoyear contracts. Although it was the second largest independent VoIP company, behind Vonage, SunRocket was facing stiff competition from cable TV companies that were selling similar telephone service, sometimes at discounted rates, if customers also bought other cable services. Companies. A U.S. federal judge set aside a $1.5 billion patent-infringement judgment against Microsoft—the largest patent judgment ever. The suit had been filed by Alcatel-Lucent over the rights to the widely used MP3 digital music format, which was used by Microsoft’s Windows Media Player as well as by the music software of many other firms. The judge ruled that Microsoft did not infringe on one of two patents and that ownership of the other patent was unclear.

as Mac

OS X

10.5). Al-

though not dramatically different, it automated and simplified useful but often-neglected tasks such as backing up data, programs, and system settings. Record-setting Macintosh computer sales in Apples fourth fiscal quarter helped make the company a significant player in the U.S. personal-computer market, along with top manufacturers Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Apple also was one of the companies caught up in the U.S. government investigation of corporate backdating of executive stock options, a practice that maximized the gain for option recipients. Although the company was not charged, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against the firm's former general counsel and former chief financial officer in connection with fraudulent option dating. In addition, Apple settled its long-running court battle with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ music company, over the use of the Apple name and logo. Apple Inc. gained ownership of all trademarks related to “Apple” but licensed some back to Apple Corps. Apple also settled a trademark dispute with Cisco Systems over the iPhone’s name. The growing competition between Google and Microsoft took another turn when Google began to offer free downloadable versions of Sun Microsystems’ $69.95 StarOffice, a competitor of Mi-

ever. The European Court of First Instance rejected a Microsoft appeal in a

crosoft Office for personal productivity software such as word processing and spreadsheets. The move was significant because, compared with Google's free online word-processing and spreadsheet applications, StarOffice had more features and thus was more comparable to Microsoft's Office product. In an effort to fight back, Microsoft offered free software online for e-mail, picture sharing, and blogging. IBM also announced that it would offer a free al-

2004

antitrust

ternative to Microsoft Office, the down-

ruling and upheld the $689.4 million fine. Microsoft said that it would not appeal the latest decision and would comply with the 2004 antitrust ruling by making it easier and less expensive for competitors to work with Microsoft software. The original ruling was based on Microsoft's alleged abuse of its dominant market position with the Windows OS. Apple made sharp gains in personal computers to an estimated 896 of the U.S. market, and some analysts attrib-

loadable Lotus Symphony, which would offer word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. IBM also downsized its worldwide operations by 4,170 employees, or about 196. The degree to which eight million customers worldwide relied upon their BlackBerry wireless e-mail service became clear when North American customers suffered a 10-hour outage in April, provoking howls of protest. Service provider Research in Motion said that the outage was caused by software

Not all went well for Microsoft, how-

European

Commission

223

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Computers and Information Systems

problems at its Canadian network operations centre that handled all e-mail messages for BlackBerry units in North America.

PC maker Dell Inc., acknowledging that some quarterly results had been falsified in the years 2003-06 to meet sales targets, reduced its earnings for fiscal year 2003 to the first quarter of 2007 by $92 million, a relatively small amount for a company with about $57 billion in annual sales. Its downward adjustment in revenue for the period was less than 196. Dell, which had be-

come

the number

worldwide,

two

PC

company

after Hewlett-Packard,

be-

gan to sell PCs through traditional retail stores for the first time. It completed deals with a number of retailers, including Wal-Mart stores (in the U.S., Canada,

and Puerto Rico), Staples of-

fice-supply stores, and several overseas companies. Intel said that it would build a $2.5 bil-

lion computer-chip plant in China, the company’s first major manufacturing operation in Asia. According to the company, China was its fastest-growing major market. Mergers and Acquisitions. Microsoft bought online advertising firm aQuantive for about $6 billion, its largest ac-

quisition ever and a sign of the growing importance of online advertising as consumers

spent more

time on the In-

ternet. Although online advertising accounted for only 6% of total U.S. advertising expenditures in 2006, that number was expected to grow to more than 12% by 2010, according to research firm eMarketer. Microsoft’s competitor Google also made its largest acquisition to date, buying online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. It was part of Google’s effort to expand from its search-engine business into advertising by combining the two firms’ databases of information in order to tailor ads to consumers’ individual preferences. (Google maintained its lead in Internet searching over second-ranked Yahoo! and third-ranked Microsoft, according to Internet traffic-measurement firm comScore. In September Google had

and Internet search engines, might hurt privacy rights and limit consumers’ choice of Internet content. Microsoft also complained that the deal would reduce Internet advertising competition, but Google disputed the claim. Yahoo! bought two online advertising companies—Right Media for $680 million (Yahoo! already owned 20% of the firm)

and BlueLithium

for $300 mil-

lion. Right Media ran auctions for buying and selling online ad placements. BlueLithium was one of several companies that sought to show consumers relevant advertising by tracking their behaviour as they moved from one Web site to another, a type of behavioral targeting. Yahoo! also paid $350 million to acquire Zimbra, which provided Webbased e-mail to businesses. Acer of Taiwan acquired American PC maker Gateway for $710 million. Gateway, founded in 1985 as a direct-sales

consumer

group, BEUC, was concerned that the combining of the two firms’ databases, which contained extensive information on consumer use of both the Internet 224

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of music; more

bits per second meant better sound.) Apple said that iTunes would continue to sell copy-protected songs for 99 cents. Amazon.com

and Wal-Mart,

the

largest CD seller in the U.S., reported that they would also sell some songs online without copy protection. Earlier in the year, Apple’s Jobs had urged the four major music companies to abandon copy protection, largely because the vast majority of the music they sold—as CD recordings—had no dicted that all record companies would have to abandon digital-rights-management software on songs sold online if they wanted Internet music sales to grow enough to offset a decline in sales of music CDs. A music-industry sales report showed that in 2006 the sales of digital music online did not increase fast enough to make up for the decline in CD sales. Online music piracy continued unabated, even though the Russian Web site AllofMP3.com—a particularly egregious offender in the view of the music industry—was shut down. The Web site

$116 billion for the year, which would

about one-tenth the standard online price, and had claimed to be the second largest seller of online music, after iTunes. AllofMP3.com had been accused of piracy in a dispute over payment of music-industry royalties. The record labels scored a victory in the first of their consumer lawsuits against online song sharers to go to a jury trial (many had previously been

music-download

A European

searches.)

tained in each second

on hard times in the decade since Compaq Computer offered to buy it for $7 billion. (Compaq itself was later bought by Hewlett-Packard.) The acquisition made Acer the world’s third largest PC maker, behind first-place HewlettPackard and second-place Dell. The combined company would have more than $15 billion in revenue and ship more than 20 million PCs annually. E-Commerce. The rapid growth of ecommerce slowed noticeably in 2007, something that experts said was inevitable given the fact that Internet sales had become so large. Internet sales in the U.S. were projected to be

implications.

Internet

slightly higher audio quality owing to a higher bit rate of 256 Kbps (kilobits per second) versus 128 Kbps for other songs purchased from iTunes. (The bit rate measured the amount of data con-

copy

Google’s DoubleClick deal proved controversial, sparking an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over whether the combination had antitrust

of U.S.-based

cost $1.29 each and were said to have

PC firm that had no stores, had fallen

make them 5% of all retail sales. Experts said that the declining growth rate for e-commerce also indicated that consumers were shifting their buying patterns. For example, the growth rate for online sales of toys and video games was expected to rise, while the growth rate for clothing sales was expected to decline, according to Forrester Research. Online sites that helped consumers make everyday buying decisions continued to be popular. Craigslist rivaled newspaper classified ads as a leading venue for buying and selling, and Angie’s List was able to charge members for consumer reviews of householdservice providers, such as plumbers and movers. Apple, which had about 70% of the

57%

rights-management software, which meant that the songs could be used directly on digital music players other than the iPod. The unprotected songs

market,

introduced

a

major change in May in the way music was sold online. In an arrangement with EMI Group, Apple began to offer EMI songs from iTunes without digital-

had

protection.

sold

settled

albums

out

Some

analysts

for as

of court.)

little

A

as

pre-

$1,

Minnesota

woman was found to have infringed on music copyrights and was ordered to pay $222,000 in damages, even though she could have settled out of court before the trial for $4,750. Hers was one of about 30,000 lawsuits that the mu-

sic industry had filed since 2003 in an effort to curb music piracy. Analysts said that even though the music industry had won the courtroom battle, it was losing the larger war against online song sharing. About 85% of all downloaded digital music still (continued on page 226)

Computers and Information Systems

Social Networking—Making Connections on the Web The world was its most wired ever in 2007, with approximately 1.25 billion people connected to the Internet (19% of the global population). Increasingly, these users eschewed the anonymity that had previously been typical of the online experience. Millions flocked

working site; members could create profiles for themselves, main-

to social networking sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, and Orkut. On these sites, members created and main-

those numbers into revenue and collapsed with countless other dotcoms when the "bubble" burst that year. Others were quick to see the potential for such a site, and Friendster launched in 2002 with the initial goal of competing with popular subscription-fee-based dating services such as Match.com. It deviated from this mission fairly early on, and it soon became a meeting place for post-"bubble" Internet tastemakers. The site's servers proved incapable of handling the resulting spike in traffic, however, and members were faced with frequent shutdowns. Members were further alienated when the site actively began to close down so-called "fakesters" or "pretendsters." While many of these were little more than practical jokes (profiles for Jesus Christ or the Star Wars charac-

tained personal profiles that could then be linked to the profiles of other members. The end result was a network of “friends” or “contacts" that shared similar interests, business goals, or academic

courses. The most basic social networking software allowed friends to comment on one another's profiles, send private messages within the network, and traverse the extended web of friends that was

visible in each member's profile. More advanced SNSs enabled members to enhance their profiles with audio and video clips, and some opened their software source code to allow third-party developers to create applications or widgets—small programs that ran within the member's profile page. These programs included games, quizzes, photo-manipulation tools, and news tickers. At its best, a social net-

tain lists of friends, and contact one another through the site's private messaging system. SixDegrees.com claimed to have attracted more than three million users by 2000, but it failed to translate

ter Chewbacca), some, such as universities or cities, were helpful identifiers within a friends list. Once again, there was a void in the

working site could function as a hive of creativity, with users and developers feeding on each other's desire to see and be seen. Critics, however, saw SNSs as crass popularity contests, in which "power users" pursued the lowest common denominator in a quest to gain the most friends. With hundreds of millions of unique visitors using dozens of SNSs worldwide, it was certainly possible to observe both extremes—often within the same group of "friends." The earliest online social networks appeared almost as soon as the technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of USENET in 1979. USENET allowed users to post and receive messages within subject areas called newsgroups. Initially, there was no standard convention for the naming of newsgroups. This led to confusion as the number of newsgroups grew throughout the 1980s. In 1987 several USENET developers implemented a change that normalized groups into broad hierarchies such as news,

social networking Web, and MySpace was quick to fill it. MySpace actively sought a younger demographic from its inception in 2003. It quickly became a venue for rock bands to connect with fans and to debut new material. Unlike Friendster, MySpace had the infrastructure to support its explosive growth, and members joined by the millions. MySpace was purchased by News Corp. in 2005, and the site's higher profile caused it to draw scrutiny from legal authorities who were concerned about improper interactions between adults and the site's massive population of minors. The spectre of online predators did little to diminish MySpace's

talk, miscellaneous, and alternative (the last was created for news-

served as an academically oriented alternative to MySpace, claiming

groups that dealt with taboo or niche topics, and it remains the most populous category on USENET). USENET and other discussion

20 million unique monthly visitors. LinkedIn, furthermore, has drawn

forums, such as privately hosted bulletin boards, enabled individuals to interact in an online social network, but each was essentially a closed system. With the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993,

membership (which reached 70 million monthly active users in 2007),

but it did open the door for other SNSs to seize some of its momentum. Facebook took the Classmates.com formula and turned it on its head, with a network that was initially open only to students at universities and high schools. Since its 2004 launch by founder Mark Zuckerberg (see BIOGRAPHIES) at Harvard University, Facebook has

nearly 15 million professionals to its business-networking site. While MySpace and Facebook competed for members in North America, Bebo was a popular site in the United Kingdom, Orkut dominated in Brazil and India, Friendster recaptured some of its former glory

those systems were joined with an easy-to-use graphical interface. The architecture of the World Wide Web made it possible to navigate

among users in Southeast Asia, and China's QQ grew from an instant

from one site to another with a click, and faster Internet connections

most adventurous was Ning, which launched the final version of its

allowed for more multimedia content. The first companies to create social networks based on Web technology were Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com. Classmates.com, founded in 1995, used an aggressive pop-up advertising campaign to draw Web surfers to its site. It based its social network on the existing connection between members of high-school and college graduating classes, armed service branches, and workplaces. SixDegrees.com was the first true SNS. It launched in 1997 with most of the features that would come to characterize a social net-

site in 2007. Ning users created their own social networks from the ground up, using software that required very little programming expertise. Upgrades, such as personalized domain names and revenue-generating banner advertisements, could be purchased, and the network software supported a host of third-party applications. These personal SNSs were then displayed in a browsable master

messaging service to become a major force in the SNS realm. Perhaps

index (much like the friends in a standard SNS profile) to form, in

essence, a social networking site for social networking sites. (MICHAEL RAY)

225

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Computers and Information Systems

(continued from page 224)

consisted of illegal copies, said Gene Munster, a digital-music-industry analyst for brokerage firm Piper Jaffray. In addition, the line between free illegal songs and for-pay legal music was beginning to blur. The well-known rock band Radiohead sold its latest album online for whatever people were willing to pay, and the music industry itself was experimenting with an advertisingsupported Web site, SpiralFrog.com, that allowed users to download free but copy-protected

music.

Computer Security and Crime. In March a federal judge struck down the 1998 U.S. law known as the Child Online Protection Act, which made it a crime

for Web site operators to let children view “harmful” content. The ruling said that parents could protect their children through software filters and other means that did not limit the freespeech rights of others. Civil-liberties advocates and other opponents of the law had argued that it was constitutionally vague and would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The ruling came three years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction against the law on the grounds that it probably would be struck down. Police in London questioned alleged members of a worldwide Internet pedophile ring and rescued 31 children. More than 700 suspects worldwide were under scrutiny. The adults were said to have used an Internet chat room called “Kids the Light of Our Lives,” which showed images of children suf fering sexual abuse. The Storm Worm became the biggest e-mail attack in more than a year. Clicking on an executable file that was contained in an infected e-mail caused the Storm Worm to hide itself while it shut down computer security software, which in turn allowed additional malicious code to be downloaded and personal information on the computer to be stolen. PCs also could be turned into "zombies" within a group of compromised computers called a “botnet,” which was typically used to launch additional attacks. Google advocated the creation of new international privacy standards for the ways in which consumer data would be collected and used. It proposed the standards as an alternative to the existing situation in which privacy laws varied around the world. The company suggested that the standards be set by the United Nations or some other rec226

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ognized international group and that individual countries adopt the rules and adapt them to local needs. (Underscoring the problem of an online service’s having to comply with varied local laws, Google agreed to block four YouTube video clips after the government of Thailand complained that the videos broke Thai laws against offending the country’s king.) Google changed its own privacy policy by saying that it would keep logs linking Internet searches to specific computers and Web browsers for only 18-24 months and would make the logs anonymous after that. It had been keeping the logs indefinitely. Microsoft also made a request for industry privacy standards, and it promised to keep search logs for only 18 months. It said that its search users would be able to opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising, which triggered the display of particular types of ads depending on what Web sites a person looked at while online. Google’s commitment to privacy was questioned,

however,

after

it intro-

duced a mapping service, called Street View, that showed street-level photographs from around the U.S. that were searchable by street address. Some photographs provided users the view through house windows or captured persons sunbathing. Google defended the service by saying that the images showed only what a person could see by walking down the street. The U.S. Department of Defense began blocking access to several Web sites by anyone who used its network, including troops in Iraq. YouTube, MySpace, and

11 other Web

sites, which

soldiers used to communicate with friends and family as well as to entertain themselves, were blocked because

of the load they placed on the military's private network and because of concerns that soldiers might disclose sensitive military information. A California man,

Jeffrey B. Goodin,

became the first person found guilty by a jury of having violated the 2003 federal law that banned unsolicited e-mail with false return-address information. Goodin violated the CAN-SPAM Act with a scheme that tricked AOL subscribers into disclosing credit-card information in the belief that they were dealing with AOLs billing department. Goodin then used the data to make purchases. He was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and ordered to pay about $1 million to the victims of the scheme.

Computer Games. With its Wii videogame console, Nintendo emerged during the year as the unexpected winner of the video-game machine wars. Wii lacked state-of-the-art graphics but provided entertaining game play for the average person. There also was continuing growth of online games and online “virtual worlds” that were like alternate universes in which players could pretend to live. To earn

its share

of the $13 billion

spent annually in the U.S. on video games and related equipment, Nintendo catered to casual gamers, who wanted games that were easy to learn and intuitive to play (such as by swinging a motion-sensitive control device as if it were a tennis racket). That strategy ran counter to the conventional belief in the industry that new video-game machines had to cater to the so-called “hard-core” players who wanted the latest and greatest graphics and the most challenging game play. In unit sales the Nintendo Wii outsold the more expensive Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 consoles (the PS3 lagged the most), which were aimed at serious gamers. Both Microsoft and Sony were forced to cut prices to stimulate sales, and Microsoft also had to deal with extensive repairs on many of its Xbox 360 machines at a cost estimated to be as much

as $1.15

billion. Microsoft got some good news when the Xbox 360 first-person shooter game Halo 3 proved to be a success with serious game players; it was seen as one way for the Xbox 360 to compete with the popularity of Nintendo's Wii. Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds where participants could meet, travel, and buy property, had millions of registered users (some critics said that only about 200,000 were regular participants) and its own currency—the Linden dollar—that could be exchanged for real money. Real-life retailers such as tennis-shoe manufacturer Adidas set up shops in Second Life in hopes that people, using their cartoonlike avatars as their representatives, would go to Second Life stores to make virtual purchases. Scientists at the University of Alberta improved an existing game software called Chinook to a level that it would never lose (that is, it would always either win or achieve a draw) in a tradi-

tional game of checkers. Checkers was the most complicated game to date to have been completely mastered by a computer. The project took 18 years to complete and verify. (STEVE ALEXANDER)

Earth Sciences DIAMOND inclusions in ANCIENT terrestrial rock provided clues about the early history of Earth's CRUST. Scientists studied SLOW EARTHQUAKES and the crystalline structure of Earth's INNER CORE. International scientific studies documented GLOBAL WARMING, and new research anticipated CLIMATECHANGE EFFECTS in specific areas of the U.S.

GEOLOGY AND GEOCHEMISTRY he oldest diamonds known in terrestrial rock were described in 2007 by Martina Menneken of the Institute for Mineralogy, Münster, Ger., and colleagues. The diamonds appeared as tiny inclusions in zircon crystals extracted from ancient metamorphosed sediments from Jack Hills in Western Australia. The scientists studied 1,000 zircon grains and found diamonds in 45 of them. Isotope dating of these zircons had previously established their extreme age, with some being as old as 4.25 billion years. Although geologic processes had destroyed all rocks from so long ago, the resistant zircons passed from one rock cycle to the next. The trapped inclusions were therefore the only known source of physical information about conditions on early Earth. The prevailing view had been that these early conditions were dominated by hot basaltic lavas. The geochemistry of a variety of silicatemineral inclusions found in the zircon crystals had recently established that the inclusions had grown within waterbearing granitic magmas 4.25 billion4 billion years ago and at temperatures

ing. They used an infrared spectrometer to take a series of continuous records from a distance of about 250 m

(820 ft). The

that gas composition and temperature changed abruptly during the explosive eruptions. In particular, the temperature and the ratios of carbon dioxide to water and to sulfur dioxide increased. The composition of the gas dissolved in the original magma was determined from analyses of glass inclusions that had been trapped in olivine at a depth of about

that the zircons grew deep within a thickened continental lithosphere more than 4.25 billion years ago before they were caught up in the relatively cool granitic magmas

in continental crust.

Stromboli Island’s volcano is spectacular for its explosive blasts of gas and lava, which typically occur every 10 to 20 minutes. The flying chunks of lava generally rise from shallow depth and fall within

the

crater,

but

occasional

larger explosions from deeper sources threaten volcano visitors and nearby inhabitants. Mike Burton of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Catania, Sicily, and colleagues published the results of gas analyses of measurements made in 2000-02 with geochemical remote sens-

results demonstrated

10 km

(6.2 mi)

Using

the

known solubility of gases as a function of pressure and temperature, a computer simulation of degassing during the rise of the magma helped explain the volcano’s plumbing system. About 9996 of the gases are released quietly as the magma rises to levels of reduced pressure. The other 196 coalesces into large bubbles, or slugs, that accumulate and intermittently clog the volcanic conduit until they rise rapidly and burst out explosively from about 250 m below the surface. The results showed that the gas slugs are generated at a considerable depth of about 3 km (1.8 mi) and are decoupled

from

the

slower magma uprise and degassing process. Improved understanding of the mechanisms controlling strombolian

A study of the variation in gases emitted by Stromboli Island's volcano, one of the world's most active, provided clues about its inner workings. Shown is an eruption of the volcano in February when lava flows reached the sea.

as low as 680 °C (1,256 °F), which was

a surprising indication that a continental crust was already present. An analysis of light scattered by the diamond inclusions (using Raman spectroscopy) revealed distinctive structural and chemical properties that were matched only by microdiamonds that had been found in zircon crystals of ultrahighpressure metamorphic rocks, and evidence had shown that these microdiamonds probably grew at depths of at least 100 km (62 mi). The authors’ pre-

ferred interpretation of the origin of the Australian zircons with diamonds was Protezione Civile Italiana/AP

227

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Earth Sciences Courtesty of Sanjeev Gupta

good calibration back to about 12,500 years ago, but the radiocarbon calibration curve that was extended back to about 26,000 years ago on the basis of studies of coral and foraminifera in marine sediment was less certain. There was no accepted older chronology because calibrations of the carbonand oxygen-isotope records from ice cores (back to 650,000 years ago) and

Glacial-Age Megaflood Ice Sheet

(England)

marine

sediments

(back to about

100

million years ago) had generated timescales with significant discrepancies.

e»

120

B

|ce-sheet front

d

Lake

e

ian Institution, Washington,

Rock ridge

—

River direction

During glacial periods the area between England and France was a river-drained valley that rose eastward to a rock ridge. Evidence of catastrophic megafloods indicated that large amounts of water built up behind the ridge and breached it about 450,000 years ago, as shown above, and again about 200,000 years later. explosive activity in Sicily and other areas was a high priority for civil defense. According to evidence published by Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College, London,

and

colleagues,

the

folded

chalk ridge that once formed a land bridge between England and France near the Dover Strait was disrupted twice, generating torrential floods that scoured the land surface that became the seafloor beneath the English Channel. High-resolution sonar mapping of the seafloor, supported by older charts from the U.K. Hydrographic Office, revealed an intricate array of features, including incised channels around elevated regions (former islands), scarps, cataracts, and hanging tributaries. Geomorphic interpretation of these features indicated the occurrence of two successive megafloods. During periods of maximum glaciation and lowest sea level, the floor of the English Channel was continuous low-lying land. The chalk ridge acted as a dam that retained a large glacial lake over part of what is now

the North

Sea, south

of

the edge of the Scandinavian ice sheet. The rising lake eventually broke over and through the chalk dam and rapidly drained in a catastrophic flood about 450,000

years

ago.

glacial maximum

During

a second

about 250,000 years

228

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ago, a restabilized dam was ruptured, and the second megaflood incised its history across that of the first flood. The seafloor between England and continental Europe was alternately flooded and exposed as sea level rose and fell during the glacial cycles, and additional paleogeographic changes were associated with the huge glacial lakes,

advances

were

pre-

sented on carbon-isotope measurements for tree-ring chronology. New carbon-isotope data from corals and uranium-thorium dating of stalagmites from Chinese caves provided the prospect of extending reliable radiocarbon dating beyond 26,000 years, well into the glacial period preceding the current interglacial period. Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithson-

(France) oz.

Important

land

bridges,

and

dam

bursts.

These changes greatly influenced subsequent plant, animal, and human migrations.

Predictions about future climate change depend critically on knowledge about the timing of past climate changes. Progress in dating the fluctuations recorded in many geologic climatic proxies (indicators) was reviewed

and evaluated at a workshop in 2007 on “Radiocarbon and Ice-Core Chronologies During Glacial and Deglacial Times.” Results were outlined by Bernd Kromer of Heidelberg (Ger.) Academy of Sciences and others. Accurate timescales with high resolution were essential for correlation of the various geochemical measurements made on cores from marine and lake sediments, ice, trees, caves, and corals. Radiocar-

bon dating furnished a common timescale for terrestrial and marine materials. Tree-ring analyses provided

D.C., and

four coauthors reviewed the results of recent geologic, geochemical, and archaeological studies of seven sediment cores obtained from the east harbour of Alexandria, Egypt. Alexander the Great founded the city in 332 BC. A town had already existed at the site for at least seven centuries, but evidence of human

activity was limited to periods later than about 400 Bc. The sediments were classified and dated by radiocarbon analyses. Potsherds and ceramic fragments in the sediments that were dated to between 940 and 420 BC were typical of the cooking vessels, bowls,

and

jars used in the southeastern Mediterranean during the 9th to 7th century BC. The contents of lead, heavy minerals, and organic material in the sediments began to increase at about 900 BC, which provided signals of early human-related activity. Lead concentrations increased from less than 10 parts per million (ppm) up to about 60 ppm by 330 Bc and then exceeded 100 ppm during the swift expansion of Alexandria. Heavy mineral and organic contents followed similar patterns, with abrupt increases through the three centuries after Alexander arrived. The heavy minerals were derived from imported construction rocks, and the organic material was derived from increased sewage runoff from the booming city. (PETER J. WYLLIE)

GEOPHYSICS On Aug. 15, 2007, an earthquake of moment magnitude 8.0 occurred off

Earth Sciences University of Bayreuth/Informationsdienst Wissenschaft e.V.

the coast

of southern

Peru,

near

the

city of Pisco. The dimensions of the fault plane were about 100 km by 200 km (60 mi by 120 mi), and the relative

movement between the two sides of the fault was 8 m (26 ft). Over 35,000 build-

ings were destroyed, and more than 500 persons were killed. Seismic waves from the earthquake were felt in all of the countries

that border Peru, and a

tsunami with wave heights generally ranging from 10 to 30 cm (4 to 12 in) was recorded throughout the Pacific basin. Large earthquakes are common in Peru because of its location next to a convergent plate boundary where the Nazca tectonic plate subducts (descends)

eastward

beneath

the

South

American plate at an average rate of 7.7 cm (3 in) annually.

Satoshi Ide of the University of Tokyo and colleagues discovered a new scaling law for what are known as slow earthquakes. In contrast to normal earthquakes, which last only tens to at most hundreds of seconds, these seismic events occur over a span of a

few hours to a year. Slow earthquakes generally cannot be felt and were discovered only in the last decade because of the large numbers of broadband seismometers that had been deployed in Japan and the western United States. The researchers found that the size of slow earthquakes increased in direct proportion to the duration

of the event,

whereas

for nor-

mal earthquakes the size was proportional to the cube of the event's duration. This observation unified a diverse group of slow seismic phenomena that were previously thought to be distinct. Although slow earthquakes do not pose a direct hazard to society, they do significantly affect the amount of strain at convergent plate boundaries and therefore influence when and where large damaging "normal" earthquakes occur. Since

2003

American

seismologists

had operated a network of 12 oceanbottom seismometers along a 4-km (2.5-mi) stretch of the East Pacific Rise

west of Central America where the Nazca and Pacific tectonic plates spread apart at an average rate of 11 cm (4.3 in) per year. During a data-recovery cruise in April 2006, the researchers were chagrined to find that only 4 of the 12 instruments could be recovered. Seismic data from 2 of the recovered instruments showed a gradual

increase

in

microseismicity

(tremors) with a large peak of activity about

Jan.

22,

2006,

followed

by a

Material placed at the centre of this diamond-anvil cell was subjected to extremely high pressure to learn about the crystalline structure of the Earth’s inner core. sharp cutoff. In 2007 Maya Tolstoy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, N.Y., and colleagues reported that subsequent measurements of ocean-water temperature and light scattering, dating of rock samples, and seafloor digital images of new lava rock indicated that an eruption had taken place at the midocean ridge. A new volcanic island was recently born in the Pacific Ocean near Home Reef in the Vava’u island group of Tonga. These islands were formed by magma created during the westward subduction of the Pacific tectonic plate beneath the Australian plate. Evidence of the volcanic eruption that created the new island was first noticed by a passing ship in August 2006, and the eruption was subsequently monitored via satellite imagery. In early 2007 R. Greg Vaughan of the California Institute of Technology and co-workers reported on data from the Aqua and Terra satellites, which were used to monitor the size of the new island, the sea-surface temperature in the vicinity of the volcano, and the dispersal of pumice rafts (masses of floating pumice rock). The volcano had previously erupted in 1984, when

leagues reported the results of a series of mineral physics experiments that provided a novel explanation for the existence of Earth's asthenosphere, a layer in the upper mantle that is softer and less viscous than the lithospheric plates that override it. The scientists found significant differences in the water solubility of the two main minerals of the upper mantle, olivine and enstatite, as a function of temperature and pressure. Water solubility for olivine continually increases with depth, whereas for enstatite the water solubility sharply decreases with depth before gradually increasing. The combination of the two behaviours leads to a pronounced solubility minimum for the overall composition of the upper mantle at the depth of asthenosphere beneath both continents and oceans. The investigators suggested, therefore, that the partial rock melting prevalent in Earth's asthenosphere is likely caused not by volatile enrichment but by the inability of large amounts of water to chemically bind to the surrounding rock. Àn international team of geophysicists led by Leonid Dubrovinsky of Bayerisches Geoinstitute, University of Bayreuth, Ger, reported new evidence that the crystalline structure of Earth's solid inner core is body-centred cubic (bcc) as opposed to hexagonal closepacked (hcp). Scientists had traditionally believed hcp to be the stable phase of iron at the extremely high pressures and temperatures near the centre of the Earth. The researchers placed samples of an iron-nickel alloy that contained 10% nickel in heated diamond-anvil cells and used X-ray diffraction to image the internal structure of the samples as pressure was increased to more than 225 gigapascals (4.7 billion Ib per sq ft) and as temperature was raised to more than 3,100 °C (5,600 °F). The team’s results

confirmed earlier suggestions that the presence of modest amounts of nickel alters the pressure-temperature stability of iron such that the bcc crystalline structure becomes the stable phase. On the basis of evidence from meteorites, scientists believed that Earth’s core contains 5-15% nickel, so the

new experiments strongly implied that bee crystals exist within the core. (KEITH D. KOPER)

it created a small island, but the island

had

eroded

away

prior to the 2006

eruption.

Katrin

Mierdel

Geosciences,

of the Institute

Tübingen,

Ger,

for

and col-

METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE In 2007 the United Nations panel of experts on climate change issued its 229

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Earth Sciences

Fourth

Assessment

and concluded that the cumulative evidence since the previous assessment, released

in

2001,

A study published by a team of authors headed by scientists at the LamontDoherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, N.Y., suggested that more drought could be in store for the U.S. Southwest. À broad consensus of climate models indicated that during the 21st century the region would become drier than it had been and that it might already be undergoing the change. If the models were correct, the implication was that the levels of dryness seen in the droughts

Report

more

elles

E

~g

strongly indicated that human

activities were

affect-

ing global climate. In the first part of the assessment, which covered the physicalscience basis of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

ARCTIC

NORTH* POLE

Change (IPCC) stated that a

variety of observations had revealed that the warming of the climate system was “unequivocal” and that there was “very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.” It indicated that 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) ranked among the 12

OCEAN

pM

e aka

of the

1950s,

and

2000-04 could become the established climate in this region

Ss A NORTH A

1930s,

within

years

or

decades. In a separate study by the U.S. National ERICA == V. OF eae )- "goo 1000 1500 km Academy of Sciences, researchers indicated that fuMinimum sea-ice extent, Source: National Snow and Ice September 2007 Data Center (NSIDC) warmest years in the inture droughts in the ColMedian September ice edge, strumental record of global orado River Basin could be 1978-2006 € 2008 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. surface temperatures, that longer and more severe bemountain glaciers and cause of regional warming snow cover had declined on average in rowed the ranges for forecast sea-level and that this would reduce the river's both the Northern and Southern hemirises in the current report compared flow and the amount of water that it spheres, and that losses from the ice with previous reports. For the years supplied. sheets of Greenland and Antarctica had 2090-99 the rise varied from 18-38 cm Most climate models did not initialize “very likely contributed to sea-level rise (7-15 in) for the low-emissions sceor take into account natural variability over 1993 to 2003.” According to the renario to 26-59 cm (10-23 in) for the generated internally Doug Smith and port, however, not all aspects of climate high scenario, all relative to 1980—99 colleagues from the U.K. Hadley Cenwere changing. For example, although mean sea levels. (See Special Report on tre for Climate Prediction and Research the minimum extent of the Arctic ice page 170.) presented a new modeling system that In research news concerning climate took into account both internal varicap during the summer months was change in the United States, a study by shrinking—with the 2007 minimum ability and external forcing from such shattering previous records—there Martin Hoerling and colleagues from factors as solar radiation and humanthe National Oceanic and Atmospheric were no significant trends in Antarctic related increases in greenhouse gases. Administration Earth System Research sea-ice extent, a result consistent with The result was a decadal (10-year) foreLab, Boulder, Colo., found that greencast of global temperature fluctuations the observation that atmospheric temperatures had not been warming when house gases likely accounted for more from 2005 that indicated that warming than half the above-average warmth might be subdued for several years by averaged across the Antarctic region. experienced across the country in internal variability but that the climate Also, there were no consistent trends in daily temperature ranges, since day and 2006. According to NOAAs National would continue to warm, so the averClimatic Data Center, mean U.S. temage global temperature in at least onenight temperatures had risen at about peratures in 2006 were the second half of the years from 2010 to 2014 the same rate. As for the future, the IPCC projected highest since record keeping began in would exceed that of the warmest year a warming of about 0.2 °C (0.35 °F) per 1895, tying 1934 for second place and on record, 1998. decade through the mid-2020s for a coming in slightly cooler than the On Nov. 2, 2007, a pilotless aircraft range of emission scenarios, but conrecord warm year of 1998. A study by flew into a hurricane for the first time. tinued greenhouse-gas emissions “at or Barry Lynn of NASAs Goddard InstiThe 1.5-m (5-ft)-long aircraft, with a above current rates would cause furtute for Space Studies and colleagues wingspan of 3 m (10 ft), took off from ther warming and induce many suggested that greenhouse-gas warmWallops Island, Virginia, and was changes in the global climate system.” guided by remote control into the eye ing might raise average summer temEstimated temperature increases for of Hurricane Noel off the U.S. coast. peratures by about 5.5 °C (10 °F) in the the end of the 21st century relative to eastern part of the country by the The low-altitude flight allowed contin1980-99 global averages ranged from 2080s. This conclusion was based on a uous observations in parts of the storm 1.8 °C (3.2 °F) for the low-emissions where a manned hunteraircraft misclimate simulation that used a scenario to 4 °C (7.2 °F) for the highweather-prediction model coupled to a sion would have risked the lives of the emissions scenario. The IPCC narglobal-climate model. crew. (DOUGLAS LE COMTE) 230

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1000 mi

Education Concerns in education in 2007 often crossed national boundaries:

the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which contributed $1.4 billion to more

HIGH-STAKES ACHIEVEMENT TESTING in primary

schools remained controversial; officials in Japan, Israel, Russia, and the United States addressed questions

pertaining to NATIONAL HISTORY; European and Russian postsecondary institutions were further REFORMED; and academic FREEDOM saw more limits imposed worldwide.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION UNICEF study of children's well-being in 21 industrialized nations compared six aspects of childhood: educational well-being, health and safety material well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks, and subjective well-being; ratings on the six dimensions were combined to produce a single well-being score. In descending order, the five countries with the best scores were The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and

Spain; the five with the worst scores were Portugal, Austria, Hungary, the U.S., and the U.K.

In UNESCO math and language tests administered to third and fourth graders in 13 Latin American countries,

pupils in Cuba’s lowest-income schools scored higher than most upper-middleclass students in the 12 other countries. Analyst Martin Carnoy of Stanford University speculated that the Cuban government's “social controls are not compatible with individual adult liberties, but they do assure that lower income children live in crime-free environments, are able to study in classrooms

(c) the use of testing to label schools as failing, (d) lack of adequate funding, (e)

than 2,000 high schools between 1999 and 2007. In some of the newly constituted small schools, the teacher-student

relationship improved, but in others— particularly those housed together in a large building—students found themselves in environments that lacked diversity in ethnicity, socioeconomic tus, or academic level.

sta-

India became the world’s leading source of academic coaching by offering high-quality tutoring over the Internet at low cost. TutorVista, a typical India-based tutoring business, began with one teacher and one student in 2005 and had grown to 500 teachers

the disregard of special needs such as learning disabilities and limited Eng-

countries

lish, and (f) unconstitutional

interfer-

earnings in 2006 were $15 million, and

ence by the federal government in the states’ sphere. During the final months of 2007, members of Congress introduced more than 100 bills designed to correct the NCLB’s shortcomings. The continuing effort to improve American high schools by dividing large ones into small ones (400 or fewer students) was not yet fully successful. The small-school movement was led by

the business was expected to continue its rapid growth. The Japanese government revised the countrys main education law, which had been written in 1947 under the guidance of U.S. occupation forces. The revision directed schools “to cultivate an attitude that respects tradition and

and

more

than

2,000

students

by early 2007.

in 12

Its reported

culture, that loves the nation and home

country.” An opinion survey reported

Russian Orthodox priest Father Vladimir Pakhechev teaches the fundamentals of Russian Orthodox culture to sixth-grade students at Public School No. 3, Kolomna, Russia, in September. The reintroduction of instruction about the Christian religion in schools in Russia met with objections from secular and Muslim organizations.

with few student-initiated disturbances,

and attend schools that are more socially mixed.” U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) nationwide educa-

tional initiative entered its sixth year, and Congress debated reauthorizing legislation. Critics cited numerous weaknesses in the program, including: (a) dependence on a single annual test as the entire measure of students’ progress, (b) flaws in methods of setting schools’ mandatory achievement goals, Sergei Kivrin—The New York Times/Redux

231

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education

that 6796 of the public approved of the revision and 2996 did not. Supporters hailed the change as building national pride, bolstering Japan's international military role, and easing the country's shame for World War II atrocities. Critics feared,

however,

that the revision

would reignite the spirit of the wartime education system, which had centred on training students to support the countrys imperial ambitions. In keeping with the new policy, the Japanese Education Ministry initially asked the publishers of high-school history textbooks to expunge references to the Japanese army's practice during World War II of forcing citizens of Okinawa to kill themselves rather than be taken as prisoners-of-war; when the legislature in Okinawa objected to the omission, the ministry softened its stance. Controversies over textbooks arose in other countries as well. For the first time in the 59-year history of Israel, a textbook for Palestinian third-graders— Living Together in Israel —acknowledged that warfare during the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 had been a tragedy for Palestinians. Politically conservative Jews condemned the book while praising the texts used in Israels Jewish schools, which omitted mention of the

war's

effect

on

Palestinians.

In the

United States, Sikh clerics added their voices to the chorus of Jewish, Muslim,

and Hindu complaints about allegedly inaccurate portrayals of their religions in social-studies textbooks adopted in California. The Sikhs particularly objected to illustrations that showed their faith's founder, Guru Nanak, wearing a

golden crown and a closely cropped beard rather than a turban and a full beard. An increasingly active role for religion in public schools was fostered in Texas, where legislators passed a bill expanding students’ right to openly express their religious beliefs. The lawmakers also inserted a mention of God into the Texas pledge of allegiance recited by students. In Georgia, following legislation in 2006, a few school districts be-

gan offering Bible classes in public high schools; similar laws were under consideration Tennessee,

in Alabama,

Missouri,

and Texas.

In Russia instruction in the traditions, liturgy, and saints of the Russian Orthodox Church returned to public schools for the first time since the suppression of the church under communism;

there were,

however,

objections

from the substantial Muslim and secular communities in the country. 232

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

State governments

in Germany were

criticized for failing to provide adequate instruction in the native languages of the country’s large immigrant population, contrary to the European Union’s emphasis on linguistic pluralism. A developmental psychologist charged, “It’s a fundamental problem that Germany doesn’t first strengthen a child’s mother language and culture, and then push learning German from that point on.” Methods for curbing student misconduct were adopted in many countries. Although most schools in the U.S. had banned the presence of cell phones in test sessions to prevent test takers from receiving answers from friends, some students found a new way to cheat (and administrators made further attempts to stop the cheating) by sneaking in banned personal media players—such as iPods and Zunes—that allowed them to listen surreptitiously to stored test answers. The Chinese government installed an elaborate system of surveillance cameras and mobile-phone detectors to reduce cheating on the national college entrance exam. A teachers union in Northern Ireland urged the creation of self-defense classes for teachers who were forced to cope with increasingly disruptive student behaviour. Bullying—either in person or via the Internet—became a criminal offense in Ontario when the legislature passed an antibullying law as part of the province’s Safe Schools Act. Japan’s Education Ministry sent materials that described techniques for coping with bullying to administrators in the countrys secondary schools. An Australian court,

satisfied

that

a

school

had

ignored complaints, awarded recordhigh damages of $A 220,000 (about U.S.$198,000) plus weekly earnings for life to an 18-year-old boy who had been bullied incessantly in primary school and consequently developed severe emotional and physical problems. South Korea’s minister of education introduced a plan to reduce bullying by authorizing citizens to request protec-

tion for children on school trips; for certain schools special police officers would be assigned to monitor behaviour,

teachers

would

receive

extra

training for emergencies, and violent children would attend special afterschool classes. Drug abuse continued to be a problem for schools. Increasing numbers of teenagers

were

using

over-the-counter

cough medicines to get high. The cough

medicines’

active

tromethorphan

ingredient—dex-

(DXM)—could

be in-

gested in large amounts to produce hallucinations

and

other

intense

side effects could include

effects;

high blood

pressure, blurred vision, disorientation, and loss of motor control. In addition,

more youths abused such prescription drugs as hydrocodone and methadone, mistakenly believing that those medications were safer than street drugs. Girls outnumbered boys among those who were misusing household products, such as aerosol sprays, as inhalants to achieve a euphoric sensation. In support of schools’ antidrug campaigns—and to the dismay of many free-speech advocates—the United States Supreme Court ruled that school officials could ban the display of slogans that could be construed as endorsing drug abuse. Thirteen studies of sex education in the U.S. reported that the federal governments Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) plan failed to

deter young people from engaging in premarital intercourse. The CBAE program in 2007 provided $113.4 million to groups that taught abstinence as the sole acceptable method of birth control. Critics of the plan recommended that sex education include instruction about other modes of birth control and disease prevention in addition to abstinence, such as the use of condoms.

response

to the research

U.S. Senate

Committee

In

results, the

on Appropria-

tions recommended a drastic reduction in CBAE funds. Joe Solmonese, president of the antidiscrimation organization the Human Rights Campaign, said, “We applaud [the committee] for listening to the overwhelming evidence that these programs are ineffective and based on narrow right-wing ideology.”

HIGHER EDUCATION Education

ministers

from

46 Euro-

pean countries met in London to assess

progress toward the 2010 goal of synchronizing the nations’ degree-granting programs so that students and faculty members could transfer easily from one institution to another. A survey of 900 universities reported that 82% had reached that goal by 2007. In an effort to raise confidence in the quality of Europe’s higher education, the ministers agreed to establish a voluntary register of national accreditation agencies that met European standards. The annual rating of American higher education institutions in the magazine

Education Kris Snibbe/Harvard University News office

U.S. News & World Report continued to meet resistance among many American university offi-

cials. More than 60 American liberal arts college presidents refused the request by U.S. News that they judge other colleges’ reputations, although administrators of the highest-ranked colleges continued to submit reputation

scores.

Meanwhile,

the

ranking practice was

spreading

abroad;

in China,

organizations

the U.K., and Germany, other

countries,

among

conducted

rat-

Baltimore, Md., $377; Duke University, Durham, N.C., $332; and

the

University

of Wisconsin-

Madison, $326.

Investigators in the United States exposed corruption in the countrys $85 billion studentloan industry by identifying university officials who owned stock in loan companies and were paid for advising students to borrow from those companies. Six major universities agreed to reimburse students

$3.27

million

for in-

flated loans that had resulted from revenue-sharing agreements between the loan companies and university officials.

ing surveys. A study at Ireland’s Dublin Institute of Technology surveyed 202 institutions around the world and found that many Numerous other universities made changes specifically to launched internal investigations in the wake of the discoveries. raise their rankings. Drew Gilpin Faust fields questions at the Feb. 11, The Russian parliament apIncreasingly in the United 2007, news conference following her selection as the proved a standardized nationStates, women were named to first female president of Harvard University. She wide college-entrance test to retop positions at major universibegan the position in July and was formally place the high-school final ties. With the installation of installed in October. exams and individual universiDrew Gilpin Faust (see BIOGRAties’ admissions tests used since PHIES) as the first woman to become president of Harvard, four of the the early 1990s. The new test was exters for the refugees and to offer spepected to improve the chances for apcial classes in the Kurdish language for eight prestigious Ivy League schools plicants from remote regions and from the Arabic-speaking newcomers. Alhad female presidents. Issues of academic freedom were a poor families to qualify for higher eduthough more Australian students than cation. This new approach to testing ever before were studying abroad, some concern in the dismissal of faculty was expected to reduce the system’s university programs were oversubmembers in Sweden, Jordan, and South Africa. Two veteran professors— corruption; for example, universities scribed while others closed for lack of had typically required applicants to pay students. Senegal—and other African a Russian and a German—were disfor supplementary tutoring in conneccountries where world-class universicharged from Sweden’s Uppsala University for having created discord ties had been built in the 1960s in the tion with their entrance exams. Also in flush of postcolonial optimism and inRussia, nearly 500 foreign students at a between faculty members in a society leading Moscow university were vestment—faced the disintegration of in which workplace harmony was protected by law. institutions under the weight of a burwarned to stay in their dormitories durgeoning population and a lack of fundAl-Zarqa (Jordan) Private University ing the days leading to Adolf Hitler's ing. Chinese officials were distressed to dismissed 14 Islamist professors, most birthday, April 20, because neo-Nazis commemorating that event had in the learn that about 4096 of the country's of them members of the Muslim Brothmost-gifted college students chose to erhood, who had severely criticized the past attacked foreigners in apparent pursue their postgraduate studies in inJordanian government. Al-Zarqa's preshate crimes. Saudi Arabia sought to strengthen its stitutions overseas. In Japan postsecident, Adnan Nayfeh, denied charges education system by setting aside a that the firings had been politically moondary institutions competing for a derecord $14.93 billion for higher educativated, saying, "I was hired to do the creasing number of students sought to tion. The government planned to open increase their appeal by adding attracbest things for students and for the ac11 new applied-science universities, ademics at the university, and it was tive new living quarters or turning to adding to the 110 recently established time to get some new blood.” specialized curricula. postsecondary institutions. Over a fourFinancially well-endowed American South African universities adopted a year period, applications rose from universities entered 2007 in a strong number of tactics to stifle criticism of 68,000 to 110,000. economic condition after a record year administrative polices. The University Enrollment problems plagued instituof fund-raising. The 10 institutions that of KwaZulu-Natal was at the forefront tions in Greece, Iraq, Australia, several received the largest amounts (in milof a growing movement of repression; African countries, China, and Japan. lions of dollars) from alumni, corporatwo professors were discharged for Greek universities were forced by the tions, and foundations in 2006 were: having damaged the reputation of the Education Ministrys policies to take Stanford University, $911; Harvard Uniuniversity because they criticized adtwice as many students as they were versity, $595; Yale University, $433; the ministrative practices in the public University of Pennsylvania, $409; Corprepared to serve. In Iraq more than press. KwaZulu-Natal administrators 1,000 university students fled from emnell University, Ithaca, N.Y., $406; the also drafted a plan that gave the unibattled cities in the south to enroll in a University of Southern California, versity broad powers to intercept staff Kurdish university in the north, where $406; Columbia University, New York and student e-mail messages. authorities were obliged to rent quarCity, $377; Johns Hopkins University, (R. MURRAY THOMAS) 233

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The Environment The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its fourth CLIMATE-CHANGE ASSESSMENT, the phaseout of substances that deplete the OZONE LAYER sped up, and the environmental benefit of BIOFUELS was questioned. A surprisingly large

wildlife MIGRATION was observed in The Sudan, and GORILLAS in Virunga National Park were in danger.

the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in September had called for all countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by onehalf by 2050, and he said that he wanted Canada to coax the members of the partnership into joining the agreement that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS Europe. On Dec. 20, 2006, the Euro-

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES he third meeting of parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) was held in Dakar, Senegal, in

April-May 2007. The treaty, which went into force in 2004, called for the phasing out of 12 POPs, including PCBs, chlordane, and dioxins. The Dakar del-

egates, however, failed to agree on a way to enforce compliance. The meeting did adopt guidelines on the best available techniques and best environmental practices for reducing POPs that were emitted as by-products of industrial processes, and it established a global monitoring scheme to study the convention’s impact on POP levels in the environment. It also updated the methodology for estimating the emission of dioxins from industrial and natural sources. The 2007 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement from the University of Southern California was presented in April to Gatze Lettinga, professor emeritus of environmental technology at Wageningen (Neth.) University. Lettinga invented the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket, a reactor that used microbes to digest pollutants in domestic sewage and industrial effluents and converted them into methane,

which could then be used as a fuel. Lettinga had waived all patent rights, and reactors that used the technology had been built in less-developed countries (LDCs) such as Brazil and India.

The Asahi Glass Foundation awarded the two 2007 Blue Planet Prizes to Americans Joseph L. Sax and Amory B. Lovins. Sax was honoured for drafting the world’s first modern environmental law to be based on public-trust doctrine—it supported citizen action for 234

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

environmental protection—and for establishing environmental laws internationally. Lovins was rewarded for his contributions to the protection of the environment through the improved energy efficiency advocated by his “soft energy path” and for his invention of an ultralight and fuel-efficient vehicle called the Hypercar. In June the World Health Organization published the results of an eightyear analysis of scientific literature and available statistics on health and population. It found that long-term exposure to an unhealthy environment killed far more people than road accidents, wars, and natural disasters combined but that 25% of these deaths were avoidable. The principal causes of death were linked to polluted water, poor sanitation, and smoke from wood-burning stoves. Noise, work stress, and outdoor

pollution added to the burden of ill health. The annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic

Cooperation

members,

which was held in Sydney in early September, agreed on the nonbinding goal of improving energy efficiency. Before the meeting, Australian Prime Minister John Howard urged member governments to find a new way forward on climate change by using flexible targets for reducing emissions. Led by the U.S. and Australia, the Sydney Declaration reaffirmed members’ commitment to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and called for a 25% decrease by 2030 in 2005 levels of energy consumed per unit of gross domestic product. In October Canada became a member of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, whose other members were Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and

pean Commission proposed bringing airline emissions from flights between EU airports into the EU carbon-emissions trading scheme in 2011 and in 2012 include all airline flights into or out of EU airports. In 2007 EU trans-

port ministers approved the proposal, and the EU Environment Committee later recommended that the plan begin in 2010 for all flights to or from EU airports. On September 28 in Montreal, however, a majority of delegates to the 36th meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) rejected the EU proposals. ICAO Assembly Pres. Jeffrey Shane said that members did not object to the concept of using emissions-trading schemes to combat climate change but objected to the unilateral imposition of such schemes, which he said had to be agreed to by airlines. Provisions of the final version of the EU’s REACH

(registration,

evaluation,

and authorization of chemicals) agreement, formally adopted in mid-December 2006, began to come into force on June 1, 2007. Most of the substantive provisions, however, would not become effective until June 1, 2008. The 849-

page legal text replaced more than 40 EU laws on chemical policy, and its implementation triggered a cascade of deadlines for meeting its provisions and for establishing a European chemicals agency. In September Ukrainian authorities signed an agreement with Novarka, a French construction company, to build a steel cover that would replace the concrete casing placed over the failed Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl following the 1986 accident, ensuring the safety of the site for 100 years, at a cost of $505 million. The arch-shaped steel casing would be 150 m (492 ft) long and 105 m (344 ft) tall. Under a sepa-

The Environment Sigit Pamungkas—Reuters/Landov

rate

deal,

American

firm

Holtec would build within the site’s

exclusion

zone

a

$200

million dry-storage facility for the radioactive waste produced by the reactor. The schemes would be financed by international donors and administered by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Africa. In July geologists from the Boston

University

Center

scientific basis of climate change) said that the global average surface temperature had risen 0.74 °C (1.3 °F) over the past 100 years, atmospheric

concentration of carbon dioxide had increased from a preindustrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to about 379 ppm in 2005, and methane concentration had increased from 715 parts per billion (ppb) to 1,774 ppb over the same period. The report predicted that temperatures in 2090-99 would be

for Remote Sensing reported evidence of a large underground deposit of water—the remnants of an ancient lake— 1.8-4 °C (3.2-7.2 °F) higher in the Darfur region of The Suthan those in 1980-99 and that sea levels were likely to rise by dan. The discovery raised hopes for providing relief from 18-59 cm (7-23 in) over the the competition for scarce wasame period. Working Group II (on impacts and adaptation) ter that was helping to drive the predicted that if left unchecked, armed conflict in the region. The researchers estimated that climate change would wreak havoc on human societies and the deposit had an area as great the environment. It said that as 30,000 sq km (12,000 sq mi). Although other researchers disarid areas would become still drier and that other areas puted the finding, the United would be at increased risk of Nations mission in The Sudan and the Egyptian Ministry of flooding. More than one billion people might face water shortWater and Irrigation planned Concrete balls were attached in clusters that were then ages in 2050, and by 2020 yields to drill test wells. dropped into an active mud volcano in Java, Indon., in Asia. China’s rapidly growing of rain-fed crops in some an attempt to impede its outpouring of mud. African countries might be reeconomy and heavy reliance on duced by one-half. Biodiversity coal were contributing to serious environmental problems, but the Agency (EPA) that failure to regulate might be reduced, with 20-30% of plant and animal species facing an increased country was beginning to recognize the greenhouse-gas emissions from motor risk of extinction if the average global economic costs of pollution. (See Spevehicles was contrary to the requiretemperature were to rise by more than cial Report on page 180.) ments of the Clean Air Act. On May 14 1.5-2.5 °C (2.74.5 °F). Working Group A team of scientists led by Richard Pres. George W. Bush signed an execuIII (on mitigation) said that a global carDavies of Durham (Eng.) University retive order that directed the EPA, the bon price was needed to provide incenported in January that the most likely Department of Transportation, the Detives to invest in lower-carbon techexplanation for the mud volcano that partment of Energy, and the Departnologies but that greenhouse-gas levels began erupting on May 29, 2006, near ment of Agriculture to develop regulacould be stabilized at safe levels and at Sidoarjo, East Java, Indon., was that tions to limit emissions from motor reasonable cost. (See Special Report on drilling at the site had ruptured presvehicles. page 170.) surized limestone about 2,800 m (9,200 The Browns Ferry unit 1 nuclear reft) below the surface. The report said actor, which had been closed since In early August the UN General Asthat 7,000-150,000 cu m (247,0001985, was restarted in May after a fivesembly held its first-ever plenary ses5,300,000 cu ft) of mud a day might year, $1.8 million refurbishment. The sion on climate, and at the end of the continue flowing for months or years to unit was one of three nuclear reactors month a preparatory meeting was held come and that an area of about 10 sq at the Browns Ferry plant near Athens, for the UN Climate Change Conference. km (4 sq mi) would probably remain Ala., and was reopened by the TenAmong the topics discussed at the uninhabitable for years. Davies disnessee Valley Authority under an existmeeting was the financing of steps to missed the alternative explanation, that ing operating license. It was the first prevent further increases in greenan earthquake on May 27 had triggered nuclear reactor to be newly placed into house-gas emissions. It was estimated service in the United States in 11 years. that the cost would reach $200 bilthe eruption. During the year an atlion-$210 billion by 2030, which would tempt was made to obstruct the outflow from the mud volcano by droprequire an annual investment by 2030 ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES of 0.3-0.596 of global GDP. The UN Cliping into its mouth as many as 1,500 Climate Change. During 2007 the workmate Change Conference, which inconcrete balls that were linked together ing groups of the Intergovernmental cluded representatives from more than in groups of four. North America. On April 2 the U.S. Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) com180 countries, was held in Bali, Indon., Supreme Court ruled in a case brought pleted their contributions to the orgaon December 3-15. At the beginning of nization’s fourth climate-change assessthe conference, Australia announced by the state of Massachusetts against the U.S. Environmental Protection ment. Working Group I (on the that its new national government had 235

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The Environment

ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Talks at the conference were divided, but on the fi-

nal day a consensus was reached on how negotiations, to be concluded by 2009, would proceed for the purpose of reaching a new international agreement for replacing the Kyoto Protocol after its 2012 expiration. In addition, programs

were

set up

to compensate

LDCs for conserving their forests and to provide funding and the transfer of technology to LDCs to help mitigate and adapt to anticipated climate change. The U.S. administration hosted a conference on climate change in Washington, D.C., on September 27-28. Chaired

by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the meeting was attended by representatives from Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, and South Africa.

Representatives from the EU and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were also present. In a speech before the group, Pres. George W. Bush linked energy security and climate change and pointed out that in 2006 the U.S. economy grew while its greenhouse-gas emissions decreased. He said that there were many policy tools and technologies that countries could use to “reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, strengthen

energy

security,

encourage

economic growth and sustainable development, and advance negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” and that each country had to choose those

2040 in order to extend equipment dependent on participating countries also by 2013 they would freeze duction at 2009-10 levels.

measures

Air Pollution. On Oct. 5, 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) un-

most appropriate to its own

circumstances. Critics complained that the U.S. continued to fail to commit to binding emissions targets as it maintained its positions that each country should set its own objectives and that technology was the principal tool for reducing emissions. Ozone Layer. Representatives of the 191 countries that had ratified the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, together with the European Commission, agreed on September 22 to advance by 10 years the phasing out of hydrochlorofluorocarbons

(HCFCs).

At their meeting in

Montreal, the representatives agreed that developed countries would reduce HCFC production and consumption by 75% by 2010 and 90% by 2015, as measured against the 1987 baseline year, and phase them out completely by 2020. Less-developed countries would make reductions of 10% by 2015, 35% by 2020, and 67.5% by 2025 (as measured against a baseline year of 2009-10) and phase them out completely by 2030, although there was a provision that they could continue to use up to 2.5% of the baseline amount between 2030 and

veiled

its new

last issued

airquality

in 1997,

and

the life of HCFCs. All agreed that HCFC pro-

guidelines, at the same

time, it challenged governments to improve urban air quality in order to protect public health. WHO estimated that air pollution caused about two million premature deaths each year, with more than one-half of the deaths in LDCs. The new guidelines’ value for sulfur dioxide exposure over 24 hours was reduced from 125 to 20 ug/cu m (micrograms per cubic metre) and the value for ozone exposure over 8 hours was reduced from 120 to 100 ug/cu m. The guidelines also recommended that the annual mean for PM10 emissions (small particulates produced mainly from the burning of fossil fuels) be less than 20 ug/cu m. On Aug. 11, 2007, a limit of 1.5% of

sulfur in marine fuels used by vessels sailing in the North Sea came into force, as agreed upon by the European Union in 2005. The European Environment Agency reported on March 15, 2007, that sum-

mer smog in 2006 reached its second worst level in a decade. The EU alert

Argentine demonstrators crowd a bridge over the Uruguay River between Argentina and Uruguay on April 29 in a protest against the construction of a pulp mill, at upper right, on the Uruguayan side of the river.

Xinhua/Landov

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The Environment Paul Elkan & J. Mike Fay—©2007 National Geographic/Wildlife Conservation Society

threshold for ozone of 240 ug/cu m was exceeded 190 times, compared with 127 times in 2005 and 99 in 2004, although the 2006 figure was much smaller than the 720 times the alert threshold was exceeded during Europe's 2003 heat wave. The target value of 120 ug/cu m was exceeded at most stations, and the

highest ozone level—370 ug/cu m—was recorded in Italy. For four days in August, 1.3 million cars were removed from Beijing traffic and some 800 extra buses put into service. The measure reduced air pollution by 15-20%. It also reduced congestion, which allowed traffic to move much faster. Buses, for example, were able to

average 20 km/h (12 mph) rather than the customary 14 km/h (9 mph). The experimental scheme, part of the city’s preparations for the 2008 Olympics, banned cars that had license plates with odd numbers on Saturday and Monday and cars with even-numbered plates on Friday and Sunday. Freshwater Pollution. In late August the official opening of a pulp mill in Uruguay on the Uruguay River, which separates Uruguay and Argentina, trig-

gered protests in which about 2,000 protesters gathered on both sides of the river to sing their national anthems, and several hundred Argentine protesters crossed over a nearby bridge into

Uruguay.

The

Argentine

govern-

ment and environmentalists maintained that the mill would pollute the river, but the Uruguayan government and Botnia—the Finnish company that owned the mill—disagreed. The dispute had lasted more than two years and had been submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for arbitration, but no resolution was

reached before the plant began production in November. Marine Pollution. Rules laid down by the International Maritime Organization that permitted the sequestration (storage) of carbon dioxide beneath the

seabed came into force on February 10. The rules exempted carbon dioxide from the general ban on dumping wastes

at sea.

On September 17 Panama became the 25th country to ratify the global ban on using organotin-based antifouling paints on ships without the application of a barrier coat to prevent them from leaching. Following the ratification, the ban was scheduled to become effective on Sept. 17, 2008.

The annual meeting of HELCOM, or the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, took place in early

A herd of tiang formed part of a major wildlife migration that was observed in southern Sudan early in 2007. March in Helsinki. Countries that bordered the Baltic Sea approved the general direction of an action plan released in draft form in 2006, but they called for more detailed measures to be defined for the plan. At the end of a further meeting held on September 17-19, states made progress toward setting maximum allowable pollution inputs and subsidiary national targets. HELCOM estimated that to restore the Baltic to a good condition, phosphorus inputs needed to be reduced by 42% and nitrogen by 18%. Biofuels. The use of biofuels to substitute for fossil fuels as a way to combat global warming came under criticism in September from a team of researchers led by Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen. The group calculated that biofuel production and consumption could result in the release of more greenhouse gases than they saved. For example, the fertilizer used to grow biofuel crops led to the release of nitrous oxide, a gas whose greenhouse effect was 300 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. The group also determined that biodiesel made from rapeseed oil (canola) released the equivalent

tion and Development warned that subsidizing biofuels would lead to surging food prices and, potentially, to the destruction of natural habitats. (See Special Report on page 174.) Toxic Waste. The Indian Supreme Court ruled in September that Blue Lady,

a former

ocean

liner, could

be

broken up at the Alang ship-breaking yard in Gujarat. Blue Lady had remained off the coast of India since June 2006 while the case was argued. Environmentalists maintained that the ship contained about 1,200 metric tons of asbestos as well as other toxic materials. A technical expert committee, set up to decide whether it would be safe to dismantle the ship, had recommended that work proceed. (MICHAEL ALLABY)

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION Possibly the most important wildlife discovery in 2007 occurred in January when an aerial survey of southern Sudan revealed huge numbers of migrating wildlife. Researchers from the American Wildlife Conservation Society observed more than 1.3 million white-

of 1-1.7 times more greenhouse gas than conventional diesel and that fuels derived from sugar cane and corn

galla gazelle (Gazella thomsonii albono-

(maize)

tata) in Boma

released

the

equivalent

of

0.5-0.9 and 0.9-1.5 times more than gasoline, respectively. On September 11 a report from the Organisation

for Economic

Co-opera-

eared kob (Kobus kob leucotis), tiang (Damaliscus lunatus tiang), and monand Southern

Parks and an estimated (Loxodonta africana), Sudd, Africa's largest land. The findings ran

National

8,000 elephants mainly in the freshwater wetcontrary to the 237

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The Environment

concern that decades of civil war in The Sudan might have depleted wildlife populations. The Wildlife Conservation Society called for the creation of a Sudano-Sahel Initiative to help manage the natural resources in the region. As in the previous year, climate change and its potential and observed effects on wildlife conservation were dominant themes, highlighted by several reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as part of its fourth assessment. The report on "Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability" noted that there was very high confidence, based on more evidence from a

wider range of species than its previous assessment

in 2001, that recent warm-

ing was having a strong effect on terrestrial biological systems. Changes included earlier occurrences of springtime events such as leaf unfolding, bird migration, and egg laying and shifts in the ranges of plant and animal toward higher elevations and latitudes. There was also high confidence that rising water temperatures were associated with observed changes in marine and freshwater biological systems, including variations in ocean algal, plankton, and fish abundance at high latitudes, increases in freshwater algal and zooplankton abundance in high-latitude and highaltitude lakes, and earlier migrations and shifts in the range of fish in rivers. (See Special Report on page 170.)

The lesser flamingo nests and breeds in the shallow waters of Lake Natron in Tanzania.

In northwestern Kazakhstan the 764,000-ha (1,900,000-ac) Irgiz-Turgay nature reserve was created in March to protect unique wetlands and the habitat of the rare and critically endangered saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), which lived on the steppes. The new reserve was part of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, a coalition of international nongovernmental organizations in co-

operation with Kazakh authorities that was

to create a 6 million-ha

(15 mil-

lion-ac) system of protected areas to safeguard the future of Kazakhstan's steppes and semideserts. A two-year survey of tigers (Panthera tigris) in India revealed alarming levels of population decline and cast doubt on previous population estimates. The census found that there were

1,300-1,500

tigers

and

that the

number in some areas had fallen by as much as two-thirds since the last census, in 2002, when the population was estimated

at about

3,600. The decline

was attributed to poaching and urbanization, and the Indian government was criticized by conservationists for failing to deal with poaching and the illegal trade in tiger skins. In November the government announced a plan to use retired soldiers to patrol tiger sanctuaries. The price paid by some rangers in Africa to protect wildlife was highlighted in May when, within the span of one week, wildlife rangers in Africa were slain in three separate incidents. An attack by a group of suspected poachers on seven rangers patrolling the Tana

River

District

in Kenya

re-

sulted in a gunfight that left three rangers dead. In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a wildlife officer was killed when Mai Mai rebels attacked patrol posts in Virunga National Park, and three rangers were shot dead in

Chad’s

Zakouma

National

Park,

where elephant poaching was a wellknown problem. The unrest in the area of Virunga National Park also led to the death of at least 10 mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) during the year. Fighting between the DRC army and troops loyal to the dissident Gen. Laurent Nkunda made the national park a nogo area for park rangers, and it was extremely difficult to protect the gorillas. In September two men in possession of a dead juvenile mountain gorilla were arrested. The traffickers were attempting to get $8,000 for the gorilla. In June the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman,

duced Owen Newman/Nature Picture Library

238

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

home

population

to the

first reintro-

of Arabian

Oryx

(Oryx leucoryx) and a flagship reintroduction project since 1980, became the first site to be deleted from UNESCO's World Heritage List. The World Heritage Committee removed the site following a decision by Oman to reduce the size of the protected area by 9096, a move that the committee viewed as destroying the site's value. The sanctuary which was placed on the World Heritage List in 1994, had a population of 450 Arabian oryx in 1996, but this number had dwindled—largely because of poaching—to 65 with only 4 breeding pairs. East Timor

(Timor-Leste),

which be-

came an independent country in 2002, in July declared more than 123,000 ha (304,000 ac) as its first national park.

Nino Konis Santana National Park linked 3 of the island's 16 areas designated as important bird areas by BirdLife International, and it included more than 55,600 ha (138,000 ac) of the

Coral Triangle, a marine area with the greatest diversity of coral and of coralreef fish in the world. The land areas within the park were home to 25 bird species endemic to Timor and neighbouring islands, including the endangered endemic green pigeon (Treron psittaceus), threatened by the loss of its monsoon forest habitat. In perhaps the strangest wildlife smuggling case of the year, a man tracked by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was charged with smuggling into the United States three endangered Fijian banded iguanas (Brachylophus fasciatus) and hiding them inside his prosthetic leg. The Fiji banded iguana was protected under CITES Appendix I, which prohibited trade in the species. If found guilty, the smuggler could face up to five years in prison.

News surfaced in July of plans to build a soda-ash extraction and processing plant on the shores of Lake Natron in Tanzania, which was the breed-

ing site for 75% of the global population of lesser flamingos (Phoenicopterus minor). Lake Natron was a soda lake rich

in salt and other nutrients as well as the algae upon which the flamingos feed. The lake was also a Ramsar wetland site (a wetland of international importance). The plant would remove up to 560 cu m

(19,800 cu ft) of brine per

hour from the lake and would require the building of roads and housing. The plans provoked strong opposition from conservation groups, and in November it appeared that a new environmental assessment of the plant would be ordered.

(MARTIN FISHER)

Fashions CELEBRITY-endorsed FAST FASHION, ECO-CONSCIOUS clothing and accessories, COUTURE FOR MEN, and HUGE HANDBAGS were some

of fashion's HOTTEST trends.

among consumers as they stampeded into the Manhattan store as soon as it opened. “Shoppers ripped clothes off mannequins, grabbed items from racks and out of the hands of sales associates,

recurrent

inexpensive mass-produced variations of current designer merchandise, described by Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) as “adulterated versions of things that have preceded them.” In March actress Drew Barrymore appeared in advertisements promoting Gold, a 35-piece collection produced for international New Look stores by Giles Deacon, Britain’s Designer of the Year. The affordable

kimono dresses, jumpsuits, and leather trench coats—inspired by the performers considerable personal style. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna's close friend, was "sent one of everything in the collection in every colour,” according to an H&M spokesperson. On April 30 huge crowds outside the London flagship store of Topshop, the British high-street fashion giant, witnessed supermodel Kate Moss's brief appearance in the display window, flaunting a red maxi dress, a standout item

dresses,

among

was

theme

in 2007

"fast fashion"—that

jeans,

T-shirts,

shoes,

is,

hand-

bags, sunglasses, bangles, and earrings translated Deacon’s dressed-up, glossy glamour into a more casual idiom. A month later Gap launched Gap Design Editions, a collection of inventive white

Moss's 91-piece signature Top-

shop collection, which went on sale a day later. Moss received a $6 million paycheck for her effort, which proved an overnight success. "Items were being restocked by the minute," WWD reported; merchandise reserved for the Topshop Web site sold out in hours. The May 8 debut of Moss's Topshop collection at Barneys New York provoked hysteria

shirts for women, created by cuttingedge American designers, including Doo-Ri Chung, Thakoon Panichgul, and Rodarte; in the autumn Gap premiered a limited-edition shoe collection that featured timely pointy-toed flats and highSupermodel Kate heeled platform winter sandals Topshop window by Pierre Hardy, the Paris deLondon on April signer famed for his unusual retailers were an luxury footwear for Balenciaga. Story. In November Roberto Cavalli

and even tore head shots of the model from displays,” added WWD. “At 10:30 most of the merchandise was gone.” Two Spanish retail giants backed successful autumn-winter fast-fashion debuts by celebrity siblings. Mango’s 25piece collection was inspired by the clothes worn by Penelope Cruz and her sister Monica. Carlos Ortega, owner of Pepe Jeans, bankrolled Twenty8Twelve, a line of casual clothing conceived by Sienna Miller and her sister Savannah. (The name

was devised from Sienna's

birthday, December 28.) To coincide with the launch, Twenty8Twelve opened an impressive retail flagship in London’s hip Notting Hill. As evidence that the joint venture was not “just another celebrity fashion line,” Sienna cited the expertise of Savannah, a graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and a former employee of designer Alexander McQueen. Sienna also declared, “I’m not about to

become

a brand—I won't be releasing

an album, perfume,

and knickers next

year.” Millers comment was perhaps a veiled jab at Victoria

Moss appears as a mannequin in a to launch her signature collection in 30. Celebrity collaborations with important part of the year’s fashion

Beckham, the wife of international association football (soc-

to a collection of men's and womens party wear and women’s lingerie for Swedish

cer) superstar David Beckham. The Beckham family moved from Madrid to Los Angeles, where in August David officially joined the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer Victoria leveraged the global publicity by launching

retailer

it

dVb, her own luxury brand; her

was distributed in about 200 of

collection was initially stocked by upscale department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Henri Bendel. In February she introduced sunglasses modeled on the oversized styles that were once sported by Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; Victoria later introduced a line of expensive denim. Intimately Beckham, men's and womens fragrances launched by both Beckhams, followed in September. People magazine described Victoria's

lent his decadent, exotic touch

H&MS

Hennes

&

Mauritz;

1,420 worldwide stores.

Eclipsing the efforts of recognized designers,

however,

was

fast fashion produced collaboratively by a lineup of female celebrities and anonymous design teams working for international retail chains. In late March,

for

example,

H&M

launched M by Madonna in 28 countries; the pop stars fans arrived at dawn to be the first purchasers of bargain-priced classics—leotards,

fitted shirts,

239

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Fashions AP

les, raised the profile of these goods. “Swaparama” and “Feather Duster” clothes-swapping events—that is, meetings at which previously worn clothing was donated and traded—proved popular in London. In New York City hundreds of people lined up outside Whole Foods stores to purchase $15 ecofriendly canvas Anya Hindmarch totes appliquéd with the phrase “I’m not a plastic bag” and meant to function as a carryall for groceries. British

fashion,

once

overshadowed

by that produced in Paris and Milan, emerged as world-class. Cutting-edge and commercially viable collections were produced in 2007 by a new generation of British-trained designers, including 29-year-old Jonathan Saunders, who reported a 40% increase in sales of his sophisticated women’s wear rendered from bold textiles he described as "engineered prints." Four Londonbased designers—theatrical Gareth

A creation by cutting-edge British designer Gareth Pugh is part of the spring-summer 2008 collection shown at his London Fashion Week show.

Pugh; Danielle Scutt, whose work dis-

Taking advantage of her position as one of the year’s most visible celebrities, Victoria Beckham makes an

appearance on June 14 at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York City, to publicize her dVb clothing and accessory line.

played a '70s-inspired sex appeal; and Todd Lynn and Erdem Moralioglu, Canadians who purveyed chic rock-star androgyny and refined romantic femininity, respectively—were dubbed the "new school' by American Vogue, which praised their "very promising" spring-summer collections. Dalston (Eng.)-based Christopher Kane revived the '80s body-conscious minidress to spectacular effect: "Selling out worldwide," noted ES Magazine of his creations. French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld wore a frilly Marie Antoinetteinspired custom-made Kane frock "at least five times," including "in the front

ley allowed the Shoreditch (Eng.)-based designer and former British Vogue journalist—who described her signature as “English countryside-meets-London’s avant-garde"—to open a 130-sq-m (about 1,400-sq-ft) boutique on Mayfairs Brook Street in September. Championing London’s burgeoning fashion

much-emulated blonde “razored bob” scene, New York Times fashion editor as the “hairstyle of the year.” Victoria Cathy Horyn credited the British capialso made a cameo appearance on an tal's booming economy and the shopautumn episode of Ugly Betty, the hit ping habits of extremely wealthy foreign TV comedy series based on the trials visitors and new residents from Russia. and tribulations of a perky idiosyncratThe Oxford Street (London) flagship ically dressed Mexican American editoof British department store Selfridges rial assistant working in the office of a proved innovative, launching in Seprow of the Chanel Cruise show,” acManhattan-based high-fashion magatember the Wonder Room, a sweeping cording to the designer. zine. Not everyone was pleased with the retail space promoted as a "cabinet of Singapore retail and hotel tycoon celebrity-endorsed fast-fashion trend. Christina Ong’s interest in Luella Bartcuriosities" and showcasing an opulent Giorgio Armani labeled the craze array of luxury accessories and “depressing because it plays with fine jewelry alongside avantDesigner Anya Hindmarch’s $15 “I'm not a plastic people’s sense of inadequacy, garde furniture and glossy cofbag” shopping totes are seen at Whole Foods treating customers as schmucks fee-table books. British modMarket, New York City. The functional natural-fibre because they need the endorseels—including the pixie-cropped, bags represented the “clean,” eco-aware trend in ment of a high-profile person to tall, lean Agyness Deyn and lithe fashion. feel worthy.” redhead Lily Cole—were among The acquisition of masses of the industrys most in-demand relatively inexpensive merchanand were featured in major addise also ran counter to the vertising campaigns. The lavish awakened — eco-consciousness March nuptials of Indian busiwithin the fashion industry. Denessman Arun Nayar and British riding wastefulness, this segment actress-model-beachwear deof the industry promoted “clean signer Elizabeth Hurley, who clothes,” those made from rewas gowned by Donatella Versponsibly obtained natural fisace, made global headlines as bres, such as bamboo, recycled designers such as Tom Ford and cashmere, soy, and organic cotValentino as well as celebrity Sir ton; popular “eco-boutiques,” Elton John attended the two cersuch as Avita Co-op in Los Angeemonies, one at historic Sudeley Mario Tama/Getty Images

240

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Fashions

Castle in Gloucestershire, Eng., and the

other in Jodhpur, India. Cate Blanchett’s starring role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s romantic sequel to Elizabeth (1998), was

lauded for its impressive costumes by Alexandra Byrne. The splendorous court gowns Blanchett modeled on screen were inspired by costumes Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga had conceived for a 1941 Paris stage play; Christian Dior’s milliner, Stephen Jones, created the movie's plumed hats and opulent headdresses. Chanel commemorated London's fashion moment by launching a limited edition of its classic quilted-leather handbag enlivened by a flashy Union Jack print. In May Tom Ford launched a novel fashion concept—the “men’s version of couture," as Vogue's editor-at-large André Leon Talley described his made-tomeasure finely crafted men's tailoring, sold from Ford’s new three-story boutique on New York Citys Madison Avenue, the first of many planned stores worldwide. The dimly lit ‘30s-inspired retail emporium featured rare artifacts, including a Lucio Fontana slashed stainless-steel work, Jean Arp sculpture, and fitting-room fixtures that were made at the foundry used by Swiss

Model Shalom Harlow shows a dress from the Christian Dior haute couture autumn-winter 2007 collection on July 2 at Versailles, near Paris. The lavish

production was part of the couturier’s 60th anniversary celebration.

Designer Valentino Garavani attends an exhibition on July 6 that featured his signature red gowns, at Ara Pacis museum in Rome, as part of his 45th anniversary celebration. In September he announced his retirement from the fashion house that remained a favourite of the world’s most glamorous women.

AP artist Diego Giacometti. Critical reaction was mixed, and some observers

considered the venture too pretentious. “Haughty couture,” sniped the Village Voice, citing the four- and five-figure price tags of Ford’s line, much of which was displayed behind glass. A new Brooks Brothers line called Black Fleece was well received. This expensive classically styled clothing meant for professional men and women was produced by New York designer Thom Browne for Brooks Brothers. Browne, the 2006 Council of Fashion Designers of America Menswear

Designer of the Year, cut his teeth at the retail chain Club Monaco before launching his eponymous label of slimcut suits sold from his boutique in New York City’s Tribeca neighbourhood. Introducing Black Fleece in March, Browne, presented as Brooks Brothers "guest designer" staged an intimate show of autumn-winter clothes and accessories inspired by preppy pieces he

founders, 75-year-old designer in chief Valentino Garavani and his business partner Giancarlo Giammetti, would retire. The announcement followed July’s lavish 45th anniversary celebration and commemorative fashion exhibition in Rome. Valentino rose to fame in the ‘60s as the couturier of choice to a legion of jet-setting celebrities, socialites, and royalty: actress Elizabeth Taylor, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy (later Onassis), socialite Babe Paley, and Princess Grace of Monaco, among others. His contemporary femininity, identifiable by sartorial signatures such as the colour lipstick red, characteristic patterns, and lush lacey textiles remained favoured by Paltrow, Elle Macpherson, Hurley, and Anne Hathaway, who demurely modeled a blackand-white strapless Valentino frock at the 79th Academy Awards. In July the Valentino Fashion Group acquired a 4596 stake in the New York City readyto-wear label Proenza Schouler, but that firm's leaders, Lazaro Hernandez

and Jack McCollough, were not brought into management at Valentino. Instead, the 35-year-old Alessandra Facchinetti, a former designer for Gamme Rouge (an expensive line of striking sporty-elegant down winter jackets produced by the upscale French outerwear label Moncler), was appointed to succeed Valentino as creative director of women’s wear. Facchinetti had also served for a year (2004-05) as

Gucci’s head of women’s wear. Several major figures were lost to the fashion world

in 2007.

Isabella Blow,

the infamous former style director of British society magazine Tatler, committed

suicide;

her

former

boss

at

Vogue, Anna Wintour, spoke at her memorial service.

(See BIOGRAPHIES.)

In

June a legion of Milan fashion titans— including designers Giorgio Armani, Donatella

Versace,

Valentino,

and

show included the revival of a vintage

Krizia’s Mariuccia Mandelli—gathered at Basilica di San Magno in Legnano, Italy, to mourn the passing of designer Gianfranco Ferré. The death of retired designer and businesswoman Liz Claiborne was marked quietly, but her legacy in American retail remained

necktie pattern, oxford cloth shirts, and

substantial. (See OBITUARIES.)

unearthed

in the

labels

archive;

the

late-40s- and ‘50s-inspired men’s suits. By September Black Fleece had been made available in more than 40 Brooks Brothers stores worldwide, confirming that Browne had succeeded in launching a look that would help modernize the venerable American label. In September the Roman fashion house Valentino announced that its

On July 2 Christian Dior’s spectacular 60th

anniversary

autumn-winter

cou-

ture show—a tribute to legendary painters, illustrators, and photographers—was staged at Versailles. The show was dedicated to Steven Robinson,

head of Christian Dior and John Galliano design studios, who died in Paris on April 4.

(BRONWYN COSGRAVE)

Tony Barson—Wirelmage/Getty Images

241

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Health and Disease OBESITY and DIABETES increased to epidemic proportions, and deadly STAPH infections and COUNTERFEIT DRUGS raised serious concerns. International efforts against several ENDEMIC DISEASES made headway, and new developments were reported in STEM-CELL research and in finding the GENETIC BASIS of certain disorders.

lobal Warming. Along with shifting climate patterns, scientists

were

concerned

that climate change would contribute to the spread of infectious diseases. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that predicted that global warming could create unprecedented health risks, including deadly heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels,

and fierce storms. Flooding and drought could lead to contaminated water supplies, which in turn could result in the spread of infectious waterborne diseases. The report warned of the possible spread of mosquitoborne illnesses such as malaria, dengue fever,

yellow fever and encephalitis. Some mosquitoborne diseases already were spreading beyond their normal ranges as mosquitoes moved to higher altitudes and into areas that were once too cold for them to survive. Child Mortality. In 2007 the estimated worldwide number of deaths of children under five years of age fell below 10 million annually—to 9.7 million—for the first time since record keeping began in 1960. UNICEF attributed the decrease to campaigns against measles and malaria, promotion of breastfeeding over bottle-feeding (which was a poten-

tion in childhood deaths. If young children were still dying at 1960 rates, 25 million would have succumbed in 2007. According to UNICEF, the most rapid improvements had been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, eastern Asia, and Ocea-

nia. The situation worsened, however, in

countries of southern Africa that had been hit hard by AIDS and in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone, which had been ravaged by war. The highest rates of child mortality were reported in western and central Africa, where more than

150 of every 1,000 children born were expected to die before the age of five. HIV and AIDS. A report published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS,

and UNICEF said that the number of persons in low- and middle-income countries who were receiving treatment

in 2007 had increased to 2 million from 1.3 million over the past year. Although the news was promising, the figure was still far short of the 3 million WHO had hoped would have access to such drugs by the end of 2005 and corresponded to only 28% of the 7.1 million people with advanced AIDS in lowand middle-income countries. In subSaharan Africa the rate of infection continued to be high, and for every person in this region who received antiHIV drugs, another five were newly infected. According to a report released in June by the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, if current trends continued, the region (which had about 25 million infected persons) would face 36 million new infections by 2015. While access to HIV/AIDS drugs slowly improved, researchers developed

An infant sleeps under a net for protection against disease-carrying mosquitoes in a village in India.

tial source of contaminated water), and the economic improvements experi-

enced in many countries (with the exception of countries in Africa). The agency reported that vaccination drives had helped reduce measles deaths and that more babies were sleeping under mosquito nets, which protected against malaria and other mosquitoborne illnesses. In 1960 about 20 million children died before the age of five, and the increase in population since then underlined the significance of the reducParth Sanyal—Reuters/Landov

242

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Health and Disease Dr. P. Marazzi/Photo Researchers, Inc.

new HIV/AIDS drugs. Two new drugs, each representing a new class of antiHIV medication, were reported to be safe and effective and would add to the four classes already available to HIV/AIDS patients. One of the drugs, maraviroc, worked by blocking a protein used by HIV to enter cells of the human immune system. Maraviroc was

developed by Pfizer and received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August. The drug would be used to treat people with advanced HIV/AIDS who had not responded to other drugs. The other drug, raltegravir (formerly known as MK-0518), was developed by Merck and received FDA approval in October. The drug worked by blocking the HIV enzyme integrase, one of three enzymes that HIV needed in order to replicate in the body. According to the company, the integrase inhibitor would prevent HIV from inserting its genes into unin-

fected DNA. The company said that the drug was safe and effective for patients who had multidrug-resistant HIV. Staph Infection. A study led by R. Monina Klevens of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and pub-

lished in October American Medical concern about the infections caused

in the Journal of the Association sparked prevalence of serious by methicillin-resist-

ant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a

type of staph bacteria that was resistant not only to the antibiotic methicillin but also to other antibiotics. Most MSRA infections occurred in hospitals and other health care settings, and they could be invasive and potentially deadly when a wound or medical procedure provided a port of entry for the bacteria into the body. Noninvasive MSRA infections typically occurred as a mild, treatable infection of the skin. The study found that invasive MRSA infections were more common, both in and out of hospitals,

than health experts had thought; the study estimated that in the U.S. in 2005 there had been about 94,000 cases of invasive MRSA, which had resulted in

about 19,000 deaths. Another study by CDC researchers indicated that staph infections—mainly minor skin and softtissue infections—were responsible for an estimated 12 million outpatient visits annually in the U.S. and that the percentage of staph infections caused by MRSA was growing.

The that

increased resulted

awareness

from

these

of MRSA studies,

to-

gether with the reported deaths of a number of school-age children who had contracted MRSA, helped spark a

These blisters on a young girl’s arm are the result of a skin infection by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. health scare during which many U.S. schools closed for disinfection. Health officials stressed that good hygiene, such as washing hands with soap and water, not sharing towels and other personal items, and keeping cuts and other wounds bandaged, greatly reduced the risk of infection by the bacteria. Polio. Although new cases of polio appeared in 2007 in Chad and Myanmar (Burma), which had been free of cases

the year before, the total number of new cases of polio around the world declined significantly as the work of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, be-

gun in 1988, continued. As of late December, 1,083 cases had been reported,

compared with 1,997 cases for 2006. More than one-third of the 17 countries, including Kenya and Indonesia, that had reported cases of polio in 2006 did not report new cases in 2007. A campaign was carried out to provide polio vaccinations in some of the world’s most troubled and dangerous regions. In Afghanistan nearly 7.3 million children were vaccinated in April. In September health workers in Iraq began an effort to vaccinate 4.8 million children,

and in the northern

area

of

The Sudan a vaccination effort that was to reach about 5 million children was begun in August. Avian Influenza. The H5N1 strain of avian influenza (bird flu) had infected

poultry throughout much of Southeast Asia, central Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Millions of birds had been destroyed in an effort to stop its spread. The disease could be transmitted to humans in close contact with infected birds, and since

2005 more than 100 persons had died worldwide from H5N1 infection. The

virus did not have the ability to be readily transmitted between humans, but health officials were concerned that the virus could acquire such an ability and— because humans had no immunity to bird flu—cause a pandemic with the potential for causing millions of deaths. In January WHO reported that H5N1 viruses with resistance to the antiviral drug oseltamivir had been isolated from two family members in Egypt. WHO called the development potentially dangerous because oseltamivir, commonly sold under the name Tamiflu, was the chief weapon against H5N1. The resistant viruses did not spread to anyone else. FDA officials announced in April the approval of the first bird-flu vaccine for humans, although the vaccine had to be given in a high dose and was only about 50% effective in clinical trials. Despite the vaccine’s limitations, the U.S. government planned to buy several million doses as part of the country’s strategic national stockpile of medicine, which was maintained by the CDC. Other Infectious Diseases. In March WHO reported that the worldwide incidence of tuberculosis (TB) had leveled off for the first time since 1993,

when the organization had declared a tuberculosis emergency. According to WHO, the percentage of the world's population with TB peaked in 2004, and the total number of cases in 2005 (the latest year for which statistics were available) was 8.79 million, up about 70,000

from

2004.

At the same

time,

WHO officials expressed concern that the spread of drug-resistant TB strains could reverse the progress made against the disease. In South Africa the 243

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Health and Disease Nic Bothma—EPA/Corbis

In November thousands rallied in Cape Town to support a call to action against tuberculosis. South Africa was seeing a deadly rise in tuberculosis in conjunction with an HIV/AIDS epidemic. AIDS epidemic had led to an increase in TB cases, including drug-resistant strains. Of the 343,000 cases reported

WHO later reported an Ebola outbreak in western Uganda, which by December 7 had 93 suspected cases. They included

global measles-immunization coverage with the first routine dose increased

there in 2006, an estimated 6,000 were

22 fatalities,

multidrug resistant, break in that year,

care workers. A new species of Ebola virus was identified in 9 of the cases. Researchers reported in the British medical journal The Lancet that there was a rapidly growing epidemic of syphilis in China, where that sexually transmitted disease had been almost eliminated from 1960 to 1980. The researchers found that the incidence of syphilis increased from under 0.2 to 6.5 cases per 100,000 persons in the period 1993-99 and that congenital syphilis increased from 0.01 to 19.68 cases per 100,000 live births in the period 1991-2005. A coauthor of the report, Myron S. Cohen, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School

million children from years old had received through immunization Cancer. In what U.S. called promising news,

and in one outextensively drug-

resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), which

did not respond to either the best firstor second-line tuberculosis drugs, killed 52 of its 53 victims who were infected with HIV. WHO reported in August that dengue fever was spreading across Southeast Asia and warned that the region might face the worst outbreak of the disease in about a decade. The mosquitoborne disease infected about 25,000 people in Cambodia and killed nearly 300 children under the age of 15. WHO reported that the number was three times the total cases for all of 2005. Dengue fever, a severe

flulike illness,

affected

infants, young children, and adults. It seldom caused death, though dengue hemorrhagic fever was a potentially deadly complication. In September, after an absence of two years, the Ebola virus reappeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The highly contagious disease, one of the world's deadliest pathogens, killed 50-9096 of those it infected. WHO reported on October 3 that out of 76 suspected cases, there were 25 confirmed. 244

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

4 of whom

were

health

of Medicine, said that the data demon-

strated "a syphilis epidemic of such scope and magnitude that it will require terrific effort to intervene." In early 2007 WHO and UNICEF announced that the number of deaths from measles had been reduced 6096 worldwide from 1999 to 2005, when there were an estimated 345,000

measles

deaths.

The

greatest

success

was in Africa, where measles deaths fell

by 7596. During the period 1999—2005,

from 7196 to 7796, and more

CDC

than 360

9 months to 15 measles vaccine campaigns. health officials a report by the

and major U.S. cancer organiza-

tions released in October found that national cancer death rates had fallen by 2.196 each year from 2002 through 2004. The drop was about double the 1.1% annual decline from 1993 through 2002. There was a decline in the death rates of most of the top 15 cancers, including lung, prostate, and colorectal cancers in men and colorectal and breast cancer in women. The death rate from lung cancer among women continued to increase but at a slower rate. Incidence rates for all cancers decreased slightly from 1992 through 2004 after having increased between 1975 and 1992. Controversy surrounded the use of a vaccine, Gardasil, that helped prevent cervical cancer,

the second most com-

mon cancer in women worldwide. Gardasil was approved by the FDA in 2006 and protected against four types of sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), including two types that had been identified as the cause of

Health and Disease

most cases of cervical cancer. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended the use of Gardasil for girls aged 11 and 12 and for females aged 13 to 26 who had not yet been immunized. In the U.S., lawmakers in many states debated whether to require girls who entered sixth grade to be vaccinated with Gardasil. At issue was whether it was ethical or cost-effective to mandate a vaccine for a disease that was transmitted sexually. In September the European Union approved the sale of Cervarix, another vaccine against certain types of

HPV. The approval allowed doctors in EU countries to prescribe the vaccine to females aged 10 to 25. An FDA decision whether to approve Cervarix was expected in 2008. Cardiovascular Disease. Researchers found that South Asians typically suffered heart attacks nearly 6 years earlier than their counterparts from other regions and that they typically died from cardiovascular disease 5 to 10 years earlier. The difference was attributed to a higher prevalence of risk factors among South Asians, including smoking, a history of diabetes, hypertension, depression, and stress. The study, conducted by the Government Medical College in Nagpur, India, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, determined that the average age for a first heart attack in South Asian countries was 53, compared with 58.8 in other countries. The researchers also noted that South Asians were less likely to adopt lifestyle habits that helped protect against heart attack, including daily consumption of fruits and vegetables and leisure-time physical activity. German researchers from the Institute for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology at the University of Duisberg-Essen,

Ger., found a relation-

ship between living close to heavy traffic—such as near a heavily traveled street or highway—and atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which was a risk factor for heart attack or stroke. The researchers attributed the effect to vehicular sources of air-pollution particulates that had previously been linked to heart attacks and strokes. A number of experimental technologies to treat cardiovascular problems were introduced in 2007. They included an implantable device that stimulated the body's cardiovascular regulatory system to control high blood pressure, a computer that automated balloon inflation during angioplasty, and a microcapsule that could be tracked with

X-rays to simplify the delivery of stem cells to tissues that needed new blood vessels. The devices were introduced at the American College of Cardiology’s Innovation in Intervention: i2 Summit

2007 in March. Obesity. In the United States, where more than one in three children and adolescents was overweight or obese, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,

an American philanthropic organization, launched an unprecedented effort to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic. It announced plans to spend $500 million during the next five years on public-health efforts to curb childhood obesity. The money would fund research and programs to improve nutrition and physical activity in schools and would help provide better access to healthy foods in poor and underserved communities.

Growing numbers of persons in parts of the world where obesity was once rare were also gaining excessive weight.

According to WHO—which considered global obesity an epidemic—on the basis of 2005 data, the most available, about 1.6 billion

recent adults

worldwide were overweight and 400 million were obese. WHO had also found that obesity rates in Europe had tripled in recent years. An American epidemiologist reported in September that in China the obesity rate for men and women had jumped from less than 1% in 1990 to more than 20% and that for Mexican women obesity rates reached 7196. In October French researchers reported that worldwide, 40% of men and 30% of women were overweight and that 24% of men and 27% of women were obese. The cause for obesity in all countries occurred in similar patterns—diets rich in sweeteners and saturated fats, lack of exercise,

and the availability of inexpensive processed foods. Stem Cells. Stem-cell research took a promising new turn in 2007 when two

separate research teams, one based in Japan and the other in the United States, reported that they had been able to turn human skin cells into cells similar to embryonic stem cells. The development could have far-reaching implications, because the process of acquiring embryonic stem cells involved destroying embryos and had therefore been at the centre of a longstanding controversy. Supporters for embryonic stem-cell research argued that the potential to cure disorders such as diabetes and Alzheimer disease made the research worthwhile, whereas

opponents considered the destruction of embryos to be unethical. In the new research, both groups of scientists added four master regulatory genes to the skin cells. (Each group used only two of the same genes.) The genes reprogrammed the skin cells to have characteristics of a pluripotent stem cell. Such a cell had the potential to develop into the more than 200 types of human cells that constituted the body's tissues and organs. The induced pluripotent stem cells required further study and evaluation, but the researchers said that they would be in a position to create patient- and diseasespecific stem cells without using human eggs or embryos. Such cells could help scientists understand disease mechanisms and aid in the search for safe and effective drugs. Genome Research. Ongoing research into the human genome was helping to pinpoint the causes of various diseases and eventually could lead to new drugs and treatments. The findings were part of a continuing wave of discoveries made by means of DNA microarrays, or chips, which could quickly read the sequence of human DNA at up to 500,000 points across an individual’s genome. In an approach called whole-genome association, scientists were using the technology to compare the genomes of large numbers of patients with those of healthy individuals to identify differences that might be associated with disease. In June scientists in Britain reported

that with whole-genome association they had detected DNA variations that underlay seven common diseases. Their work revealed the genetics of bipolar disorder, coronary artery disease, Crohn

disease,

hypertension,

rheuma-

toid arthritis, and type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Similarly, researchers in Iceland and Sweden discovered the genetic basis for a major type of glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, and two independent research teams in Germany and Iceland identified three variant sites on the human genome that predisposed people to restless legs syndrome—a condition characterized by an urge to move the legs, typically when at rest. In addition, researchers in

May reported finding six variant sites on the genome that increased the risk of breast cancer. The discovery added to already-identified genes and accounted for most of the overall genetic risk of breast cancer. Vaccines. Malaria remained the greatest threat to children in Africa, particularly in the sub-Saharan region of the 245

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Health and Disease Ahmad Zamroni—AFP/Getty Images

continent,

and in 2007

at least

nine vaccines were in development. One vaccine, being developed by GlaxoSmithKline and tentatively named Mosquirix, reduced the risk of infection from malaria by 6596 after the course of three shots and was shown to offer protection to infants under one year of age. Health officials believed that a

were found to be tainted or were recalled because of health and safety concerns. The incidents raised questions about product safety regulations and enforcement in China. In May diethylene glycol, a poisonous industrial solvent that was sometimes used in antifreeze, was found in

Chinese-made Panama,

toothpaste

in

and officials in several

other countries also discovered being used for West African chiland seized Chinese-made toothdren would make it possible to paste that contained diethylene eliminate the meningococcal epiglycol. No deaths were reported, demics that had afflicted the unlike the previous year when at continent for more than 100 least 50 persons in Panama had years. The Meningitis Vaccine died from cold medicine that Project (MVP) reported in June had been contaminated by dieththat preliminary results of a ylene glycol from China that had phase-two vaccine trial showed been labeled as glycerin. Chinese that the vaccine was safe and regulators claimed that diethylcould slash the incidence of epiene glycol in small amounts was demics in the “meningitis belt,” safe and that the toothpaste was which extended through 21 meant to be spit out and not concountries of sub-Saharan Africa. sumed. In July, however, China MVP (a partnership between prohibited manufacturers from Police in Jakarta burned seized counterfeit drugs in WHO and Program for Approusing the chemical in toothpaste, November. Indonesia was participating in an priate Technology in Health, a and in October the Chinese govinternational effort to combat counterfeit medical U.S.-based nonprofit organizaernment said that it had arrested products in Southeast Asia. tion) was working with an In774 people during a two-month dian firm to produce the new period as part of a crackdown on children. The medicine combined vaccine against serogroup A Neisseria the production and sale of tainted food, amodiaquine with artemisinin, which meningitidis (meningococcus). The vacdrugs, and agricultural products. was derived from sweet wormwood. cine was expected to block infection The recalls of Chinese products inDoctors believed that combining the cluded millions of toys that were decoand extend protection to the entire poptwo antimalarial drugs would reduce rated with paint that contained lead— ulation, including those who had not the possibility that resistance to either been vaccinated. a toxic metal when ingested. In Researchers who were trying to dedrug would develop. response, China signed an agreement velop a vaccine to treat Alzheimer disThe sale and distribution of counterto prohibit the use of paint containing feit drugs reached crisis proportions in ease had hit several roadblocks in relead on toys that were exported to the cent years but now believed that they Asia in 2007, and experts reported that United States. The agreement was anwere moving forward. In a study with the problem was growing worldwide. nounced in September at the second Counterfeiters appeared to target antimice, American scientists found that a U.S.-China meeting on consumer prodtransdermal, or skin-patch, vaccine was malarial medications—artemisinin, in uct safety. The Chinese government safe and effective in clearing away particular—though fake antibiotics and also vowed to step up safety efforts by brain plaques that were associated with other counterfeit drugs were also reincreasing inspections of exports and the disease. The vaccine worked by ported. In some cases fake antimalarial by investigating companies that were stimulating the immune system to act drugs contained inert substances such suspected of violating the law. After one against beta-amyloid, the protein that as chalk or starch, but in other cases of the largest pet-food recalls in U.S. accumulates in the brain plaques. The they contained potentially dangerous history, China gave U.S. regulators perresults of the study indicated that the drugs. WHO estimated that the number mission to enter the country to investiside effects that had plagued a previous of avoidable malaria deaths that regate whether suppliers exported conhuman vaccine could be potentially sulted from the inadvertent use of taminated pet-food ingredients to the eliminated. In an earlier clinical trial, a counterfeit drugs ranged from tens of United States. Previously, FDA reprethousands to more than 200,000 every small percentage of study participants sentatives had been blocked from enyear. In China, which was believed to developed brain inflammation as an tering China. FDA officials also said autoimmune response and died. be the source of most of the world’s that there was evidence that tainted pet Pharmaceuticals. An inexpensive antifake drugs, the former chief of China’s food from China had killed at least 16 malarial pill, developed through a food and drug administration was execats and dogs in the U.S. and sickened multinational collaboration of universicuted in July for having taken $850,000 thousands of other animals. They beties and pharmaceutical companies, from pharmaceutical companies and lieved that the source originated with was introduced in March. The medihaving approved fake drugs. Chinese exporters of wheat gluten and cine, called ASAQ, was to cost less than Other Developments. In 2007 a variety other animal-feed ingredients. $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for of products manufactured in China (KEVIN DAVIS) new meningitis vaccine that was

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Health and Disease

TUER

l Enidemi

Diabetes mellitus is a public health threat that rivals HIV/AIDS in its reach and deadly toll. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF), an alliance of diabetes associations in more than 160 coun-

tries, has described diabetes mellitus as a “global epidemic with devastating humanitarian, social, and economic consequences.” The

most prevalent form of the disease—accounting for 90% to 95% of diabetes

cases—is

type 2 diabetes

mellitus (T2DM),

formerly

known as non-insulin-dependent diabetes. At least 7 million people develop T2DM each year, and 3.8 million people die from complications of the disease. "Yet awareness of the global scale of the diabetes threat," the IDF contends, "remains pitifully low."

Once mainly a disease that affected older adults in wealthy countries, T2DM now strikes all populations. Urbanization, sedentary lifestyles, and high rates of obesity are major contributing factors to the upsurge in cases. The IDF estimates that worldwide among adults 20—79 years old, 246 million persons (5.996 of the population) had T2DM in 2007—with about 8096 of them living in lessdeveloped countries (LDCs)—and that by 2025, 380 million (7.1%

of the population) would have it. In the United States T2DM prevalence has more than doubled since 1990, and minorities are dispro-

portionately affected. The disease is increasingly diagnosed in children and adolescents, in both developed countries and LDCs—a

trend closely tied to epidemic rates of childhood obesity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted that about one-half of all African American and Hispanic American children born in 2000 will develop T2DM. T2DM is a metabolic disorder in which the body is unable to utilize the hormone insulin properly. Insulin is normally secreted by the beta cells of the pancreas in response to the intake of food. The role of insulin is to "unlock" cells so that glucose, the simple sugar into which food is broken down in the body, can enter the cells and be converted into energy. When glucose cannot get into cells, it builds up in the bloodstream, which sets the stage for diabetes and its many serious complications such as kidney disease, potentially blinding eye disease, damage to the nerves of the feet and lower limbs that can necessitate amputation, and cardiovascular disease,

which is the cause of premature death in more than one-half of diabetes cases. The vast majority of persons who develop T2DM first experience insulin resistance, a condition in which the body's cells are resistant

to the action of insulin. Excess body fat (especially in the area of the abdomen), a sedentary lifestyle, and genetics are all thought to contribute to its development. In the early stages of insulin resistance, people are likely to have glucose levels that are elevated but not high enough to be classified as diabetes. This intermediate condition is often called prediabetes. The IDF estimates that 308 million people had prediabetes in 2007 and has predicted that the number will rise to 418 million by 2025. Fortunately, progression from prediabetes to diabetes is not inevitable. A landmark three-year clinical trial completed in 2001 called the Diabetes Prevention Program, demonstrated that over-

weight people with prediabetes who lost a moderate amount of

weight and exercised regularly reduced their risk of developing diabetes by 58%. Even persons with a genetic predisposition that more than doubled their chance of getting T2DM were able to overcome their risk with lifestyle interventions, medication, or both together. Unfortunately, at least one-third of those who are headed toward

developing full-blown diabetes are not aware of their deteriorating health. They may not learn that they have T2DM until they develop one of its serious complications, at which point irreversible damage has already been done. The key to managing T2DM and thwarting or delaying the onset of devastating complications is what is termed “tight glycemic control"—keeping blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible. Proper diet, exercise, and weight loss are the foundation of T2DM

management, but as the disease progresses, most people also need medication. There are currently eight classes of drugs for T2DM on the market and dozens of promising new agents in the pipeline. All regulate glucose, but they do so by targeting different metabolic defects. Medications that lower blood pressure or modify cholesterol levels are often critical components of T2DM-management regimens, since the majority of people with T2DM have high blood pressure, elevated levels of "bad" cholesterol (LDL), and low levels of "good" cholesterol (HDL).

Because T2DM is a progressive disease in which the pancreatic beta cells can stop producing insulin entirely, some patients eventually need insulin. (Insulin is the mainstay of treatment of type 1 diabetes, in which the body's immune system destroys the insulinproducing beta cells, usually in childhood.) Advances in the understanding of insulin physiology and in recombinant DNA technology have enabled the production of highly refined insulin formulations. In 2006 the first inhaled insulin product, Exubera, was approved for persons with type 1 or 2 diabetes. Initially, it was touted as a major breakthrough, but only carefully selected patients could use it, and few physicians prescribed it. One year after Exubera's launch, Pfizer, the company that made the drug, announced that it was discontinuing the product. Diabetes and its complications are unfathomably costly. Unless there are momentous changes, the countries with the fewest resources, where the prevalence of the disease is rising fastest, will

bear the brunt of the diabetes burden. The effort to slow the epidemic received important support on Dec. 20, 2006, when the United Nations passed a resolution that officially recognized the seriousness of the global T2DM threat. The resolution called upon all UN member states to develop national policies for preventing and treating T2DM and to observe World Diabetes Day (November 14) every year as a way of raising awareness of diabetes. In 2007 the day was marked by such activities as walkathons and free glucose testing, and more than 200 buildings—from the Empire State Building in New York City and the World Trade Centre Tower in Dubai, U.A.E., to a clock tower in Tirana, Alb., and a cinema in

Asmara, Eritrea—were lit up in blue, the colour chosen to signify a unified global response to a long-ignored epidemic. (ELLEN BERNSTEIN)

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Life Sciences Researchers studied the origin of CAT DOMESTICATION, variations in DOG SIZE, HORMONE structure in plants, and

chemical changes in the PROTEINS that package DNA. GENETIC ENGINEERING created novel strains of rice and mosquitoes to combat MALARIA, and rice strains with HUMAN GENES began to be grown commercially.

ZOOLOGY oological research in 2007 provided new insights into the domestication of cats. Cats were known to have been associated with humans as early as 9,500 years ago from archaeological evidence on Cyprus, but their evolutionary line from wild ancestors and the region where they were first domesticated had been uncertain. To determine the origin of cat domestication, Carlos A. Driscoll of the Laboratory of

single allele (gene variant) is the major genetic determinant of body size in domestic dogs. The gray wolf (Canis lupus) is the accepted ancestor of the domestic dog (C. familiaris), but as a consequence of centuries of selective breeding, the latter had one of the greatest ranges of body size among terrestrial vertebrates. The largest dogs weighed 50 times more than the smallest. Several genetic explanations for the observed variability had been suggested, but none had been confirmed.

The investigators located genetic sequences related to size on a section of chromosome 15 in the Portuguese water dog, a recognized domestic breed with a wide range in size. They discovered that an allele of the gene that encodes the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) was present in small dogs but typically absent in large ones. The genetic association between body size and the /GF-/gene was also apparent in 14 small breeds of dogs and typically absent in 9 that were classified as giant breeds. IGF-/ had been shown in earlier studies to affect the body size of mice and humans. The findings helped clarify the genetic origin of size diversity among domestic dogs and also revealed how natural selection on a single gene could lead to rapid evolution in body size in species undergoing adaptive radiations. Andrew F. Russell of the University of Sheffield, Eng., and colleagues provided insight into previously unrecognized benefits of cooperative birdbreeding systems in which nonbreeding

Genomic Diversity, Frederick, Md., and

colleagues obtained and analyzed DNA from 851 individual nondomestic (wild)

and domestic cats to determine their genotypes. The nondomestic cats included European cats, Near Eastern

Gibson, a Great Dane measuring 107 cm (42.2 in) tall at the shoulder, is seen

striding alongside a much smaller Chihuahua. Researchers discovered the principal genetic basis of the unusually large size variation in domestic dogs.

wildcats, central Asian cats, southern African wildcats, and Chinese desert cats, all of which were considered sub-

species of Felis silvestris. The sample of domestic cats included both feral domestic cats and recognized breeds of housecats. A separate wild species, the sand cat (F. margarita) of North Africa and the Middle East, was chosen as the

closest outgroup (group belonging to a separate evolutionary branch). Genetic mixing is extensive between feral domestic cats and wildcats throughout their geographic ranges, but the genetic evidence supported the conclusion that cats were first domesticated in the Middle East, presumably during the rise of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. The investigators estimated that the common ancestor for the Near Eastern wildcat subspecies (F. s. lybica) and domestic cats lived approximately 131,000 years ago. Nathan B. Sutter and Elaine A. Ostrander of the National Human Genome

Research

Institute, Bethesda,

Md., and colleagues determined that a

=

Deanne Fitzmaurice/Corbis

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© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Life Sciences

helper males assisted in providing food for offspring. In such species the young are given more food when helper males assist with feeding, and helper males are presumed to benefit from kin selection (by being closely related to the offspring) or group augmentation (such as a greater efficiency in acquiring re-

sources by being associated with other individuals). How females or offspring benefit from the presence of helper males,

however,

had been

difficult to

assess because when offspring received additional food, their fledgling size and survival were often unaffected. The investigators compared breeding units of the superb fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) of Australia. Some

of the breed-

ing units consisted only of breeding pairs, and others contained helpers. In cooperative breeding units with helpers, the young received 19% more food than in breeding units without helpers. When helpers were present, however,

mother

wrens

laid

smaller

eggs that had reduced nutritional content and produced smaller chicks. The benefits that offspring received when helpers were present were thereby concealed by the overall reduction of the females' investment in their eggs. Experiments in which eggs laid by a female in a group with helpers were substituted for eggs laid by a female in a breeding pair and vice versa gave further confirmation that the birds compensated for the presence or absence of helpers by adjusting egg and hatchling size. For example, chicks from helpergroup eggs incubated and raised only by breeding pairs exhibited reduced growth and survival. (The incubation period and the time that the superb fairy-wren chicks remained in the nest did not vary.) The investigators showed that the advantage for females when helpers were present was the reduction in their reproductive investment, which increased their fitness and probability of breeding again. Two independent teams of researchers reported

sequencing Macaque

on

two

studies. Genome

major

The

genome-

Rhesus

Sequencing

and

Analysis Consortium, under the leadership of Richard A. Gibbs of Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, sequenced the genome of the rhesus macaque monkey (Macaca mulatta). The species had been used as the premier nonhuman primate in biomedical research for decades, including studies on viruses that caused flu, polio, and AIDS, and it

was the species in which the blood protein known as the Rh factor was first

identified. Using a genetic map with an estimated 20,000 genes, researchers ex-

pected to be able to target particular traits expressed in individuals and use genetic pathways to identify and manipulate specific genes that were responsible for the trait. In addition to the value of the genome sequence for biomedical research, the sequence provided unprecedented opportunities for examining at the genome level the evolutionary relationships and changes between humans, chimpanzees (the closest living relative of humans), and rhesus macaques, which had a common ancestor 25 million years ago. A team led by Tarjei S. Mikkelsen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sequenced the genome of the South American gray short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis

domestica)

in the

first

such work on a marsupial. The species had been used frequently in genetic research and in the fields of immunology and neurobiology. Comparison of the genome of a metatherian (marsupial) with those genomes available for eutherian

(placental)

the prospect function,

mammals

offered

of insight into genomic

organization,

and

evolution

among mammal lineages. An initial finding was that in the opossum only about 1% of the genetic regions that code for amino-acid proteins, compared with about 20% for noncoding regions, had evolved since the divergence of metatherians and eutherians 180 million years ago. Life in the deep-ocean portions of the Southern

Ocean,

which

encircles

Antarctica, had been poorly explored compared with other oceans and with the shallow-water habitats of the Antarctic region. Angelika Brandt of the Zoological Museum, Hamburg, and colleagues provided the first overview of the zoological diversity of these deepsea communities, based on their inves-

tigations in the Weddell Sea. A variety of sampling techniques, including underwater photography, bottom coring, and bottom and midwater trawling, were used during three expeditions between 2002 and 2005, at depths as great as 6,348 m (20,827 ft). The zoological

distinctiveness and unexplored nature of the deep waters of the Southern Ocean were apparent in several ways. The collection of samples of more than 13,000 crustaceans known as isopods yielded 674 species, of which 86% had previously been unknown, and the number of isopod species found was 1.8 times greater than that known from the shallower depths of the entire Antarctic

continental shelf. Numerous species were found among other major taxonomic groups, including foraminifers (158), nematodes (57), ostracods (more

than 100), polychaete worms (more than 200), shelled gastropods and bivalves (160), and sponges (76). At least

20% and for most of the groups more than 50% of the species collected were new to science. The investigators noted several biogeographic trends. For example, among their deep-sea samples of isopods, ostracods, and nematodes—or-

ganisms that typically disperse poorly— there were species characteristically associated with the continental shelf and many not known outside the Southern Ocean. Organisms that were more likely to disperse, such as foraminifers,

and

that were found at great depths were more closely related to fauna found in other oceans, in particular the Atlantic Ocean. The observations dismissed an earlier perception that species diversity in the deep areas of the Southern Ocean is low, and they offered new opportunities for exploring the zoogeographic patterns and evolutionary relationships among the deep-sea and continental fauna. Shannon L. LaDeau and Peter P. Marra of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Washington,

D.C., and A.

Marm Kilpatrick of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, New York City, used long-term records from the North American Breeding Bird Survey program to assess the impact of the West Nile virus on 20 species of birds. Adjustments were made for anticipated changes in population levels caused by climatic and ecological factors. Noticeable declines that coincided with the arrival of the virus in 1999 in New York were found in seven species. The greatest impact was observed in the population of American crows, which declined

by as much as 45%. All species, including American blue jays, were commonly with urban and suburban findings had implications

of the bird robins and associated areas. The concerning

links between birds and humans,

who

were also susceptible to West Nile virus and other bird-transmitted pathogens. (J. WHITFIELD GIBBONS)

BOTANY In 2007 genetically modified (GM) plants that incorporated human genes began to be grown commercially for the first time. The plants, strains of rice modified to express human protein in their seeds, were made by Ventria 249

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Life Sciences Frans Lanting/Corbis

entists engineered a strain

of rice that carried a vaccine for cholera, which is

caused by Vibrio cholerae bacteria. When the rice was fed to mice in scientific trials, it produced antibodies that targeted the vulnerable mucosal sites where cholera infection first

occurs.

In

contrast,

conventional vaccines that are administered via injection are less targeted. The rice-based vaccine also had the advantage that it could be stored at room temperature;

conventional

vaccines required refrigeration. Similar types of GM plants developed for vaccines could be particularly useful against other viruses that attack mucosal tissues in the body, such as human immunod-

however, further regulatory approvals would be needed. Critics of the project feared that the strains could contaminate normal rice strains and people would then unwittingly be exposed to the GM proteins by eating them in food. The journal Nature Biotechnology compared growing such pharmaceuticals in crops to packaging pills in candy wrappers. The USDA believed that the rice would not escape into the environment or enter the food supply, thanks to such safeguards as planting the GM

rice more

than 480 km

(300

mi) away from any other rice farms. GM rice also showed promise for producing human vaccines. Japanese sci250

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of human

cancers, because

Ind., and colleagues genetically modified plants to resist infection from

the Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV), a

to 1 m (3.3 ft) in diameter and stinks

virus that attacks many agriculturally important plants, including cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbages. CaMV uses re-

of rotting flesh to attract the small flies it needs for pollination. The classification of this and the other 20 or so species of rafflesias had long baffled scientists. A team led by Charles Davis at Harvard University examined eight genes of R. arnoldii and determined that the plant belongs to the Euphorbiaceae family, which includes poinsettias and bells of Ireland as well as commercially important crops such as the

Zhixiang Chen of Purdue

The giant single flower of the parasitic plant Rafflesia arnoldii is inspected by children in a rainforest in Malaysia.

the rice could be sold to consumers,

treatments

TIR1 is similar to human ubiquitin ligases that are involved in cancer. The scientists expected that these human enzymes might be affected by small molecules like auxin and that chemists might be able to synthesize such molecules as a new type of cancer drug. The parasitic plant Rafflesia arnoldii has the world’s largest single flower, a red-and-white bloom that measures up

eficiency virus (HIV).

Bioscience, a biotech company headquartered in Sacramento, Calif. Commercial planting of the rice in designated fields in Kansas was approved in May 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The human proteins produced by the GM rice strains were lysozyme, lactoferrin, and serum albumin, which are commonly found in human breast milk. The company claimed that the rice-manufactured proteins could be taken orally to combat diarrhea and anemia, a potentially important application for less-developed countries. Before products made from

3-acetic acid and two other plant hormones that are collectively known as auxin. Auxin plays an essential role in the growth and development of plants, and there was much conjecture about the nature of the receptor-hormone binding. The scientists extracted TIR1 from the plant Arabidopsis and purified it into crystals. Using X-ray images of the crystals, they determined the enzyme's three-dimensional structure. The crystals were then soaked in auxin and X-rayed again, which revealed that auxin functions as a "molecular glue" that improves the ability of TIR1 to bind its peptide target. In the absence of auxin, TIR1 does not bind its target as tightly. This discovery not only was a major advance for plant biology with important potential implications for agriculture but also might lead to new

University, West Lafayette,

verse transcription to create copies of

itself and spread the infection. In reverse transcription, the virus’s RNA is copied into DNA after it latches onto a victim cell. In their investigation the researchers infected the plant Arabidopsis thaliana with cauliflower mosaic virus and found that reproduction of the virus makes use of cyclin-dependent kinase C complex (CDKC), a protein complex found in the plant cells. By blocking CDKC the scientists were able to make the plant completely resistant to infection from CaMV. This research might lead to ways of combating HIV, because HIV also uses reverse transcription and the same protein complex (referred to in human cells as positive transcription elongation factor b) to multiply and spread the infection. For

the

first time,

scientists

deter-

mined the structure of a plant hormone receptor and the means by which the receptor interacts with a hormone. A team led by Ning Zheng of the University of Washington School of Medicine studied the hormone

receptor, TIR1, a

type of enzyme known as a ubiquitin ligase, and its interaction with indole-

rubber

tree, castor-oil plant, and cas-

sava. Given the inferred phylogeny, the scientists estimated that flower diameter among the plants in the evolutionary lineage of R. arnoldii underwent about a 73-fold increase over about 46 million years, one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary size increase reported for any plant or animal. Biologist Santiago Ramírez and his colleagues at Harvard University identified the first fossilized remains of an orchid. The finding allowed them to work out the origins of orchids and solve a long-standing dispute over their evolution. Although orchids formed the largest family of flowering plants, they rarely fossilized. The fossilized remains that were found were particles of orchid pollen that covered a bee found preserved in fossil amber that was 15

Life Sciences

million-20 million years old. The pollen was identified as belonging to an orchid from the orchid subtribe Goodyerinae. The scientists compared the fossil pollen with pollen of modern-day plants and reconstructed an evolutionary tree for orchids. On the basis of the assumption that the plants underwent a relatively constant rate of evolution, the oldest common ancestor of the orchid family dated from 76 million to 84 milion years ago, in the Late Cretaceous Period. "The dinosaurs could have walked among orchids," said Ramírez.

(PAUL SIMONS)

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND GENETICS Epigenetics Takes Centre Stage. The genome is often called the blueprint of life, but it is the epigenome—the way the genome is modified chemically and packaged—that defines how the information in the blueprint is read and applied. Genetic information is encoded in the sequences of nucleotides that make up the DNA that is passed from parents to offspring. In contrast, epigenetic in-

phorylation.) The specific location of methylation on a histone protein can be important. For example, Zhao and colleagues identified specific histone modifications that distinguish actively expressed regions of the genome from repressed regions and found histone modifications that correlate with chromosome banding patterns. Lander and Bernstein similarly determined specific histone modifications that distinguish actively expressed genes, genes poised for expression, and repressed genes in different kinds of cells. Epigenetic changes not only influence the expression of genes in plants and animals but also enable the differentiation of distinct cell types from pluripotent stem cells early in development. In other words, such changes allow cells to become specialized as liver cells, brain cells, or skin cells, for ex-

ample, even though the cells all share the same DNA and are ultimately derived from one fertilized egg. As the mechanisms of epigenetics have become

better

understood,

researchers

have recognized that the epigenome also influences a wide range of biomedical conditions. This new perception has opened the door to an understanding of normal and abnormal biological processes and promises interventions that might prevent or ameliorate certain diseases.

Epigenetic contributions to disease fall into two classes. One involves genes that are regulated epigenetically, such as the imprinted (parent-specific) genes associated with Angelman syndrome or Prader-Willi syndrome. Clinical outcomes in cases of these syndromes depend on the degree to which an inherited normal or mutated gene is or is not expressed. The other class involves genes whose products participate in the epigenetic machinery and thereby regulate the expression of other genes. For example, the gene MECP2 encodes a protein that binds to specific methylated regions of DNA and contributes to the silencing of those sequences. Mutations that impair the MECP2 gene can lead to Rett syndrome. Many tumours and cancers are believed to involve epigenetic changes attributable to environmental factors. These changes include a general decrease in methylation, which is thought to contribute to the increased expression of growth-promoting genes, punctuated by gene-specific increases in methylation that are thought to silence tumoursuppressor

genes.

Epigenetic

formation, though heritable by cells or signaling attributed to environmental organisms, is not specific to the nufactors has also been associated with cleotide sequence of the transmitted some characteristics of aging by renucleic-acid genome. The field of episearch that studied the apparently ungenetics, the study of the epigenome equal aging rates in genetically identiand its functional significance, has recal twins. cently exploded, revolutionizing One of the most promising arthe fields of genetics and develeas of recent epigenetic investiopmental biology. For example, gation involves stem cells. It has The mature eyes (bottom) and larvae (top) of in 2007 researchers led by Keji been understood for some time Anopheles mosquitoes. The specimens with the Zhao of the National Institutes of green marker protein were genetically modified to that epigenetic mechanisms play Health, Bethesda, Md., and by a key role in defining the "pobe resistant to malaria parasites. Eric Lander and Bradley Berntentiality" of stem cells. Only restein of the Broad Institute, Camcently, however, as those mechabridge, Mass., reported how they nisms have become clearer, has were able to identify and map key it become possible to intervene genomewide epigenetic modificaand effectively alter the developtions in mammalian cells. mental state and even the tissue Epigenetics is known to involve type of given cells. The implicaa number of possible chemical tions of this work for future clinmodifications to DNA and to the ical intervention for conditions proteins called histones that ranging from trauma to neupackage the DNA into a complex rodegenerative disease are prosubstance, called chromatin, infound. side a cell. One principal type of A New Weapon in the War on modification is DNA or histone Malaria. Malaria is an infectious methylation. Methylation can be disease that affects more than transient and change rapidly 350 million persons each year, during the life span of a cell or killing more than a million. It reorganism, or it can be largely sults from infection by any of permanent once set early in the four species of the protozoan development of the embryo. parasite Plasmodium: P falci(Other largely permanent chemiparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. cal modifications also play a malariae. The parasite has a role; these include histone acetycomplex life cycle that proceeds lation, ubiquitination, and phosthrough distinct phases in an Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute/Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena

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© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Life Sciences

infected human host and an infected Anopheles mosquito. The mosquito acquires Plasmodium protozoa when it sucks blood from an infected person. The mosquito harbours the parasites as they proceed through stages of reproduction and maturation. The mosquito subsequently transmits them back to humans when it bites and injects saliva contaminated with Plasmodium. The struggle to reduce or eliminate malaria worldwide has been long, costly, and at times controversial. The measures have included the reduction of local mosquito populations, reduction of mosquito access to humans (by using insecticide-treated bed nets, for example),

and

medications,

such

as

quinine or primaquine, that combat the infection in a human host. Efforts to devise a safe and effective vaccine continue but have yet to bear fruit. In recent years, however, a new weapon has emerged that might prove the best solution of all—a genetically modified Anopheles mosquito that is itself resistant to infection by Plasmodium. Since the mid-1990s, several groups have produced transgenic mosquitoes that are resistant to Plasmodium infection. One group, for example, modified mosquitoes to express a small amount of a substance called SM1 dodecapeptide in cells that line the salivary gland and gut of the mosquito. This peptide binds to the same cell-surface receptors used by Plasmodium to recognize and invade mosquito cells. Overexpression of this peptide in target tissues therefore competitively inhibits entry of the Plasmodium parasite. A key question was whether transgenic mosquitoes could thrive in the wild among natural mosquito populations, since the genetic manipulations that were required for establishing Plasmodium resistance could render the resulting mosquitoes less “fit” than their wild-type (normal)

peers. In 2004 a team of researchers directed by Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., reported a major breakthrough. The team had identified a line of transgenic mosquito that expressed the SM1 peptide (and consequently was resistant to Plasmodium infection) yet remained as fit as its wild-type peers when fed on the blood of mice that had not been infected by Plasmodium. Equal fitness, however, was no guarantee of success in the field, especially given the much greater number of wildtype mosquitoes.

In the spring of 2007, Jacobs-Lorena and colleagues reported the striking 252

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

observation that their transgenic mosquitoes demonstrated a clear fitness advantage—relative to wild-type mosquitoes—when fed on the blood of mice that were infected by Plasmodium. 'To test the relative fitness of their

(200 million to 146 million years ago) of Spain represented one of the largestknown terrestrial animals. The dinosaur was estimated to have had a

transgenic mosquitoes in the context of Plasmodium infection, the re-

foreleg bone) was about 180 cm (70 in)

searchers conducted a series of experiments in which initial populations that were made up of equal numbers of wild-type and transgenic mosquitoes were allowed to interbreed and expand for 13 generations. One hundred individual mosquitoes from each new generation were tested to ascertain the relative proportion of wild-type and transgenic subpopulations. The results clearly demonstrated a slow but steady increase in the proportion of transgenic mosquitoes, with a plateau of about

70%

transgenic

mosquitoes

reached in each population by the ninth generation. These results were exciting for three reasons. First, if resistance to Plasmod-

ium infection provided a fitness advantage to mosquitoes, then even a small number of transgenic mosquitoes released into a Plasmodium-infested area would increase until such mosquitoes provided an effective deterrent to human

transmission.

Second,

if the vast

majority of mosquitoes in currently Plasmodium-infested areas could be rendered disease-free, malaria might be controlled or eliminated without the need for widespread use of chemicals, deforestation, draining of wetlands,

or

other environmentally destructive measures. Finally, this strategy might be directed at other mosquito-borne infectious diseases, such as yellow fever,

dengue, alitis.

and West Nile virus enceph(JUDITH L. FRIDOVICH-KEIL)

PALEONTOLOGY One of the most significant events in paleontology in 2007 was a report of the discovery in New Mexico of a grouping of fauna from the Late Triassic Period (228 million to 200 million

years ago) that included fossils of both true dinosaurs and dinosauromorphs— animals that were related to dinosaurs but were more primitive. It had previously been thought that the first dinosaurs quickly replaced dinosauromorphs, through either competition or the extinction of the older species. The new finding indicated that the replacement was much more gradual. A newly described dinosaur, Turiasaurus

riodevensis,

from the Jurassic

mass of 40,000 to 48,000 kg (88,000 to

106,000

Ib), and its humerus

(upper

in length. Analysis of the specimen suggested that the animal belonged to a previously unknown group of primitive European sauropods. Another newly discovered dinosaur species, Gigantoraptor erlianensis, was a giant birdlike dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous (100

million to 65 million years ago) of China. Although the dinosaur was estimated to have weighed about 1,400 kg (3,100 Ib), a phylogenetic study placed it among the oviraptors, a group of small feathered theropod dinosaurs that generally had a body mass of less than 40 kg (88 Ib). The large size of the new species was unusual because there was a general evolutionary trend toward decreasing size in this and other theropod lineages closely related to birds. Analyses of soft tissue that was discovered in 2005 inside a well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex femur (thighbone) that was about 70 million years old revealed that protein was still present in the bone. The results showed the presence of small amounts of collagen, the main organic tissue in bone. Such molecular studies, until recently not believed to be possible with old fossil material, might eventually contribute to the understanding of evolutionary relationships between the dinosaurs. In another study, Velociraptor was discovered to have quill knobs. The presence of the bumplike structures, found on the forearm of a fossil specimen from Mongolia, indicated that the dinosaur had feathers and that the feathers were attached to the bone by follicular ligaments. The discovery of two fragmentary specimens of fish from about 420 million years ago in the Late Silurian shed light on the origin of the osteichthyans (bony fish). A lower jawbone of Andreolepis from Sweden and an upper jawbone of Lophosteus from Germany established these two genera as the oldest positively identified osteichthyans. The report in late 2006 of a lamprey, Priscomyzon riniensis, from about 360 million years ago—35 million years earlier than previously known specimens— led to a reanalysis of early jawless vertebrate relationships. The fossil was a soft-body impression of an animal that was nearly identical to the modern lamprey. Because lampreys have a cartilaginous skeleton, their fossil record is

Life Sciences Evangelia Tsoukala/AP

ported in late 2006, of the 100-millionyear-old bee is significant because it existed near the time of the first appearance of angiosperms. The previously oldest-known fossil bees were 35 million-45 million years younger. In another study bacteria, fungi, algae, and protozoans were found preserved in Triassic amber from Europe. The amber consisted of hardened resin droplets only about 1 mm (0.04 in) in size. Scientists were able to assign the microorganisms to living genera, which suggested that these lineages had not changed morphologically during the past 220 million years. In a rare event about 300 million years ago, a major earthquake caused an ancient forest of 1,000 ha (4 sq mi)

to drop below sea level and undergo rapid burial. The newly described remains of this nearly intact ecosystem were uncovered in an Illinois coal mine. The finding allowed the scientists to analyze the distribution of a variety of extinct plants, including lycopsid Mastodon tusks at a dig in Greece dwarf a team led by Evangelia Tsoukala of Aristotle University (Thessaloniki). The three-million-vear-old tusks, measuring

trees, across the forest floor. The iden-

5 m (16.4 ft) and 4.6 m (15 ft), were among the longest ever discovered.

tree stumps at a site near Gilboa, N.Y.,

very poor, and lampreys were previously thought to have evolved from the ostracoderms (extinct armoured jawless vertebrates). The new finding suggested that lampreys evolved from other types of Paleozoic jawless vertebrates that lacked bony armour and that the ostracoderms were more closely related to the first primitive jawed fish than they were to lampreys. Two new fossil penguin species—a 1.5-m (5-ft) giant penguin, /cadyptes salasi, and a smaller species, Perudyptes devriesi—from Peru challenged traditional ideas about the role of climate change in penguin evolution. It had been suggested that penguins originated in high latitudes and migrated to equatorial regions after the climate had cooled near the end of the Eocene Epoch (about 34 million years ago), but the find showed that penguins arrived in lower latitudes at least 30 million years earlier than previously thought. A newly described Mesozoic mammal from northeastern China, Volaticotherium antiquum, represented a new

group of insectivorous gliding mammals. The discovery not only pushed back the known origin of gliding by millions of years, but it also showed that early mammals had more diverse lifestyles than previously thought. A study of mammal assemblages across

the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T, boundary disputed the widely held assumption that mammalian faunas rapidly increased in diversity after the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous Period about 65 million years ago. The study concluded that mammalian diversification rates barely changed across the K-T boundary and that they did not increase rapidly until the Eocene and Oligocene epochs (from 56 million to 23 million years ago). A newly described eutriconodont Mesozoic mammal, Yanoconodon allini,

added to the understanding of the evolution of the mammalian inner ear. Detachment of the three middle-ear bones from the mandible occurred during the transition between reptiles and mammals. The new specimen showed the middle-ear bones still to be connected to the mandible but only by an ossified piece of cartilage. This feature is similar to the ear structure in embryos of modern monotremes and placentals, but in the eutriconodonts it apparently represents an embryonic feature that was not lost in adults. A piece of Cretaceous amber from Myanmar (Burma) yielded the oldestknown fossil bee, Melittosphex burmensis. Since bees are one of the most important pollinators of angiosperms (flowering plants), the discovery, re-

tity of 385-million-yearold

fossilized

had been a mystery since they were discovered in the late 19th century. Although considered to represent the earliest forest, no leaf or other type of photosynthetic structure had been found that was associated with the stumps. Newly described tree specimens

from the area, however, showed

that the stumps pertained to fernlike trees that grew leafy twiglike branches out of a vertical trunk. The specimens, classified in the genus Wattieza, grew to a height of 8 m (26 ft) or more.

A report early in 2007 suggested that the 600-million-year-old globular microfossils from the Doushantuo Formation in China were not animal embryos as previously thought. The report instead found parallels between the microfossil structures and structures formed during cell division in modern sulfur bacteria and suggested that the microfossils were cell clusters of giant specimens of such bacteria. Several months

later, however,

another

report

described additional microfossils from the same formation that supported the original hypothesis. The new Doushantuo fossils were found encased in large organic enclosures with a complex structure, which indicated that the fos-

sils were likely eukaryotic cells and therefore not bacteria. The study concluded that the fossils represented early cleavage-stage embryos inside egg

cysts.

(WILLIAM R. HAMMER)

253

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature GLOBALIZATION was well-established in the literary world, as

lished in the U.K.

MIGRATION, IMMIGRATION, and DISPLACEMENT were important

themes in many countries. WELL-KNOWN English-language writers produced new works. Books from Canada, Europe,

and East Asia often focused on INTERNAL CONCERNS. POLITICS played a huge role in South American literature, and RELIGION remained a lively topic in many regions. Persian and Arabic literature explored LIMITS of language and behaviour. CUTTING-EDGE Japanese devoured novels on their cell phones.

ENGLISH nited Kingdom. The 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature was unexpectedly bestowed on British author Doris

Lessing

in recogni-

tion of her large and profound body of work. Much of her writing was informed by her experiences as a colonial subject in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). (See NOBEL PRIZES.)

Also unexpected was the awarding of the 2007 Man Booker Prize—Britains most prestigious literary award—to Irish writer Anne Enright. The other six novels on the short list were higher profile before the announcement

that

her

don’t think it’s at all slight in terms of its emotional steps. It’s a very tight and very taut novel.” The short list also raised eyebrows because of the number of important writers with new books that were not included—Michael Ondaatje,

J.M.

Coetzee,

Graham

judging

panel,

254

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said,

“We

Bi-

ografi [1993].) Mister Pip was set in 1991 on the island of Bougainville, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, at the beginning of the 10-year civil war. The story was told from the perspective of a girl named Matilda. As violence erupts, her teachers and all of the white people flee, except for Mr. Watts, an eccentric recluse. He decides to teach the children, but the only book he has is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The children are entranced by the story, but misunderstanding and lack of imagination among the adults lead to disaster, and Great Expectations becomes a catalyst for violence. The Costa (previously Whitbread) Book of the Year was The Tenderness of Wolves

(2006), the first novel of Scot-

tish-born Londoner Stef Penney. Set in an isolated community in northern Canada in 1867, the novel opens with the murder of a French trapper and the disappearance of a strange local boy. News of the violent crime draws unwelcome

outsiders;

Broadband

secrets

are

un-

Prize

for

Fiction,

awarded to a female author for a work written in English and published in the U.K., was Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Her widely praised novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) had as its backdrop the NigeriaBiafra civil war of 1967-70. The story was told by Ugwu, a 13year-old houseboy, and was about a small group of people— Odenigbo, the charismatic university lecturer who employs Ugwu; Odenigbo’s beautiful girl-

her brother, who has committed

the

(The first was

earthed and old resentments stirred up. a New Zealander. The novel, his 11th The Costa judges said that they “felt enveloped by the snowy landscape and gripped by the beautiful Winner of the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonwriting and effortless storyfiction, American author Rajiv Chandrasekaran telling.” The British public holds the U.K. edition of his award-winning novel agreed, and the book quickly beImperial Life in the Emerald City. came a best seller. The winner of the Orange

The Gathering, had won. The story was told from the point of view of Veronica as her family comes together for the funeral of

this, Sir Howard Davies, chair of

Swift,

and William Boyd, for example. The other Man Booker front-runner was Mister Pip (2006) by Lloyd Jones,

novel,

suicide. The author readily acknowledged that the novel was a depressing read, but she said that it was like a "Hollywood weepie." One of the favourites for the prize had been Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Set in 1962, it told the story of Edward and Florence on their wedding day, both of them nervously contemplating their first sexual encounter. Owing to its brevity, the book’s inclusion on the short list was controversial. Responding to

book, was only his second to be pub-

friend, Olanna, who abandons

a

life of privilege (and therefore relative safety) to live with him; her

Sd

twin

sister,

Kainene;

and

Richard, a diffident Englishman who is in love with Kainene. Their lives cross and drift apart

Literature

and weave together again as the civil war unfolds around them and eventually affects them all. In nonfiction The God Delusion (2006)

by Richard Dawkins continued to be high-profile and controversial, and it remained on the best-seller lists. A rash of books came out in response to Dawkins’s atheistic stance. Among the most notable of these was Darwins Angel: An Angelic Riposte to “The God Delusion,” by John Cornwell. The Times newspaper described Cornwell's book as “a piece of sheer heaven. . .deliciously wise, witty and intellectually sharp.” The 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction was awarded to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, for Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (published in the U.S. in 2006 and in the U.K., with a slight change in title, in 2007). The book was about the ill-prepared attempts of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to rebuild Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Baroness Helena Kennedy, chair of the judging panel, praised the book as being “up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years. . . . Chandrasekaran stands back...from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle of it." Gen. Sir Mike Jackson's Soldier: The Autobiography also drew attention because of its criticism of the coalition's actions in Iraq. A career soldier and former head of the British army, the general was renowned for the care he took of the men and women under his command as well as for his ability to court the media. His autobiography described his experiences in some of the world's most troubled places. The Royal Society Prize for Science Books (formerly the Aventis Prize) was

awarded to Stumbling on Happiness (2006) by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert. Reviewers gleefully pointed out the many paradoxes in the book; in 7he Times Christopher Hart noted, "Reading it won't make you any happier, the author assures us; but by the end you will at least realise why it was really dumb of you ever to have thought it might.” The Royal Society's junior prize was awarded to Can You Feel the Force? (2006),

a children’s

introduction

to

physics by British television host Richard Hammond and a team of advisers. This brief compendium explained the scientific principles behind many everyday phenomena—such as

rainbows,

bouncing

balls,

and

fric-

tion—and suggested experiments to demonstrate them. The prize was judged by panels of young people who were drawn from more than 100 organizations in the U.K. The Dangerous Book for Boys (2006), by brothers Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, remained at the top of the nonfiction best-seller charts in 2007. Although the publishers had advertised the title initially as a children’s book, they quickly found that grown-up boys were also eager to read it. Hoping that girls (and their mothers) were equally interested in revisting a golden age of innocent childhood pastimes (playing simple playground games and making their own

toys, for instance),

a rival

house published The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine.

The year saw a number of eagerly awaited children’s book sequels, including Outcast by Michelle Paver—the fourth book in her prehistoric “Chronicles of Ancient Darkness” series—and Anthony Horowitz’s Snakehead, starring the ultimate boy spy, Alex Rider. Another interesting publication was the graphic-novel version of 2001's bestselling Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, adapted by Andrew Donkin and illustrated by Giovanni Rigano and Paulo Lamanna. Nick Hornby, long a charttopping writer for adults, wrote his first book for teenagers, Slam. In picture books, Julia Donaldson and Axel Schef-

fler,

the

pair

behind

The

Gruffalo

(1999), produced Tiddler, much

to the

delight of the youngest book lovers. In poetry two titles stood out, one set far away and the other locally. The first, John Haynes’s Letter to Patience (2006),

the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. Ten years and six books after the first Harry Potter, the last was published simultaneously around the world; having been fed numerous hints that Harry himself might die, fans were in a frenzy of anticipation by the time the book came out. It sold 11 million copies in the first 24 hours in the U.K. and U.S. alone. The most prestigious children’s book prize in the U.K. is perhaps the Chartered Institute of Library and Informa-

received the Costa Poetry Award. The book-length poem, in iambic pentameter, took the form of a letter written by the father of a Nigerian family living in England in 1993 and addressed to his friend Patience. Once a university lecturer in politics, she now works in a bar in Nigeria, which is in the throes of political unrest. The Costa judges pronounced the book “a unique long poem of outstanding quality, condensing a lifetime of reflection and experience into a work of transporting momentum, imaginative lucidity, and consummate formal accomplishment.” The second, Seamus Heaney’s District

tion

Carnegie

and Circle (2006), was awarded the T.S.

Medal. The recipient (of this and of its picture book equivalent, the Kate Greenaway Medal) is chosen by children’s librarians in conjunction with hundreds of schools nationwide. The 2007 medal was awarded to Just in

Eliot Prize for Poetry. The collection opened “in an age of bare hands and cast iron” and ended “as the automatic lock / clunks shut.” Like all of Heaney’s work—and all of the best U.K. literary fiction in 2007—it inspired the reader to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Without doubt, the most talked-about

novel of 2007 was the final book in the Harry Potter

series, Harry

Professionals

(CILIP)

Potter and

Case (2006) by London-based American

writer Meg Rosoff. It was about a 15year-old boy—who begins the story as David Case but changes his name to Justin Case—who is convinced that fate is out to get him. The CILIP Carnegie judges said that the novel was “distinctive and outstanding” and the writing style “intelligent yet spare,” while the Times called it “a modern The Catcher in the Rye.” The recipient of the Kate Greenaway Medal was British artist and writer Mini Grey, for The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon (2006), the story of what happened after the dish and the spoon from the nursery rhyme "Hey diddle, diddle" ran away together. The judges commented that the book “conveys beautifully the idea of villainous cutlery!”

(POLLY NOLAN)

United States. Amid flat sales figures for trade books and in the face of the rising use of gadgets born of technology—iPods that download music and now films—and a growing new interest in comic

books

for adults

(so-called

graphic novels), the good old-fashioned superabundance of American literature once again emerged in 2007. Novelist Norman Mailer pursued his obsession with the questions of good and evil by publishing a fascinating fictional study of the childhood of Adolf Hitler. The novel, titled The Castle in the Forest, re-

ceived many good reviews and others that were mystifying (a number of critics, for and against, deciding to review (continued on page 258)

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Literature

WORLD

LITERARY PRIZES 2007

All prizes are annual and were awarded in 2007 unless otherwise stated. Currency equivalents as of July 1, 2007, were as follows: €1 = $1.355; £1 = $2.009; Can$1 = $0.939; ¥1 = $0.008; SKr 1 = $0.146; DKr 1 = $0.171; and 1 Russian ruble = $0.039.

Nobel Prize for Literature

Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction

Awarded since 1901; included in the behest of Alfred Nobel, who specified a

Established in 1996. Awarded to a work of published fiction written by a woman in English and published in the U.K. during the 12 months ended March 31. Prize: £30,000 and a bronze figurine called the “Bessie.”

prize for those who “shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” The prizewinners are selected in October by the Swedish Academy and receive the award on December 10 in Stockholm. Prize: a gold medal and an award that varies from year to year; in 2007 the award was SKr 10 million. Doris Lessing (U.K.)

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award First awarded in 1996, this is the largest international literary prize; it is open to books written in any language. The award is a joint initiative of Dublin City Council, the Municipal Government of Dublin City, and the productivity-improvement company IMPAC. It is administered by Dublin City Public Libraries. Prize: €100,000, of which 25% goes to the translator if the book was not written in English, and a Waterford crystal trophy. The awards are given at Dublin Castle in May or June. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Norway), translated by Anne Born (U.K.)

Half ofa Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award The prize was first awarded in 2005 and recognizes a collection of short stories in English by a living author and published in the previous 12 months. The award is organized by the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland and Cork and underwritten by O’Flynn Construction. Prize: €35,000, shared by the writer and the translators (if any). No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July (U.S.)

Bollingen Prize in Poetry Established in 1949 by Paul Mellon, it is awarded to an American poet every two years by the Yale University Library. Prize: $100,000.

Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Frank Bidart

Established in 1969 and awarded biennially by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today. Novelists, poets, and dramatists are equally eligi-

PENI/Nabokov Award

ble. Prize: $50,000, a replica of an eagle feather cast in silver, and a certificate.

Claribel Alegria (Nicaragua), awarded in 2006 Man Booker International Prize

This prize is awarded every other year (beginning in 2005) to a living author of fiction of any nationality who writes in English or whose work is widely translated into English for the body of his work. The prize is supported by the Man Group PLC. Winners are announced in midyear. Prize: £60,000.

Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) (awarded in 2007)

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature This award, first awarded in 2003 by the government of Sweden, is awarded annually to one or more living authors who, in the words of the organizers, “in their writing have produced literature for children and young people of absolutely the highest artistic quality and in the humanistic spirit associated with Astrid Lindgren.” In 2007 the award was given to an organization. Prize: SKr 5 million. Banco del Libro (Venezuela) Commonwealth

Writers’ Prize

Established in 1987 by the Commonwealth Foundation. In 2007 there was one award of £10,000 for the best book submitted, as well as an award of

£5,000 for the best first book. In each of the four regions of the Commonwealth, two prizes of £1,000 are awarded: one for the best book and one for the best first book.

Best Book Best First Book

Regional winners—Best Book Africa Caribbean & Canada

Eurasia Southeast Asia & South Pacific

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (New Zealand) Vandal Love by D.Y. Béchard (Canada) The Native Commissioner by Shaun Johnson (South Africa) The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards (Canada) The Perfect Man by Naeem Murr (U.K.) Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (New Zealand)

Man Booker Prize

Established in 1969, sponsored by Booker McConnell Ltd. and, beginning in 2002, the Man Group; administered by the National Book League in the U.K. Awarded to the best full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the U.K. during the 12 months ended September 30. Prize: £50,000.

With this award, in even-numbered years the PEN American Center recognizes a living author for his or her body of work in a variety of genres written in, or translated into, English. Named for Vladimir Nabokov and supported by the Vladimir Nabokov Foundation, the award was first presented in 2000. Prize: $20,000.

Philip Roth (2006 award)

PEN/Faulkner Award The PEN/Faulkner Foundation each year recognizes the best published works of fiction by contemporary American writers. Named for William Faulkner, the PEN/Faulkner Award was founded by writers in 1980 to honour their peers. Prize: $15,000.

Everyman by Philip Roth Pulitzer Prizes in Letters and Drama

Begun in 1917, awarded by Columbia University, New York City, on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board for books published in the previous year. Five categories in Letters are honoured: Fiction, Biography, and General Non-Fiction (authors of works in these categories must be American citizens); History (the subject must be American history); and Poetry (for original verse by an American author). The Drama prize is for “a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.” Prize: $10,000 in each category. Fiction

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Drama

Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

History

The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

Poetry

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Biography

The Most Famous Man in America by Debby Applegate

General Non-Fiction

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

National Book Awards Awarded since 1950 by the National Book Foundation, a consortium of American publishing groups. Categories have varied, beginning with 3— Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry—swelling to 22 awards in 1983, and return-

ing to the following 4 in 2001. Prize: $10,000 and a crystal sculpture in each category.

Fiction

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Nonfiction

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Costa Book of the Year Established in 1971 as the Whitbread Literary Awards (from 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year); Costa Coffee assumed sponsorship in 2006. The winners of the Costa Book Awards for Poetry, Biography, Novel, and First Novel as well as the Costa Children’s Book of the Year each receive £5,000, and the

Poetry Young People’s Literature

Time and Materials by Robert Hass = The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Frost Medal

winner of the Costa Book of the Year prize receives an additional £25,000. Winners are announced early in the year following the award.

Awarded annually since 1930 by the Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (2006 award)

John Hollander

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Literature

WORLD

LITERARY PRIZES 2007 (continued)

Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Awards

Planeta Prize

The ALSC, a branch of the American Library Association (ALA), presents a series of awards each year for excellence in children's literature. The two best-established and best-known are the following: The Newbery Medal, first bestowed in 1922 (the oldest award in the world for childrens literature), honours the author of the most distinguished contribution in English to American literature for children. The award consists of a bronze medal. Susan Patron, for The Higher Power of Lucky

Premio Planeta de Novela. Established in 1951 by the Planeta Publishing House for the best unpublished original novel in Spanish. Awarded in Barcelona in October. Prize: €601,000 and publication by Planeta. El mundo by Juan José Millás

The Caldecott Medal, first bestowed in 1938, is awarded to the artist of

Camées Prize

Premio Luis da Camões da Literatura. Established in 1988 by the governments of Portugal and Brazil to honour a “representative” author writing in the Portuguese language. Prize: €100,000. António Lobo Antunes (Portugal)

the most distinguished picture book for children. The award consists of a bronze medal.

Russian Booker Prize

David Wiesner, for Flotsam

Awarded since 1992, the Russian Booker Prize has sometimes carried the

Governor General's Literary Awards

names of various sponsors-e.g., Smirnoff in 1997-2001. In 2004 it was underwritten by the Open Russia Charitable Organization and called the

Canada’s premier literary awards. Prizes are given in 14 categories altogeth-

Booker/Open Russia Literary Prize. Awards: $15,000 for the winner; $1,000

er: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Translation, Nonfiction, and Children’s Literature (Text and Illustration), each in English and French. Established in 1937. Prize: Can$25,000. Fiction (English) Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje Fiction (French) La Mer de la Tranquillité by Sylvain Trudel

Poetry (English) Poetry (French)

All Our Wonder Unavenged by Don Domanski Seul on est by Serge Patrice Thibodeau

for each finalist. Matisse by Aleksandr Ilichevsky Big Book Prize

Premiya Bolshaya Kniga. First given out in 2006, it is sponsored by the government of Russia and underwritten by a number of prominent businessmen, who also serve on the jury. Awards: 3 million rubles for first prize, 1.5 million for second, and 1 million for third.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya for her novel Daniel Shtayn, perevodchik

Griffin Poetry Prize

Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature

Established in 2001 and administered by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the award honours first-edition books of poetry published during the preceding year. Prize: Can$50,000 each for the two awards.

Established in 1996 and awarded for the best contemporary novel pub-

Canadian Award International Award

Strike/Slip by Don McKay Scar Tissue by Charles Wright (U.S.)

Büchner Prize

lished in Arabic. Prize: $1,000 and a silver medal. The winning work is

translated into English and published in Cairo, London, and New York. Nabidh Ahmar (“Red Wine”) by Aminah Zaydan (Egypt)

Caine Prize for African Writing

Hooft Prize

The Caine Prize for African Writing is awarded annually for a short story written by an African writer and published in English. The prize is named for Sir Michael Caine, longtime chairman of Booker PLC, the publishing company, and chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for 25 years. The Caine Prize was first given out in 2000. Award: £10,000 plus a travel allowance. Monica Arac de Nyeko (Uganda) for “Tambula Tree”

P.C. Hooftprijs. The Dutch national prize for literature, established in 1947.

Man Asian Literary Prize

Prize: €60,000.

This prize is to be awarded annually, beginning in autumn 2007, for an Asian novel unpublished in English. The prize is underwritten by the Man Group PLC and the Hong Kong International Literary Festival Ltd. Prize:

Georg-Büchner-Preis. Awarded for a body of literary work in the German language. First awarded in 1923; now administered by the German Academy for Language and Literature. Prize: €40,000. Martin Mosebach (Germany)

J.M.A. Biesheuvel Nordic Council Literature Prize

Established in 1961. Selections are made by a 10-member jury from among original works first published in Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish during the past two years or in other Nordic languages (Finnish, Faroese, Sami, etc.) during the past four years. Prize: DKr 350,000.

Drémfakulteten by Sara Stridsberg (Sweden) Prix Goncourt Prix de l'Académie Goncourt. First awarded in 1903 from the estate of French literary figure Edmond Huot de Goncourt, to memorialize him and his brother, Jules. Prize: €10.

Alabama Song by Gilles Leroy Prix Femina Established in 1904. The awards for works "of imagination" are announced by an all-women jury in the categories of French fiction, fiction in translation, and nonfiction. Announced in November together with the Prix Médicis. Prize: Not stated. French Fiction

Baisers de cinéma by Eric Fottorino

$10,000 for the author and $3,000 for the translator, plus publication and

distribution of the work if other arrangements have not been made. Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (China), translated by Howard Goldblatt (U.S.) Jun'ichiro Tanizaki Prize Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Sho. Established in 1965 to honour the memory of nov-

elist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Awarded annually to a Japanese author for an exemplary literary work. Prize: 1,000,000 and a trophy. Yüichi Seirai for Bakushin ("Ground Zero")

Ryunosuke Akutagawa Prize Akutagawa Ryunosuke Sho. Established in 1935 and now sponsored by the Association for the Promotion of Japanese Literature, the prize is awarded in January and June for the best serious work of fiction by a promising new Japanese writer published in a magazine or journal. Prize: 1,000,000 and a commemorative gift. “Hitori Biyori” (“Being Alone”) by Nanae Aoyama (136th prize, second half of 2006) “Asatte no Hito” (“The Person of the Day After Tomorrow”) by Tetsushi Suwa (137th prize, first half of 2007)

Strega Prize

Mao Dun Literary Award

Premio Strega. Awarded annually since 1947 for the best work of prose (fiction or nonfiction) by an Italian author in the previous year. The prize is supported by the beverage company Liquore Strega and Telecom Italia. Prize: not stated. Come Dio comanda by Niccoló Ammaniti

Established in 1981 to honour contemporary Chinese novels and named after novelist Shen Yanbing (1896-1981), whose nom de plume was Mao Dun; awarded every five years. The latest awards were announced in April

Cervantes Prize for Hispanic Literature

Premio Cervantes. Established in 1976 and awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for a body of work in the Spanish language. Announced in November or December and awarded the following April. Prize: €90,450. Juan Gelman (Argentina)

2005.

Zhang Juzheng (“Chang Chii-cheng”) by Xiong Zhaozheng Wuzi ("Without Words") by Zhang Jie

Lishi de tiankong (“The Sky of History”) by Xu Guixiang Dong cang ji (“Hidden Away in the East”) by Zong Pu Yingxiong shidai (“The Era of Heroes”) by Liu Jianwei

257

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

other

(continued from page 255)

Mailer rather than the novel)

with

Mailer

followed

through

book, On

God, in which he advanced

of his comic

Stegner’s

a nonfiction

Because

Head

portrayed

trous,

western

successes.

a Fire

Was

a powerful, Canadian

Lynn in My

if disas-

antiheroine.

his argument that God is an artist. Mailer died soon after the book's pub-

Three writers turned in volumes of novellas: Rick Moody, with Right Liveli-

lication. (See OBITUARIES.) Don DeLillo, a master of the so-called

hoods (which contained “The Albertine Notes,” one of the finest science-fiction stories of recent years); Paul Theroux,

postmodernist novel, boldly took up the subject of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City in the novel Falling Man, which received mixed reviews. Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's farewell to the character of writer Nathan Zuckerman (who held sway in eight earlier

with The Elephanta Suite (three long stories set in contemporary India); Michael Knight, with The Holiday Season; and Alan Cheuse, with The Fires.

Some younger writers, mostly firstgeneration Americans, produced debut novels of real mastery, among them Do-

novels), fared a little better with the re-

viewers and critics than his peers. "Maybe the most potent discoveries are

minican American Junot Diaz, with The

man dying of ALS (amyotrophic lateral

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (the pathetic tragedy of a Dominican kid from New Jersey who is a dangerously hopeless romantic); Nathan Englander, with The Ministry of Special Cases

sclerosis; Lou Gehrig disease), also had

(which takes the reader into the lives

a fine reception. Michael Chabon released two new

and hearts of a Jewish Argentine family during Argentina’s “dirty war”); Pe-

historical fiction novels in 2007.

ruvian American

reserved for last," Zuckerman declared. Some critics agreed. Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison’s novel about a

Five days up the river and they came upon another, flowing in from the mountains to the east to meet the Sacramento, causing it to swell and double its width to form a kind of bay, and at last they get a look at those who live here. A crowd of men stand on the bank, two hundred or more, armed with bows and arrows,

their bodies painted yellow, black and red. Three sailors level their pistols, but Sutter tells them, “Wait!”

James D. Houston’s late 19th-century California historical novel Bird of Another Heaven followed on the success of his Donner Party fiction Snow Mountain Passage (2001).

The winner of the 2007 National Book Award for best fiction was Denis Johnson’s 600-page Tree of Smoke, which took its name from a biblical text that in part sets the tone for the novel: Joel 2:30-31.

And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the

moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.

The novel, which follows the story of a CIA agent in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, won copious praise.

Some younger but well-established fiction writers published novels that met with warm praise. Michael Chabon demonstrated the definition of prolific 258

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

by bringing out two novels in one year, The Yiddish Policemen’s

Union,

a seri-

ous alternative historical fiction about life in a Jewish state set aside in Alaska,

and Gentlemen of the Road, a historical fantasy about a Jewish adventurer and his African pal in an adventure set in an ancient myth-tinged central Asian kingdom during the Middle Ages. Sherman Alexie also delivered two books— the novel Flight and a young-adult fiction titled The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Nigerian-born fiction writer Chris Abani had two offerings—the full-length novel The Virgin of Flames and the short novel Song for Night. Story writer Amy Bloom had, in Away (the period saga of a female Jewish immigrant to the U.S.), a momentary best seller. Ann Patchett’s novel Run found itself on the best-seller list soon after publication. Five Skies by Ron Carlson took up with great success the world of men and machines in this story about the construction of a stunt ramp in the middle of the Idaho wilds. In Red Rover Deirdre McNamer took her readers to a Montana bustling with youthful vigour and then rife with old age. Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers went back to the period of Sen. Joseph McCarthys prominence during the early 1950s and opened up the hidden world of gay Washington, D.C., at that time. Christopher Buckley used Washington, D.C., for the setting of Boomsday, an-

Daniel Alarcón, with

Lost City Radio (about the aftermath of a guerrilla war in an unnamed Latin American country); and Iranian American Dalia Sofer, with The Septembers of Shiraz (a lyrical lament about an Iranian family’s struggle following the end of the Iranian Revolution). Hawaii

served as the setting for story writer Kaui Hart Hemmings’s pleasurable first novel, The Descendants. Story writer Margot Singer put her linked stories into a volume called The Pale of Settlement, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman came out with Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales, mainly in the vernacular.

(“Follow

me,

Jack

or

Jill—if you will. You know, in Chinese lore, white is the color of death and corruption. ‘Taint necessarily so, like the Man

sings in the Song.

Howsumevah,

kick back and allow me to hip you to my color-whacked past. . .then you tell moi... .": "Shark Liver Oil") San Fran-

cisco writer Kiara Brinkman made her debut with a novel, Up High in the Trees.

Two former U.S. poet laureates brightened the year in poetry with new volumes of verse. Robert Hass, in Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005, wrote of

love and politics and nature. (“Tomales Bay is flat blue in the Indian summer heat. / This is the time when hikers on Inverness Ridge / Stand on tiptoe to pick ripe huckleberries / That the deer can't reach. This is the season of lulls— / Egrets hunting in the tidal shallows, a ribbon / Of sandpipers fluttering over mudflats... .”:n.

Literature

"September, Inverness") His book took the National Book Award in poetry. Robert Pinskys Gulf Music fuses song and history and the vexing connections or lack of them between all things in this world, as in the title poem: “Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la, / Mah

la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wellawah. / The hurricane of September 8, 1900 devastated / Galveston, Texas... .” Among other prizewinning poets,

John Ashbery came out with A Worldly Country, and C.D. Wright released One Big Self: An Investigation. Other offerings included Gary Soto’s A Simple Plan,

Grace

Schulman’s

The

Broken

String, Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North, Tom Sleigh’s Space Walk, and Karl Kirchwey's The Happiness of This World. Poet and novelist Kelly Cherry produced Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. Mary Lee

Settle, who

died in 2005,

left Learning to Fly: A Writers Memoir, notably about her World War II experiences in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison was the first full biography of the late American writer. Novelist and experimental biographer Beverly Lowry offered Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life. Noteworthy personal writings included: Notebooks (2006; journal entries [1936-81] of playwright Tennessee Williams), edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton; The Journal of Joyce

Carol

Oates,

1973-1982,

edited

by Greg Johnson; and Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, edited by W.C. Bamberger. Page Stegner,

son

of the

celebrated

Western

writer, edited The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner. Some sprightly criticism and essays appeared in book form, including novelist and story writer George Saunders’s The Braindead Megaphone and story writer Steve Almond’s Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obses-

sions. (“William Butler Yeats, when he was riding the bus, would occasionally go into a compositional trance. He

would stare straight ahead and utter a low hum and beat time with his hands. People would come up to him and ask him if he was all right.”) The New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella expanded her view to publish short essays and reviews of writers, sculptors, and other artists in 7Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints.

Janice Ross focused on an experimental American choreographer in her Anna

Halprin:

Experience

as

Dance.

Critic Philip Joseph examined literary

regionalism

in American

Literary

Re-

gionalism in a Global Age. Sheldon M. Novick took up the subject of the late work of Henry James in Henry James: The Mature Master. In The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, spirited critic Mark Edmundson portrayed the master of psychoanalysis during the Nazi siege of Europe. Stacy A. Cordery wrote about one of the most famous female figures in Washington in Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker.

evil spirit haunts a woman’s dementiafrayed memories; to M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song, which traced the ef fects of 800 years of history and mythology on the turmoil and strife of modern

India

to Alissa

York’s Effigy, the spellbinding tale of a family whose members share a wideopen faith and a closetful of secrets. Then there was the aptly titled Spook Country, William Gibson’s sinister romp through a hyperspace inhabited by counterfeiters of all kinds—spies, double agents, geohackers, and journalists. In The Empress

She had a cheerful countenance, and that sometimes disguised her habit of looking on the world with what she called ‘detached malevolence.’ She laughed easily and often, finding humanity wryly funny in its capricious and frequently self-destructive march. She was personally shy—just one reason she never sought elected office.

and Pakistan;

Letters,

Linda

Rogers

drilled down through the layers of early 20th-century Victoria (B.C.) society from the heights of moneyed privilege to caves of smuggled drugs and the illicit affairs of mismatched mates. Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes transported the reader from an African village to a Deep South plantation, to the polyglot crowds of Halifax (N.S.) docks to the manor houses of London,

Cultural critic Alan Trachtenberg added to his productions with Lincoln's Smile and Other Enigmas. Much-honoured historian James M. McPherson augmented his studies with This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Roth won the PEN/Faulkner Prize— for a record-breaking third time—for

while in Claire Mulligan’s The Reckoning of Boston Jim, the hero repays a woman's kindness by searching for her errant husband on an epic journey from Vancouver Island to Barkerville’s untamed gold fields. The more recent history of the MacKenzie pipeline hearings (1974-77) formed the backdrop for Elizabeth Hay’s Giller Prize-winning Late Nights

his

The

on Air, in which the foibles of a cast of

PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction went to Elizabeth Spencer. Chicago writer Stuart Dybek, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, was given the Rea Award for the Short Story. Robert Olmstead’s Civil War fiction Coal Black Horse won the Heartland Prize. The Pulitzer Prize committee, known to prefer uplifting fiction, stretched its limits to give the prize in fiction to Cormac McCarthy for his dramatic postapocalyptic allegory The Road, a novel that was also a pick of the Oprah Winfrey television book club and a New York Times best seller.

eccentric characters are played out against the barrenness of northern landscapes and southern hearts. In Divisadero Michael Ondaatje used the base of a closely shared childhood from which to launch the diverging stories of three lives divided by a single brutal incident. For that work Ondaatje was rewarded with the Governor General's

novel

Aside

from

Everyman

Mailers,

(2006).

deaths

in 2007

included those of fiction writers Tillie Olsen, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Grace Paley, Elizabeth Hardwick, and humorist Art Buchwald. (See OBITUARIES.) Other

losses were novelist Daniel Stern and literary critic John W. Aldridge. (ALAN CHEUSE)

Canada. Historical novels were plentiful in Canada in 2007, ranging from Mary Novik’s Conceit, an artistic concept daringly realized in the raunchy, spirit-ridden 17th century; to David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, in which an

Literary Award for fiction (his fifth).

Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here was built on the mutable structure of a long friendship with all its odd angles and shady corners. October was Richard B. Wrights masterful evocation of a month of contrasts—two people dying, two lives lived, two moments in time—then and now. Barbara Gowdy, in Helpless, delved the depths of that most-hated predator, the pedophile kidnapper, while in Lauchlin of the Bad

Heart,

D.R.

MacDonald

dis-

sected the life of a man captive of, and sustained by, the village he was born in and returned to. Short stories were all over the map. Tom Wayman explored the Boundary Country of British Columbia’s Kootenay valleys, while Barry Callaghan viewed 259

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

novels proved successful for Helon Habila

(Measuring

Time)

and

Chima-

manda Ngozi Adichie (see BIOGRAPHIES), whose affecting novel Half of a Yellow

Sun

(2006)

won

the

Orange

Prize for Fiction. South African-born 2003 Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, who was living in Australia,

addressed

numerous

social,

political, aesthetic, and interpersonal concerns in his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, which highlighted the profound problems of millions of people living in democracies throughout the world—all presented in a unique narrative divided into two and then three distinct parts running concurrently on each page. Fellow Nobel Prize winner (in 1991) Nadine

Gordimer

of South

Africa received Frances Legion of Honour and rewarded readers with her memorable collection Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories. Award-winning Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy wove a suspenseful tale of a child kidnapping in Helpless.

Also from South Africa, Shaun Johnson (Native Commissioner [2006]) and Max-

ine

Case

(All We

[2006]), won

the wild country Between Trains, and Patricia Robertson juxtaposed the dark realities of war and the glittering spells of exotic dancing in her collection The Goldfish Dancer. The stories in Mary Borskys Cobalt Blue were set somewhere between here and there in landscapes physical and metaphysical together. The even more surreal habitat of Salvatore Difalco’s Black Rabbit & Other Stories was

in stark contrast to

the brutal fact of loss in Mary Lou Dickinson’s One Day It Happens. M.A.C. Farrant in The Breakdown So Far led readers from bare beginnings through broken bits of thought and narrative to unsettling conclusions. Poetry was

as idiosyncratic

as ever.

Margaret Atwood opened The Door to the conundrums of growing old in a turbulent world; Yvonne

pared

and

Canadian

contrasted

Blomer com-

dows

into

the

mind

of a madman,

based on his own memoirs. In Muybridge’s Horse, a long, sensual poetic study of passion and obsessive brilliance, Rob Winger exposed the career of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. In Torch River Elizabeth Philips illuminated the thoughts and experiences of the denizens of a wilderness-challenged society, as, from another angle, did Joanne Arnott in her Mother Time, chronicling children’s lives in chronological order, while Agnes Walsh's Going Around with Bachelors, offered a seriously lighthearted look at a gallery of Newfoundland's vanishing people.

and

(ELIZABETH RHETT WOODS)

mirror,

Other Literature in English. Outstanding new works in English by authors from

Japanese

cultures in A broken

work. Barbara Nickel’s Domain established its own poetic spaces—mental, physical, and social—while Brian Henderson’s Nerve Language offered win-

fallen leaf; Lorna Crozier meditated on The Blue Hour of the Day; Patrick Friesen managed to keep his poetic balance as he investigated the secrets

Australia were among the highlights in world literature in 2007. Booker Prize

of Earth’s

Erin

winner (in 1991) and Nigerian-born au-

Mouré navigated her way through the downfalls of life most tellingly in O Cadoiro. Dennis Lee presented another collection of short poems in his quirky

thor Ben Okri released the novel Starbook: A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration, and compatriot poet and fiction writer Chris Abani brought out his second novella, Song for Night, a first-person narrative about a soldier who suffers when he is separated from his platoon. Similar themes were present in Biyi Bandele’s coming-of-age novel Burma Boy. Elsewhere, second

Crude

Gravities;

Yesno, while Don Domanski

and

in All Our

Wonder Unavenged used intensely distilled language and form to imbue each detail with unearthly clarity; Domanski won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry for this 260

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, and

Have

regional

Left Unsaid

Commonwealth

Writers’ Prizes in the categories of Best Book

(Africa)

and

Best

First

Book

(Africa), respectively. Prolific South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda enjoyed continued popularity with the publication of his latest novel, Cion,

which

centred

on

the

character

of

Toloki, who had invented his own

oc-

cupation as a professional mourner and had first been introduced in Ways of Dying (1995). Several other fine works from subSaharan Africa worth noting included Ugandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko’s story "Jambula Tree" (from the collection

African

Love

Stories

[2006,

edited by Ama Ata Aidoo]), which captured the Caine Prize for African Writing. Moreover, Ghanian-born poet, critic,

musician,

and

performance

artist Kwame Dawes amply displayed his talents in Impossible Flying, perhaps his most personal verse collection to date. New Zealand author Lloyd Jones published to great fanfare his most recent work, Mister Pip (2006), inspired in part by the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. The novel not only won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Overall Best Book and the Montana (N.Z.) Medal

for fiction but also was

short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Janet Frame’s posthumously released beautiful and thought-provoking verse collection The Goose Bath (2006) gave witness to the depth and breadth of the authors life and took the top honour in

Literature

GERMAN The German Book Prize was awarded in 2007 to Julia Franck for her novel Die Mittagsfrau, the story of a woman who spends a large part of the 20th century struggling for independence and happiness. The novel’s protagonist, Helene, experiences World Wars I and II and loses her father and her Jewish mother to war or racial prejudice. Living in Berlin in the turbulent 1920s, she also loses her fiancé, and when she ul-

timately marries and gives birth to a son, she makes the painful decision to abandon him in order to find herself; but this she never does. The novel,

Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko won the 2007 Caine Prize for African Writing for the short story “Jambula Tree.” the poetry category for the Montana Medal competition. In Australia, David Malouf, one of the

finest practitioners of the short story, delivered 31 selections constituting his epic collection The Complete Short Stories. Renowned

author, historian,

and

film director Richard Flanagan drew popular and critical acclaim with The Unknown

Terrorist (2006), a spellbind-

ing mystery that offered a cynical postSept. 11, 2001, view of the political climate in and plight of large cities. Alexis Wright, one of Australia’s finest Aboriginal writers, published her second novel, Carpentaria (2006), an epic set in northwestern Queensland that won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Established authors Les Murray and Janette Turner Hospital saw the release of their

which reflected on the way in which history impinges on the lives of individuals in unexpected and frequently unpleasant ways, showed that people’s efforts to elude the constraints of history often seemed destined to end in failure. With this novel and with the winning of the German Book Prize, Franck established herself as one of the most important German authors of the younger generation. Ingo Schulze’s short-story collection Handy, the recipient of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, was

one

of the most

interesting books of the year. Following up on the remarkable success of Schulzes 1998 book Simple Storys—a novel told in the form of interconnected short stories—Handy further demonstrated Schulze's mastery of short fiction. Schulze's stories were seemingly modest and unimposing, but they were told with such cleverness that they gripped the reader with the urge to know more. One short story, “Die Verwirrungen der Silvesternacht,” reflected on the collapse in 1989 of the German

Democratic

Republic

pheus Lost, respectively), and Colleen McCullough added a seventh novel to her Masters of Rome series, Antony and Cleopatra. On a sad note, the year was marked by the deaths of British-born Australian author, poet, and scriptwriter Elizabeth Jolley

seits des Van-Allen-Gürtels,

(see

(Selected Poems

OBITUARIES);

and Or-

Australian

award-winning author Glenda Adams; New Zealand poet and actress Edith Hannah Campion; Senegalese writer, film director, and producer Ousmane Sembéne

(see OBITUARIES);

tralian author, playwright,

and Aus-

and televi-

sion scriptwriter Steve J. Spears. (DAVID DRAPER CLARK)

Austrian author Thomas Glavinic, whose novel Die Arbeit der Nacht (2006)

had been

well received,

followed

up

with another novel, Das bin doch ich.

Like Herrndorf, Glavinic played with the relationship between reality and fiction; the main character in his new novel was Thomas Glavinic, the author of a book called Die Arbeit der Nacht,

who reflected enviously on the international success of another German-language novel by another young author who had written a book called Die Vermessung der Welt. Glavinic’s novel humorously suggested that in the lives of writers, fiction and reality cannot be neatly separated. Glavinic’s Austrian colleague Sabine Gruber published Uber Nacht, a cleverly constructed novel that told the parallel stories of two women—one an Austrian patient named Irma who is waiting for a liver transplant and the other an Italian nurse named Mira— who will ultimately cross paths. The novel reflected on the philosophical and moral implications of organ transplants and the various other kinds of sharing and transubstantiation that are connected to them. The names of the two main characters are in fact simply

Julia Franck, winner of the German Book Prize, poses with her awardwinning novel, Die Mittagsfrau.

(GDR)

via the private life of a young couple who are driven apart by the very historical events that they have helped bring about; 10 years later, on New Year’s Eve, the couple is briefly brought together again, only to be separated for good. In this story, as in many others, Schulze showed how the great dramas of history often play out in a much more banal way at the individual level. Another important collection of short stories was Wolfgang Herrndorfs Dies-

latest works

whose viewpoint was similar to his own. Herrndorf regarded Berlin's often self-centred literary milieu satirically but not without sympathy; after all, he was part of it.

a series

of

tales about contemporary 30- and 40somethings living in present-day Berlin. Herrndorf flirted with the connection between fiction and reality; many of his characters were themselves involved in the world of contemporary literature, and they seemed to be based on real people—frequently authors 261

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature Eric Fougere—VIP/Corbis

permutations of each other, and their lives correspond in unusual and unexpected ways. Grubers novel also suggested that literature itself is based on the transplantation of life into different, but strangely familiar, contexts. Young German author Thomas von

Salvayre lampoons

the creeping com-

mercialization of art as her heroine, a

Wallner beginnt zu fliegen, told the story of three generations in a single family whose lives and problems seemed to re-

talented novelist, takes a job writing for Jim Tobold, the “king of hamburgers,” a successful fast-food businessman. Forced to follow Tobold everywhere, copying down his words in order to condense them into a capitalist manifesto, the writer grows to hate and yet admire the vulgar, cutthroat businessman, into whose faithful pet her job

peat

has transformed

Steinaeckers

from

well-received

generation

to

first novel,

generation.

Arnold Stadler's novel Komm, gehen wir

her art for money. The one true literary sensation of 2007 was another work of journalistic

was a reflection on love, or on the im-

possibility of love; it revolved around a ménage

à trois between

a young

Ger-

realism, Yasmina Reza’s L’Aube le soir ou la nuit, for which the author, a fa-

man couple and an equally young American who meet each other on a beach on the Island of Capri. In Alexander Osang’s novel Lennon ist tot, the protagonist

moves

to

New

York

to

study but soon gives up his work at the university

in an

effort

to participate

more fully in everyday American life; as the novels title suggests, the central event for the protagonist is the murder in 1980 of singer John Lennon. Finally, Katja Lange-Müller's novel Bóse Schafe also addressed the problems, and impossibility, of love: its protagonist, Soja, falls hopelessly in love with Harry, but her attempts to help him beat his drug addiction are doomed to failure. Martin Mosebach

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

was named the winner of the 2007 Georg Büchner Prize in recognition for the body of his literary output. On June 2 Wolfgang Hilbig, one of the most important authors from the former GDR, died of cancer. (STEPHEN BROCKMANN)

FRENCH France. A new record was set in 2007

for the number of books published in France, and during the rentrée littéraire alone (the high publishing season between August and October), 727 books came out, of which more than 400 were

novels. In this annually increasing proliferation, much fiction passed unnoticed as a new trend toward journalistic realism made itself felt among the year’s literary successes, sparking a new polemic on “reality fiction” and the lack of imagination in French literature. For example, one of the year’s best sellers and winner of the Prix Médicis was Jean Hatzfeld’s third tome of his portrait of Rwanda in the wake of genocide. La Stratégie des antilopes told the tale of Nyamata, a village in which Tutsi survivors must now live in fear and memory side by side with their 262

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

her, as she sells out

French author Frédéric Beigbeder reprised the character Octave Parango in his newest novel, Au secours

pardon. Hutu persecutors, recently released from prison. Another popular example of the new journalistic trend was François Bégaudeau’s Fin de l'histoire, which described in detail the true-life press conference given in June 2005 by Florence Aubenas, a French reporter who had been kidnapped and held hostage in Iraq for five months. Inspired by reality fiction’s journalistic concerns, many novels took aim at European social problems. In A fabri de rien, Olivier Adam

sins.

In

Tom

est

mort,

Marie

Dar-

rieussecq imagined the life of a mother struggling with guilt, grief, and the absurdity of death 10 years after the accident that killed her four-year-old son

on

Tom, in a novel that, despite its subject,

the problem of illegal immigration in France: when a middle-class woman in the north of France slowly enters the world of humanitarian aide workers caring for clandestine refugees, she comes to see the dignity of people she has barely noticed before, except to de-

gained poignancy by avoiding sentimentality. In Sans lorang-outan Eric Chevillard took on a subject much darker than those of his past works, namely the approaching extinction of the great apes, but did so in his usual, humorous way; after the death of the last two orangutans, mankind slips into chaos and devastation brought on by its own nonchalant destructiveness. On a lighter note, the tireless champion of the French language Erik Orsenna published a fairy tale in defense of the accent marks some French are trying to eliminate from their language. In La

cry their presence.

concentrated

mous playwright, followed Nicolas Sarkozy throughout his successful presidential campaign. Granted unprecedented access, Reza described Sarkozy's unbridled ambition and lust for power in a portrait that gripped French readers in its display of their new presidents personality, from his quick anger and boredom to his childlike humour. Though "reality fiction" dominated book sales, a few works of pure fiction did attain success with their portrayal of the perennial French theme of isolation. In her novel Mon cœur à l'étroit Marie NDiaye told of a proper, if starchy schoolteacher who suddenly discovers that her entire town has inexplicably begun to hate her. As she struggles in vain to understand why, the schoolteacher sinks into insanity, questioning her past and reliving her many

In Au secours par-

don, Frédéric Beigbeder brought back Octave Parango, the antihero of his successful 2000 novel 99 francs, this time setting him in a modeling agency in order to attack the world of cosmetics. As he seeks a new face for a leading cosmetics firm, Parango is cynically aware that his choice of everyounger, ever-blonder models is paving the way for pedophilia, racism, and the tyranny of youth. In Portrait de l'écrivain en animal domestique, Lydie

Révolte des accents,

an island commu-

nity sinks into bland boredom when a visiting theatrical troupe leaves, taking all accent marks with them, until in order to bring spice back to their

Literature

language, an islander sets out to persuade the accents to return home. In addition to the Prix Médicis awarded to Hatzfeld’s journalistic La Stratégie des antilopes, the Prix Renaudot went to Daniel Pennac’s Chagrin d'école, an autobiofiction in which the

author relives the guilt and embarrassment he felt in his childhood as the class dunce, until he was finally saved by a teacher who understood him. The Prix Femina went Baisers de cinéma,

to Eric Fottorino’s in which, after his

cameraman father’s death, the lawyer Gilles Hector meets a married woman at the movie theatre where he seeks any clue to his lost and unknown mother’s identity amid images of 1950s starlets. As the two impossible quests for inaccessible women merge, Gilles finally opens himself up to love, even if it means vulnerability to the pain of loss. Last, the most coveted literary prize, the

Prix

Goncourt,

was

awarded

to

Gilles Leroy’s Alabama Song, another “reality fiction,” which told the story of Zelda’s first meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, their marriage, and Zelda's attempts to defend herself against her husband's overwhelming selfishness. (VINCENT AURORA) Canada. The year 2007 in Quebec literature was rich and varied. JeanFrancois Beauchemin’s slender but substantial semiautobiographical work about his near-death experience, La Fabrication

de l'aube (2006), won

the

coveted Prix des Libraires in the Roman Québécois category. In the book, which attracted attention because of its unusual

theme,

the narrator

dies—or

almost succumbs—then returns to tell the tale of the great beyond. Among other new

was

writers

first-time

with Dawson

to garner

novelist Kid, whose

Simon

attention

Girard

title referred

to the shootings at Dawson College, a sad evocation of rare domestic violence in urban Quebec. Old stalwarts weighed in as well, with poet and novelist Elise Turcotte adding to the breadth of her oeuvre with a book of linked poetic short stories, Pourquoi faire une maison avec ses morts, and popular favourite Marie Laberge moving from her usual romantic tales to the crime genre with Sans rien ni personne, a "cold case" story Daniel Poliquin, a writer from French-speaking Ontario, scored with La Kermesse

(2006), a novel that won

the 2007 Prix des Lecteurs of RadioCanada and was also, in its English version (A Secret Between Us), a finalist for

the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The accolades underscored the continuing pat-

tern of crossover successes between the two literary cultures within Canada. Writer Stanley Péan celebrated nearly 20 years of publication with the release of a short-story collection, Autochtones de la nuit, which was accompanied by the reissue of four of his earlier works. Leméac Editeur Inc. marked its 50th anniversary, which was considered quite an accomplishment in the perilous marketplace of Quebec. In the meantime, Montreal's two literary festivals, Blue Metropolis and the Festival International de la Littérature, vied for

a place in the hearts of the city’s bookloving population. As always, politics and the pen crossed paths, quite literally. Former Canadian prime ministers Jean Chrétien (Passion politique) and Brian Mulroney (Mémoires) managed to avoid each other at the Montreal Book Fair as both launched their books, continuing their campaigns for a place in Canada's and Quebecs history. More substantial issues were on writers' agendas as well. Journalist Dominique Forget offered up Perdre le nord?, an essay that addressed Canadians' concerns about the disappearing polar ice cap and issues relating to Canada’s sovereignty over its northern frontier. (DAVID HOMEL)

of the most

2007 was

popular books

returns

to Genoa,

where

he and

scores of peaceful demonstrators were victims of police brutality during the 2001 Group of Eight summit. In recent years several novels had focused on harsh social realities, depicting Italy as a country of vulgarity, consumerism,

and

blatant—violence.

latent—or

sometimes

Niccoló

Ammaniti's

Come Dio comanda, which received the

Strega Prize (Italys highest literary award), was a notable example of this trend. A somewhat lighter and lessunsettling work was Sandro Veronesi's Brucia Troia; in two parallel stories the novel traced the effects of economic progress and urban development from the 1950s to 1970 on a fanatic priest who wants to impress the faithful with elaborate electronic machines and on a gang of petty criminals that specializes in arson.

Giancarlo Pastores complex novel Regina centred on the struggle of a young protagonist to distinguish between reality and fiction or, more precisely, to come to terms with the myths that he is forced to confront. Openly acknowledged in the novel as an inspiring force, writer Elsa Morante

not a novel; it was

of

an inves-

tigative report showing the exorbitant costs Italians bore to support the luxurious lifestyles of their politicians. In La casta: cosi i politici italiani sono diventati intoccabili, journalists Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella highlighted the many privileges associated with a career in politics—such as retirement with full benefits at age 50—and denounced widespread practices that led to an oversized government sector. Although the authors did not uncover much new information, they gathered impressive statistics, from the ratio of functionaries to inhabitants—which in some

who

(1912-85) was again confirmed as a durable influence on Italian literature,

ITALIAN One

1963 Vaiont landslide. In Cosa cambia Roberto Ferrucci gave voice to the questions and anguish of a journalist

regions was

about

Italian novelist Niccolò Ammaniti won

the 2007 Strega Prize for Come Dio comanda.

1 to 400—to

the number of hours officially flown by planes carrying Italian politicians—a stunning 37 per day. Some of the year’s novels dealt with tragic events in Italys recent history. Mauro Coronas / fantasmi di pietra was a moving tribute to the small village of Erto,

in the Friuli-Venezia

Giulia

re-

gion. The narrator moves from door to door through the abandoned hamlet, re-creating the ties that held together a community forever displaced by the © Marco Ghidelli/drr.net

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© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature

thanks in particular to her unsurpassed ability to depict the world of childhood.

Luigi Meneghello, who died in 2007. He would chiefly be remembered for

where because it is a metaphor of the world.” Camino de hierro, by Nativel

Morante's

Libera nos a Malo (1963), a tender and

Preciado, received the Primavera Prize.

ironic representation of his native vil-

This novel about the universal themes of death and memory, although harsh, also exhibited sensitivity and kindness. Vicente Molina Foix won the National

final novel, Aracoeli

(1982),

provided the epigraph for Silvia Dai Pràs La bambina felice, which addressed its protagonist’s difficult transition from childhood to adolescence. Alessandra Neri and Marosia Castaldi chose to focus on women at the end of their lives in their respective novels, Nove mesi and Dentro le mie mani le tue: tetralogia di Nightwater. The title of Neri's work (“Nine Months”) ominously

referred not to the normal duration of a pregnancy but rather to the time elapsed between the protagonist’s diagnosis and her last words: “I am about to die.” The author meticulously described hospitals and the rituals of the communities that inhabit them. Comparisons between the experiences of terminal patients and those of prisoners in concentration camps call into question medical practices and public attitudes toward death and dying. A meditation

on

concentration

camps

and a prognosis of nine months to live also figured in Dentro le mie mani le tue. The two novels, however, could not

be more different. While Neri’s slim volume followed the protagonist’s descent to darkness in a restrained style, Castaldi’s work was highly distinctive in the Italian contemporary landscape for its unusual length (721 pages), for its experimental prose, and for its attempt to create a universe wherein the dead and the living, reality and literature, converge. Sicilian dialect attained privileged status in the Italian literary scene, as attested not only by the continued success of Andrea Camilleri’s novels (such as La pista di sabbia, the latest of Inspector Montalbano’s adventures) but also by the publication of Terra matta, an edited version of Vincenzo Rabito's memoir. Rabito’s lack of formal education did not prevent his filling more than 1,000 typed pages with the story of his life, in energetic prose modeled on spoken Sicilian and marked by the authors idiosyncrasies—such as the habit of separating words with semicolons. Afraid that the original work's difficulties would discourage even the

lage of Malo (near Vicenza). (LAURA BENEDETTI)

Prize for Narrative with E/ abrecartas,

SPANISH Spain. Most of the books of Spanish writers in 2007 were either psychologically oriented novels or adventures with a historical setting. One of the most anticipated was Veneno y sombra y adiós, the third volume of Javier Marías's Tu rostro mañana trilogy; in this story the main character—variously Jaime, Jacobo, or Jacques Deza— who has been able to see others’ destinies, finally sees his own true self as well. He finds himself immersed in a world of betrayal and violence. In Nunca pasa nada, José Ovejero ex-

plored how life could become an accumulation of secrets and concluded that people are less ashamed of what they do than they are afraid of being caught. Juan José Millás won the Planeta Prize with El mundo, the memoir of a preadolescent boy. Millás explained, “Juanjo Milláss only dream is to escape from the street where he lives; when he does

escape, he finds the same street every-

In October Spanish writer Juan José Millás received the Planeta Prize,

Spain’ richest literary award, for El mundo, a work based on his own childhood.

Juan Manuel de Prada received the Biblioteca Breve Prize for El séptimo velo,

the

story

of Julio,

a man

who

learns a family secret after his mother's death and becomes obsessed with following the steps of Jules Tillon, another man who was obsessed with his hidden history. El alma de la ciudad, by Jests Sanchez Adalid, was set during the time of King Alfonso VIII and was the story told by a pilgrim, Blasco Jiménez, who must choose between his loyalty to a recently established city named Ambrosía

(Plasencia)

and

his personal

freedom. In Antonio Gala’s El pedestal de las estatuas, previously unknown writings of Antonio Pérez, secretary to

Philip I, revealed the hidden history of Spain in the late 16th century—the sinister and violent activities of the Spanish monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and most of the nobility. The Nadal Prize was awarded to Felipe Benitez Reyes for his parody novel Mercado de espejismos, in which two retired art thieves are commissioned to steal the remains of the Three Wise Men from the cathedral at Cologne, Ger. Benitez invites the reader to reflect on the need for people to invent their lives in order for them to become real. Luis Leante received the Alfaguara tive of contrasting cultures and social classes. In the story Montse Cambra, after losing a daughter and being abandoned by her husband, goes to the Spanish Sahara to look for her first boyfriend. The highest distinction in Spanish letters, the Cervantes Prize, was awarded

to Argentine poet Juan Gelman, whose more than 20 books of poetry addressed social and political conditions in his native country.

Santangelo and Luca Ricci produced an approximately 400-page adaptation that, while respecting as much as possible the authors style, improved readability by presenting the text with standard spelling and punctuation. A passion for local language was also a distinctive feature of the writing of

(VERONICA ESTEBAN)

Latin America. Latin American literature in 2007 continued its usual oscillation between addressing political reality and escaping into the imagination. Some works did both. AFP/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ters, including Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, and Rafael Alberti.

Prize for Mira si yo te querré, a narra-

most ambitious readers, editors Evelina

264

an epistolary novel that consists of about 70 years of correspondence between fictional and historical charac-

Literature

Combining themes and texture with great literary skill made two works by Argentine

writers

worth

noting.

New

York-based Maria Negroni’s La Anunciación described in lyrical and surrealistic prose the shifting inner world of Emma, an Argentine woman who has been exiled to Rome for political reasons. In La batalla del calentamiento (2006), Marcelo Figueras addressed Ar-

gentina’s recent past in a wildly imaginative allegorical tale about people in a small invented town. Three notable Argentine short novels were built on particular obsessions. Esther Cross’s Radiana portrayed a pianist who repeats the same tune until she be-

sor; the novel memorably portrayed the disintegration of a remote mountain town, a casualty of the cruelty of guerrillas, the paramilitary, and the army. This heartrending story won the Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela in 2006. In the nonfiction La puta de Babilonia, Fernando Vallejo criticized the theology and practice of religious institutions—especially the Roman Catholic Church but to some extent Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism

as well—

phys El encierro de Ojeda—which received the Juan Rulfo award for short novel in 2004 but was published in 2007—the main character is obsessed first with mathematics and then with words that he uses to describe everyday objects in bizarre ways. In La vida nueva, by the prolific César Aira, pub-

from their foundations to the present day Juan Gabriel Vázquezs Historia secreta de Costaguana mixed fiction and reality in a very original way. Wellestablished Uruguayan writer Mauricio Rosencof was represented by Una góndola ancló en la esquina. Humour, cruelty, and tenderness mixed together in the tale of a town that has to deal with the unreality of actual historical events, as well as with its dayto-day life. Alejandro Zambra, a successful young Chilean author, published his second

lishers

truth-

novel, La vida privada de los árboles, a

fully or falsely devote themselves to their work, life and literature get mixed up, and publication of the narrator's first novel is repeatedly postponed. El enigma de Paris by Argentine Pablo De Santis was a masterful detective novel, erudite and witty, set in Paris during the Exposition of 1889. The novel won the Premio Iberoamericano Planeta Casa de América de Narrativa. In Cuba the Premio Alejo Carpentier was awarded in December 2006 to Las potestades incorpóreas by Alberto Garrandés, a symbolic novel in which reality and allegory are balanced. Senel Paz published En el cielo con diamantes (the title refers to the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), set in Cuba in the 1960s. Several exiled Cuban writers produced novels that were critical of the regime of Fidel Castro. In Amir Valle's Las palabras y los muertos, the history of the revolution is narrated after Castros death by one of his bodyguards. La fiesta vigilada by Antonio José Ponte was set in the period 1968-93, when bars and cabarets were closed and parties were held only in private. In Salidas de emergencia by Alexis Romay, an expatriate living in Spain decides to re-

short work of original design about a mediocre professor who decides not to think about what he is experiencing— his wife's absence during the entire night—imagining instead alternative stories. Two posthumous works by Roberto Bolafio also appeared in 2007: El secreto del mal, a compilation of incomplete short stories, essays, and autobiographical sketches, and La univer-

comes

an automaton.

deceive

writers,

In Martín Mur-

writers

sidad desconocida,

a collection he had

prepared of his complete poems. Guadalajara de noche (2006) by the Chicago-based Honduran León Leiva Gallardo takes place during the meeting of the Guadalajara, Mex., book fair. There the narrators wild nights and days are both a descent into hell and a celebration of life. In August Mexican writer Elena Poni-

Cuban novelist Amir Valle specialized in writing detective novels and works focusing on communist Cuba under Fidel Castro. unspecified Latin American country, sometimes recognizable as Peru, the host of a radio program that is devoted to finding missing people heads for the jungle to look for her own husband. La felicidad de los muertos by Enrique Cortez was a sober reflection on the causes of political violence and a metanarrative game that is well played in only 80 pages. Award-winning poet Jorge Nájars El! árbol de Sodoma included three independent narratives

atowska was awarded the 2006 Rómulo Gallegos Prize for El tren pasa primero

with common

(2005). The novel dealt with Mexico's

Peruvian Amazonia.

rail strike of 1958-59 and the governments suppression of the strike. With her usual mastery, the author wove historical testimony with fiction and public life with private life. Xavier Velasco's Éste que ves explored the anguish and desperation of childhood in a self-referential tale. In Llamadas de Amster-

turn to Cuba, where his son still lives;

dam, Juan Villoro mixed a failed artist's

he becomes enmeshed with numerous other people, all of them trapped in some way. Colombian Evelio Rosero’s short novel Los ejércitos featured a memorable main character, a retired profes-

domestic misfortunes with ironic references to the Mexican leadership. Lost City Radio by California-based Peruvian Daniel Alarcón (Radio ciudad

perdida, translated by Jorge Cornejo) illustrated the tragedy of civil war. In an

topics: terrorism, narco-

traffic, and the cultural diversity of the (LEDA SCHIAVO)

PORTUGUESE Portugal. The enigmatic writer of Spanish descent Maria Gabriela Llansol won the 2007 Fiction Prize of the Association of Portuguese Writers for her book Amigo e amiga: curso de siléncio de 2004 (2006). “[Amigo e amiga] recreates life after suffering, without any sentimental pathos or transcendent pretension,” declared Luís Mourão, one

of the five members of the jury. Llansol had won the same award in 1991 for Um

beijo dado

mais

tarde

(1990)

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© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature

and thus became the fourth writer to have received the prize twice since its inception in 1982. Since her literary debut in 1962 with Os pregos na erva, Llansol had published 35 volumes of narrative and diary that established her reputation as a master of intricate po-

etic prose with a devoted circle of admirers. Another acclaimed Portuguese woman writer Lídia Jorge, published

Paulo who seeks to expiate past sins. Bernardo Carvalho’s O sol se põe em São Paulo was a family mystery centred on Japanese-Brazilian life. The novel addressed the situations both of the family in today’s metropolis and of its forebears in Osaka during World War II. In Antônio Vicente Seraphim Pietro-

The 2007 Camóes Prize, the most im-

fortes Amsterdã SM, the protagonist, Cláudio, delights in the sadomasochistic activities of the Dutch city. Distinguished author Autran Dourado published a collection of short fiction, O senhor das horas (2006), in which he returned to his detailed observations of the lives of normal people; for example, in the story “O herói de Duas Pontes”

portant trophy of Portuguese-language

(“The Hero of Duas Pontes”), the pro-

literatures, went to António

tagonist’s series of “firsts” (first day in

an

important

new

novel

in 2007;

at

once lyrical and suspenseful, Combateremos a sombra followed its protagonist, the psychoanalyst Osvaldo Campos, through a densely plotted maze of personal and political deception.

Lobo An-

tunes, who during the year published his 19th novel, O meu nome é legião. The prolific young Portuguese poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist Gongalo M. Tavares received his most significant literary prize to date, the 2007 Portugal Telecom Prize, for his novel Jerusalém. Praising the book, the eminent philosopher and critic Eduardo Lourengo stated: “With recent [Portuguese] literature we find ourselves, as

it were, in a world of death in parentheses. Perhaps no other writer conveys this feeling better than the author of Jerusalém.” Among Tavares’s other recent works were the short-story collection Agua,

cdo,

cavalo,

cabeca

school,

first love

affair)

ends

in his

death—as the first person to die in a 1932 revolt. A recurrent theme of Ricardo Lisias’s story collection Anna O. e outras novelas was shades of psychological instability; the title story was inspired by Freud’s famous case. The collection titled Entre nds: Contos sobre homossexualidade brought together classic stories on gay themes from 150 years of Brazilian literature. Two notable theatrical works about homosexual characters were produced in 2007. Os Disponiveis.com by Herny

Domingues Filho focused on the lives and problems of characters seeking sex

(2006)

The poet Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, initially linked to the movement Poesia 61, died in January. A collection of her poems was published as Obra breve (1991, 2006). Some

of her most

Brazilian author Bernardo Carvalho captivated readers with his mystery novel O sol se põe em São Paulo.

cele-

memorandos (1996) and Cenas vivas (2000). Another great loss for Por-

tuguese letters was the death of Eduardo Prado Coelho. The author of Os universos da crítica (1982) and several

collections of essays, he was an influential public intellectual who since the 1990s had written a daily column of cultural criticism for the newspaper

saida,

in

late

man, a youth, and a seminarian.

An official Web site for the works of Clarice Lispector (www.claricelispectorcom.br) was launched by Editóra Rocco to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Lispector’s death. The publisher also released Clarice Lispector: Entrevistas, which included Lispectors’s interviews with leading Brazilian intellectuals in the 1960s and ’70s. In 2007 Brazilian letters lost poet Alberto da Cunha Melo as well as several notable critics: Léo Gilson Ribeiro, Joel Silveira, and Paulo Dantas. The German

Brazilianist Ray-Güde Mertin, whose efforts brought the works of many important Brazilian writers of the late 20th century to the world’s attention through translations, died in January. (IRWIN STERN)

RUSSIAN After several years in eclipse, the “thick journals” reclaimed their place in 2007 at the centre of the Russian literary scene. This was in part due to the absence of new book publications from several of the leading fiction writers of the post-Soviet period (such as Sorokin,

Viktor

Pelevin,

Dmitry Bykov, and Boris Akunin). Two of the year’s Russian Booker Prize nominees were published in literary journals: Andrey Dmitriyevs Bukhta Radosti (“Haven of Joy”) in Znamia and

also

a Booker

nominee,

came

from Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Daniel Shtayn, perevodchik (2006; “Daniel Stein, Translator”) told the story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who is rescued by monks and then converts to

(VICTOR K. MENDES)

published

written in

1967 but suppressed in the same year by Brazil's military dictatorship, examined the relationships between an older

and

Brazil. Brazil’s fiction in 2007 was characterized by variety. Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s latest novel, Espinosa sem

de Paula's Santidade,

Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s Matisse in Novy mir. Although written in different styles and by writers of different generations, both novels focused on the psychological experience of their protagonists and “reflected” post-Soviet life via memories of the past and featured grotesque comparisons between the experiences of successful people and those of people at the bottom of the social ladder. Ilichevsky won the award. The years most controversial novel,

brated works appeared in the last years of her life, among them Epístolas e

Püblico.

cente

Vladimir

and the novel Aprender a rezar na era da técnica (2007).

on an Internet site. A revival of José Vi-

2006,

found his urban philosopher-detective

Roman

Espinosa investigating connections be-

priest and attempts to reconcile Judaism and Christianity on the level both of ritual and dogma. Reviled by fanatics on both sides, Shtayn is ultimately murdered. The actual model

tween two seemingly quite different crimes. Beatriz Bracher's linguistically dense novel António concerned the life of an upper-middle-class man from Sáo € Andersen—Solo/drr.net

266

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Catholicism;

he

becomes

a

Literature € Andersen—Solo/drr.net

for the character, Daniel Rafayzen, died of natural causes. The novel,

which was reviewed widely (including in a group of articles in Novy mir), was praised by some for its boldness but criticized by others for its oversimplification of complex religious and philosophical issues as well as for its melodramatic plotline. Nonetheless, the novel captured the Big Book Prize. Other works that made the Booker short list included Yury Maletsky's Konets igly (2006; "The End of the Needle”), Igor Sakhnovsky’s Chelovek, kotoryi znal vse (“The Man Who Knew Everything”), and Aleks Tarn’s Bog ne igrajet v kosti ("God Does Not Play Dice"). Hlichevskys book was another on the short list for the Big Book Prize, along with Aleksey Varlamov's 2006 biography of leading 20th-century Russian writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Pelevin’s 2006 Empire V (generally considered one of his weaker efforts),

and Dina

Rubina’s

novel Na

solnechnoi storone ulitsy (2006; “On the Sunny Side of the Street”). The latter, a work of adventure-fantasy, was a change of pace for a writer better known for ironic portraits of Russian,

Russian author Andrey Dmitrivev was nominated for the 2007 Russian Booker Prize for his novel Bukhta Radosti. known Moscow-based writer who was

works

reared in Ukraine

filled an important gap in the presentation of modern Russian poetry. Biographies continued to be very popular with the reading public. The most important of these was a myth-challenging study of the legendary Soviet poet Sergey Esenin, written by Oleg Lekmanov and Mikhail Sverdlov. A great loss to Russian literature was the sudden death of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov at age 66. Prigov was a founder of Moscow Conceptualism and a leading poet, artist, and theoretician

and in Israel, came

Israeli, and Central Asian life.

out with two books about wild animals:

Works of imagination continued to dominate the sphere of serious literature. Oleg Yuryev completed his prose trilogy with the novel Vineta, which was published in Znamia. Begun in 2000 with Poluostrov zhidyatin (“The Zhidyatin Peninsula”) and followed by Novy golem, ili voyna starikov i detei (2002;

Zayats PTs (“The Hare PTs”), about

“The New Golem, or the War of the Old

Folk and the Children"), the trilogy dealt with the tragic relationship of European, Russian, and Jewish peoples.

basis of his exhaustive study of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova in the 1960s). The Bunin Prize for poetry produced a major literary scandal when the jury,

Vineta

which was to award it, dissolved itself

(the title refers

to an

ancient

Slavo-Germanic city located on the south Baltic coast) tells the grotesquely phantasmagoric story of the sudden international rivalry for control of the city, which in the end turns out to be St. Petersburg. This combination of real and fantastic elements creates a link between the novel and the "Petersburg myth," a central strand of Russian literature inaugurated in the works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Fairy-tale-based fiction also, and somewhat unexpectedly, had success in 2007. For example, the surprisingly popular novel Put Muri (“Muri’s Way”), written by St. Petersburg schoolteacher Iliya Boyashov, recounted the adventures of a cat named Muri. The book was the winner of the National BestSeller

award.

Linor

Goralik,

a well-

a

rabbit, and Martin ne plachet (“Martin Doesn't Cry"), featuring a talking elephant. The important Andrey Bely Prizes were awarded to Aleksandr Skidan for poetry, to the late Aleksandr Golshteyn for prose, and to Roman Timenchik for the humanities

(on the

because of interference and pressure from sponsors. In the end, a new jury was hastily formed and the award given to Andrey Dementyev, an aged poet of the Soviet period. The Moscow-based publishing house Novoe Izdatelstvo published important new volumes of poetry from Oleg Yurev, Aleksey Tsvetkov, Yevgeny Saburov, Yuly Gugolev, Yevegnya Lavut, and Nikolay Baitov. The same publisher also came out with a collection of articles from the important poet-critic Mikhail Aizenberg and a book from Lithuanian poet-critic Thomas Ventslova about Joseph Brodsky (of whom Ventslova was a close friend). Other important works of contemporary poetry came from Yelena Shvarts, Olga Martynova, and Arkady Shtypel. The publication in 2006 of the two-volume complete

of Leonid

of postmodernism.

Aronzon

(1939-70)

(See OBITUARIES.) (VALERY SHUBINSKY)

PERSIAN Various events brought into relief the increasingly precarious situation of Persian literary activity in 2007. In Iran

fears that the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might not allow the 20th Tehran International Book Fair to proceed and concerns that draconian censorship measures would further restrict publishing activities proved largely unfounded. Cumbersome regulations did slow the pace of book publishing considerably, though, and the closure in the fall of several “book cafés” complicated literary life. Not everyone agreed with the description of Iran’s cultural challenges in the May 27 New York Times article “Seeking Signs of Literary Life in Iran.” 267

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Literature € Andersen—Solo/drr.net

In Afghanistan in May the first postTaliban book fair was held in Mazare Sharif. Iran’s participation in this event proved largely successful, although some of its books were deemed insulting to the majority Sunni population of the host country. At the end of the year, the National Assembly of Tajikistan was debating a bill to name Tajiki Persian the country’s official language, as well as whether to declare a gradual return to the Perso-Arabic alphabet a long-term goal. The years major prizewinners included Hamid-Riza Najafis Baghha-yi

don-based Ahdaf Soueif’s latest collection of short stories, 7 Think of You, in-

cluded rather subdued descriptions of sexual relations. Novelists continued to experiment with form and language, among them Sun‘ Allah Ibrahim, who used a documentary style in his novel Al-talassus

(“Sneaking”). In this story a nine-yearold boy in Cairo during the volatile late 1940s observes the world of adults, in-

cluding that of his elderly father. Palestinian poet Mahmüd Darwishs latest publication, Fi hadrat al-ghiyab (2006; "In the Presence of Absence"), was a set

shini (“Orchards of Sand”) and Husayn

San‘atpur’s Samt-i tarik-i kalamat (“The Dark Side of Words")—both short-story collections—as well as Munir al-Din Bayruti’s novel Chahar dard (“Birth Pangs"). Qaysar Aminpur's Dasturi zaban-i

eshq

(“A Grammar

of Love”)

proved the best-selling poetry collection of the year. The publication in Iran of Jalal Khaliqi-Mutlaqs edition of Firdawsi's epic, the Shah-Nama (“Book of Kings"), was perhaps the most notable literary event in 2007. The year marked the 800th anniversary of the birth in Balkh (now in Afghanistan) of 13th-century mystic poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. Most notable among the events held to celebrate the anniversary were the congress held in May in Kabul and the academic conferences held in September in London and at the University of Maryland. This international recognition focused attention on the poet’s legacy as well as on Persian literary tradition. The death in London on November 29 of Jaleh Esfahani at age 86 was a significant loss to Persian literature. (AHMAD KARIMI HAKKAK)

ARABIC Novels continued to get the most attention in Arabic literature in 2007. In Saudi Arabia a surge began in 2006, when approximately 50 novels were published. Half of them were by female writers, including Raja’ ‘Abd Allah alSani‘, whose daring novel Banat alRiyüd (2005; Girls of Riyadh, 2007) broke new ground. As a literary form, the novel was well suited to respond to reform trends and the sense of freedom sweeping the country. In his [khtilas (“Embezzlement”),

Hani Naqshabandi,

who was the editor of the Saudi women’s magazine Sayyidati (“My Lady”), produced a semiautobiographical story. The novel addressed shortcomings of Saudi society as revealed in 268

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Palestinian poet Mahmiid Darwish experiments with boundaries of language and form. clandestine correspondence between Hicham, the editor of a women’s magazine, and Sarah, a married reader in

Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, ‘Ala al-Aswani’s Shikaja (“Chicago”) met with even greater success than his '/nàrat Ya'qübiyan (2002; The Yacoubian Building, 2004). Informed by the writer's own experiences as a dental student in Chicago, the novel addressed the dislocations of Egyptian students and immigrants in the U.S. and was critical of all parties, including the governments and societies of Egypt and the U.S. The author received the Mediterranean Award for Culture at the Galassia Gutenberg book fair in Naples. A growing boldness characterized the Arabic novel as more writers felt free to describe sexual relations within and outside of marriage. The glorification of the body and women’s right to sexual pleasure were central in Sahar alMujis novel N (or Nan). Baha’ Tahir

was

less explicit in Wdahat al-ghurub

(2006; “The Sunset Oasis”) as he por-

trayed the sex life of an Egyptian man and his Irish wife. Yusuf Abii Rayyah’s Samt al-tawahin

(“The Silence

of the

Mills”) featured strong female characters, including Shahinaz,

a member

of

the impoverished aristocracy who makes advances to a male guest, and Shahda, who—to please her father— married a man she did not love. Lon-

of autobiographical essays in poetic prose. The traditionally dominant literary form, poetry, seemed to have been pushed aside by readers; Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi—although his public appearances drew many fans—questioned whether Egyptians liked poetry. Literary critics pointed to a decline in Arabic literacy, and even Egyptian novelist Muhammad ‘Ala’ al-Din, as he prepared to publish his first collection of poetry, acknowledged his limited mastery of Arabic grammar. Literary critic Salah Fadl called for schools to use more appealing reading texts. Poetry was, however, not ignored by its small but devoted readership. Fartiq Shüsha, who introduced the work of new poets in the Egyptian press,

praised the elegance of the language and the beauty of the images in Süzàn Ulaywan’s collection, Bayt min sukkar (“A House Made of Sugar”). On the of-

ficial level, poetry maintained respect and recognition; in Egypt the poet Muhammad

national

‘Afifi Matar

appreciation

received

award.

the

The fic-

tion award went to Jamal al-Ghitani.

Egypt's first lady, Suzan Mubarak, led a campaign to encourage reading and the creation of children's literature. The winning books for 2007 (all published in 2006) were Influwanzàü. . .yà fayzah (It Is Flu, Faiza”) by Syrian writer Lina Kilani, Ayna ikhtafa akhir aldindsawrat? (“Where Did the Last Dinosaurs Go?") by Amal Farah, and AL balanah al-bayd@ (“The White Balloon”) by Fatimah al-Ma‘dul. An

honorary award was given to Ya‘qub Shārūnī for his novel Sirr malikat almulük

(“The

Secret

of the Queen

of

Kings") a narration of Hatshepsut's life. Conferences on writers in exile were held in Qatar and Algiers; the Algiers meeting featured long-shunned Francophone Maghribi literature. Nostalgia was at the centre of Ni'*mat al-Buhayri's

Literature © Riccardo De Luca/drr.net

novel Ashjar qalilah ‘inda al-munhana

but he ultimately decides to leave the

(“Few Trees on the Slope”). Ibrahim al-

community

Kuni vividly evoked the desert in his novels. Many writers stressed geographic displacement, whereas the poet Adünis stressed his inner exile. The passing in 2007 of the highly respected Cairo-based Iraqi poet Nazik al.Mala'ikah marked the year. AIMala'ikah took Arabic poetry in a new and much freer direction with the pub-

county and to the girlfriend he left there. Shanhe ru meng was permeated with detestation for bureaucracy as well as deep doubts regarding commu-

lication of her poem "Cholera" (1947). (AIDA A. BAMIA)

One of the most notable events in 2007 for Japanese literature was the publication of Tetsushi Suwa’s first

Wang

Anyi,

one

of China's

leading

contemporary writers, attracted notice in 2007 with her novel Qimeng shidai

(“The

Age

of Enlightenment”).

Like

return

to

his

native

nist social construction. (WANG XIAOMING)

JAPANESE

novel,

CHINESE

to

Asatte

no

hito

(“A Distracted

Man”), initially published in the June issue of the literary magazine Gunzo. Suwa received the magazine’s newwriter prize as well as the year’s second Akutagawa Prize, awarded twice a year

some of her other recent novels, Qimeng

to promising

shidai was a reminiscence of Shanghai, where the author lived for nearly 50 years. Set during the early years of the

In Suwa’s novel the protagonist struggles to understand the life of his uncle, who has suddenly disappeared, leaving behind an unintelligible diary. This experimental work contemplated the meaning of language and the relationships between words and the world. Suwa’s recognition marked the first time in 30 years that the winner of the Gunzoó New Writers Award also won the Akutagawa Prize—the last having been Ryu Murakami in 1976 for Kagirinaku tomei ni chikai bura (Almost Transparent Blue). Nanae Aoyama’s Hitori-biyori ("Being Alone”) won the Akutagawa Prize for the first half of 2007. Young writers such as Suwa and Aoyama received more attention from the public and the press than established authors, who published relatively few notable works in 2007. Best sellers by well-known writers included Banana Yoshimoto’s

Cultural

Revolution,

the

novel

was

composed of a series of stories, the main characters of which were all middle-school students. Among its other themes, the book explored the disturbances of early adolescence, the delicate relationships between boys and girls of that age group, and sexual troubles caused by the impulses of youth. Wang was particularly interested in the process of spiritual maturation in boys. The novel featured long talks between the boys as well as conversations between boys and their fathers and grandfathers about the Cultural Revolution, the world communist

movement, feelings of pessimism and optimism, and the meaning of life. By a very fine process of description, Qimeng shidai showed that the period of the Cultural Revolution—usually considered

to

have

been

a harsh,

even

miserable time—was also viewed some as an age of enlightenment. Another notable novel to appear China during the year was Shanhe meng ("Shadow in Her Dream") by Fei, a well-known

novelist

by in ru Ge

and litera-

ture professor in Beijing. The book was the last volume of a trilogy that had taken the author some eight years to write. Shanhe ru meng told the story of a county official in eastern China who returns from a visit to the Soviet Union intent on quickly implementing communist reforms, only to lose his position as his supporters rebel against him one by one. In the book’s closing chapters, the protagonist travels to a neighbouring area where a communist community has already been established,

Japanese

Maboroshi Hawai

fiction writers.

(“Phantom Hawaii”)

Best-selling Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto In 2005 Kenzaburo Oe, seeking to promote the revival of literature as an alternative to the culture of the Internet and the mobile phone, established a prize in his own name.

In May 2007

the first winner was announced: Yü Nagashima's impressive short-story collection Yako-chan no chikamichi (2006; “Yuko’s Shortcut”). Nagashima said that he was happy to have received the prize, yet he was a little uneasy because he had never read Oe’s stories. He

also

commented

that

he

could,

and Noboru Tsujihara’s Encho shibai banashi: Meoto yurei (“The Playacting of Encho: A Ghost Couple”). Two publications of non-Japanese classics— Haruki Murakami’s new translation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye and Ikuo Kameyama’s new translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—were discussed more often than Japanese literary works. Best-seller lists were dominated by books that originated as serialized “mo-

bata Prize for the years outstanding short story was won by Masayo Koike's

bile

"Tatado"

phone

novels”

(keitai shosetsu),

works that were downloaded in very brief installments to phones from Web sites. Young people, who were used to text messaging on their phones, read the small-screen works everywhere they went. Among the most popular writers were Yoshi, Rin, Mika, and Mei.

however, sympathize with Oe’s wish to introduce new Japanese literature to the world. The Yomiuri Prize for Literature was not awarded. The Jun'ichiro Tanizaki Prize, for the years most accomplished literary work, was awarded to Yuichi Seirai's collection of stories about the inhabitants of Nagasaki, Bakushin (2006; "Ground Zero") The Yasunari Kawa-

("Tatado Beach"), which was

first published in the September 2006 issue of the literary journal Shincho. Deaths in 2007 included novelist Saburo Shiroyama, who was best known for his use of business subjects, and antiwar writer Makoto Oda. (YOSHIHIKO KAZAMARU)

269

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Military Affairs The TROUBLES ended, but conflict remained, especially in such HOT SPOTS as Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Darfur region of The Sudan; meanwhile, China successfully

tested its first ANTISATELLITE WEAPON, and Russia launched the

first of a new generation of nuclear-powered ATTACK SUBMARINES.

he longest-running conflict in the history of the British army came to an end in July 2007. The army was originally sent to Northern Ireland in 1969, following violent clashes between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Ironically, when the soldiers were deployed, it was anticipated that they would be in Northern Ireland for just a

CONFLICTS

civilians died violent deaths in October,

Africa. In January U.S. aircraft attacked targets in southern Somalia suspected of harbouring supporters of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. This was the first overt use of U.S. forces in the country, which had not had an effective government

in 16 years, since the UN

peacekeeping operation of 1993. Throughout 2007 militias of the Islamic

few weeks. The conflict (which came to

Courts

be known as the Troubles) dragged on, and British troops spent 38 years supporting the police in Northern Ireland. More than 300,000 military personnel had been involved in Operation Banner, as the campaign was named. The Troubles cost the lives of 763 service mem-

gent groups clashed with the forces of Somalia’s interim government. Approximately 1,600 Ugandan troops were sent to the country’s capital, Mogadishu, as part of a planned 8,000strong African Union (AU) force to support the government, but other African countries failed to send troops by year’s end. Additionally, Ethiopia had thousands of soldiers in Somalia to support government forces but said that their troops would not leave until the AU force was up to full strength. Approximately 200,000 people died

bers, more than 3,600 civilians, and un-

told numbers of paramilitaries on both sides.

WMD, ARMS CONTROL, AND DISARMAMENT India and Pakistan signed an agreement in February aimed at reducing the risk of accidental nuclear war between the two countries. In July, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin announced that his country would no longer observe the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which limited the number of heavy weapons NATO countries and the Soviet Union (and its successor states) could deploy between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural Mountains. The suspension meant that Russia would no longer be exchanging data on military deployments

or permitting

NATO

to inspect

its forces. Among the various reasons given was Russia's concern over plans by the United States to base part of a missile-defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. 270

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Middle East. The year 2007 became the deadliest for U.S. forces in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. More than 900 troops were killed. The monthly casualty rate declined rapidly after June, however, once the U.S. completed sending an additional 30,000 troops. At that point, with approximately 160,000 U.S. soldiers in the country, numerous operations were staged against al-Oaeda-related groups and Shi‘ite militia groups. Following the “surge” in U.S. forces, statistics showed that fewer than 900

Union

(ICU)

and

other insur-

and more than 2,000,000 were displaced

during the four-year-old war ravaging the Darfur region of The Sudan. Rebels representing several black African groups had been fighting government forces and ethnic Arab militias for control of the region. The conflict spread across the border into Chad and the Central African Republic. Although a 7,000strong AU mission that was struggling to protect civilians had been scheduled to be supplanted by a UN Security Council-approved force of 26,000 peacekeepers by the end of the year, the government of The Sudan delayed this action. Caucasus. The level of violence declined in Chechnya, where separatists had been fighting for an independent state since 1994. One of the last remaining rebel leaders, Rustam Basayev, was killed by Russian security forces in August.

compared with nearly 2,000 in January. Armed Palestinian groups of Hamas and Fatah supporters within the Gaza Strip fought a series of internecine battles. Israel launched air strikes and ground operations into Gaza in an ef fort to quell the almost daily rocket attacks Palestinian militants directed at Israeli civilians across the border. Throughout 2007 Kurdistan Workers’ Party

(PKK)

rebels

intensified

their

campaign for an independent homeland, killing dozens of civilians and military personnel in Turkey. The PKK (operating from bases within Turkey and in Iraq) had waged a violent campaign for a Kurdish homeland since 1984,

resulting

in more

than

30,000

deaths. Turkey boosted the number of troops it had along the border with Iraq to 100,000. In December Turkish jets bombed PKK targets in Iraq, and approximately 300 Turkish troops crossed the border to attack PKK bases. South and Central Asia. Violence in Afghanistan had continued to escalate (more than 6,000 people had been killed) since Taliban guerrillas relaunched their insurgency in 2005. There were about 40,000 soldiers in Afghanistan under the command of NATOS International Security Assistance Force and 10,000 un-

der U.S. control. Security forces in Pakistan became increasingly bogged down in fighting Islamic militants and tribesmen along the border regions with Afghanistan. These regions were also a stronghold for proTaliban and al-Qaeda groups fighting in Afghanistan. On November 3 Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf, who was also head of the armed forces, declared mar-

tial law, blaming Islamist extremists for unprecedented levels of violence in the country. Under pressure from political

Military Affairs Vladimir Smirnov—ITAR-TASS/Landov

opponents in Pakistan and allied governments abroad, Musharraf stepped down as head of the armed forces on November 28. Martial law was suspended in December. Fighting between government troops in Sri Lanka and the separatist Libera-

LT > E

-

E LE

tion Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had

worsened since the collapse of a ceasefire in 2006. In March 2007 the Tigers launched their first-ever air raid, using a light aircraft to bomb a military base next to the international airport in Colombo. Though the government in July drove LTTE fighters from their last stronghold in the island's east, the Tigers were still able to mount a series of ground and air attacks on government forces in the north of the country. Southeast Asia. The Philippines military in April stepped up its offensive against the Islamic militant group Abu Sayyaf after the group beheaded seven hostages on the southern island of Jolo. Fighting on the island left hundreds of casualties and forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes.

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY In January China became only the third country (after the former Soviet Union

and the United States) to have

successfully tested an antisatellite weapon. The test involved using a medium-range ballistic missile, which rammed a disused Chinese weather satellite orbiting at an altitude of 850 km (530 mi).

In March the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) began a space mission to test the abilities of one satellite to perform various maintenance operations on another. The Orbital Express mission was composed of the Autonomous Space Transfer and Robotic Orbiter (ASTRO) and the NextSat

target satellite. ASTRO successfully approached NextSat and docked with it without help from ground controllers— something no unmanned spacecraft had ever done before. In April Russia launched its first new nuclear-powered attack submarine in 17 years. Christened Yury Dolgoruky (after the founder of Moscow), the 170m (555- ft)-long submarine was the

first of the Borey class; it had a submerged speed of about 29 knots and could carry up to 16 ballistic missiles.

MILITARY AND SOCIETY For the first time in UN peacekeeping history, an all-female unit was de-

n

sey

i

A launch ceremony is held on April 18 for the Yury Dolgoruky, Russia’s first new nuclear-powered attack submarine in 17 years. ployed. The force of more than 100 Indian policewomen was sent to Liberia in January to train police and to assist with local elections and prison security. Mexico began allowing women to train in its elite military schools for the first time. Although women were not allowed to assume combat roles, the change meant that they could enter fields such as engineering and aviation, in which they could rise to the rank of general. In March, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush apologized for the substandard living conditions and treatments being offered to wounded troops returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The apology followed a scandal that led to the resignation of the secretary of the army and two generals. Nonetheless, advances and new technologies in military medicine were dramatically improving the treatment of wounded soldiers on the battlefield. (See Special Report on page 176.) In July Brazilian Pres. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva fired Defense Minister Waldir Pires following the country’s worst air crash, in which nearly 200 people died. The Defense Ministry was responsible for civilian airtraffic control. Japanese Defense

Minister

Fumio

Kyuma

re-

signed in July after suggesting that the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were inevitable. Armed Forces and Politics. In February the U.S. announced the creation of Africa Command to run all its military operations in Africa. Previously, responsibilities for the region had been divided between its European, Central,

and Pacific commands. In August the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conducted its first-ever

joint military exercise involving its six member states. About 4,000 troops and 80

aircraft

from

China,

Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan participated in the counterterrorism

exercise,

named

Peace

Mission 2007.

NATO made its first-ever circumnavigation of Africa during August and September. The task force of ships from six member states also conducted operations off the coast of Somalia, where an

upsurge in piracy had been seen. The deployment marked NATOS first joint naval exercise with the South African navy. Following an incident in September that led to the fatal shooting of 17 and wounding of more than 20 Iraqis in Baghdad by employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA, the U.S. government ordered new rules to improve the oversight of private security contractors in Iraq. The incident prompted Iraq’s government to approve a draft law revoking the immunity from prosecution such contractors enjoyed. China and the United States in November announced an agreement to establish direct telephone links between their Defense Ministries. This was the first time that China had agreed to such a military link. China and India conducted their firstever joint military exercise

in Decem-

ber. Although only about 100 troops from each country participated, the event was hailed as a watershed in improved bilateral relations. The two armies had fought a brief border war in 1962, and skirmishes continued until the late 1980s. (PETER SARACINO) 271

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts Music DOWNLOADS and PODCASTS were ubiquitous in 2007,

and COMPUTER GRAPHICS in films looked almost like live action. MUSICALS ruled the popular stage and returned to the MULTIPLEX. New generations rediscovered the CLASSICS of

dance and theatre, and many performing arts ICONS left the scene.

MUSIC lassical. The classical music world bade farewell to some of its most illustrious artists in 2007, even as it greeted some new technologies and broader cultural forces that would be crucial to its future. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti, soprano Beverly Sills, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (see OBITUARIES) were icons of their musical generation. Pavarotti was one

of the most famous musical artists—of any genre—of the post-World War II era. Similarly Sills transcended her prodigious vocal talents to become an ambassador for the music she loved and for the institutions that nurtured it. Rostropovich, considered by many to be the finest cellist of his age, was also a tireless champion of human rights. Stockhausen heralded a new era of sounds,

creative

strategies,

and

aes-

thetic concepts that defined vast stretches of the contemporary classical canon and offered fresh paths for the continued evolution of new music. Technology continued to affect the position of classical music in the culture at large. Classical music downloads made up, by some estimates, upwards of 20% of the online music market (in comparison with a steady 4-696 share of the conventional record market). A central problem of downloads—how to categorize and display data about composers, works, and performers—was solved in a system called the

Classical

Music

Initiative,

which

was developed by Gracenote, Inc., and adopted by Apple for iTunes and by the Naxos and Sony BMG labels, among others, for their offerings. An early and inadvertent benefit of the new technology was the discovery 272

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of a stunning hoax. When a Gramophone magazine critic entered a CD by the late British pianist Joyce Hatto into his computer, iTunes (referencing Gracenote) attributed the recording to another artist. As experts began to analyze some of the more than 100 recordings issued in Hatto’s name on her husband William Barrington-Coupe’s Concert Artist Recordings label, it was revealed that many had been taken from recordings by other pianists. The hoax was described by a spokesperson for the trade group British Phonographic Industry as “one of the most extraordinary cases of piracy the record industry had ever seen.” The discovery of the Hatto hoax was a minor consequence of the burgeoning use of Web downloads. In November Deutsche

Grammophon

(DG) became

the first major classical label to distribute its recordings online. In the first phase of a plan to digitize the companys entire catalog, DG announced that it would offer about 2,400 highquality albums—600 of them no longer in release—to consumers in more than 40 countries via its DG Web Shop Internet site.

Soprano Barbara Hendricks, who left the EMI label in 2004, founded the la-

bel Arte Verum in 2006 and in 2007 released a new album, Endless Pleasure, as a CD and online; she invited listen-

ers to pay whatever they chose for each download. She became the first classical artist to pursue a commercial path that had been blazed by rock group Radiohead earlier in the year, bypassing the once all-powerful record labels. In December the San Francisco-based male chorus Chanticleer took another page from the pop music world when it gave an in-store performance at J&R

Music & Computer World in New York

City. The group, which was named 2008 Ensemble of the Year by Musical America magazine, was plugging its latest album, Let It Snow.

Classical organizations intensified their efforts to reach out to a broader public via new media and technological formats. In May the Boston Pops announced that contestants in its annual POPSearch competition for amateur singers could audition on the YouTube Web site. On September 14 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra performed a “virtual” concert on the Second Life Web site. Many orchestras— not to mention numerous public radio stations—streamed concerts on the Internet, and some

offered downloads

of

recent performances. The Metropolitan Opera Company (Met) in New York City completed the first year of its programming on a dedicated Sirius satellite radio channel. The Met also broadcast live, in a high-definition digital format, six productions to movie theatres around the world and reached more than 325,000 viewers; for the 2007-08

season the program was expanded to eight operas at more locations. Following the Met’s lead, the National Ballet of Canada offered “Live HD” showings of its December 22 performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 7he Nutcracker at various Cineplex theatres, and Britains Opus Arte collaborated with Montreal’s DigiScreen and others in presenting high-definition screenings of operas and the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker in movie houses in North America and Europe. The New York Philharmonic got into the act by launching a series of free podcasts that featured interviews with orchestra members and guest soloists about upcoming concerts. The podcasts were made available for download at the orchestra’s Web site and from iTunes; plans were also made to offer downloads of four live concerts by the orchestra. The Philharmonic also made the news in October when it was invited by the government of North Korea to perform in the insular country. That month orchestra president Zubin Mehta and other NYPO officials flew to the capital, Pyongyang, to discuss details of the invitation. They later announced that the performance would take place in February 2008.

Performing Arts: Music Heidi Schumann—The New York Times/Redux

nounced successor at the National Symphony was Ivan Fischer. In June, Franz Welser-Most was named music director of the Vienna State Opera from the start of the 2010-11 season, and he

said that he would continue his duties as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Marin Alsop (see BIOGRAPHIES)

began her tenure as music director of the Baltimore (Md.) Symphony Orchestra, becoming the first woman to head a major American orchestra.

Heidi Melton (left) portrays Mary Todd Lincoln, and Kendall Gladen plays Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave, in the Philip Glass opera Appomattox, staged at the San Francisco Opera in October.

Controversy erupted during the summer and, to no one’s surprise, emanated

from the perennial hotbed of scandal, Germany's Bayreuth Festival. Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of composer Richard Wagner, made her directing debut at the annual Wagner festival with a seven-hour production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Audiences booed and critics jeered at the staging, which included a rewritten plot and full-frontal nudity. Katharina Wagner and Christian Thielemann, music director of the Munich Philharmonic,

subsequently announced their intention to take over leadership of the festival, replacing Katharina’s ailing father, Wolfgang, who had strenuously guarded his control of the festival for decades. Richard Wagner, generally regarded as Hitlers favourite composer, was also inadvertently in the news when it was reported that part of the record collection of the Nazi leader had been discovered in the attic of former Soviet intelligence officer Lev Besymenski, who had reportedly retrieved the recordings in 1945 from the ruins of Hitlers chancellery in Berlin. In addition to Wagner, Russian and Jewish composers and musicians were represented in the collection. In June the Guarneri String Quartet,

one

of the world's

most

illustrious

chamber ensembles, announced that its

members planned to retire in 2009. The quartet was formed in 1964 at the Marlboro (Vt.) Music Festival and over

the succeeding decades was hailed for its performances of the string quartet canon. Renowned pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy also announced that he

would give up concert performing because of arthritis, although he planned to continue to make recordings as a pianist. He intended to focus on his career as a conductor and in 2009 would take the position of principal conductor and artistic adviser for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. In November Alfred Brendel, hailed as Britain’s greatest living pianist, announced that he would retire at the end of 2008. As usual, conductors played musical chairs during 2007. In July the New York Philharmonic announced that current music director Lorin Maazel would be succeeded at the end of the 2008-09 season by Alan Gilbert, who in turn gave up his post as music director of Santa Fe (N.M.) Opera to Dutch maes-

tro Edo de Waart. At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, music director EsaPekka Salonen (see BIOGRAPHIES) said

that he would leave the orchestra at the end of the 2008-09 season; he was to be

replaced by Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who was 26 at the time of the announcement. Meanwhile, Du-

damel began his tenure in 2007 as principal conductor of the Göteborg (Swed.) Symphony Orchestra. Donald Runnicles was named director of both the BBC Scottish Symphony and Deutsche Oper Berlin; it was announced that Charles Dutoit would direct the London-based Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and become interim conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Leonard Slatkin, longtime director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was named music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; his an-

Opera companies found that calling on well-known outsiders could freshen their image. Placido Domingo, general director of the Los Angeles Opera, announced that film director Woody Allen would direct the company’s seasonopening 2008 production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi; another film director, William Friedkin (The Exorcist), would

direct the other one-act operas on the same bill. In 2006 the Met's artistic director, Peter Gelb, had imported a production of Madama Butterfly by British film director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient), and in 2007 Gelb went on to program productions created by two Àmerican women

who were new to

opera but known for their creative stage work: Julie Taymor (The Lion King) and Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses). Classical music lost tenor Jerry Hadley, Canadian Opera Company director Richard Bradshaw, and composer Gian Carlo Menotti (see OBITUARIES), as well

as pianists Aaron McMillan and Natalia Karp, composer Petr Eben, conductor Janos Furst, and sopranos Teresa StichRandall and Régine Crespin. As the classical ranks were being depleted by losses and retirements, the music itself continued to be renewed with the debut of new works and the revival of old. In October the San Francisco Opera presented the world premiere of Philip Glass’s latest opera, Appomattox, a study of the leadership qualities of Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham

Lincoln.

In a thor-

oughly contrasting work, American composer Lee Johnson’s Dead Symphony No. 6, which was first performed in May by the Russian National Orchestra, explored the music and spirit of the rock group the Grateful Dead. The late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 9 (completed by Alexander Raskatov) finally received its world premiere on June 16 in a performance by conductor Dennis Russell Davies and the Dresden (Ger.) Philhar-

monic. In November Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B Minor (Unfinished) was “finished” by Russian com273

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Music Douglas Mason/Getty Images

poser Anton Safronov and performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, led by Vladimir Jurowski. In a hint of things to come, modernist mainstay Charles Wuorinen announced in September that he had begun work on an opera based on the short story and film Brokeback Mountain. The Metropolitan Opera announced that it had commissioned a collaboration between film director Minghella and composer Osvaldo Golijov for a work to be produced in the 2011-12 season.

liferating artist Web sites, sonnyrollins.com stood out for offering historic concert performances by tenor saxophone great Sonny Rollins, as well as monthly biographical installments that featured

Jazz. An ominous undercurrent in the 21st century was the dispersing of the jazz community in New York City, cen-

and Vision festivals returned; other fes-

tivals in New York City included the Columbia/Harlem Festival of Global Jazz,

which

hosted

musicians

from

Africa and Europe as well as from the Americas, and the fifth Festival of New

Trumpet Music, which had among its performances two rarely heard brassensemble works by Anthony Braxton. The young musicians of the Brooklyn Jazz Underground made news with a four-day festival at the Manhattan club Smalls. A number of young Israeli musicians received attention, among them bassists Omer Avital and Avishai Cohen, trumpeter (a different) Avishai Co-

hen, clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen (the trumpeter’s sister), and pianist Yuval Cohen (the trumpeter’s brother).

Chicago’s Umbrella Music, which had offered weekly shows at several locations, held an international festival in

November. New

(Chicago’s jazz scene,

York's, suffered

like

from high rents,

and the Jazz Showcase, Chicago's leading jazz club, closed on New Year's Day 2007.) Perhaps the major festival of the year was the eight-night affair at the 274

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

with Rollins,

his family, and fellow musicians. King Olivers classic 1923 band included four great artists from New Orleans: cornetists Oliver and his 21-yearold protégé Louis Armstrong, the clarinetist Johnny Dodds, and his brother, drummer Baby Dodds. Together they created true ensemble music that peeped through the fragile grooves of 78-rpm recordings in the premicrophone era and still sounded

(HARRY SUMRALL)

tre of the jazz world, as rent increases and gentrification shuttered venues. The April 2007 closing of Tonic, a leading club that specialized in adventurous music, brought the issue into sharp relief. Musicians and fans protested (singer Rebecca Moore and guitarist Marc Ribot were arrested), and a city councilman proposed tax breaks to landlords and others who aided artists. In the summer the Alliance for Creative Music Action was formed to lobby the city for performance spaces, affordable housing for artists, and arts education in public schools. Jazz at Lincoln Center, previously a bastion of conservatism, presented a concert of free jazz that featured highenergy saxophonist John Zorn and innovative pianist Cecil Taylor. The JVC

interviews

tinny in LP and CD reissues. In 2007

new sound-reproducing technology brought about a CD reissue, King Oliver off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings. For the first time, the players’ individual sounds, intricate Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman

performs at Bonnaroo, a Tennessee pop-music festival, in June. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; the event began with a gala “Living Legends of Jazz” concert that included performances by the Jazztet, Regina

Carter, T.S. Monk,

Wynton Marsalis with Dave Brubeck, the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, and Nancy Wilson, among others. In a historic move, longtime jazz promoter George Wein sold his Festival Productions, which had presented the JVC and

blending, and, most of all, their passion

became real to contemporary ears. Mosaic Records reissued two vital swing-era boxed sets—Duke Ellington: 1936-40 Small Group Sessions and Classic Chu Berry Columbia and Victor Sessions. Of the year’s new recordings, Roscoe Mitchell's Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3 was especially rewarding for the leader’s sensitive settings for strings, percussion, and winds (in particular, Evan Parkers brilliant solo on tenor saxophone). Another tenor saxophonist,

Fred Anderson,

of-

fered some of his finest recent work in duets with bassist Harrison Bankhead

other festivals, to the Festival Network,

on The Great

a venture headed by Wein’s former employee Chris Shields. For the first time, a largely improvised jazz work won the Pulitzer Prize

Herbie

Vision

Hancock

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

Concert.

and

Brad

and

Pianists

Mehldau

guitarist

Pat

bum by alto saxophonist Ornette Cole-

Metheny were among the sidemen in Pilgrimage, the last CD by tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, issued a few months after his death. Metheny and

man; the Pulitzer committee awarded a

Mehldau’s

posthumous special citation to John Coltrane. Coleman also received the Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. In the midst of his set at Bonnaroo, a Tennessee pop-music festival, Coleman collapsed of heat stroke, but he went on to lead his quartet later in the year. The Internet became increasingly important to jazz, with labels such as Ayler, artistShare, Tompkins Square, and Greenleaf selling some recordings—by artists such as Ran Blake, Dave Douglas, and the Maria Schneider Orchestra—only over the Web, usually as digital downloads. The label Verve reissued hundreds of out-of-print jazz albums as downloads. Among the pro-

Tolliver’s big-band collection With Love, singer Kurt Elling’s Nightmoves, and Winterreise by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and his trio were also among the year’s notable releases. Death took a dreadful toll in 2007. Be-

in music: Sound Grammar,

a 2006 al-

Quartet,

trumpeter

Charles

sides Brecker, pianists Oscar Peterson, Joe Zawinul, and Alice Coltrane, violin-

ist-composer Leroy Jenkins, and the great drummer Max Roach (see OBITUARIES) were among jazz's losses, as were saxophonist Frank Morgan, pianist Andrew Hill, writer Whitney Balliett, trom-

bonist Paul Rutherford, Carlos

(“Patato”)

Valdés,

conga

player

clarinetists

Alvin Batiste and Tony Scott, bassist Art Davis, and singer Dakota Staton. (JOHN LITWEILER)

Performing Arts: Music

Popular. International. The fusion of traditional styles with Western influences resulted in some of the finest global music of recent years; in 2007 the trend continued as African artists worked with Western rock musicians or produced their own distinctive form of hip-hop. The most successful newcomer was K’Naan, who as a child fled

with his parents from war-torn Somalia to Canada. K’Naan developed a unique minimalist African—hip-hop fusion,

in which

he was

often

backed

only by one African drum. His approach was bravely low-key by hip-hop standards, but he succeeded because of

the power of his music, in which he educated Western audiences about Somalia and asserted that he had witnessed more suffering and brutality than American superstars who bragged about gangster lifestyles and violence. He impressed crowds across the U.S., where he appeared alongside Stephen and Damian Marley (sons of reggae hero

Bob

Marley),

and

in

Britain,

where he made his first major appearance at the huge Glastonbury music festival. At Glastonbury, K'Naan also took part in "Africa Express," a daring five-hour experimental show with an emphasis on spontaneity; no one knew in advance exactly who would turn up or which combinations would perform. Started as an angry reaction to the lack of African artists at Bob Geldofs Live 8 concert the previous summer, the show attracted such

African stars as Malis Amadou and Mariam,

Toumani

Diabate,

and Tinariwen; Senegals Baaba Maal; and the Algerian rocker Rachid Taha, who appeared alongside K'Naan. Participating Western musicians included the Magic Numbers, DJ Fatboy

pean tour by the 42-member El Gusto Orchestra featured several Jewish musicians, including the celebrated pianist

The African instrumental newcomer of the year also came from Mali. Bassekou Kouyate, who started out working with

Maurice El Medioni, who had lived in

the late Ali Farka Touré, was a virtuoso

Algeria before 1962. The shows were hailed as an important collaboration between Jewish and Muslim artists. Another British rock performer involved in the African music scene was Justin Adams, who worked as guitarist with Robert Plant and as producer for Tinariwen, the best-known exponents of “desert blues.” On the album Soul Science, Adams set his rousing electric guitar work against the traditional ritti, the one-stringed fiddle played by the

exponent of the n'goni, which in his hands could tackle anything from blueslike traditional songs to passages of frantic and rapid-fire improvisation worthy of a great jazz player. His debut

Gambian musician Juldeh Camara. (In-

in the '60s, released a live album to cel-

cidentally, Plant got the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin together for

ebrate their return to the scene

a London

their third reunion

mentalists Kassin + 2 included Alexan-

since the band broke up in 1980.) Not all the African musical experiments related to rock music. Malian

dre Kassin, Domenico Lancellotti, and Moreno Veloso, the son of Brazilian

singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré was in-

mixed

vited by opera director Peter Sellars to write a piece for the New Crowned Hope project, which began as a celebration in 2006 of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart and was reprised in 2007 in London. In her experimental piece Mozart was born in Mali, as a hereditary musician, or griot. Her songs were backed by a string quartet, as well as the traditional Malian n'goni (a four-stringed lute) and Western guitars and bass.

samba, but the trio also started Orquestra Imperial as a side project, playing big-band samba from the ’40s and ’50s. The orchestra developed a cult youth following in Rio de Janeiro. Among the international music figures who died in 2007 were Canadian folk-rock singer Denny Doherty; Australian rockers Billy Thorpe, Lobby Loyde, and George Rrurrambu; Irish

incorporated folk music, acrobatics, martial arts,

and animation.

show,

tantes,

the rock band

that had

been

hailed as Brazil's answer to the Beatles

nearly 30 years. Contemporary

star

Caetano

Veloso.

indie

rock,

Their

after

experi-

albums

electronica,

and

singer-songwriter Tommy Makem; Con-

in 2007. On the scandalous side, former pop star Britney Spears

embarrassed herself repeatedly, legendary producer Phil Spector faced a murder trial, and coun-

try singer Sara Evans weathered a messy and very public divorce.

of the organizers. Albarn, a passionate enthusiast for music from around the world, also composed the music for a new and highly experitheatrical

wife, singer Ami Sacko, and was greeted with enthusiasm. In Brazil musicians also mixed revival and experiment. Members of Os Mu-

golese musician Madilu System (see OBITUARIES); Brazilian producer Guilherme Araújo, and British broadcaster and record company The "world music opera" Monkey: Journey to the executive Tony Wilson. West, directed by Chen Shizheng and featuring (ROBIN DENSELOW) music by British rocker Damon Albarn, is United States. Popular music in performed in October at the Chátelet Theatre in the U.S. hit several rough spots Paris, the last stop on its tour. The work

Slim, and Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz), who was one

mental

concert,

album, Segu Blue, was recorded with his

On

the

retail

side,

Nielsen

SoundScan reported that midyear sales of CDs were down by 15% from 2006’s discouraging figures. In fact, sales had been eroding throughout the new mil-

his

“world music opera” Monkey: Journey to the West, which incorporated Chinese folk music and circus performers. Albarn became involved in the El Gusto project, producing an album recorded in Algeria that revived the multiethnic chaabi style that flourished before the country’s independence in 1962. A Euro-

lennium.

Warner

Music

Group

laid off 400 employees; big-box retail giant Wal-Mart shrank its music

inventory;

and musicians

and record-company chiefs began wondering whether the business was in a death spiral. Not everyone was subject to the commercial pummeling, though. Xinhua/Landov

275

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Dance Michael Caulfield—WireImage/Getty Images

Beyoncé

and

Shakira’s

collaboration

“Beautiful Liar,” and rock band Maroon

5’s “Makes Me Wonder.” Clubgoers delighted in a number one Billboard single by hip-hop singer T-Pain, “Buy U a Drank,”

and

in Rihanna's

smash

hit,

"Umbrella." Longtime stars seemed unfazed by the changing commercial landscape. Bruce Springsteen released a number one album, Magic, and played numerous soldout shows with his E Street Band. John Fogerty, formerly of Creedence Clearwater

Revival,

nin’ Down

Kanye West, for one, proved averse to any downturn. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) His

album Graduation, released on September 11, posted the biggest first-week totals of any album since rapper 50 Cent’s The Massacre in 2005. At the 49th annual Grammy Awards in February, the Dixie Chicks—a group that had received little country radio airplay in the extended wake of lead singer Natalie Maines’s critical comin 2003

about Pres. George W.

Bush—swept the major categories, winning five trophies, including the top song,

record,

album,

and

country

al-

bum prizes. Other big winners included hip-hop soul singer Mary J. Blige and rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Police, a group that broke up in 1984, reunited with a show-opening version of “Roxanne.” The next day the Police announced a tour that would ultimately become the year’s most successful in North America. Through the summer the group earned a gross $91.3 million over 31 shows. Country superstar Kenny Chesney remained a top performer as well, drawing more than a million fans for the sixth consecutive year. Multiple styles were represented among the year’s most successful albums. Teen-friendly sound track High School

Musical

2, West’s

to

the

"swampadelic" sounds of his past with the much-lauded Revival. The Eagles’ Long Road out of Eden sold more copies in its first week of issue than any disc except West’s Graduation, even though the Eagles’ CD was sold only in WalMart stores. A four-hour Peter Bogdanovich-directed documentary, Run-

Justin Timberlake performs his hit song “What Goes Around. . .Comes Around” at the 49th annual Grammy Awards show on February 12 in Los Angeles.

ments

returned

a Dream,

examined

mental movie I’m Not There, in which four men, a woman, and a 13-year-old

boy portrayed “Dylan” (under different names) at various stages of his life. Critics also cheered the return of 80-year-old Porter Wagoner, who released the muchheralded album Wagonmaster. Wagoner died later in the year. (See OBITUARIES.)

& Dunn

force in the genre. (See BIOGRAPHIES.)

The year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, R.E.M., the Ronettes, Patti Smith, and Van Halen. Deaths in-

cluded rock singer Brad Delp, gospel singer James Bodie Davis, singer-song-

writers Hank Thompson and Dan Fogelberg, doo-wop singer Zola Taylor, singer-songwriter-producer Lee Hazlewood, and longtime popular singers Don Ho and Teresa Brewer (see OBITUARIES); other losses were CBGB club

founder Hilly Kristal, saxophone player Boots Randolph, steel guitarists John Hughey and “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, country star Del Reeves, singer Frankie Laine, and James Brown’s collaborator

Bobby Byrd.

(PETER COOPER)

Tom

Pettys career, and Bob Dylan’s life was the subject of Todd Haynes’s experi-

Country duo Brooks

enced a rare loss in the Country Music Association Awards’ duo category, but they remained a popular and profitable

experi-

T-Pain, whose song “Buy U a Drank” reached the top of the charts, sings and dances at the VH1 Hip Hop Honors ceremony on October 4 in New

York City.

DANCE North America. New

York City Ballet

(NYCB) made use of a special Web site,

as well as the usual print advertisements, to draw attention to its first production of a new ballet set to Sergey Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet score. Calling his version Romeo + Juliet, “and” was sometimes depicted by a dagger), Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins found the lead performers in the youngest ranks of his dancers. The two-act reduction of the work’s traditional three-act scheme, with a unit set

and costuming by Danish painter and designer Per Kirkeby, turned out to be more interesting on paper and on the Internet than onstage. Shown during the company’s spring season in New York City and in the summer residency at Saratoga

Springs,

N.Y.,

(ABT) unveiled its newest production of

another classic, The Sleeping Beauty, to the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. This production drew attention to the participation in the direction and rethinking of the ballet of the well-

Graduation,

known,

Jones’s

nal result, credited to ABT

Too

Late,

and

rock band

sometimes

controversial, artistic di-

rector Kevin McKenzie with the assistance of Kirkland and the dramaturge Michael Chernov, also received a mixed

critical Scott Gries/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

and

former dancer Gelsey Kirkland. The fi-

Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight all fared well. Major singles included pop kingpin Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around. . .Comes Around,” superstars 276

+

Juliet received mixed reviews at best. Against any number of familiar productions, NYCB’s youth-oriented version ended up looking thin as drama and monotonous as ballet theatre. At New York Citys Metropolitan Opera House, American Ballet Theatre

pop-country band Rascal Flatts’ Still Feels Good, jazzy sophisticate Norah Not

Romeo

response.

Tony

Walton

and

Performing Arts: Dance AFP/Getty Images

Willa Kim, familiar to Broadway theatregoers, designed the generally successful sets and costumes, respectively. For a subse-

premises of its Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The NBC also presented an all-Robbins bill, including his West Side Story Suite,

quent run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa, Calif, the ballet was re-

in anticipation

vised, perhaps

not for the last

time.

The year saw the departures from the stage of three noted ballerinas: Italys Alessandra Ferri of ABT and the Americans Kyra Nichols of NYCB and Patricia Barker of Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet. NYCB's programming overall celebrated the centennial of the birth of Lincoln Kirstein,

who

was

instrumental

in the founding (with George Balanchine) and great success of the company. The Harvard Theatre Collection, along with other cultural institutions on the East Martha Graham Dance Company members Coast, variously presented speMaurizio Nardi (left), David Martinez (centre), cial events that showcased Katherine White (right) rehearse a scene from Kirstein’s interests in the literary, Diversion of Angels in September in New York visual, and performing arts. A substantial biography by Martin terviews and essays. Prolific independDuberman, The Worlds of Lincoln ent dancemaker Twyla Tharp found her Kirstein, was also published. At the New York Public Library for work the subject of a specially arranged the Performing Arts, an exhibition performance by groups from five New York City-area colleges. Meanwhile, Cal called “Invention: Merce Cunningham & Collaborators” celebrated one of the Performances, at the University of Calmasters of modern dance. Cunningifornia, Berkeley, offered a series called “Focus on Twyla Tharp,” consisting of ham’s company toured extensively, with one special stop at Dia:Beacon in Beaprograms by Miami City Ballet, the Jofcon, N.Y., the venue for another of the frey Ballet, and ABT. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater staged Maudancemakers well-known "Events"— ie., specially arranged site-specific rice Béjart's unconventional Firebird, as dance works. In July, Paul Taylor and well as reviving Aileys Flowers and Rehis company brought attention to the flections in D, for its monthlong New American Dance Festival, Durham, York City season. N.C., by presenting the choreographer's Prominent among the premieres by latest

work,

De

Suefios,

which

was

based on aspects of Mexican culture. In August, Mark Morris again brought dance to Lincoln Centers Mostly Mozart Festival, offering a three-part program called Mozart Dances, which was broadcast on PBS's Live from Lincoln Center. Later in the summer PBS showed Nureyev: The Russian Years, a documentary about the legendary career of Rudolf Nureyev, who was also the subject of a new biography, Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh. The Martha Graham Dance Company put together on short notice a New York City season to help cap its 80th anniversary celebrations, and Criterion released Martha Graham: Dance on Film, a two-disc DVD presentation of historic films expanded by recent in-

San Francisco

Ballet (SFB) was

Con-

cordia by Canada's Matjash Mrozewski. Most of the company’s year was spent preparing for its major 75th anniversary celebration in 2008; NYCB, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and National Ballet of Canada (NBC) planned to col-

laborate with SFB for the festivities. In 2007 the Canadian company performed the 2005 version of Balanchine's rarely performed Don Quixote, in a co-production with stager Suzanne Farrell, who held the rights to the ballet. The New York Public Library concurrently restored a historic film of a preview performance from 1965, which featured Farrell dancing opposite Balanchine himself. The library screened the remastered film and then made it available for individual viewing on the

of commemora-

tion of the 10th anniversary, in 2008, of the renowned choreographer’s death. Montreal-based choreographer Edouard Lock showed his Amjad, a postmodernist take on Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, which he presented in several Canadian cities with his troupe, La La La Human Steps. Notable festivals in Canada included the seventh Vancouver International Dance Festival and Montreal's first Festival TransAmériques, which hosted 10 contemporary dance programs. The NBC's Guillaume Cóté appeared with his own company, as well as with others, including with ABT in a guest appearance as Prince and Charming in James Kudelka's Cinderella. One work on the City. “Three World Visions" program given by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal was Polyphonia by NYCB resident choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. Set to music of Gyorgy Ligeti, the fourcouple showcase helped the choreographer launch his own new venture, Morphoses: The Wheeldon Company, at the Vail (Colo.) International Dance Festival. Polyphonia joined other works that the choreographer was preparing for weeklong seasons in London and New York City. New York City’s annual Lincoln Center Festival included wonderful music and dance offerings from Mongolia. As an outdoor event the festival presented Slow Dancing, digital portraits of individuals from across the world of dance—including the legendary Bill T. Jones (see BIOGRAPHIES),

Judith Jami-

son, and Allegra Kent—each taped in roughly 5-second solos that were processed by photographer David Michalek into hyperslow-motion 10minute huge projections shown three at a time. In September the installation, differently configured, traveled to the Los Angeles Music Center. The Jacob's Pillow festival, Becket, Mass., began its

75th anniversary season with debut appearances by the State Ballet of the Republic of Georgia, led by its director and leading ballerina, Nina Ananiashvili. Following the success of his Broadway work for Mary Poppins, English choreographer Matthew Bourne toured his touching Edward Scissorhands, 277

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Dance

making

a long stop at the Brooklyn

Academy of Music (BAM). BAM’s 25th

Next Wave Festival included performances of the impressive work of Ohad Naharin by Batsheva Dance Company, from Tel Aviv, as well as offering the most recent work devised by experimentalist John Jasperse for his troupe. Premieres in the United States included Christopher Fleming’s The Three Musketeers by the Dayton (Ohio) Ballet; Stanton

Welch’s

The

Four

Seasons,

The North American dance community mourned the loss during 2007 of choreographers Glen Tetley, Michael Kidd, and Alberto Alonso; NBC founder Celia Franca; and dancer Lowell Smith (see OBITUARIES). Other significant

losses included dance school administrator Nathalie Gleboff; ballet teachers

Edith d’Addario, Antonina Tumkovsky, and Natalia Clare; dancers Hortense Kooluris, Josefina Méndez, and David

Adams;

choreographers

Walter Nicks,

danced by Houston Ballet to Antonio

Ruthanna

Vivaldi’s

Ballet’s

writers Mae Banner and Robert Tracy;

performance in Raleigh, N.C., of artistic director Robert Weiss’s two-part bal-

critic and collector Ann Barzel; and 33year NBC music director George Crum. (ROBERT GRESKOVIC)

music;

and

Carolina

let Monet Impressions.

News of individuals included the appointment of ABT’s renowned Ethan Stiefel as dean of dance at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Veteran artistic director Gerald Arpino of the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago was named emeritus director in July, and Ashley Wheater, bal-

Boris,

and Michael

Smuin;

Europe. The European dance world in 2007 was, as usual, busy with celebrations of various anniversaries, but one

in particular stood out as a truly continentwide occasion. Choreographer Hans van Manen, who was primarily associated with the Dutch National Bal-

let master of the SFB, became the Jof-

let and Netherlands Dance Theatre, cel-

frey's artistic director in September. The Joffrey's former associate director Adam Sklute became artistic director of Ballet West in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sarasota Ballet of Florida named England's Iain Webb as its new artistic director. Los Angeles Ballet launched its second season under the direction of Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary. Marat Daukayev was appointed deputy artistic director of the Kirov Academy of Ballet of Washington, D.C.

ebrated his 75th birthday; National

Ballet hosted

the Dutch

the event,

and

St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet (familiarly known as the Kirov), as well as companies from Munich, Stuttgart, Ger., and Mainz, Ger., joined in.

The Stuttgart Ballet dedicated a season to its great choreographer and former director John Cranko, who would

have turned 80 in August; he was credited with having raised the company to international status. The programs in-

Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta, as guest star, joins members of the Bolshoi Ballet in a performance in London on August 6 of the full-length ballet Spartacus, choreographed by Yury Grigorovich to music of Aram Khachaturian.

cluded most of his best-known works as well as a revival of his Carmen from 1971. Berlin's Staatsballett gave its first performances of Sir Frederick Ashton's Sylvia; the Hamburg Ballets director, John

Neumeier,

mounted

The

Little

Mermaid—based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen and originally made for the Royal Danish Ballet. Neumeier also made a new work based on J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio. The Bayerisches Staatsballett attracted an international audience to Munich with its new production of Marius Petipa's Le Corsaire, staged by company director Ivan Liska with the assistance of American Doug Fullington, an expert in Stepanov notation, the method used to record many 19th-century classics. A new production of Le Corsaire was also a feature of the Bolshoi Ballet’s home season in Moscow. Yury Burlaka and director Alexey Ratmansky reproduced as closely as they could the ballet as it was done in 1899, replacing lost passages with their own choreography where necessary. In an “American” triple bill, the company danced its first performances of George Balanchine’s Serenade and of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, as well as giving the world premiere of Christopher Wheeldon's Misericordes

(which

later toured

with

the title E/sinore), based very loosely on the story of Hamlet. Other notable events were a gala to celebrate the 80th birthday of Yury Grigorovich, the debut of guest star Carlos Acosta in the title role of Spartacus, and a revival of Asaf Messerers 1963 showpiece Class Concert. In St. Petersburg the Mariinsky company showed a reconstruction of Petipa’s Le Réveil de Flore, staged by Sergey Vikharev; gave the first performance of Aria Suspended by the Canadian choreographer Peter Quanz; and featured principal Diana Vishneva (see BIOGRAPHIES) in her own gala program

(Silenzio.

Diana

Vishneva),

in

which the ballerina danced extracts from some of her greatest roles in an unusual contemporary setting. Former

Mariinsky principal dancer Faroukh Ruzimatov was appointed director of the ballet company of the Mussorgsky Theatre, St. Petersburg. Boris Eifman premiered his latest work, The Seagull, for his own St. Petersburg-based company in January, transferring the action of the Chekhov play to a ballet studio. In Scandinavia the Royal Danish Ballet (RDB) mounted new works by Kim Brandstrup (Ghosts) and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (L'Homme de bois), as well

as a new version of Igor Stravinsky's Photoshot/Landov

278

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Theatre

Rite of Spring by Finnish

der through the backstage and cellar areas of the theatre, seeing dance performances and art installations. Director Frank Andersen planned to step down in summer 2008, to be replaced by New York City Ballet (and former RDB) principal dancer Nikolai Hiibbe. Dinna Bjorn’s final season as director of the Finnish National Ballet opened with Sylvie Guillem’s production of Giselle in the newly renovated opera house in Helsinki; the Royal Swedish Ballet revived Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée and added Jean-Christophe Maillot’s production of Cinderella to its

let National de Marseille toured to New York City and Copenhagen. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Ballet's year was marked by the retirement of Darcey Bussell, who was by far the company’s best-known ballerina. Her final performance, in Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth, was shown live on national television. Works that were new to the company included William Tackett’s Seven Deadly Sins and Balanchine’s Jewels. The Birmingham Royal Ballet performed director David Bintley’s full-length Cyrano, a completely new version of a story he had first used for the company some 16 years earlier. The title role was danced by principal Robert Parker, who retired at the end of the season at age 30. English National Ballet’s year included open-air performances in Paris of Derek Deane’s Swan Lake and also the premiere of a full-length work by

repertory.

Michael Corder, The Snow Queen, set to

with a brilliant Richard ITI, in which

The Greek National Opera Ballet started the year with completely new versions of two 20th-century classics: L'Aprés-midi d'un faune, remade by Ioannis Mandafounis, and Les Sylphides, by Constantinos Rigos. The companys artistic director, Lynn Seymour, resigned from her post after a year, citing problems with working conditions. The city of Kalamata, Greece, again hosted its well-established international festival of contemporary dance. In Italy,

music by Sergey Prokofiev. Northern Ballet Theatre showed two new versions of Tchaikovsky ballets—A Sleep-

Jonathan Slinger established himself in

ing Beauty Tale, giving a new twist to

an

the old story, and Nutcracker; both were choreographed by company director David Nixon. The company also visited China, performing Nixon’s Madame Butterfly. Scottish Ballet continued its progress, performing director Ashley Page’s best-known ballet, Fearful Sym-

Richard II was followed by an indifferent account of the two Henry IV plays, with Geoffrey Streatfeild as an unpleasantly knowing Prince Hal and David Warner—who was returning to the scene of his definitive Hamlet and Henry VI in the mid-1960s—as a rather

metries, as well as a new piece, Ride the

too-likable, too-thin, Falstaff.

Beast, by Stephen Petronio. The Bolshoi Ballet spent an extremely successful three weeks in London in the summer. New stars Natalya Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev made most of the headlines, but there was much praise too for Acosta's Spartacus, the new Le

Other RSC endeavours included the staging of various new-play projects, the touring of The Comedy of Errors, and the production by Neil Bartlett of a gender bending Twelfth Night, starring Broadway actor John Lithgow as Malvolio. All the histories were slated to run in chronological order at the Roundhouse in North London in the spring of 2008, and associate director Gregory Doran planned to direct yet another RSC company back in the Courtyard. The RSC was very active, and its work was often very good, but audiences could not always find its productions. In contrast, Hytner’s National Theatre conveyed a sense of integrated purpose, despite a varied repertoire of classics and new plays. Rafta, Rafta. . ., for instance, was Hytner’s version of a domestic comedy from 1964 by Bill Naughton, adapted and modernized by Ayub Khan-Din; working-class characters in northern England, in an utterly convincing shift, were made South Asians. Similarly, Hytner’s moderndress revival of George Etherege’s Restoration classic The Man of Mode prospered by having the “arranged

pher Jorma Uotinen.

choreogra-

Company princi-

pal Kenneth Greve staged a new production of Nutcracker. One of RDB's programs, “Silk & Knife,” featured six works by Jiri Kylian; as a prelude, the site-specific Undergardens, by Karine Guizzo,

allowed the audience

to wan-

for her farewell, ballerina Alessandra Ferri of La Scala (Milan) danced in the

company’s

premier

performances

of

Neumeier’s La Dame aux camélias; the

Rome Opera Ballet showed Stravinsky's Persephone in a version created by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, fea-

turing the great ballerina Carla Fracci, who was also the company’s artistic director. Maurice Béjart, who later died at age 80 (see OBITUARIES), staged a performance at La Scala to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the murder of Gianni Versace, designer of the costumes for 12 of his ballets. The Paris Opéra Ballet added two major works to its repertoire: Roland Petit's Proust ou les intermittences du coeur and Ashton's La Fille mal gardée; the Ashton work was very successful, despite initial doubts about its suitability for the Paris stage and audience. In a more contemporary mode, the company also gave the world premiere of Roméo et Juliette, with choreography by Sasha Waltz and set to the music of Hector Berlioz. Etoile Laurent Hilaire made his farewell as a dancer but continued with the company as a ballet master. The Bal-

Corsaire,

and

London

favourite

The

Bright Stream. Unfortunately, there was much less enthusiasm for two other visiting companies, the La Scala Ballet with Rudolf Nureyevs production of The Sleeping Beauty and the Peter Schaufuss Ballet with its Rolling Stones "dansical," Satisfaction. European dance losses included Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Nina Vyroubova, British ballerina Belinda Wright, Russian choreographer Igor Moiseyev (see OBITUARIES), and British dancer Stanley Holden. (JANE SIMPSON)

THEATRE Great Britain and Ireland. After the successful Complete Works Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon ended in the summer of 2007, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) under artistic director

Michael Boyd still could not rival the National Theatre, led by Nicholas Hytner, in terms of achievement and reputation, and the company’s fortunes thus appeared volatile. The main Stratford house (and the smaller Swan too)

was closed for several years for refurbishment and renovation. Nonetheless,

a number of big projects were under way for RSC. Trevor Nunn, a former RSC artistic director, toured with King Lear and Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Tan McKellen played a magnificent Lear and shared the Chekhov role of Sorin with William Gaunt; they ended the tour at the New London Theatre. Boyd himself began directing another RSC company in the entire Shakespeare history play sequence, in the order of their composition. His Henry VI trilogy at the Courtyard (an exciting 1,100-seat temporary accommodation) in Stratford-upon-Avon was topped

the front rank of British actors; a few

months later he impressively portrayed ethereal,

hedonistic

Richard

II.

279

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Theatre

marriage" side of the plot driven by the brides Anglo-Asian ethnicity. Also

at the

National,

Marianne

El-

liott’s scintillating production of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (starring Anne-Marie Duff) brought up timely religious and political arguments. Howard Davies’s superb staging of Maxim Gorky’s first play, Philistines, illuminated universal aspects of family relationships in times of great change. New plays at the National included The Reporter, a slickly staged biographical play by Nicholas Wright about James Mossman (played by Ben Chaplin), a famous British television journalist who committed suicide; The Five

Wives of Maurice Pinder by Matt Charman, a striking comedy of polygamy in the suburbs; and the British premiere of 19th-century Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson’s

The

Enchantment,

a

Strindbergian story that featured Nancy Carroll as a heroine in romantic turmoil. Three writers emerged sensationally from the Young Writers program of London’s Royal Court Theatre: Bola Agbaje with Gone Too Far!, a sharp comedy about identity issues among teenagers in a London public-housing project; Alexandra Wood with The Eleventh Capital, an imaginative parable of regime change; and Polly Stenham with That Face, a lacerating study of warped mother love (Lindsay Duncan was the terrible parent). The Court’s artistic

director,

Ian

Rickson,

bowed

out after seven years with a superb performance of The Seagull, newly translated by Christopher Hampton and starring Kristin Scott Thomas; Rickson then made a fine National Theatre debut with a chilling revival of Harold Pinter’s second play, The Hothouse. The new head of the Royal Court, Dominic Cooke, directed an abrasive play by American

Bruce

Norris,

7he Pain

and the Itch. Cooke and associate Ramin Gray also mounted revivals of Rhinoceros by Eugéne Ionesco and The Arsonists

(better

known

as

The

Fire

Raisers) by Max Frisch, in alternating repertory and in new translations by Martin Crimp and by Alistair Beaton, respectively. Some critics charged that the flood of musicals in the West End left behind the audiences for new drama and classic revivals. The criticism was not strictly fair to London’s producers, who, unlike those of Broadway, could not depend on attracting a committed audience. London’s theatre overall was as varied and as vibrant as ever, but au280

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

diences were unpredictable. Hence, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber repeated his publicity-seeking ploy of casting a West End

lead on a television talent show,

this time in his and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Adelphi. The casting of Lee Mead, winner of the viewers' voting, as

Joseph ensured instant stardom for the actor and a huge surge at the box office. The production was a slightly scaled-down and much-improved revival of Steven Pimlott's colourful production at the London Palladium in 1991. (Pimlott, a talented director with the RSC, and of operas, succumbed to

cancer before the revivals opening night.) David Ian, co-producer in 2006 of Lloyd Webber's The Sound of Music, brought back his own 1993 version of Grease, directed by David Gilmore, with two other TV-talent-show discoveries,

but their impact was far lighter than Mead'. The West End also exhumed the popular Buddy Holly tribute show, Buddy, and an old-fashioned-looking Fiddler on the Roof, starring Henry Goodman. In

British actors Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood rehearse in September at London’s Gielgud Theatre for a production of Shakespeare s Macbeth, directed by rising star Rupert Goold.

addition, Bad Girls—the Musical, based on a TV series set in a womens prison,

proved a surprise critical hit, and singer Michael Ball and comedian Mel Smith opened in the musical Hairspray, which made its London debut five years after its Broadway bow. The critics were partly placated by decently presented West End revivals. David Storeys In Celebration starred Orlando Bloom as the most taciturn of three brothers returning home for their parents' wedding anniversary; Jonathan Pryce led David Mamet's blistering Glengarry Glen Ross; Daniel Radcliffe (see BIOGRAPHIES) was outstandingly good as the horse-blinding adolescent in Peter Shaffer’s Equus; and RSC veteran David Suchet played a scheming cardinal in American Roger Crane’s debut play, The Last Confession, about the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I. Patrick Stewart, another RSC wart, continued his remarkable

stalrein-

statement as a leading stage actor after having spent years as a main character in the Star Trek franchise; he portrayed Macbeth and Malvolio at the Chichester

Festival

Theatre.

Macbeth,

di-

rected by rising star Rupert Goold, arrived in the West End later in the year, and the RSC announced that in 2008 Stewart would play Claudius to the Hamlet

of television’s

Doctor

Who,

David Tennant (an electrifying actor of genuine RSC pedigree). Another RSC veteran, Antony Sher, graced a skillful

revival by Adrian Noble

of Jean-Paul

Sartre’s Kean, but the audience failed to

materialize. The only major new musical was The Lord of the Rings at the Theatre Royal, Drury

Lane,

a three-and-a-half

hour,

$25 million spectacular that disappointed audiences. Work had been done on the show since the tepidly received Toronto world premiere in 2006, but Matthew Warchus's production still laboured to clarify the story and win the audience over with dancing hobbits and elves, ludicrous orcs, and (literally)

stilted tree men. The music was nothing special. In comparison, Warchus's expert revival of Boeing-Boeing, a 1962 farce by Beverley Cross—adapted from Marc Camoletti’s French hit—about flight attendant roommates and their befuddled shared boyfriend, was a surprise and unalloyed delight, starring Roger Allam and Mark Rylance. In another surprise hit, popular television actor John Simms played a fussy young man obsessed with his dead mother in Elling, based on a cult Norwegian film about a pair of former mental hospital inmates adjusting to life in the outside world—or, to be exact, Oslo.

Elling was

a transfer from the tiny

Bush Theatre, and the other main “off-

West End” venues that continued to prosper included the Donmar Ware-

Performing Arts: Theatre

house—which announced a West End residency from September 2008 in Cameron Mackintosh’s Wyndham’s Theatre (Jude Law was

announced

as

Hamlet)—with sparkling revivals that starred Ian McDiarmid in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman and Samuel West and Toby Stephens in Pinters Betrayal; and the Almeida, which excelled in two con-

trasting revivals of American Depression-era drama, Theodore Ward's Big White Fog and Clifford Odetss Awake and Sing!, the latter featuring Stockard Channing. A

new

West

End

initiative

was

launched in October at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, with a new company run by former Almeida director Jonathan Kent. This latest riposte to the critics’ lament on the state of the West End opened with a revival of William Wycherleys The Country Wife. Announced for 2008 were a new production of Edward Bond's The Sea and a new musical, Marguerite, by the writers of Les Misérables. Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic remained stable with a scrupulous revival by Peter Gill of Patrick Hamilton’s “Victorian” thriller Gaslight, featuring the graceful Rosamund

Pike, and a striking, if not

wholly successful, stage version of Pedro Almodóvars film All About My Mother by Samuel Adamson, starring Diana Rigg and Lesley Manville. Across the road the Young Vic flopped badly with The Soldiers Fortune, Thomas

Vernon

God

Little,

and

an

Ukraine,

one

and actor John Normington,

of the original members

of the

RSC.

Other deaths included broadcaster and producer Ned Sherrin, actors Barbara Kelly Ian Richardson, John Inman (see OBITUARIES), Gareth Hunt, and Mike Reid, and the writer Sheridan Morley. (MICHAEL COVENEY)

U.S. and Canada. An economically debilitating 19-day strike by Broadway stagehands—the longest shutdown there in more than 30 years—made national headlines in November 2007. The walkout left only 8 of the commercial theatre sectors 35 shows up and running over the usually lucrative Thanksgiving holiday, depleting New York City’s arts economy by an estimated $2 million a day. The strike dis-

rupted the plans of thousands of visitors to the city, and it delayed the openings of several high-profile productions, including Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention, a play about the early days of the television set, and the Walt Disney Co.’s newest musical extravaganza, The Little Mermaid. On November 28 the on-again, off-again negotiations finally bore fruit, and the shuttered theatres reopened the following night. The years most-acclaimed new play, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, was

a big-cast, multigenerational family drama that had originated earlier in the season at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Critics searched for superlatives to apply to Letts (known as an actor as well as the author of two much-produced thrillers, Kilfer Joe and Bug) as they compared the play's central figure—Violet Weston, the malicious drug-addled matriarch of a rural Oklahoma family, played by Chicagobased actress Deanna Dunagan—to such classic American stage characters as Eugene O'Neill's Mary Tyrone, Tennessee Williamss Amanda Wingfield, and Edward Albees Martha. The production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, went to the top of the list for potential Tony Awards. The 2007 Tonys (as well as almost every other applicable award) were swept by the wildly energetic rock-in-

Ot-

ways rarely seen Restoration comedy, but rallied with a stimulating season of short plays by Bertolt Brecht, an engaging adaptation of D.B.C. Pierre’s novel

can film actor James Cromwell as her actor-husband James; novelist Roddy Doyle’s inner-city makeover (with Nigerian poet Bisi Adigun) of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey; and a visit of the brilliant Katona József Theatre of Budapest with Chekhov's Ivanov in a riotous production to complement the more sedate pleasures of Brian Friel's version of Uncle Vanya at the Gate Theatre. Among the major losses to British theatre in 2007 were the Americanborn comedy writer Dick Vosburgh, whose best-known work was the musical A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the

en-

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company performs a scene from August: Osage County, the enthusiastically received new play by Tracy Letts, in November at the Imperial Theater in New York City.

thralling production of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding. The Bristol

Old Vic, Britain’s

oldest

operating theatre, was closed down for refurbishment amid concerns that its artistic future was insecure. There were, however, fanfares for the reopen-

ing of the Theatre Royal in Bury St. Edmunds and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. David Greig was the most prominent playwright of the Edinburgh Festival; he had a new play, Damascus, at the Traverse Theatre and, for the National Theatre of Scotland, a new ver-

sion of Euripides’ The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming as a sexually ambiguous Dionysus.

The Dublin Theatre Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary with a revival by the Galway-based Druid Theatre Company of Eugene O'Neill's Long Days Journey into Night, with Marie Mullen as Mary Tyrone and the AmeriSara Krulwich—The New York Times/Redux

281

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Theatre Walter Bieri—Keystone/AP

flected musical Spring Awakening, adapted by writer Stephen Sater and pop composer Duncan Sheik from Frank Wedekind's 1891 German play Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy at Lincoln Center Theater won seven Tonys, a record for a play. Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson took acting prizes for their work in another unconventional musical, Grey Gardens. The flagship Alliance Theatre Company of Atlanta, under the savvy artistic direction of Susan V. Booth, received the regional theatre Tony. The most-produced plays of the year across the United States were John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning Doubt

executive directorship of TCG, where she was expected to work toward cohesion within the U.S.’s sprawling network of resident theatres. Adventurous director Robert Woodruff unexpectedly relinquished leadership of the Harvard-connected American Repertory Theatre in Cam-

bridge, Mass., after only six years, leaving that theatre’s direction

in question.

Southern

California's prestigious La Jolla Playhouse selected as its new artistic director Christopher Ashley, known for such crowd-pleasing projects as the hit discomusical Xanadu; he replaced Des McAnuff. McAnuff moved on to become Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company rehearses Songs one of a trio of new artistic diof the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Lee's provocative rectors at Canada's Stratford (2004), David Lindsay-Abaire’s play about identity politics, in August at the Shakespeare Festival in a muchexamination of grief, Rabbit Hole Theater Spektakel in Zürich. discussed restructuring of the (2006), and Sarah Ruhl’s magic venerable producing organizarealist The Clean House (2006). tion. McAnuff—who would share festiThe most-produced playwright was the Twist. Academy Award-winning actor F. val leadership with Marti Maraden and late August Wilson; works from his Murray Abraham played the infamous Don Shipley under the supervision of landmark 10-play cycle about 20th-cenJews Barabas and Shylock (in the first general director Antoni Cimolino—was tury African American life proliferated two plays) in rotating repertory. expected to lead off his tenure in May on theatre schedules. The annual fiscal Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for 2008 with a multiracial Romeo and evaluation of the field by the service orGodot took on a range of new meanganization Theatre Communications ings when the Classical Theatre of Juliet. Group (TCG) revealed that most AmerHarlem took its production of the play In contrast to the Stratford festival, the new Festival TransAmériques of ican theatres were operating in the (as Waiting for Godot in New Orleans) to New Orleans, performing outdoors Montreal in May and June offered a black, though overall attendance had for crowds of displaced Hurricane Kabracing dose of cutting-edge theatre fallen by 8% over the previous five and dance. The festival was headlined years and regular subscribers were intrina survivors in the city’s devastated Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighby brilliant experimentalist Robert creasingly hard to come by. Young and emerging writers continbourhoods. Is He Dead?, a previously Lepage's Lipsynch, a large-scale group unpublished 109-year-old farce by ued to make impressive debuts. The work about the relationships between Brothers Size, an evocative twist on voice, speech, and language; among the Mark Twain, opened on Broadway in West African myths set in contempoplays devices was a projection of aclate November, refurbished by playrary Louisiana—written by 27-year-old wright David Ives and featuring Nortors’ faces onto stationary dummies. AlTarell Alvin McCraney during his studthough the performance lasted more bert Leo Butz as a starving French ies at the Yale School of Drama—caught than five hours in Montreal, the work painter who fakes his own death to fire in a staging at New York City’s Pubcreate sales for his paintings. At the was expected to take nine hours in its lic Theater, won a $50,000 Whiting final form. Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Award, and was produced in London Among the most interesting new Rock, an oral-history-based docudrama and Washington, D.C. Another newcalled It Happened in Little Rock revisCanadian plays was 29-yearold Hancomer, Korean American playwright nah Moscovitch’s provocative East of ited one of the civil rights movement's Young Jean Lee, raised hackles with an Berlin, a play about the post-Holocaust most resonant moments—the 1957 in-your-face skewering of identity polistandoff that forced U.S. Pres. Dwight guilt and retribution that haunt chiltics in her Songs of the Dragons Flying dren from both sides of the conflict. It D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to to Heaven (2006), seen Off-Broadway, at was a hit at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. enforce the racial integration of that festivals in Austria and Germany, and at citys Central High School. Aging memAlso earning acclaim was the first-ever co-production between Britain’s Royal arts centres in several cities. bers of the “Little Rock Nine,” the black Other theatrical undertakings were Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the students who were the first to attend notable for their unusual concepts or Central, took part in the plays develNational Arts Center of Ottawa, a stage contexts. Theatre for a New Audience opment and were honoured at special adaptation by Margaret Atwood of her in New York City explored the idea of performances. 2005 novel The Penelopiad. The play— Notable staff changes included the apthe “stage Jew” in a season consisting which had an all-female cast, including of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Shakepointment of Teresa Eyring, the highly RSC veteran Penny Downie in a virtuspeare's The Merchant of Venice, and an regarded former managing director of oso performance as Odysseus’s longadaptation by British writer-director the Tony-winning Children’s Theatre suffering wife—was scheduled to tour Neil Bartlett of Charles Dickens's Oliver Company of Minneapolis, Minn., to the Canada. 282

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures

The years deaths included the actor, singer, and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle and

actors

Roscoe

Lee

Browne,

Tom

Poston, Betty Hutton, and Robert Goulet (see OBITUARIES), as well as ac-

gation into a series

of San Francisco

the third Pirates of the Caribbean

in-

stallment, At Worlds End (Gore Verbinski); a fourth Die Hard adventure, Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman), after

a 12-year gap; and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates), a fifth spin round the world's cinemas for the boy wizard. A few of these films went beyond the sequel's usual chore of reinventing the wheel: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix darkened and intensified

do-

American

You're Dead,

a crime

wasted shot. Joel and Ethan Coen curbed their whimsical proclivities to make the excellent No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel—a violent, darkly humorous thriller about an ordinary Joe who walks off with drug dealers’ loot. No film of the year brought a creepier character than Javier Bardem’s psychopathic villain. Even his haircut was frightening. Numerous films had a political dimension, most often focusing on the Iraq war and its consequences. There

cluded Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi); Shrek the Third (Chris Miller and Raman Hui); the third Bourne film, The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass);

another

the Devil Knows

Hamlin (founder of the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem,

United States. Facing stiff competition from realistic video games such as Halo 3, the American film industry pursued the public with its own franchise successes. Sequels released in 2007 in-

Is Gone,

mestic story, aimed modestly—and successfully—at the heartstrings. In A Mighty Heart, his first film for an

thriller and family tragedy rolled into

MOTION PICTURES

Grace

Bay-area killings in the 1960s and ’70s. Veteran director Sidney Lumet produced his own quality goods in Before

tors George Grizzard, Charles Nelson Reill and William Hutt, Larry Leon N.C.), and performance artist Sekou Sundiata. (JIM O’QUINN)

Strouse’s

one—intricate

was

a sameness

and tense, with not one

to the arguments;

any

differences lay in the degree of anger about the U.S. government's actions or the cogency of the film's narrative or style. Paul Haggis’s home-front story In the Valley of Elah fumbled its plot by straining for significance; Brian De Palma’s atrocity drama Redacted seethed with inchoate anger. James C.

Javier Bardem played a memorable villain in Joel and Ethan Coen’s muchadmired film No Country for Old Men.

the drama of the Potter series, and The

Bourne Ultimatum managed to significantly boost its predecessors’ nervous energy and adrenaline rush. A potential new franchise beckoned with The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz), the first

part of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The year’s most heartening feature was the number of films with grownup ambition, some with impressive running times to match. Paul Thomas Anderson took 158 minutes to unfurl There Will Be Blood, an uncompromising adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, which charted the wiles and

hubris of a pioneer oil prospector. With Daniel Day-Lewis’s brilliantly detailed performance and Andersons rigorous artistic control, the film’s grim spell held. Andrew Dominik scaled 160 minutes with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, featuring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck—a poetic, slow-burning portrait of the

studio,

British

director

Michael Winterbottom turned to Pakistan and the story of the kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. This story, which was filmed in a documentary-mosaic style, adopted the point of view of Pearl’s wife, convincingly played by Angelina Jolie, taut with passion. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Some

of Winterbottom’s visual

flair could have assisted Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, a talkative plea for political engagement, nearly carried by its lustrous players (Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Redford himself). James Mangold continued the Western genres revival with 3:10 to Yuma, an excellent, visually dynamic remake of a well-respected 1957 original. Indulgences in the acting and directing bloated Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, but

the film still impressed viewers with its lyrical account of a young man’s quest for freedom in the Alaskan wilderness. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe teamed to good effect as a hoodlum and cop in American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s ambitious tale about a Harlem drug lord. Elsewhere, humans were under siege. Robert Zemeckis’s AngloSaxon adventure Beowulf refined the performance-capture technique he previously showcased in The Polar Express; life drained out of the cast. Digital ef fects also took over in Michael Bay’s brazen Transformers, inspired by the robotlike toys of the same name. Popcorn cinema thrived with Knocked Up (Judd Apatow), a rude, charming, and riotously funny comedy about the unplanned consequences of a one-night stand, featuring Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Evan Almighty (Tom Shadyac) went a different route, gathering up environmental pleas and concern for viewers’ spiritual well-being into a flimsy story about a latter-day Noah, played by the engaging Steve Carell. The Jane Austen Book Club (Robin Swicord)

offered sophisticated

fun with serious twinges, while Waitress, unveiled shortly after the murder of its writer-director, Adrienne Shelly, found warm humour in a pregnant woman's fraught domestic life. But the years best comedy was Ratatouille

star-struck

(Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava), a small

nemesis, and their journey toward fate.

masterpiece of animation, blessed with

In the field of urban crime, David Fincher delivered Zodiac (158 minutes),

nimble wit, genuine warmth, and a re-

outlaw

Jesse

James,

his

freshingly different leading character— a French rat passionate about cooking.

a well-sustained, densely woven investiMiramax/Everett Collection

283

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures Focus Features/Everett Collection

Conceived by comedian Jerry Seinfeld,

graphical The Home Song Stories was a mainstream drama that centred on Joan Chen’s powerful performance as an unstable Chinese Australian mother facing assimilation problems in the 1970s. The strongest drama came from

the animated Bee Movie (Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner) had its mo-

ments, despite its bee-sized plot. The other headline animated feature was The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman),

which was modestly successful as a belated big-screen expansion of television's The Simpsons, but there were no immediate plans for a sequel. Disney's

Dee McLachlan’s The Jammed,

triumph,

of two artistic giants, Ingmar Bergman

Enchanted

(Kevin

geous treatment of enforced prostitution in Melbourne. Western Europe. On July 30 the deaths

Lima),

stood in a class of its own, deftly mixing live action and animation to transpose stereotypical Disney fairy-tale characters onto Manhattans mean streets. Amy Adams glistened with innocence

and

optimism

as

Princess

Giselle. British Isles. Canadian David Cronenberg made the most gripping film shot in Britain:

Eastern

Promises,

a bril-

liantly managed drama about Russian mobsters at large in London. Working from Steve Knights ingenious script, Cronenberg moved with panther stealth from one surprise and subtlety to another. Blood and gore played their part in the spell; so did the razor-sharp characterizations, led by Viggo Mortensen's taciturn mafioso. Joe Wright's suavely handled Atonement, adapted from Ian McEwan's novel about a childhood lie and its aftermath, displayed its full British pedigree in its literary sophistication, genteel period trappings, and disguised emotions. Pursuing his own British tradition, Ken Loach turned his critical eye on the exploitation of immigrant labour in Its a Free World. . ., a mature and rel-

atively unpreachy treatment of an urgent topic. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age, an unnecessary sequel to his Elizabeth (1998), shrieked with melodrama;

Cate

Blanchett,

strutting

her finery again as Queen Elizabeth, proved the only attraction. Another British tradition continued with Mr. Bean’s

Holiday

(Steve

Bendelack),

which was set in France—and which was said to be the last screen outing for Rowan Atkinson’s comic bumbler. David Mackenzie added idiosyncratic tweaks to British realism in Hallam Foe,

an intimate coming-of-age drama with a playful touch, a strong visual sense, and a very convincing central actor (Jamie Bell). Sarah Gavron’s film of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, about a Muslim woman's life in East London, at-

tracted opposition from area residents, some of whom criticized Gavron's rosetinted view. The prettiest film of all, perhaps, was Becoming Jane, Julian Jarrolds imaginary spin through Jane 284

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a coura-

David Cronenberg’s subtle and intricate drama Eastern Promises featured Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mobster. Austen’s early life and loves, featuring the American Anne Hathaway diligently equipped with an English accent. Few new talents broke through, but director Tom Shankland put down a strong calling card with wAz, a smart crime thriller set in New York City. The popular touch was also pursued in Hot Fuzz, the whirlwind tale of murder in

an English village, though director Edgar Wright assembled his stock ingredients only to make loud mockery. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The shy side of Canadian life was given an absurdist twist in Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental,

a Film

Without

Guns),

an

ac-

complished portrait of quietly desperate lives. Louder drama was found in Clément Virgos Poor Boys Game, a skillful variation on his usual themes of racial and sexual identity. The action grew more raucous in Allan Moyle’s mischievous comedy Weirdsville, which centred on the absurd travails of two heroin addicts. But no Canadian film was more idiosyncratic than Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, a delicious fusion of fantasy and fact celebrating the director’s upbringing in his prairie hometown. Australian film had a quiet year. Rolf de Heer displayed plenty of quirks in the curious Dr. Plonk—part satire on modern life, part tribute to silent filmmaking. Tony Ayres’s semiautobio-

and Michelangelo Antonioni, prompted media commentary about the decline of intellectually rigorous European cinema. Serious thinking was certainly not an issue in the German comedy Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, from the Jewish Swiss-born director Dani Levy—a film that was significant more for its novelty than for anything else. The Nazi years also inspired Die Fálscher, Stefan Ruzowitzkys absorbing drama about concentration-camp prisoners coerced into supporting the German war effort by forging foreign currency notes. Although no masterpieces emerged in Europe, much good work was still accomplished. German director Christian Petzold enhanced his growing reputation with Yella, a stylish thriller anchored by the director’s cool gaze and Nina Hoss’s performance as a young businesswoman with inner demons. Fatih Akin impressed even more with his firm but tender handling of Auf der anderen Seite, a moving depiction of the tangled lives and emotions of six people—four of Turkish background and two Germans. Admirers of French literary cinema had a feast with Jacques Rivette’s Balzac adaptation Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe), a strongly acted account of the seesawing love affair between a Napoleonic war hero (Guillaume Depardieu) and a teasing Paris socialite (Jeanne Balibar). Those

who sought after the fashionable but substantial enjoyed the true-life story Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)—Julian Schnabel’s vivid, moving, sometimes funny depiction of the locked-in existence of a fashion magazine editor immobilized by a stroke. Mathieu Amalric’s heroic performance was one of the year’s best. Laurent Tirard’s Moliére poked around the dramatist’s life in an entertaining costume drama. Claude Millers Un Secret won approval as an intricately structured drama about the French occupation, and André Téchiné, another well-established director, shone with Les Té-

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures

moins, a mature, urgent drama exploring the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. As always, there were frequent tales about the French in love, from Les Chansons d'amour (Christophe Honoré)—a lik-

survive in the Ceausescu regime's dying days in the late 1980s. Much of the film's charge stemmed from Anamaria Marinca’s performance; Mungiu’s use of

long

takes,

silence,

and

muted

able semimusical—to the erudite craziness of Un Baiser s'il vous plaît (Emmanuel Mouret). Following his own

colours told their own story about an imprisoning, dolorous society. Cristian

tradition,

in 2006, achieved posthumous fame with California Dreamin’ (Nesfarsit)

Taiwanese

director

Hou

Hsiao-Hsien made the demanding and eloquent Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Flight of the Red Balloon), another of his painstaking dissections of loneliness

in urban

life. Across

the border,

Nemescu, who was killed in a car crash

(California

Dreamin’

[Endless]),

a

swirling, hyperrealist comedy of cultural misunderstanding set during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Marking an-

Belgian film found success with Ben X

other Romanian

(Nic

maverick Francis Ford Coppola arrived to shoot Youth Without Youth—a flickeringly engaging talk-laden tale about regeneration and time's ticking clock, made with much local talent. Hungary's chief international offering was Béla Tarr’s A Londoni férfi (The Man from London), concerning a train employee who stumbles on a suitcase of stolen money. The camera prowled slowly and elegantly, as usual, and time stood still in the morose air, yet the spiritual liftoff expected with Tarr never quite happened. Livelier product emerged from the Czech Republic. Jan Sverák, the direc-

Balthazar),

a

brazen

crowd-

pleaser about a teenager obsessed with video games. For

Italian

cinema,

2007

was

rela-

tively uneventful. The Taviani brothers’ political passions enlivened La masseria

delle

allodole

(The

Lark

Farm),

though its story about Armenian genocide during World War I never found a firm focus. Mimmo Calopresti kept things simple and light in his charming L'abbuffata. The striking, but far from charming, Nessuna qualità agli eroi (Fallen Heroes; Paolo Franchi) grimly stuck to the Oedipal theme of its tale of two men swapping murders. From Spain came Judio Medem’s conceptually dense Caótica Ana, which shakily centred on the experiences of an artistic teenager who cartwheels through time to experience the lives of

milestone, the eternal

England). Jan Hrebejk had his own fun with

Medvídek

(Teddy Bear),

a confi-

dently handled relationship comedy. Russia found less to smile about. Aleksandr Sokurov created one of his most resonant dramas in Aleksandra (Alexan-

dra), a muted cry against the Chechen war, dominated by the veteran singer Galina Vishnevskaya’s powerful performance as an elderly woman visiting her grandson’s army base. The Chechen conflict hung in the background of Nikita Mikhalkov's /2, a weightily acted jury drama inspired by the American classic 12 Angry Men (1957). Sergei Bodrov hit a different register in the bloody battles and scenic thrills of Mongol, the first of a proposed trilogy on the life of Genghis Khan. In Poland, Andrzej Jakimowski crafted the bittersweet provincial working-class drama Sztuczki (Tricks). Turk-

ish film looked to the not-very-distant past in Beynelmilel (The International), Muharrem Gulmez and Sirri Sureyya Onder’s entertaining film about Anatolian musicians in 1982 who are forced to ditch their folk music for uplifting military fare. Latin America. Carlos Reygadas, Mexican cinema’s troublemaker, trod a sur-

prisingly ascetic path in Stellet licht hit with the mordant social commen(Silent Light), a testing drama of adultary of Vratné lahve (Empties). Jirí Mentery and spiritual crisis in a Mennonite zel, a veteran of the 1960s Czech New community. More accessible were Wave, served up a likable, picaresque Jonás Cuarón's Afio ufia (Year of the social comedy with Obsluhoval jsem Nail), an ingenious visual treatment of tragic women in history. Juan Antonio Bayona's spooky mansion drama El orAnglického krale (I Served the King of two people not quite falling in love, and fanato (The Orphanage) was Rodrigo Plá's vigilante drama La Zona. A 10-year-old’s growing much easier to understand. Sweden' reputation for explorpains provided the focus for the A retired professor (Zdenek Sverák, at right) and his ing lifes sombre side was mainCuban film La edad de la peseta wife (Daniela Kolarova) suffer a mishap in Czech (The Silly Age), Pavel Giroud's tained in Den nya människan director Jan Sverdk’s hit film Empties. (Klaus Härö), a powerful drama winning and nimble drama set inspired by the country’s former just before the 1958 Cuban revolution. Argentina scored a rarpolicy of enforced sterilization of those the state deemed unfit to efied triumph with Música nocbecome parents. Laughter of the turna, Rafael Filipelli’s elegantly cool study of an emotionally dark kind dominated Johan Kling’s comedy of manners, Darsterile marriage. ling. Denmark provided its own Middle East. Israel’s cinematic fortunes rose considerably with anguish with Hvid nat (White Night; Jannik Johansen),

tor of Kolja (1996), scored a box-office

an in-

a

strong

showing

in

interna-

tense, emotionally testing account of an accidental killer's dark nights of the soul. Eastern Europe. Romania's surging reputation for quality cinema reached a peak with the award of the Cannes Festivals Palme d'Or to Cristian Mungiu's 4 luni,

tional festivals and the emergence of impressive new talents. David Volach came to the fore with his tightly controlled Hofshat Kaits (My Father My Lord), an emotionally vibrant drama set in an ultra-Orthodox Israeli com-

3 saptamani, si 2 zile (4 Months,

Assi Dayan as a rabbi at loggerheads with his son. Warm sentiment and playfulness bubbled

munity,

3 Weeks & 2 Days), an unsparingly honest drama about illegal abortions and the struggle to

featuring

veteran

actor

(continued on page 288) Benelux Film Distribution/Everett Collection

285

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures

INTERNATIONAL

FILM AWARDS

2007

Golden Globes, awarded in Beverly Hills, California, in January 2007 Best drama Babel (France/U.S./Mexico; director, Alejandro González Ifüiárritu) Dreamgirls (U.S.; director, Bill Condon) Best musical or comedy Best director Martin Scorsese (The Departed, U.S./Hong Kong) Best actress, drama Best actor, drama

Best actress, musical or comedy Best actor, musical or comedy Best foreign-language film

Helen Mirren (The Queen, U.K./France/Italy) Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, U.K.) Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada, U.S.)

Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, U.S.) Letters from Iwo Jima (U.S.; director, Clint Eastwood)

Sundance Film Festival, awarded in Park City, Utah, in January 2007

Grand Jury Prize, dramatic film Grand Jury Prize, documentary Audience Award, dramatic film

Audience Award, documentary World Cinema Jury Prize, dramatic film World Cinema Jury Prize, documentary Best director, dramatic film

Best director, documentary

Padre nuestro (U.S.; director, Christopher Zalla) Manda bala (Send a Bullet) (Brazil/U.S.; director, Jason Kohn) Grace Is Gone (U.S.; director, James C. Strouse) Hear and Now (U.S.; director, Irene Taylor Brodsky) Adama meshuga'at (Sweet Mud) (Israel/Germany/Japan; director, Dror Shaul)

Vores lykkes fjender (Enemies of Happiness) (Denmark/Norway/Finland; directors, Eva Mulvad and Anja A Erhayem) Jeffrey Blitz (Rocket Science, U.S.) Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine (War Dance, U.S.)

British Academy of Film and Television Arts, awarded in London in February 2007 Best film Best director Best actress Best actor Best supporting actress

Best supporting actor Best foreign-language film

The Queen (U.K./France/Italy; director, Stephen Frears) Paul Greengrass (United 93, France/U.K./U.S.) Helen Mirren (The Queen, U.K./France/Italy) Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, U.K.) Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls, U.S.) Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine, U.S.) El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (Mexico/Spain/U.S.; director, Guillermo del Toro)

Berlin International Film Festival, awarded in February 2007 Golden Bear Silver Bear (Grand Jury Prize) Best director Best actress Best actor

Tuya de hun shi (Tuya’s Marriage) (China; director, Wang Quan’an) El otro (The Other) (France/Argentina/Germany; director, Ariel Rotter) Joseph Cedar (Beaufort, Israel) Nina Hoss (Yella, Germany) Julio Chavez (El otro [The Other], France/Argentina/Germany)

Césars (France), awarded in Paris in February 2007

Best film Best director

Lady Chatterley (Belgitum/France/U.K.; director, Pascale Ferran) Guillaume Canet (Ne le dis à personne [Tell No One], France)

Best Best Most Most

Marina Hands (Lady Chatterley, Belgium/France/U.K.)

actress actor promising actor promising actress

Frangois Cluzet (Ne le dis à personne [Tell No One], France) Malik Zidi (Les Amitiés maléfiques, France) Mélanie Laurent (Je vais bien, ne ten fais pas, France)

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars; U.S.), awarded in Los Angeles in February 2007 Best film Best director

The Departed (U.S./Hong Kong; director, Martin Scorsese)

Best actress Best actor

Helen Mirren (The Queen, U.K./France/Italy) Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, U.K.) Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls, U.S.) Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine, U.S.) Das Leben der Anderen (Germany; director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Best supporting actress

Best supporting actor Best foreign-language film

Martin Scorsese (The Departed, U.S./Hong Kong)

Cannes Festival, France, awarded in May 2007 Palme d'Or Grand Prix Jury Prize

Best director Best actress Best actor

Caméra d'Or

286

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

4 luni, 3 saptamani, si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) (Romania; director, Cristian Mungiu) Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest) (France/Japan; director, Naomi Kawase) Persepolis (France/U.S.; directors, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi); Stellet licht (Silent Light) (Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany; director,

Carlos Reygadas) Julian Schnabel (Le Scaphandre et le papillon [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly], France/U.S.)

Jeon Do Yeon (Milyang [Secret Sunshine], South Korea) Konstantin Lavronenko (/zenanie [The Banishment], Russia) Meduzot (Jellyfish) (France/Israel; directors, Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret)

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures

INTERNATIONAL

FILM AWARDS 2007 (continued)

Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, awarded in August 2007

Golden Leopard Special Jury Prize Best actress Best actor

Ai no yokan (The Rebirth) (Japan; director, Masahiro Kobayashi) Memories (South Korea; directors, Pedro Costa, Harun Farocki, and Eugéne Green) Marián Álvarez (Lo mejor de mí, Spain)

Michel Piccoli (Sozs les toits de Paris [Beneath the Rooftops of Paris], France); Michele Venitucci (Fuori dalle corde, Switzerland/Italy)

Montreal World Film Festival, awarded in September 2007 Grand Prix of the Americas (best film) Best actress Best actor

Best director

Special Grand Prix of the Jury Best screenplay International film critics award

Ben X (Belgium; director, Nic Balthazar); Un Secret (France; director, Claude Miller) Andrea Sawatzki (Der andere Junge, Germany)

Filipe Duarte and Tomás Almeida (A outra margem, Portugal) Jacob Berger (1 Journée [That Day], Switzerland/France) Noodle (Israel; director, Ayelet Menahemi) Samira’s Garden (Morocco; writer, Latif Lahlou) Samira’s Garden (Morocco; director, Latif Lahlou)

Venice Film Festival, awarded in September 2007 Golden Lion Special Jury Prize Volpi Cup, best actress Volpi Cup, best actor Silver Lion, best director

Marcello Mastroianni Award (best young actor or actress) Luigi De Laurentiis Award (best first film)

Se, jie (U.S./China/Taiwan/Hong Kong; director, Ang Lee) La Graine et le mulet (France; director, Abdel Kechiche); / Not There (U.S./Germany; director, Todd Haynes) Cate Blanchett (rz Not There, U.S/Germany) Brad Pitt (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, U.S.) Brian De Palma (Redacted, U.S.) Hafsia Herzi (La Graine et le mulet, France) La zona (Mexico; director, Rodrigo Plá)

Toronto International Film Festival, awarded in September 2007 Best Canadian feature film Best Canadian first feature

My Winnipeg (director, Guy Maddin)

Best Canadian short film International film critics award

Pool (director, Chris Chong Chan Fui) La zona (Mexico; director, Rodrigo Plá) Eastern Promises (U.K./Canada/U.S.; director, David Cronenberg)

People's Choice Award

Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, a Film Without Guns) (director,

Stéphane Lafleur)

San Sebastián International Film Festival, Spain, awarded in September 2007 Best film Special Jury Prize Best director Best actress Best actor

Best cinematography New directors prize International film critics award

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (U.S.; director, Wayne Wang) Buda as sharm foru rikht (Iran; director, Hana Makhmalbaf) Nick Broomfield (Battle for Haditha, U.K.) Blanca Portillo (Siete mesas de billar francés, Spain)

Henry O (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, U.S.) Charlie Lam (Cheut ai kup gei [Exodus], Hong Kong) Conrad Clark (Soul Carriage, China/U.K.) Encarnacion (Argentina; director, Anahi Berneri)

Vancouver International Film Festival, awarded in October 2007

Vancity People’s Choice Award (most popular Canadian film) People’s Choice Award (most popular international film) National Film Board Best Canadian Documentary Award Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award Kyoto Planet “Climate for Change” Award Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema

She’s a Boy I Knew (director, Gwen Haworth) Persepolis (France/U.S.; directors, Vincent Paronnaud

and Marjane Satrapi) Up the Yangtze (director, Yung Chang) Normal (director, Carl Bessai) The Planet (Sweden/Norway/Denmark; directors, Michael Stenberg, Johan Séderberg, and Linus Torell) Jin bi hui huang (Fujian Blue) (China; director, Robin Weng); Xiawu gou jiao (Mid-Afternooon Barks) (China; Zhang Yuedong)

Chicago International Film Festival, awarded in October 2007 Gold Hugo (best film)

Stellet licht (Silent Light) (Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany; director,

Carlos Reygadas) Silver Hugo (Special Jury Prize) Best documentary

Tuya de hun shi (Tiya's Marriage) (China; director, Wang Quan'an) Taxi to the Dark Side (U.S.; director, Alex Gibney)

European Film Awards, awarded in Berlin in December 2007 Best European film Best actress Best actor

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

4 luni, 3 saptamani, si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) (Romania; director, Cristian Mungiu) Helen Mirren (The Queen, U.K./France/Italy) Sasson Gabai (Bikur ha-tizmoret [The Band’s Visit]; Israel/France/U.S.) (PATRICIA BAUER)

Performing Arts: Motion Pictures

(continued from page 285)

out of Eran Kolirin’s Bikur ha-tizmoret (The Bands Visit), about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli desert town;

the film won eight Israeli Film Academy awards. Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret made a strong impression with Meduzot (Jellyfish), a part serious, part whimsical film about lonely lives. Amos Gitai’s international production Disengagement, smoother in style than his usual work, took a provocative look at Israeli settlers evicted from the Gaza Strip.

In volatile times, Iran produced less quality fare than usual, but Saeed Ebrahimifars small, poignant Tak-derakhtha ("Lonesome Trees"), another fatherson drama, proved exceptional. Veteran

director Youssef

Chahine,

as-

sisted by Khaled Yousset, represented Egypt with Heya fawda (Chaos), a visually flat but forceful drama about police brutality. South Asia. India’s gargantuan commercial industry continued to generate blockbuster entertainments notable for splashy colour and charismatic stars.

love. It was enough perhaps for his diehard fans. Less-prestigious directors in China and Hong Kong found a better balance between material and style. Li Yu’s emotionally involving Ping guo (Lost in Beijing), another film subject to Chinese censorship, adopted a liberal view of modern relationships. Zhang Yang’s Luo ye gui gen (Getting Home) was an amused and gentle look at Chinese provincial life. South Korean activity slowed in 2007. For full-out scares a viewer couldn't improve upon Geomeun jib (Black House), Shin Tae Ra’s spirited exercise in modern Gothic, which earned impressive box-office success at home. Seekers of art-house bliss found fewer pickings than usual. Kim Ki-duk's Sum (Breath) stripped down to the bare essentials for a typically odd and contemplative tale about love with a death-row prisoner. In Chun nyun hack (Beyond the Years), veteran director Im Kwon-taek revisited the folk-music traditions glorified in his film Sopyonje (1993) but without recapturing its emotional resonance.

Bangladesh, Golam Rabbany Biplob displayed a talent worth nurturing in Swopnodanay (On the Wings of Dreams), a sensitively handled village drama. East and Southeast Asia. The Asian films with the highest international profile came from Hong Kong. Ang Lee's Se,

Two Japanese films made their mark. Naomi Kawase's Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest) concerned with a young caregiver and her elderly patient, won the Cannes Grand Prix, though its mix of rarefied visual trappings, respectful plot, and docile actors didn't energize everybody. Veteran Masahiro Kobayashi picked up Locarno's Golden Leopard prize with Ai no yokan (The Rebirth), a slow-burning story of grief and trauma gradually overcome. Box-office business in Vietnam was brisk for Charlie Nguyen’s Dong mau anh hung (The Rebel), a lavish martialarts feast wrapped inside a bustling period drama. In Thailand the phenomenon of the year was the release of M.C. Chatrichalerm Yukol's Tamnaan somdet phra Naresuan maharat (The Legend of Naresuan), an exuberant cycle of action biographies celebrating the 16th-century hero who liberated Siam from the

Jie (Lust, Caution) and Wong Kar Wai's

Burmese.

My Blueberry Nights both received prestige festival showings. Neither quite showed the directors at their best. The bare flesh in Lee's film triggered censorship in China, but this period drama about a patriotic student swept into an assassination plot during World War II ultimately displayed more caution than lust. The film won the Venice Golden Lion prize. Wong's English-language My Blueberry Nights lavished its own visual beauties, as well as pop star Norah Jones, on a troublingly slender story about Americans frustrated in

Africa. The clash between traditional tribal life and the modern world fueled two of the continents most striking films, both from directors making their

Om shanti om

(Farah Khan), a show-

case for the megastar Shahrukh Khan, spun a silly story of reincarnation into a spectacular audio-visual parade. Paruthiveeran

(Ameer

Sultan)

con-

quered the Tamil market with an overthe-top production about star-crossed lovers. Jag Mundhra entertained more serious goals in his British co-production Provoked: A True Story, which investigated the case of a battered wife in Britain (Aishwarya Rai) charged with murder after having incinerated her husband. Melodrama won out over social realism, but it was

288

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

solid fare. In

feature

debut:

Salif Traoré’s

Faro,

la

reine des eaux (Faro: Goddess of the Waters), from

Mali, shot with documen-

tary simplicity; and Cheick Fantamady Camara’s I va pleuvoir sur Conakry (Clouds over Conakry), made in Guinea,

a robust medley of comedy, drama, and romance.

From

Rwanda,

Munyu-

rangabo (by American director Lee Isaac Chung), one of the few films in

the local Kinyarwanda language, powerfully revisited the painful history and aftermath of the country’s genocide of 1994.

In South

Roodt

earned

Meisie,

a

Africa,

Darrell

a small

humane

triumph

drama

James

with

about

a

schoolteacher and a gifted girl who is thwarted by her father. (GEOFF BROWN)

Documentary Films. Director Jason Kohn put his own life in danger to film the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize: Documentary winner, Manda bala (Send a Bullet), an exami-

nation of political and economic corruption in Brazil and its tragic consequences. The recipient of the Sundance Audience Award: Documentary was director Irene Taylor Brodsky’s Hear and Now, the moving story of her parents, both born deaf, who

in their 60s had

surgery that enabled them to hear for the first time—a new experience that was not without complications and challenges. The most commercially successful documentary of 2007 was Michael Moore's Sicko, a highly critical view of the U.S. health care system. Two of the year’s other notable documentaries had musical subjects. / Love Hip Hop in Morocco, directed by Jennifer Needleman

and

Joshua

Asen,

observed

a

group of Muslim hip-hop artists performing in a challenging cultural environment. À winner of numerous audience awards, Jasmine Dellal's When the

Road Bends ... Tales of a Gypsy Caravan (also released as Gypsy Caravan) followed Roma musicians on a tour of North America. One of the years most controversial documentaries and a Special Jury Prize winner at Sundance was No End in Sight by Charles Ferguson, a riveting account of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the rise of the insurgents, as recollected by former military officers and advisers to the U.S. government. Another controversial film was Meeting Resistance by the team of Steve Connors and Molly Bingham. The film, which was screened at numerous international

festivals,

examined

the

complicated situation in Iraq from the perspectives of eight insurgents Amir BarLevs My Kid Could Paint That explored the case of a four-yearold girl whose paintings sold for thousands of dollars. Although the film did not establish whether the child actually made all of the paintings, it did comment on the art world, celebrity, and society's fascination with extraordinary children.

(BEN LEVIN)

Physical Sciences Scientists improved CATALYSTS and worked with synthetic MOLECULE SELF-ASSEMBLY, techniques for ELECTRON ACCELERATION,

and HYPERLENSES. Chinese and Japanese space probes reached the MOON. Astronomers mapped DARK MATTER and reported the BRIGHTEST supernova, the MOST MASSIVE star, and the MOST EARTH-LIKE extrasolar planet.

erties between macroscopic particles and nanoscale particles meant that their relative safety might also vary, however. In April, Ludwig Limbach of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, and his colleagues examined how metal-oxide nanoparticles within a cell affected the production of reactive oxygen species (chemicals that contain oxygen atoms with unpaired electrons that can react with molecules such as DNA). Nanoparticles of oxides of iron, titanium, cobalt, or manganese

CHEMISTRY pplied Chemistry. Platinum catalysts, because of their high chemical activity, were good candidates for making hydrogen fuel cells more efficient and cost-effective for use in cars, but they still needed much development. For example, the oxygen reduction that takes place on platinum catalysts in a fuel cell can form side products such as hydroxide ions (OH-), which can then react with platinum and render the catalytic surface unreactive. Two studies published in early 2007 looked at strategies that could increase the activity and overall efficiency of catalytic platinum surfaces. In one study Vojislav Stamenkovic and

organize without external direction. The basic model for such systems was to build a “seed molecule” and add molecules to the initial nucleating structure. Ideally, researchers wanted to use these strategies to specify how molecules came together on the basis of external conditions so that the researchers could easily construct precise reproducible systems that assembled predictably on a molecular scale. Rebecca Shulman and Erik Winfree of the California Institute of Technology described conditions in which they were able to coax tiles made from DNA molecules to associate in a desired pattern to form ribbonlike structures. The researchers studied the thermodynamics of these structures—both the formation

Nenad

(Ill.) Na-

of new structures (nucleation) and the

tional Laboratory and their colleagues described improved oxygen-reduction reactions with a surface that contained a 3:1 ratio of platinum to nickel. The atoms were packed as tightly as possible, an arrangement called a 111 surface. The surface alloy was 90 times more reactive than a traditional platinum-on-carbon catalyst and was

addition of tiles to the ends of the structures (elongation). Although both processes were energetically compara-

Markovic

10 times

more

of Argonne

reactive

than

a pure

platinum surface. In the second study Radoslav Adzic and colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., introduced gold nanoclusters

to a platinum-carbon cathode. The modified cathode was equally effective in reducing oxygen, but the gold slowed the degradation of the cathode. Other researchers investigated molecular engineering through the chemistry of self-assembled molecules. Such synthetic systems were modeled after biological systems whose structure included all the necessary information to specify how a complex of different kinds of molecules would assemble and

ble, the wider ribbons had a slower rate

of nucleation, which made it possible to specify the elongation of the structures. This type of control gave materials researchers another tool for fabricating materials at the micrometre scale. Environmental Chemistry. As more consumer products included nanoscale materials—materials manufactured from particles 1 to 100 billionths of a metre in size—researchers worked to understand their possible effects on environment and health. In some cases the chemical properties of nanoscale particles differed from those of macroscopic particles of the same chemical composition. The distinctive or enhanced chemical activity of nanoscale particles provided opportunities for medical applications, such as for delivering drugs more effectively into living cells. The differences in chemical prop-

oxide were found to elevate the production of reactive oxygen species in cultures of cells that line the human respiratory tract. Cell membranes were capable of blocking ions dissolved in solution from entering a cell, but the nanoparticles acted as a carrier to take the metal oxides inside the cell. Salts of chromium(VI),

or hexavalent

chromium, were usually considered to be industrial pollutants, but researchers explained how these toxic compounds could form naturally and build to unsafe levels in certain regions with chromium ores, such as California, Italy, Mexico, and New Caledonia.

Chromium in chromite and other chromium ores typically exist in a nontoxic form called chromium(III).

Scott

Fendorf and colleagues of Stanford University used laboratory experiments to show that birnessite, a manganeseoxide mineral found in these regions, could oxidize the chromium(III) in chromite into chromium(VI). The

World

Health Organizations

for maximum

standard

allowable chromium(VI)

levels in drinking water was 50 micrograms per litre. Under neutral pH conditions, the experiments showed that chromium(VI)

levels

in such

natural

environments could exceed that value within a period of 100 days. Understanding these processes was expected to help scientists predict where natural chromium(VI)

levels

might

exceed

health standards. Organic Chemistry. The synthesis of carbohydrate structures presented particularly difficult challenges in organic chemistry. It was notoriously difficult to maintain the stereochemistry (threedimensional arrangement) of the glycosidic bond in carbohydrates that links one sugar molecule to another. In addition, the backbone of carbohydrate molecules is covered by many copies of 289

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Physical Sciences London Centre for Nanotechnology

the same functional group, a hydroxyl (OH) group, which made it difficult to attach different groups at specific positions along the ring. Synthesis of polysaccharides usually involved the tedious steps of adding and removing protecting groups to differentiate the alcohols and purification to remove unwanted side products. Hung Shangcheng of National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, however

(enantiomers)

that

are

mirror

images of each other but are not identical. The manufacture

of medications,

pesticides, and other important compounds often required one enantiomer and not the other, and—for this purpose—organic chemists traditionally used metal catalysts with bound chiral ligands. Such molecules typically contained a central metal ion bound to a chiral organic complex that introduced overall right- or left-handedness into the product. F. Dean Toste and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated that the chiral portion of a molecule did not have to be directly attached to the metal ion in order to produce a chiral product. They used a gold-ion catalyst bound to a chiral binaphthol-derived counterion (an ion whose charge was opposite that of the gold ion). In solution the catalyst produced a high yield that had a 90% excess of one enantiomer by selectively cyclizing an allenic alcohol to produce a cyclic ether product. Industrial Chemistry. Biaryl molecules (molecules

disordered, and the other value tracked

Taiwan, and his colleagues, demonstrated a method for

producing multiple derivatives of glucose in "one pot"—that is, without successive isolation and purification steps. The one-pot technique relied on the use of catalytic trimethylsilyltriflate and benzyl ether and substituted protecting groups of benzyl ether. Subtle changes in the reaction conditions led to a variety of products, and the researchers demonstrated how these methods could be used to synthesize a number of polysaccharides, including the trisaccharide that binds to the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Such methods might be used to speed the synthesis of polysaccharides in chemical and biological studies. Organic chemists continued to develop new methods for synthesizing chiral molecules—molecules with two forms

methyl ends of the hydrocarbon chains. The experimenters found two time values that were proportional to the length of the carbon chain. One time value measured the time that it took for the end of the chain to become vibrationally

that contain

two

aromatic

rings, or groups, linked by a carbon-carbon bond) were important for a variety of industrial applications, including light-emitting diodes, electron-transport devices, liquid crystals, and medicines. Their synthesis was not straightforward, 290

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope, scientists obtained this image of an ice particle that consisted of only six molecules of water and formed the most basic “snowflake.” however,

because

the molecules

could

react with each other at a variety of positions along the aromatic rings. Previously, the synthesis of biaryl molecules generally required specific preactivation of each of the aromatic precursors to achieve the desired products. In May, David R. Stuart and Keith Fagnou of the University of Ottawa reported a catalytic method for cleanly and efficiently linking the aromatic compounds indole and benzene. The method required acetylation of the nitrogen on the indole ring and used a palladium catalyst with copper(ITI) acetate, 3-nitropyridine, and cesium pivalate. The reactions were carried out with thermal or microwave heating and showed cross-coupling and good regioselectivity for the carbon atom at position 2 of the indole group. Physical Chemistry. Measuring the flow of heat energy on a large-scale surface could be as simple as using a thermometer. It was far more complicated, however, to measure heat flow at the mi-

croscopic scale of nanocircuits and molecularscale electronic devices. Such measurements had to gauge both short time intervals and small space intervals accurately, and they had to be able to distinguish heat-energy transfer from other forms of energy transfer within the system. Dana Dlott and colleagues at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign used a two-dimensional system of hydrocarbons that contained 6 to 24 carbon atoms attached to a gold surface to examine their vibrational movements while heated. The researchers used a laser to heat a gold surface to 800 °C (1,470 °F), and they measured

how quickly the heat energy reached the

the movement of disorder through the hydrocarbon chain. The researchers’ findings illustrated the similarities between heat-energy transport and electronic conduction. This research added to a growing body of knowledge that suggested that molecular-scale electronics systems would need to account for heat conduction in addition to electronic factors. (SARAH WEBB)

PHYSICS Particle Physics. Fundamental particle theory encompassed three of the forces of nature (the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces), but it had not been able to en-

compass the gravitational force. One attempt to do so required that the inverse square law of gravitational attraction for massive particles break down at very small separations. In 2007 a torsion-balance experiment by Dan J. Kapner and co-workers at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics, University of Washington at Seattle, appeared to invalidate this attempt to unify the four forces. The experiment provided the most precise direct verification to date of the inverse square law and showed, to a confidence limit of 95%, that the inverse square law was obeyed down to a distance of 55 micrometres (0.002 in). The neutrino, one of the most common

fundamental particles, was very difficult to study because it interacts only very weakly with other particles. Three types of neutrino exist, and in 1998 it was es-

tablished that they oscillate (change from one type to another). This phenomenon was an indication that neutrinos have mass, which is an important parameter for the standard model of fundamental particle theory. Experimenters at the Los Alamos (N.M.) Me-

son Physics Facility (LAMPF), however, found evidence for mass differences between neutrino types so great that it was

proposed that yet another type of neutrino, named the sterile neutrino, might exist. In 2007 scientists at the MiniBooNE neutrino detector at Fermilab,

Batavia, Ill., reported that they could not reproduce the LAMPF results, which was seen as a confirmation of the simpler picture. Some new puzzling results,

Physical Sciences

however, suggested that the problem had not yet been completely solved. Each type of fundamental particle has its equivalent antiparticle, and a particle and its antiparticle annihilate on meeting. The production of atoms of antihydrogen, which consists of an antielectron bound to an antiproton, provided an important tool for looking for any differences between particles and their antiparticles. In 2007 researchers in the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus collaboration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

near Geneva

managed

to trap and store antihydrogen atoms for an interval of time that would be long enough to permit their detailed study for the first time.

and colleagues of the University of Maryland published details of magnifying “hyperlenses.” These devices used the properties of evanescent waves (waves such as internally reflected waves that rapidly diminish over distance) to produce magnified images of structures with dimensions that were small compared with the wavelength of the illuminating light. Both teams used nanostructured metamaterials that had dielectric constants of opposite sign in perpendicular directions. Using similar techniques, René de Waele and colleagues of the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics,

Amsterdam,

used

a chain

of

tiny silver particles to function like a television antenna to direct light waves. The technique pointed the way to new types of devices for controlling light. Jun Ren and colleagues at Princeton University demonstrated a new method of amplifying and compressing a laser pulse through scattering in a millimetre-scale plasma, a technique that could make possible a new generation of compact low-cost ultrahigh-intensity laser systems. Condensed-Matter Physics. Phase transi-

Bose-Einstein condensate

(BEC), were

of great interest, and M. Hugbart and co-workers of the Institute of Optics, Orsay, France, and Stephan Ritter and collaborators of the Institute for Quantum

Electronics,

Ztirich, were

able to

observe the formation of a BEC droplet. (A BEC is a clump of atoms that are all in the same quantum state and hence act as a single “super atom.”) A demonstration of the way in which BECs show quantum-mechanical effects on a macroscopic scale was given by Naomi S. Ginsberg and colleagues of Harvard University. Two independently prepared BECs of about 1.8 million sodium atoms each and separated by more than 100 micrometres

(0.004 in)

were coupled via a laser beam. A light A major constraint on the investigapulse from a second (probe) laser was tion of the fundamental forces of nathen imprinted on one of the condenture was the requirement for eversates. In quantum-mechanical terms, larger and more-expensive particle the two clumps of atoms were indistinaccelerators such as CERN’s multiguishable objects, so the probe pulse billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider, imprinted on one condensate would which was nearing completion for a theoretically be retrievable from the 2008 startup. Meanwhile, Ian Blumenother. The researchers confirmed the feld and co-workers at the Stanford phenomenon, and the result pointed to (Calif.) Linear Accelerator Center dea new field of quantum information scribed a technique for accelerating processing in which information stored electrons in the wake of an electron tions, such as the condensation of wain one condensate could be retrieved beam moving at an extremely high ter vapour on a cold surface, are comfrom one or many other condensates. speed through an ionized gas. The new mon in nature. Exotic cases of phase The nature of high-temperature suapproach had the potential to produce transition, such as the formation of a perconductors (materials with zero beams of ultrahigh-energy elecelectrical resistance at or near trons at much lower cost than room temperature) had been an A hyperlens enables a conventional lens to form a established techniques. enigma to researchers. Kenjiro magnified optical image of nanoscale objects that Optics. The production of tailorK. Gomes and colleagues of are otherwise too small to be seen with light. (The made materials made possible a Princeton University and, sepahyperlens is shown greatly enlarged compared with new class of optical instruments. rately, Nicolas Doiron-Leyraud Researchers had produced materials with negative refractive indexes, which bend light in the opposite direction from that of conventional materials and therefore might be used for new kinds of lenses or, possibly, for so-called invisibility cloaks. Previously available materials with a negative refractive index worked only in the infrared region of the spectrum, but Gunner Dolling and colleagues of the University

of Karlsruhe,

Ger.,

built a metamaterial (a composite material that does not exist in nature) that had a negative refractive index at the red end of the visible spectrum. The new material consisted of etched layers of silver and magnesium fluoride on a glass substrate. Zhaowei Liu and co-workers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Igor Smolyaninov

the other lens.)

and colleagues at the University of Sherbrooke,

Que.,

advanced

the understanding of these materials by making progress in observing the phase transition of metallic oxides of copper to the superconducting

state.

In more-conventional solidstate physics, researchers were tackling the problem of increasing the speed and performance of computer Hyperlens Image

deii

systems

via

spin-

tronics—the use of the spin of electrons to transport and store information. Xiaohua Lou and fellow workers at the University of Minnesota demonstrated a fully electrical scheme for achieving spin injection, transport, and

Far-field Image

detection in a single device that used ferromagnetic contacts on a gallium arsenate substrate. Ian Appelbaum and colleagues of the University of Delaware produced a similar device based on silicon,

Zhang Lab/UC Berkeley

291

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Physical Sciences

the most common material used in semiconductor electronics. Although this feat might provide a breakthrough, the device worked at 85 K (-188 °C, or

-307 °F) rather than at room temperature, and considerable development would be needed before a commercial product emerged. Advancing in a different direction, Darrick E. Chang and co-workers from Harvard University developed a technique that allowed one light signal to control another and could serve as the basis for a single-photon transistor. The presence or absence of a single incident photon could permit or block the passage of signal photons along a microscopic wire.

Fundamental Physics. The Casimir Effect—first postulated in 1948 by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir—was a theoretical curiosity that had become important in the physics of nanostructures. This strange effect arises from the quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation, which predicts that the whole of space is permeated by random tiny amounts of energy, called zeropoint energy, even when no fields are present. Casimir suggested that this energy might produce a tiny attractive force between two parallel metallic discs. This force was studied directly by Jeremy N. Munday and Federico Capasso of Harvard University, who carried out experiments

at nanometre

dimensions to make precision measurements of the force between two metals immersed in a fluid. They found that the results were compatible with the predictions of Casimir’s theory. Capasso and co-workers proposed to use this effect to make microscopic motionand-position sensors. Meanwhile, John Obrecht and colleagues at JILA (formerly Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics),

Boulder,

Colo.,

measured

the force between a glass plate and a cloud of rubidium atoms. As the plate was heated, the force increased in ac-

cordance with Casimir’s theory. Most physicists accepted that an external reality exists, independent of observation.

This

belief,

however,

ran

counter to some of the predictions of quantum mechanics. The famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) “thought experiment” sought to demonstrate that if the predictions of quantum mechanics were correct, it was necessary for all real objects to be connected by some type of instantaneous action at a distance

(nonlocal

action)—which

sug-

gested to Einstein that quantum mechanics was incomplete. In 1972, 292

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

however,

John

Clauser carried

out an

experiment that was equivalent to the EPR thought experiment and that vindicated the quantum-mechanical result; that is, the world

could

not be both

"real and "local Simon Gróblacher and colleagues from the University of Vienna investigated the issue and in 2007 reported on experiments that ruled out a whole class of real nonlocal theories. The result made the discussion of what physicists meant by "reality" yet more complex. (DAVID G.C. JONES)

ASTRONOMY Solar System. A host of new findings about the solar system's planets were made in 2007, including a confirmation that the innermost planet, Mercury, has a liquid core. Before 1974, when the Mariner 10 spacecraft detected a weak magnetic field around Mercury, geophysicists had thought that the planet was a completely solid body. Although the strength of the magnetic field was only about 196 that of Earth's, its presence suggested that the core might not

In orbit around

Saturn,

the Cassini

spacecraft continued its study of the planet and its satellites. Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer provided the first complete image of a cloud feature that appeared as a hexagonal pattern around Saturn’s north pole. Measuring 25,000 km (15,500 mi) wide, the feature was believed to extend about 100 km (60 mi) below the tops of

the clouds that bordered it. On the basis of a Cassini flyby of the spongylooking moon Hyperion, scientists computed that the moon's density was only about one-half that of water. Cassini data confirmed that the surface had frozen water and indicated that there were deposits of hydrocarbon substances, which suggested that Hyperion had all of the chemical ingredients, if not the physical conditions, for life. Earth Perihelion and Aphelion, 2008 Jan. 3

July 4

Perihelion, approx. 0:00! Aphelion, approx. 8:00!

Equinoxes and Solstices, 2008 March 20

Vernal equinox, 05:48!

be solid, because the convective motion

June 20

Summer

of molten core material was a possible source of the field. One way to test for the presence of a fluid interior was to look for small variations in the planet's rate of spin. During 2002-06 a team of researchers led by Jean-Luc Margot of

Sept. 22 Dec. 21

Autumnal equinox, 15:44! Winter solstice, 12:04!

Cornell

University,

Ithaca,

N.Y.,

Eclipses, 2008 Feb. 7

ble in most of Antarctica, south eastern Australia, New Zealand, and the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

Feb. 21

Moon, total (begins 0:355, the

beginning visible western Asia,

a mere 420 m (1,380 ft), it was greater

than what it would be if Mercury’s interior was completely solid. One possible explanation for the persistence of a liquid core was that the planet's metallic core might contain sulfur, which would reduce the core’s melting point. The New Horizons spacecraft, which was to rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto in the year 2015, flew past Jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007, for a gravitational boost on its long journey. The spacecraft’s route took it along the tail of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, and New Horizons found pulses of energetic particles flowing along the tail modulated by Jupiter's 10-hour rotation rate. The spacecraft also studied a major volcanic eruption on the moon Io, found global changes in Jupiter’s weather, observed the formation of ammonia clouds in the atmosphere, and—for the first time—detected lightning in the planet’s polar regions.

Sun, annular (begins 1:38'),

visible along a path beginning in West Antarctica and extending into the far southern Pacific Ocean; with a partial phase visi-

di-

rected high-power radar beams toward Mercury and analyzed the reflected signals. In 2007 the team announced that the radar signals revealed a wobble in Mercury's spin. Though the wobble was

solstice, 23:59!

Europe, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, South America, and eastern North America; the end visible in western Africa, western Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, South America, North America, and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Aug. 1

Sun, total (begins 8:04!), visible

along a path beginning in northern Canada and extending through northern Greenland, the Arctic Ocean, central Russia, and northern China; with a partial

phase visible in northeastern North America, Greenland, the far northern Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, northern Europe,

Aug. 16

and most of Asia. Moon, partial (begins 18:23'), the beginning visible in the far western Pacific Ocean, Australia, most of Asia, eastern Europe, the Indian Ocean, and Africa (except the western part); the end visible in western Asia, Africa, Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and South America.

' Universal time. Source: The Astronomical Almanac for the Year 2008 (2006).

Physical Sciences ©Peter Tuthill

In late October, Comet

17P/Holmes—

a normally dim periodic comet that orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Mars—suddenly brightened by a factor of up to one million to become an object visible to the unaided eye. Within a day its outer layers had expanded to give it the appearance through binoculars of a circular disk about the angular size of the Moon. The comet had had two similar outbursts 115 years earlier, when English amateur astronomer Edwin Holmes discovered it. The most likely explanation for the outbursts was that a layer of nonvolatile material that coated the surface fractured suddenly, releasing underlying volatile material. Stars. In 2007 discoveries of planets again dominated the news of extrasolar system astronomy. Most of the roughly 250 extrasolar planets discovered to date had been found by detecting and measuring minute changes in the motion of stars that were orbited by a planet. About 20 extrasolar planets had been found by detecting changes in the brightness of a star as the orbiting planet passed in front of, or transited, the star. One such notable discovery was HAT-P-2b, an extrasolar planet that had both a large mass—about eight times that of Jupiter—and a density greater than that of Earth. The combination was puzzling, since giant planets were thought to be gaseous like Jupiter and therefore of relatively low density. Another notable discovery was Gliese

581c,

which

orbited

the

red

An unusual and highly symmetrical square-shaped nebula reported in 2007 appears in this image of star MWC 922. The image was produced from infrared exposures by the Hale and Keck I telescopes and was believed to be a side view of cone-shaped gas emissions. had ever been observed. Anthony Moffat of the University of Montreal and his collaborators reported that they had found very high masses for two stars that revolved around one another in a binary star system, called A1, that lay within the star cluster NGC 3603 in the Milky Way Galaxy. The astronomers determined that one of the stars was 84 times as massive—and its companion 114 times as massive—as

Gliese 581c was the smallest extrasolar planet yet discovered and the most Earth-like. The initial reports from the planets discoverers, a team led by Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, suggested that the planet lay in the

the Sun. The mass of the heavier star was believed close to the maximum that was possible for a stable nuclearburning star. Such massive stars can eject their outer layers and therefore typically lose mass as they age. In view of this mass-loss effect, a discovery reported by Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., and collab-

stars

orators

dwarf star Gliese 581, about 20 lightyears from Earth. The planet was of particular interest because, with a diameter

about

1.5 times that of Earth,

"habitable

zone,"

where

condi-

tions would permit the existence of liquid water on the planets surface. Late in the year a team of astronomers led by Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University and Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, announced the discovery of another planet in orbit around 55 Cancri—a relatively nearby star that had already been found to have four planets. All of these discoveries suggested that the solar system was far from unique in the galaxy. The year also brought reports of some of the biggest and brightest stars that

was

surprising.

Using

NASA's

Chandra X-ray Observatory, the researchers found a 24- to 33-solar-mass black hole in a binary star system in the nearby dwarf galaxy IC 10. It had been thought that the late evolution of the most massive stars would lead to stellar black holes of no more than 10-15 solar masses. Before becoming black holes, stars with a mass more than 5-10 times that of the Sun were believed to collapse and then explode as a Type II supernova, one of the most violent events in

the universe. In April a team of astronomers led by Nathan Smith of the

University of California, Berkeley, and Eran Ofek of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced that supernova SN 2006gy reached a peak luminosity (intrinsic brightness) about 100 billion times that of the Sun and was the most luminous supernova then known. In the first two months of the outburst, the star emitted more energy than the Sun had released during its lifetime. The astronomers proposed that the event represented the death of a star that initially had a mass greater than 100 solar masses. Not to be outdone, the discoverer of supernova SN 2006gy, Robert Quimby of Caltech, announced in October that the luminosity of another supernova that he had discovered, SN 2005ap, was twice that

of SN 2006gy. Galaxies and Cosmology. An international team of astronomers led by Nick Scoville of Caltech created a threedimensional map of dark matter as part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey. The survey made use of nearly 1,000 hours of observing time by the Hubble Space Telescope and included observations made with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellite and a variety of ground-based observatories. The astronomers mapped the dark matter by measuring the way it distorted light from galaxies beyond it. They found that the largest identifiable structures in the universe are filaments of dark matter 60 million light-years 293

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Physical Sciences

long that contain two trillion times the mass of the Sun. Other major astronomical surveys revealed the distribution of active galaxies called quasars throughout the universe. (A quasar was thought to be a galaxy that contained a supermassive black hole at its centre.) A map of more than 4,000 quasars compiled as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example, revealed that quasars in the early universe were strongly clumped. A survey of a patch of the sky about the size of the full moon that was conducted with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, and two ground-based telescopes found evidence for more than 1,000 supermassive black holes. The intense radiation emitted from the vicinity of supermassive black holes was thought to be emitted from the accretion of mass around them, but the survey observations called into question exactly how this accretion took place. Most quasars were solitary objects, but a few had been found to form pairs and orbit each other. An American-Swiss team of astronomers led by George Djorgovski of Caltech discovered for the first time a triple quasar system, which was named QQO 1432. The three quasars in the system were separated from each other by a distance less than the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. (KENNETH BRECHER)

SPACE EXPLORATION Manned

Spaceflight.

In

2007

Space Shuttle missions—STS-117,

and

120—were

three 118,

be addressed on a subsequent mission. After the shuttle’s departure, the station crew used robot arms to relocate the Harmony node to the front of the Destiny laboratory module. With the new solar arrays providing more electrical power and the Harmony node allowing extra berthing ports, ISS expansion was expected to continue at a rapid pace. NASA still planned on completion of construction in 2010 so that it could retire the space shuttle and shift resources to the Orion spacecraft and Ares launcher. The space shuttle flights went smoothly for the most part. The STS117 crew had to repair damaged insulation on a maneuvering-engine pod on Atlantis. Tiles on the lower surface of Endeavour were gouged when insulation broke loose during the STS-118 mission. A special space walk was planned to repair the tiles but was canceled when NASA Mission Control decided that the damage was not so deep that it would endanger the shuttle and

McAuliffe,

Country

Flight

Crew!

Russia

Soyuz TMA-10 (up)

Oleg Kotov Fyodor Yurchikhin Charles Simonyi?

Russia

Soyuz TMA-9 (down)

Michael E. Lopez-Alegria Mikhail Tyurin Charles Simonyi?

STS-117, Atlantis

Frederick W. Sturckow Lee Archambault

U.S.

International

Space

Station

processes

and

tissue

as

a na-

regeneration,

pathogen infectivity and host immunity, health care delivery, health monitoring technologies, and medical countermeasures

against enemy

Dates?

Mission/payload

April 7

attack.

— April 21

June 8-22

transport of replacement crew to ISS return of departing ISS crew to Rarth delivery of supplies and $3/S4 integrated truss segment (with solar arrays) to ISS; station crew exchange

John D. Olivas James F. Reilly Clayton Anderson (u) Sunita (Suni) Williams (d) U.S.

STS-118, Endeavour

Scott J. Kelly Charles O. Hobaugh Tracy E. Caldwell Richard A. Mastracchio Dafydd R. Williams Barbara R. Morgan

August 8-21

delivery of supplies, the S5 truss, a control-gyroscope replacement, and an external equipment storage platform to ISS

Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr.

Russia

Soyuz TMA-11 (up)

Yury Malenchenko Peggy Whitson Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor?

October 10

transport of replacement crew to ISS

Russia

Soyuz TMA-10 (down)

Oleg Kotov Fyodor Yurchikhin Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor?

October 21

return of departing ISS crew to Rarth

Pamela Melroy George D. Zamka Scott E. Parazynski Stephanie Wilson Douglas H. Wheelock Paolo A. Nespoli Daniel M. Tani (u) Clayton Anderson (d)

October 23

delivery of Harmony node module; station crew exchange

(where it had been installed in 2000) to

U.S.

the end of the port truss, and the Harmony node module was berthed at a temporary location. Part of the array became torn as it was redeployed, however, and the shuttle crew made repairs during a risky spacewalk. Metal shavings were found in the rotary joint of another solar array, and it was to be locked in place until the problem could

‘For shuttle flight, commander and pilot are listed first; for Soyuz flights, ISS commander is listed first. * Flight dates for shuttle missions; Soyuz launch or return date for ISS missions. > Flew as a paying passenger. u = ISS crew member transported to station. d = ISS crew member returned to Earth.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

school-

tional laboratory . . . for research and development, and industrial processing purposes." On September 12 NASA and the U.S. National Institutes of Health signed an agreement for the NIH to use the station for research that included basic biological and behavioral mechanisms in the absence of gravity, human physiology and metabolism, spatial orientation and cognition, cell-repair

Patrick G. Forrester Steven Swanson

one that failed in 2006), and an exter-

294

the

Human Spaceflight Launches and Returns, 2007

mission added the S5 truss, a new con-

nal equipment-storage platform. During STS-120 the P6 solar array was relocated from top centre of the station

Christa

teacher-astronaut who perished in 1986 in the accident that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger. The launch of STS120 was almost delayed because of erosion to tiles on the leading edge of one wing, but NASA decided that the damage would not endanger the mission. The future of the ISS as a research facility became brighter during the year. On August 14 NASA formally announced that it planned “to operate a share of U.S. accommodations on the

specialist Barbara Morgan, who conducted several televised classroom presentations from space. A former school-

tional Space Station (ISS). The first mission installed the S3/S4 (starboard)

trol gyroscope to help the ISS maintain its orientation (the gyroscope replaced

for

its crew. STS-118 carried NASA mission

flown to the Interna-

truss and its pair of solar arrays. The additional solarpower capability was needed to power new modules that were to be delivered later. The STS-118

teacher, Morgan had been the backup

STS-120, Discovery

Physical Sciences NASA

boulder-size objects in the tenuous ring system, and charged particles far along the planet’s magnetic tail. Arrival at Pluto was set for 2015. NASAs Messenger probe, launched Aug. 3, 2004, made its second Venus flyby on June 5, 2007, and would make its first Mercury flyby on Jan. 14, 2008. Two more flybys were to follow as part of a gradual reshaping of the probe's solar orbit until insertion into Mercury orbit on March 18, 2011. Europe’s Venus

=

,

'

a^

e

On Oct. 25, 2007, astronaut Peggy Whitson (right), commander of Expedition 16 of the International Space Station, greets astronaut Pamela Melroy, commander of space shuttle mission STS-120, through the hatch between the two spacecraft.

satellite on June 28. The module, which

several kilometres. It also had a camera and multiband imager to provide stereo images in visible light and infrared radiation. Kayuga was to deploy two subsatellites—RSAT for ensuring

was inflated in orbit from 1.9 to 3.8 m

near-continuous

(6.2 to 12.5 ft) in diameter,

tween Kayuga and Earth and VRAD for use as a “radiostar” for precise mapping of the lunar gravity field. It was joined November 5 by Chang'e-1, launched October 24 by China in its first venture beyond Earth orbit. Named for the Chinese goddess of the

incorpo-

rated better communications equipment and other technological improvements made since the launch of Genesis

1 in 2006.

Space Probes. NASAs Phoenix Mars Lander headed for the Red Planet on August 4 for a touchdown scheduled for May 25, 2008. Phoenix was designed to stay at a single location in the Martian arctic and drill for rock samples with a 2.35-m (7.7-ft) robotic arm.

The samples would be analyzed in a small self-contained chemistry laboratory. Meanwhile, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity continued to work even after a significant Martian dust storm that for a time coated their solar cells. Opportunity entered Victoria crater on September 11 on the riskiest trek yet for either of the rovers. The first of the new wave of lunar exploration started on September 13 with the Japanese Aerospace and Exploration Agency's launching SELENE, the Selenological and Engineering Explorer (also known as Kayuga). It arrived in lunar orbit on October 4 after a series

of gravity-assist

maneuvers.

Kayuga carried a variety of instruments, including X-ray, gamma-ray, and charged-particle spectrometers to measure radiation scattered back into space by subsurface minerals, a laser altimeter to measure surface elevations with an accuracy of up to 5 m (16 ft), and a radar that used long radio waves to probe soil structure to a depth of

Moon,

Chang'e-1

communications

carried

cameras,

be-

X-

ray and gamma-ray spectrometers, and a laser altimeter to assay the lunar surface during its one-year mission. NASA launched its Dawn mission to explore asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres on September 27. It carried a visual and infrared spectrometer and a gamma-ray and neutron detector to map and assay the two bodies. Dawn was to make a gravityassist flyby of Mars in February 2009 and go into orbit around Vesta in August 2011. The probe would then leave Vesta in May 2012 and arrive at Ceres

in February 2015. Vesta was believed to be an entirely rocky body, but Ceres was believed to contain large amounts of frozen water. Europe’s Rosetta craft (launched

March

2, 2004) made

suc-

cessful gravity-assist flybys of Mars and Earth in 2007 on its way to flybys of the asteroids Steins and Lutetia and an eventual orbit of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The U.S. New Horizons probe, launched on a mission to Pluto on Jan. 19, 2006, zipped past Jupiter for a gravity assist on Feb. 28, 2007. In its observations of Jupiter, the probe recorded lightning near Jupiter’s poles,

or-

biting Venus since April 11, 2006, completed its originally planned mission on July 24, but the mission was extended for its atmospheric and imaging instruments through May 2009. Unmanned Satellites. Five spacecraft that made up the mission named Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions

Regarding private manned space flight, Bigelow Aerospace proceeded with plans to develop a space motel. Russia launched Bigelow's Genesis 2

Express,

During

Substorms

were

launched by NASA on February 17. The spacecraft were to follow elliptical orbits whose orientations would shift relative to the Earth, the Sun, and radia-

tion belts to help unravel where and when substorm disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere began. The mission also involved an array of ground stations. NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in Mesosphere mission was launched April 25 to study noctilucent clouds, faint ice-bearing clouds that form at a height of about 82 km (50 mi) in the

atmosphere. On April 23 India launched Italys Agile high-energy astrophysics satellite, which carried X-ray and gamma-ray detectors to study objects in the Milky Way Galaxy. Launch Vehicles. The year was marred by a handful of launch-vehicle failures. A Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket, used to

launch satellites from an ocean platform, blew up on January 30, severely damaging the platform. The second launch of a Falcon 1 rocket failed during its second-stage burn on March 20, but private backer Elon Musk pledged to press forward (the first launch failed in 2006). The usually reliable Russian Proton failed during its boost phase on September 5. In commercial development, Rocketplane Kistler fell behind schedule and lost its backing from NASA. An explosion on July 26 during a propulsion system test by Scaled Composites, builder of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo space tourism vehicle, killed three people at its facility in Mojave, Calif. Although development of a spaceport for Galactic’s SpaceShip Two near Upham, N.M., had already begun, Virgin Galactic admitted that the mishap might delay initial flights. (DAVE DOOLING) 295

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Religion A higher public profile for ATHEISTS, efforts to RECONCILE ISLAM with secular societies and religious pluralism, PROTESTS led by religious groups against GOVERNMENT authorities in Zimbabwe and Myanmar (Burma), and growing moves

Palestine, Oman, Jordan, Syria, Bosnia

and Herzegovina, and Russia and representatives of both Shi'ite and Sunni communities in Iraq. The message was

addressed to Pope Benedict, Orthodox Ecumenical

Patriarch

Bartholomew

I,

toward SCHISM in the worldwide ANGLICAN COMMUNION were among the significant developments on the religious scene

Archbishop Williams, Orthodox Christjan patriarchs, and leaders of the World Council of Churches and the world al-

in 2007.

liances of the Lutheran, Methodist, Bap-

tist, and Reformed churches. The appeal was welcomed in a response issued by Vatican

ISSUES AND EVENTS nbelief and Belief. In March,

California Democrat Pete Stark became the first member of the U.S. Congress to publicly acknowledge being an atheist. In response to a search by the Secular Coalition for America to find the most prominent nonbeliever holding political office, he said that he looked forward to working with the group "to stop the promotion of narrow religious beliefs in science, marriage contracts, the military and the provision of social services." Books by atheists remained

best sellers, includ-

ing God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), by American essayist Christopher Hitchens, and 7he God Delusion

(2006), by British biolo-

gist Richard Dawkins. The Golden Compass, a film adaptation of a book by religious skeptic Philip Pullman, divided Roman Catholics. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights denounced the film as selling “atheism for kids,” but a generally favourable review by the film office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that it represented a “generalized rejection of authoritarianism.” In an encyclical released in November titled Saved by Hope, Pope Benedict XVI declared that atheism “has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" ever known. At the same time, he said that modern Chris-

tianity has "failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task" by focusing on the salvation of individuals. In an October lecture in Swansea, Eng.,

Rowan Williams, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury said that many Christians would not recognize their re296

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ligion as it was portrayed by writers such as Dawkins and Hitchens. “Don’t distract us from the real arguments by assuming that religion is an eccentric survival strategy or an irrational form of explanation,” he said. Focus on Islam. In an unprecedented letter to world Christian leaders in October, 138 Muslim scholars issued an appeal for peace and understanding between the two religions, saying that “the very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.” Signers of the letter included the grand muftis of Egypt, Pope Benedict XVI celebrates a mass canonizing Brazilian Friar Galvao (shown in the large portrait), May 11 in Sdo Paulo.

Secretary

of State

Tarcisio

Bertone on behalf of Pope Benedict, noting its "positive spirit" and praising its "call for à common commitment to promoting peace." The appeal was also praised in a response drafted by four scholars at Yale Divinity School and endorsed by nearly 300 Christian leaders. In June the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council said that prejudice and discrimination against Muslims was a "root cause" of radicalism. The organization issued a report that called for "fighting bad theology with good theology" through such means as forming a U.S. government advisory board of young Muslims and placing Muslim chaplains on every American college campus. In an effort to improve intrafaith

leaders

relations,

who

were

Shi‘ite

gathered

and

Sunni

in Costa

Mesa, Calif., Detroit, and Washington,

D.C., signed a Muslim Code of Honor that denounced takfir—the labeling of another Muslim as a heretic—and hateful speech about the practices and leaders of other Muslim groups. Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony

Blair announced in June that the government had created a fund to help train Muslim imams in British universities in an effort to reduce the reliance of mosques in the U.K. on religious leaders from abroad who might not understand British society. Islamic studies were designated as “strategically important” to the British national interest. In May security officials from countries in the European Union announced a plan to profile mosques on the continent and to identify extremist Muslim leaders. The Washington Post reported in September that the U.S. military had created religious training programs for Iraqi detainees to attempt to persuade them to adopt a moderate, nonviolent form of Islam. The report quoted Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, com-

Religion Inter Services Public Relations—epa/Corbis

J

mander of the U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, who said that the courses were led by moderate Muslim clerics and that detainees who promised to change after undergoing the program were given polygraph tests in an effort to gauge their sincerity. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul (see BIOGRAPHIES) won parliamen-

tary election as Turkey's president in August after having campaigned with the Islamic-influenced Justice and Development Party. The wearing of a head scarf by his wife, Hayrunisa, had been criticized by secularists during the campaign, and she was not present when he took the oath of office. Gul affirmed Turkey’s status as a secular democracy, and he pledged to “defend and strengthen” the country’s values. In July more than 100 people in Islamabad, Pak., were killed during eight days of conflict that began with street battles between Islamic fighters and security forces and ended with a raid on the compound of the Red Mosque. The mosque’s leaders and the radical students who supported them in the streets wanted to impose conservative Islamic law (Shari‘ah) in the capital city; their spokesman, a Taliban supporter named Abdul Rashid Ghazi (see OBITUARIES),

July 10, the last of eight days of fighting between government forces and radical Islamic groups. had been arrested and defrocked and that those found to be innocent had been reordained and returned to their monasteries. An article in the government-operated

newspaper,

The

New

Light of Myanmar, said that authorities “had to take action against those bogus monks trying to tarnish the image of

was among the dead. In August about 100 Muslim protesters disrupted a news

the Sasana [Buddhist community].” At

conference in Hyderabad, India, and as-

dia, in November, the Dalai Lama con-

saulted exiled Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasrin, who was promoting the Telugu translation of her book Shodh (1992; published in English as Getting Even, 2003). Nasrin’s writings accused Islam and other religions of denying women’s rights and provoking conflict. The Indian government condemned the attack on the author and said that it

demned the crackdown and urged the Myanmar government to “act according to Buddha’s message of compassion.” As Zimbabwe's economic crisis worsened and the government cracked down on dissent in 2007, religious groups in and out of the country called for outside intervention. In a pastoral message issued for Easter, the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference reported that the conflict had reached a critical point at which strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations had been met with

would extend her six-month visa, which

had been scheduled to expire. Gillian

was

Gibbons,

convicted

a British

in November

teacher,

in Khar-

an interfaith gathering in Amritsar, In-

toum, Sudan, of having insulted Islam

arrests,

by allowing her predominantly Muslim students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. The court sentenced her to 15 days in prison, to be followed by deportation, but she was pardoned after two prominent British Muslims appealed to Sudan’s Pres. Omar al-Bashir.

ture. The Council of the Lutheran World Federation approved an appeal by the federation’s general secretary,

Church-State

Relations.

In Myanmar,

Buddhist monks—an especially well-regarded and well-organized constituency—were

prominent

among

the

groups that in September conducted mass protests against the military government. After violently breaking up the demonstrations, the government announced that more than 500 monks

detentions,

the Rev. Ishmael

beatings,

Noko

and

tor-

of Zimbabwe,

that asked the African Union to intervene. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches issued a similar appeal. In June, Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo, Zimb., said that it

would be justifiable for Britain to invade the country and remove Pres. Robert Mugabe. “We should do it ourselves but there’s too much fear,” Ncube

told The Times of London. In July the state-run Zimbabwe press published photos that were said to show Ncube

engaging in a sexual relationship with a married woman; although he contested the allegations, the archbishop was forced to resign his position. Malaysia’s Federal Court, the country’s highest civil court, said in May that only the Islamic Shari‘ah court had the power to rule on a woman’s petition to have her religious designation changed from Muslim to Christian on her government identity card; the ruling was effectively a final refusal, since a request before the Shari'ah court to leave Islam would be equivalent to admitting apostasy, an offense punishable by fine or imprisonment. Two months later, in another case that involved religious law, Federal Court Chief Justice Abdul Hamid bin Haji Mohamad urged the legislature to clarify which courts had jurisdiction in such cases. Malaysian Shari‘ah courts administered family, marriage, and personal cases for the Muslim majority, while civil courts handled such cases for religious minorities. Although the Malaysian constitution established a secular state, it recognized Islam as the official religion. In June Pope Benedict issued an open letter to Roman Catholics in China in which he said that the church was not trying to change “the structure or administration of the State,” and he urged the Chinese-sponsored church to acknowledge the Vatican’s authority in Catholic affairs. He revoked Pope John Paul Il’s 1988 directives that had allowed bishops and priests in China to operate without the mandate of the Vatican. Pope Benedict directed Chinese Catholic churches to decide whether to 297

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Religion Saeed Khan—AFP/Getty Images

tary schools violated Article 2 of the European

prove such blessings, a move that led Archbishop Gregory Venables of the

Convention

Province of the Southern Cone (South

on

Human

Rights. North American Events. Bishops of the U.S. Episcopal Church rejected demands from primates of other churches in the Anglican Communion that they pledge not to consecrate more gay bishops and not to permit the blessing of same-sex unions.

A Thai Buddhist monk marches April 25 in Bangkok as part of a group of thousands of monks, accompanied by elephants, demanding that Thailand’s new constitution recognize Buddhism as the national religion.

At a meeting

in

New Orleans in September, the bishops said that such decisions could be made only by the church’s triennial

convention,

which was not scheduled to meet again until 2009. Although the prelates reaffirmed a resolution that had been passed at the 2006 convention calling on church officials to “exercise restraint” with regard

register with government authorities on the basis of local “conditions and circumstances.” In September the Rev. Paolo Xiao Zejiang was consecrated as coadjutor bishop of the diocese of Guizhou with the approval of both the Chinese government and the Vatican. Thousands of Buddhist monks demonstrated in Bangkok in April to demand that Thailand’s new constitution recognize Buddhism as the national religion. In the southern Indian

burgh, Pa.; Fort Worth, Texas; Quincy, Ill; and San Joaquin, Calif.—were de-

state

of the diocese of the Rio Grande (New

of Andhra

Pradesh

in June,

the

to such matters, conservatives in the An-

glican Communion were not satisfied. Four of the 110 U.S. dioceses—Pittsbating whether to separate from the U.S. church. Four Episcopal bishops left to join the Roman Catholic Church: John B. Lipscomb of the diocese of southwest Florida, Jeffrey N. Steenson

government issued an order that banned proselytizing at sites associated with a different religion. The decision came in response to demands of several Hindu organizations that the town of Tirumala be recognized as a “Vatican

Mexico and part of Texas), and retired bishops Daniel Herzog of Albany, N.Y., and Clarence Pope of Fort Worth, Texas. Nigerian Anglican Archbishop Peter

for Hindus,” but the state’s chief min-

Akinola (see BIOGRAPHIES)

ister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, said that the order would cover places of worship of all religions.

appointed several U.S. and

In July, 10 prominent Russian scien-

tists sent a letter to Pres. Vladimir Putin protesting what they called the “srowing clericalization” of Russian society. They cited Christian teaching in the public schools, Russian Orthodox efforts to obtain government recognition of theology degrees, and the presence of Orthodox chaplains in the military. In response Putin said that it was necessary “to find a form [of recognition of religion] acceptable for the entire society.” The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ruled in June that mandatory classes on the Christian religion in Norway's elemen-

America)

to invite

conservative

Cana-

dian Anglicans to affiliate with his jurisdiction. The invitation was deplored by Canadian Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz and the Canadian church’s four regional archbishops, who declared that it contravened "ancient canons of the church going as far back as the 4th century." In January leaders of more than 30 Baptist groups in the United States and Canada announced their support for a New Baptist Covenant led by former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The organizers said that they reaffirmed Baptist values and would seek solutions to problems such as poverty and racism; they also hoped to counter unfavourable perceptions of Baptists. Carter, who in 2000 had publicly left the Southern Baptist Convention, said that the covenant was "not trying to replace or work against anyone." In November Pope Benedict announced that in April 2008 he would make his first trip to the U.S. as pope. He planned to visit Washington, D.C., and New York City. Ecumenical Developments. A joint Roman Catholic-Orthodox theological commission that met in Ravenna, Italy, in October issued a declaration affirming that the pope had held the highest rank in the Christian church before the

After being consecrated on May 5 as a bishop in the new Convocation of Anglicans in North America (which split from the U.S. Episcopal Church), the Right Rev. Martyn Minns (left) of Virginia embraces Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.

Nigerian clergy to serve as

missionary bishops to conservative Episcopalians. At a meeting in Winnipeg, Man., in June, the

governing body of the Anglican Church of Canada defeated a motion to permit

dioceses

to

approve

the blessing of same-sex relationships. Such blessings had been conducted in the diocese of New Westminster,

B.C.,

with

the approval of Bishop Michael Ingham. Synods of the dioceses of Ottawa,

Montreal, and Niagara subsequently voted to apChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

298

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Religion

though the declaration was meant to clarify a phrase in a document from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and

did not change church teaching, its assertion that other Christian bodies “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they lack apostolic succession was lamented by several Protestant groups.

Stanislaw Wielgus, named Roman Catholic archbishop of Warsaw in December 2006, attends his inaugural mass on Jan. 7, 2007. He would step down 30 minutes before his inauguration, in the face of evidence that he collaborated with Polish communists when they were in power. Janek Skarzynski—AFP/Getty Images

Great Schism in 1054. The document also acknowledged that the two sides disagreed on what power came with that rank. Walter Cardinal Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, called the document “a modest first step" while cautioning that "the road is very long and difficult." The World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Reformed Ecumenical Council agreed in separate votes to create a new global entity with a constituency of 80 million. A draft proposal called for the new body to be named the World Reformed Communion. Roman Catholic Doctrine. Pope Benedict stirred controversy in 2007 with several actions that affected Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. In January he approved the findings of the International Theological Commission, a Vatican advisory body, which said that there were serious grounds to hope that children who died without being baptized could go to heaven rather than to limbo. The commission said that its reassessment of traditional teachings was made because of the growing number of infants (including aborted fetuses and embryos produced for in vitro fertilization) who were dying unbaptized. In July the pope allowed priests to celebrate the traditional Latin (Triden-

tine) mass without the permission of a local bishop; he also approved a declaration from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that said only the Roman Catholic Church “has the fullness of the means of salvation.” Al-

In September the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document declaring that people in a vegetative state should receive food and water unless they were unable to assimilate the nourishment or unless such treatment became excessively burdensome for the patient. The statement was

issued

in response

to questions

that had been raised by theologians and medical providers. People in the News. Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus resigned before his official installation mass in January after a historical commission reported that documents revealed his collaboration with security forces during Poland’s communist rule. The Rev. Janusz Bielanski resigned as rector of Wawel Cathedral in Krakow for similar reasons a day later. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Okla.,

resigned in November after a lawsuit accused him of having misused university money to support a lavish lifestyle for himself and his family. Oklahoma businessman Mart Green subsequently announced that he and his family would donate a total of $70 million to the debt-

ridden university, which was founded by and named after Roberts’s father. In May, Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baptist-affiliated Baylor University, Waco, Texas, resigned from the presidency of (and membership in) the Evangelical Theological Society, an organization that required commitment to the principle of biblical inerrancy— ie. that the Bible is without errors of

any kind. He returned to the Roman Catholic Church, in which he had been

baptized and confirmed. He said that his recent reading of the early Church Fathers had persuaded him that the roots of Christianity were “more Catholic than Protestant.” Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., made his-

tory in July when he became the first Hindu to offer a prayer before the U.S. Senate. In January Raleb Majadele of the Israeli Labour Party became the first Muslim to win appointment to the Israeli cabinet, serving as minister without portfolio. Charles M. Taylor (see BIOGRAPHIES), whose writings ex-

Canadian philosopher Charles M. Taylor speaks at a news conference March 14 after receiving the Templeton Prize. plored the tension between secularization and spirituality, received the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. A Roman Catholic and a native of Quebec, he was the first Cana-

dian to receive the honour. Prominent religious figures who died in 2007 included the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an organizer of the Moral Majority political movement and founder of Liberty University, Lynchburg, Va.; the Rev. Rex Humbard, host of the Cathedral of Tomorrow

TV

broadcast;

the

Rev.

D.

James Kennedy, founder of the Evangelism Explosion ministry of Christian outreach and host of the Truths That Transform radio broadcast; Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was a champion of interfaith relations; Tammy Faye Messner, former wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker; the Rev. Bruce Metzger, ed-

itor of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible; Abbé Pierre, founder

of the international Emmaus Community for the poor; Maha Ghosananda, a Cambodian Buddhist patriarch and a tireless worker for peace; the Rev. John Macquarrie, an influential British philosopher and theologian; and Patriarch Teoctist, head of the Romanian Orthodox Church. (See OBITUARIES.)

Other losses included Ruth Bell Graham, author and wife of evangelist Billy Graham;

the Rev. Claire Randall,

the first female general secretary of the (U.S.)

National

feminist Rabbi

Council

theologian

Sherwin

Wine,

of Churches;

Letty founder

Russell; of the

Society for Humanistic Judaism; and Senegalese Islamic leader Serigne Saliou Mbaké.

(DARRELL J. TURNER) 299

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Religion

ANALYZING THE MEGACENSUS OF RELIGIONS, 1900—2007 Each year since 1750, churches and religions around the world have generated increasing volumes of new statistical data. Much of this information is uncovered in decennial governmental censuses; half the countries

of the world

have long asked their populations to state their religions if any, and they still do today. The other major source of data each year consists of the decentralized censuses undertaken by many religious headquarters. Each year almost all

Christian denominations ask and answer statistical questions on major religious subjects. A third annual source is the total of 27,000 new books each on

the religious situation in a single country, as well as some 9,000 printed annual

Worldwide Adherents of All Religions by Six Continental Areas, Mid-2007 Africa Christians Affiliated Christians Roman Catholics Independents Protestants Orthodox Anglicans Marginal Christians

Asia

Europe

Latin America

Northern America

Oceania

World

%

Number of Countries

441,184,000 415,932,000

359,614,000 353,986,000

565,254,700 540,826,000

533,386,000 527,382,000

273,388,400 219,451,000

26,990,300 22,741,000

2,199,817,400 2,080,318,000

333 31.4

239 239

155,246,000 96,011,000 125,152,000

127,074,000 189,463,000 59,201,000

274,865,000 24,252,000 70,345,000

472,317,000 46,013,000 58,130,000

83,377,000 75,627,000 61,077,000

8,637,000 1,730,000 7,906,000

1,121,516,000 433,096,000 381,811,000

17.0 6.5 5.8

236 222 DS

40,651,000 47,036,000 3,615,000

13,700,000 845,000 3,310,000

170,468,000 26,070,000 4,523,000

973,000 853,000 11,526,000

6,524,000 2,836,000 11,755,000

830,000 4,946,000 692,000

233,146,000 82,586,000 35,421,000

pe L2 0.5

136 165 2153

-207,258,000

gl

181

Doubly affiliated

-51,779,000

-39,607,000 | -29,697,000 | -62,430,000 | -21,745,000 | -2,000,000

Unaffiliated Christians Muslims

25,252,000 378,135,700

5,628,000 961,961,000

24,428,700 39,691,800

6,004,000 1,777,000

53,937,400 5,450,600

4,249,300 438,400

119,499,400 1,387,454,500

1.8 21.0

232 210

2,757,000 37,500 158,000

868,348,000 384,206,000 379,080,000

,680,000 309,000 ,775,000

760,000 183,000 743,000

1,715,000 740,000 3,288,000

466,000 146,000 565,000

875,726,000 385,621,500 385,609,000

13.2 5.8 5.8

126 96 136

113,605,000 123,000 62,900

145,997,000 103,548,000 21,701,000

,152,000 380,000 478,000

3,733,000 800,000 6,600

1,579,000 1,594,000 630,000

339,000 88,300 49,000

266,405,000 106,533,300 22,927,500

4.0 1.6 0.3

145 107 44

129,000 3,200 2,135,000

5,718,000 2,000 3,677,000

,840,000 139,000 139,000

971,000 13,193,000 891,000

6,191,000 164,000 718,000

107,000 7,400 137,000

14,956,000 13,508,600 7,697,000

0.2 0.2 0.1

135 56 219

300 82,400 0

6,373,000 5,173,000 3,392,000

18,000 0 0

800 0 0

0 8,400 12,200

52,200 700 0

6,444,300 5,264,500 3,404,200

0.1 ‘all 0.1

15 1 5

0 1,000 80,000

2,732,000 152,000 75,000

0 5,500 260,000

7,600 0 110,000

61,800 20,600 670,000

0 1,700 10,000

2,801,400 180,800 1,205,000

0.0 0.0 0.0

8 24 79

6,246,000 606,000

615,877,000 128,048,000

94,750,000 19,787,000

17,092,000 2,829,000

38,821,000 1,779,000

4,040,000 416,000

776,826,000 153,465,000

11.7 23

238 220

Hindus Chinese universists Buddhists Ethnoreligionists Neoreligionists Sikhs Jews Spiritists Baha'is Confucianists Jains Taoists Shintoists Zoroastrians Other religionists Nonreligious Atheists

Total population

945,346,000 | 3,995,674,000 | 727,659,000 | 576,483,000 | 336,831,000 | 33,854,000 | 6,615,847,000 | 100.0

239

Continents. These follow current UN demographic terminology, which now divides the world into the six major areas shown above. See United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision (New York: UN, 2005), with populations of all continents, regions, and countries covering the period 1950-2050, with 100 variables for every

country each year. Note that "Asia" includes the former Soviet Central Asian states, and "Europe" includes all of Russia eastward to the Pacific. Countries. The last column enumerates sovereign and nonsovereign countries in which each religion or religious grouping has a numerically significant and organized following. Adherents. As defined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a person's religion is what he or she professes, confesses, or states that it is. Totals are enumerated for each of the world's 239 countries following the methodology of the World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (2001), and World Christian Trends (2001), using recent censuses, polls, surveys, yearbooks, reports, Web sites, literature, and other data. See the World Christian Database (www.worldchristiandatabase.org) for more detail.

Religions are ranked in order of worldwide size in mid-2007. Christians. Followers of Jesus Christ, enumerated here under Affiliated Christians, those affiliated with churches (church members, with names written on church rolls, usually total number of baptized persons, including children baptized, dedicated, or undedicated): total in 2007 being 2,080,318,000, shown above divided among the six

standardized ecclesiastical megablocs and with (negative and italicized) figures for those Doubly affiliated persons (all who are baptized members and Unaffiliated Christians, who are persons professing or confessing in censuses or polls to be Christians though not so affiliated. Independents. members of Christian churches and networks that regard themselves as postdenominationalist and neoapostolic and thus independent of historic, institutionalized, confessional, denominationalist Christianity. Marginal Christians. Members of denominations who define themselves as Christians organized mainstream Christianity (e.g., Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims. 8496 Sunnites, 1496 Shi'ites, 296 other schools. Hindus. 6896 Vaishnavites, 2796 Shaivites, 296 neo-Hindus and reform Hindus.

of two denominations) This term here denotes mainstream, organized, but on the margins of

Christian Science, and Religious Science).

Chinese universists. Followers of a unique complex of beliefs and practices that may include: universism (yin/yang cosmology with dualities earth/heaven, evil/good, darkness/light), ancestor cult, Confucian ethics, divination, festivals, folk religion, goddess worship, household gods, local deities, mediums, fucianism, popular religion, sacrifices, shamans, spirit writing, and Taoist and Buddhist elements. Buddhists. 56% Mahayana, 38% Theravada (Hinayana), 6% Tantrayana (Lamaism). Ethnoreligionists. Followers of local, tribal, animistic, or shamanistic religions, with members restricted to one ethnic group.

metaphysics,

monasteries,

neo-Con-

Neoreligionists. Followers of Asian 20th-century neoreligions, neoreligious movements, radical new crisis religions, and non-Christian syncretistic mass religions. Jews. Adherents of Judaism. For detailed data on "core" Jewish population, see the annual "World Jewish Populations" article in the American Jewish Committee's American Jewish Year Book. Confucianists.

Non-Chinese followers of Confucius and Confucianism,

mostly Koreans in Korea.

Other religionists. Including a handful of religions, quasi-religions, pseudoreligions, parareligions, religious or mystic systems, and religious and semireligious brotherhoods of numerous varieties. Nonreligious. Persons professing no religion, nonbelievers, agnostics, freethinkers, uninterested, or dereligionized secularists indifferent to all religion but not militantly so. Atheists. Persons professing atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion, including the militantly antireligious (opposed to all religion). In the past two years, a flurry of books have outlined the Western philosophical and scientific basis for atheism. Ironically, the vast majority of atheists today are found in Asia (primarily Chinese communists).

Total population. UN medium variant figures for mid-2007, as given in World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision.

300

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Religion

yearbooks or official handbooks. Together these three major sources of data constitute a massive annual megacensus, although decentralized and uncoordinated. The two tables below combine all these available data on religious affiliation. The first table sum-

marizes worldwide adherents by religion. The second goes into more detail for the United States of America. What might be surprising in these tables, especially in the highly secularized Western world, is the resiliency of religion around the world. Atheists and nonre-

ligious, whom many predicted would dominate in the 21st century, are only 1496 of the world's population, and their numbers are declining annually as a percentage. (DAVID B. BARRETT,

TODD M. JOHNSON, PETER

F. CROSSING)

Religious Adherents in the United States of America, 1900-2005 Annual Change, 2000-2005 1900 Christians Affiliated Christians

%

mid-1970

%

mid-1990

%

mid-2000

%

mid-2005

%

Natural

Conversion

Total

Rate (%)

81.6 | 2,322,100 65.3 | 1,857,400

-570,900 -433,000

1,751,200 1,424,400

0.74 0.75

73,260,000 54,425,000

96.4 | 190,723,000 71.6 | 152,874,000

90.8 | 218,162,000 72.8 175,327,000

85.4 | 234,666,700 68.6 187,706,000

82.6] 66.1

243,422,700 194,828,000

5,850,000 10,775,000 35,000,000

i 14.2 46.1

35,666,000 48,305,000 58,568,000

17.0 23.0 27.9

66,900,000 56,500,000 60,216,000

26.2 22.1 23.6

68,606,000 62.970.000 57,697,000

24.1 22.2 20.3

72,441,000 67,902,000 57,498,000

24.3 22.8 19.3

678,900 623,100 570,900

88,100 363,300 -610,700

767,000 986,400 -39,800

1.09 1.52 -0.07

800,000 400,000 1,600,000

let 0.5 DN

6,126,000 4,189,000 3,196,000

2:0 2.0 1.5

8,940,000 5,150,000 2,450,000

us 2.0 IG

10,197,000 5,266,000 2,300,000

3.6 19 0.8

10,908,000 5,612,000 2,248,000

D e 0.8

100,900 52,100 22,800

41,300 17,100 -33,200

142,200 69,200 -10,400

1.36 1.28 -0.46

00| -3,176,000 42.2 | 35,248,000 145| 45,500,000

-1.5| -24,829,000 16.8| 38,400,000 21.7 | 90,656,000

-9.7| 15.0| 35.5|

-19,330,000 40,325,000 95,900,000

-6.8| -21,781,000 142| 41,105,000 33.7 | 101,034,000

-7.3| 13.8| 33.9|

-191,300 399,000 949,000

-298,900 -243,000 77,800

-490,200 156,000 1,026,800

2.42 0.38 1.05

Unaffiliated Christians | 18,835,000 Jews 1,500,000 Muslims 10,000 Black Muslims 0

24.8 20 0.0 0.0

37,849,000 6,700,000 800,000 200,000

18.0 E: 0.4 Onl

42,835,000 5,535,000 3,499,600 1,250,000

16.8 Iu. 1.4 0.5

46,960,700 5,642,000 4,322,000 1,650,000

16.5 2.0 1.5 0.6

48,594,700 5,729,000 4,760,200 1,850,000

16.3 E3 L6 0.6

464,700 55,800 42,800 16,300

-137,900 -38,400 44,800 23,700

326,800 17,400 87,600 40,000

0.69 0.31 1.95 2.31

Buddhists Neoreligionists Ethnoreligionists

30,000 10,000 100,000

0.0 0.0 0.1

200,000 560,000 70,000

(ONT 0.3 0.0

1,880,000 1,155,000 780,000

0.7 0.5 0.3

2,587,000 1,414,000 1,333,000

(o (Oh) 0.5

2,795,000 1,490,000 1,416,000

09 (055 (RS

25,600 14,000 13,200

16,000 1,200 3,400

41,600 15,200 16,600

1.56 1.05 1.22

1,000 2,800 0

0.0 0.0 0.0

100,000 138,000 10,000

0.0 (wn 0.0

750,000 600,000 160,000

0.3 0.2 0.1

1,235,000 625,000 239,000

0.4 0.2 tour

1,330,000 669,000 268,000

0.4 0.2 0.1

12,200 6,200 2,400

6,800 2,600 3,400

19,000 8,800 5,800

1.49 1.37 2.32

0 70,000 0

0.0 mw 0.0

0 90,000 0

0.0 0.0 0.0

120,000 76,000 50,000

0.0 0.0 0.0

141,000 80,000 57,400

0.0 0.0 0.0

148,000 86,200 60,200

0.0 0.0 0.0

1,400 800 600

0 400 0

1,400 1200 600

0.97 150 0.96

0 0 0

0.0 0.0 0.0

0 0 0

0.0 0.0 0.0

14,400 10,000 5,000

0.0 0.0 0.0

16,100 11,400 7,400

0.0 0.0 0.0

16,900 11,900 7,900

0.0 0.0 0.0

200 100 100

0 0 0

10,200 1,000,000 1,000

0.0 IS 0.0

450,000 10,070,000 200,000

0.2 4.8 (ONT

530,000 21,442,000 770,000

0.2 8.4 0.3

577,000 30,055,000 1,145,000

0.2 10.6 0.4

600,000 34,242,000 1,160,000

0.2 11.5 0.4

5,700 297,400 11,300

-1,100 540,000 -8,300

Independents Roman Catholics Protestants Marginal Christians Orthodox Anglicans

Doubly affiliated Evangelicals evangelicals

0 32,068,000 11,000,000

Hindus Baha'is Sikhs Spiritists Chinese universists Shintoists Zoroastrians Taoists Jains Other religionists Nonreligious Atheists

U.S. population

75,995,000 100.0

|210,111,000 100.0 | 255,539,000 100.0 | 284,154,000 100.0 | 298,213,000 100.0 | 2,812,000

200 0.97 100 0.86 HOMI: 4,600 837,400 3,000

0.78 2.64 0.26

0 2,812,000

0.97

Methodology. This table extracts and analyzes a microcosm of the world religion table. It depicts the United States, the country with the largest number of adherents to Christianity, the world's largest religion. Statistics at five points in time from 1900 to 2005 are presented. Each religion's Annual Change for 2000-05 is also analyzed by Natural increase (births minus deaths, plus immigrants minus emigrants) per year and Conversion increase (new converts minus new defectors) per year, which together constitute the Total increase per year. Rate increase is then computed as percentage per year. Structure. Vertically the table lists 30 major religious categories. The major categories (including nonreligious) in the U.S. are listed with largest (Christians) first. Indented names of groups in the first, "Adherents," column are subcategories of the groups above them and are also counted in these unindented totals, so they should not be added twice into the column total. Figures in italics draw adherents from all categories of Christians above and so cannot be added together with them. Figures for Christians are built upon detailed head counts by churches, often to the last digit. Totals are then rounded to the nearest 1,000. Because of rounding, the corresponding percentage figures may sometimes not total exactly to 10096. Religions are ranked in order of size in 2005. Christians. All persons who profess publicly to follow Jesus Christ as God and Savior. This category is subdivided into Affiliated Christians (church members) and Unaffiliated (nominal) Christians (professing Christians not affiliated with any church). See also the note on Christians to the world religion table. The first six lines under "Affiliated Christians" are ranked by size in 2005 of each of the six megablocs (Anglican, Independent, Marginal Christian, Orthodox, Protestant, Roman Catholic).

Evangelicals/evangelicals. These two designations—italicized and enumerated separately here—cut across all of the six Christian traditions or ecclesiastical blocs listed above and should be considered separately from them. The Evangelicals (capitalized "E") are mainly Protestant churches, agencies, and individuals who call themselves by this term (for example, members of the National Association of Evangelicals); they usually emphasize 5 or more of 7, 9, or 21 fundamental doctrines (salvation by faith, personal acceptance, verbal inspiration of Scripture, depravity of man, Virgin Birth, miracles of Christ, atonement, evangelism, Second Advent, et al.). The evangelicals

(lowercase "e") are Christians of evangelical conviction from all traditions who are committed to the evangel (gospel) and involved in personal witness and mission in the world. Jews. Core Jewish population relating to Judaism, excluding Jewish persons professing a different religion. Other categories. Definitions are as given under the world religion table.

301

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games In 2007 QUADRENNIAL competitions dominated several sports as Germany won the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Australia captured the cricket World Cup, and South Africa took the Rugby Union World Cup. MIXED MARTIAL ARTS reached a wider audience, but baseball, cycling, and track were hurt

by drug SCANDALS. Outstanding athletes included golfer Lorena OCHOA and boxer Floyd MAYWEATHER.

AUTOMOBILE RACING

boldly asked if one day he might drive

Grand Prix Racing. The battle to become the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile

(FIA) Formula

1 (F1) world

drivers' champion took several unexpected turns in 2007 as veteran driver Kimi

Räikkönen

(Ferrari)

faced

off against

Lewis

Hamilton

British

(McLaren),

of Finland

F1

rookie

who

had

thoroughly dominated the sports GP2 category in 2006. Räikkönen began in March by winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix but then failed to win again until July and fell 17 points behind Hamilton. With only the last three races to go, the Finn then scored a third-place finish and two straight wins to grab the championship by a single point from McLaren teammates Hamilton and two-time champion Fernando Alonso of Spain. In the end Räikkönen was a worthy world champion with six victories to his credit, compared with four each for Hamilton and Alonso. Ferraris Felipe Massa of Brazil, who opened the year as a credible title contender, earned respect for his three victories and received a contract extension until 2010. McLaren'5 decision to sign the young British rookie to partner Alonso, newly acquired from Renault, might have been considered a huge risk by some observers. (F1 teams rarely break development continuity by changing both drivers

at the same

time.) With Juan

Pablo Montoya’s contract having been terminated midway through 2006, however, and Räikkönen having contracted himself to Ferrari more than a year earlier, McLaren

committed itself to what

chief Ron Dennis considered a no-risk strategy. As a 10-yearold kart racer, Hamilton had walked up to Dennis and 302

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a McLaren

F1

car

Dennis

was

im-

pressed and took Hamilton under the team's wing as a member of its driverdevelopment program. In 2007 the young Briton's record already reflected success in both Euro F3 and GP2 racing, while hundreds of hours spent on McLaren’s in-house Fl simulator ensured that the naturally talented Hamilton was also the best-prepared fresh-

prevented them from being thrown out of the drivers’ title race after they were found guilty of being in possession of technical data illegally acquired from their rivals. Mosley later told BBC radio that he was part of a minority on the WMSC who would have supported the loss of points for Alonso and Hamilton “on the grounds there is a suspicion that they had an advantage that they should not have had.” Mosleys view was set against the backdrop of Dennis’s dilemma when it came to deciding whether McLaren should appeal the penalties handed down by the council. The McLaren chairman claimed that his team had been the focal point of a gross injustice, since

there

was

no

evidence

to

prove that any of Ferrari's intellectual property had been incorporated into the McLaren car design. Initially, McLaren offered a detailed timeline relating to the troubling episode, which was accepted—not without reservations—by its loyal supporters. In December,

however,

the

team

admitted

the end of the year, Alonso had terminated his contract with McLaren and

that the confidential Ferrari data had been more widely disseminated than previously thought. McLaren’s admission and formal apology brought an end to the scandal and left the team eligible to race in 2008. With McLaren and Ferrari dividing

returned to his former team, Renault.

the 2007 victories between them, there

Undoubtedly, McLaren would have liked the season to be remembered for the genius of Hamilton, who nearly became the sport’s first rookie world champion, rather than for a convoluted saga over stolen Ferrari technical data. During the summer Ferrari reported that McLaren’s chief designer was in possession of confidential information from Ferrari. A subsequent investigation was undertaken by the FIA and the

was little in the way of consolation to be found in the ranks of the also-rans. BMW Sauber was generally the best of the rest, and former world champion Renault was eclipsed for the time being, having failed to win a race for the first time since 2002. Toyota and Honda continued to languish on the outer fringes of competitiveness, but Williams looked crisper and sharper

World

Bull-Renault began to demonstrate genuine promise as the season drew to a close. (ALAN HENRY) U.S. Auto Racing. In 2007 major American professional auto racing survived a

man

driver

of all time.

Meanwhile,

McLaren had to field Alonso’s growing disenchantment

with the team, which

he believed had promised him priority treatment over his young teammate. By

Motor

Sport Council

(WMSC).

At a meeting in September, the WMSC confirmed the allegations, although it acknowledged that there was no evidence that the information obtained had been “used by McLaren to the detriment of the Championship.” McLaren was stripped of its constructors’ championship points and hit with a staggering $100 million fine. Only the immunity that FIA Pres. Max Mosley granted the McLaren drivers—Alonso, Hamilton,

Rosa—in

and

return

reserve

Pedro

de

la

for their testimony

than

before,

while

the

new

Red

year filled with close finishes, sorrow,

and scandal. Dario Franchitti of Scotland, driving for Andretti Green Racing, won the 91st Indianapolis 500, which ended after 166 laps under a caution flag because of rain. Scott Dixon of New Zealand finished second,

and Brazil’s Helio Castroneves (the pole winner at 225.817 mph) was third. All

Sports and Games: Automobile Racing Matt Dunham/AP

three drove Dallara-Hondas. The 17venue Indy Racing League (IRL) IndyCar Series, raced mostly on American

Wales

Rally GB D

ovals, saw Franchitti and Dixon each win four races, but the Scotsman had the most overall points, 637-624, and

J De:

206

ae

took the drivers' title. Franchitti earned $1,645,233 of the $10,668,815 Indy purse and an IRL record $4,017,583 for

the season. All IRL races used 10096 fuel-grade ethanol, unique in the sport. After

the

IRL

season,

Franchitti

switched to Ganassi Dodge stock cars and the National Association for Stock Car

Auto

Racing

(NASCAR)

Nextel

Cup, the richest American series. Canadian Jacques Villeneuve, a former Formula

One

(F1) world

champion,

also

joined NASCAR. Hendrick Motorsports and Chevrolet dominated the Nextel season, which devolved into a battle between two Hendrick drivers. In the end,

Jimmie Johnson repeated as champion by winning four of the final five Chase for the Championship events, beating teammate and four-time titlist Jeff Gordon by 77 points. The Nextel Cup (to be renamed the Sprint Cup in 2008) in mid-season introduced its Car of Tomorrow formula, said to make competition closer. NASCAR lost its former president of 28 years, Bill France, Jr., 74, to cancer

in 2007. Meanwhile, the organization repelled assaults on its rules, fining and suspending crew chiefs and docking driver and owner points all season. The most serious enforcement occurred before the 49th Daytona 500: four crew chiefs were fined and suspended for aerodynamic changes, and then two of Toyota team owner-driver Michael Waltrips employees were suspended indefinitely when his Toyota's engine was found to contain an allegedly speedboosting additive. In the race itself, Kevin Harvick, driving a Richard Childress Chevrolet, nipped Mark Martin, in a Bobby Ginn Chevrolet, by 0.02 sec

French race car driver Sébastien Loeb (right), co-driver Daniel Elena of Monaco

(left), and members of the Citroén crew celebrate the team’s fourth consecutive world rally championship drivers’ title. title over Mike Skinner of Bill Davis Toyota because Skinner and third-place teammate Johnny Benson split the Bill Davis manufacturers’ points. Montoya, named Rookie of the Year for NASCAR, won what was perhaps the most significant Busch Series event of the year, a road race on the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City. The race, held before 72,000 spectators, was televised in Spanish to about 92 million homes in the U.S. as NASCAR sought to cultivate a new Hispanic audience. The Champ Car World Series, which used Bridgestone-shod Ford Cosworth cars, shunned

oval tracks for road or

temporary street layouts. Despite meet-

uary in the Monte Carlo Rally. As in 2006, the 16-race season quickly grew into a two-man contest. After 14 races

two-time WRC champion Grónholm, racing in his final season, had taken the checkered flag in five events (Sweden, Italy

Greece,

Finland,

and

Zealand), with Loeb winning six (Mexico,

New

another

Portugal, Argentina,

Ger-

many, Spain, and France). Grónholm narrowly led Loeb in the standings going into the penultimate rally in Ireland, but a crash on the first day left him on the sidelines as Loeb won the race and pulled ahead in the standings. Finland’s

Mikko

Hirvonen

(Ford), the

winner in Norway and Japan, captured the season-ending Wales Rally GB, with Grönholm second. Loeb’s third-place

three hours of competition, while Mar-

ings in 2006 with Indy officials on a long-rumoured merger of single-seater series, this remained unlikely. Frenchman Sébastien Bourdais, driving for Newman/Haas/Lanigan, won his fourth consecutive Champ Car title as the series visited three continents and six na-

tin took home $1,120,416. The average

tions in a 14-event schedule. Bourdais,

lowed by Citroën and Subaru. For the second consecutive year, the

speed was 149.335 mph. While Chevrolets won 26 of the 36 Nextel races, there was more competition in NASCAR' other series. Carl Ed-

who won six races over a multinational field, announced that he was switching

Audi R10 team of Frank Biela, Emanuele Pirro, and Marco Werner

to F1 competition.

2007

prevailed in the 24-Hour Le Mans Grand Prix d'Endurance. Another Audi R10 team, made up of Rinaldo Capello,

of France

Allan McNish, and Tom Kristensen, led

overcame strong competition from rival

for more than 16 hours until their car lost a wheel and crashed out of the race.

to win. Jeff Burton, in another Childress Chevrolet, finished third. Harvick earned $1,510,469 for a little more than

wards, driving a Scott Ford, won the Busch Series (to be renamed the Na-

tionwide Series in 2008). Although Toyota dominated the Craftsman Truck Series, winning

13 of the 25 events, Ron

Hornaday, Jr., driving a Kevin Harvick Chevy Silverado, gained the individual

(ROBERT J. FENDELL)

Rallies Sébastien

and

Other

Loeb

Races.

(Citroén)

In

Marcus Grónholm (Ford) of Finland to

capture his fourth consecutive world rally championship (WRC) drivers' title. Loeb began with a solid victory in Jan-

finish, however,

was

enough to main-

tain his lead over Grönholm in the standings, by a mere four points. Hirvonen was third overall. Ford again took the WRC

In the Rolex

manufacturers’ title, fol-

24

at Daytona

(Fla.)

Speedway, a Chip Ganassi/Felix Sabatesowned Lexus-Riley co-driven by Mon305

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Baseball

toya, Scott Pruett, and Salvador Duran

edged the Pontiac-Riley of Patrick Carpentier, Darren Manning, Ryan Dalziel, and Milka Duno by 1 min 15.482 sec after 2,378 mi (668 laps). Max Angelelli, Wayne Taylor Jan Magnussen, and NASCAR hero Jeff Gordon were third in another Pontiac-Riley. Duno was the highest-finishing woman in major endurance-racing history. In the 15-event Rolex Series, the team of Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty (Pontiac-Riley) won

the Mitchell Report were expected to be felt in 2008. World Series. The American League (AL) Boston Red Sox earned their sev-

enth World Series championship and second in four years by sweeping the National League (NL) Colorado Rockies

four games to none in the best-of-seven World Series. The Red Sox clinched with a 4-3 triumph in Denver on October 28. Jon Lester registered the victory,

ever played in Denver, the Red Sox won 10-5

behind

Daisuke

Matsuzaka

(see

BIOGRAPHIES), a star pitcher from Japan who also contributed a two-run single. Jacoby Ellsbury had 4 of Boston's 15 hits in the game. Play-offs. The Red Sox won their 12th pennant by defeating the Cleveland Indians four games to three in the American League Championship Series (ALCS). The Red Sox clinched the title

a turbo diesel-powered Audi R10 repeat as champion, leading all but 21 of the

dinals

364

game one, played in Boston on October

on October 21 by routing the Indians 11-2 in Boston. The Red Sox trailed three games to one in the best-of-seven series but rallied to win the last three games while outscoring the Indians 30 runs to 5. The Red Sox were just the 10th team in history to rebound from such a deficit, the most recent being

24, the Red Sox routed Colorado

the 2004 Red Sox, who trailed the New

408406 over Pruett (Lexus-Riley).

The 55th running of the Mobil 12 Hours of Sebring, jewel of the 12-event American Le Mans Series (ALMS), saw

laps.

Biela,

Pirro,

and

Werner

drove the winning LMP1 (Le Mans Prototype 1) at an average speed of 112.039 mph. A Corvette C6.R finished seventh overall to lead the GT1 (Grand

Touring 1) class. Audi Sport North America-sponsored diesels also won the

and Mike Lowell, who hit a home run, was voted Most Valuable Player (MVP)

of the series that ended the late-season surge by Colorado, which had won 21 of 22 games entering the series. (The Red Sox also swept the St. Louis Carin the 2004

World

Series.)

In

13-1,

behind a 17-hit attack and the pitching

York

Yankees

of Josh Beckett, who recorded nine strikeouts in seven innings. Dustin Pedroia, later voted AL Rookie of the Year,

Beckett,

led off the game with a home run for the Red Sox, who erupted for seven runs in the fifth inning. The Red Sox won game two, held the next evening, by 2-1; Curt Schilling registered the victory after Lowell's double broke a 1-1 tie in the fifth inning. In game three, on October 27, the first World Series game

sion Series, the Red Sox eliminated the

who

three won

games

to none.

the first and

fifth

games against the Indians, was voted ALCS MVP. In the AL best-of-five Divi-

Los Angeles Angels in three straight (ROBERT J. FENDELL; games, and the Indians defeated the MELINDA C. SHEPHERD) Yankees three games to one. In the best-of-seven NL Championship Series, the upstart Rockies secured their BASEBALL first pennant by winning four consecuNorth America. Major League Baseball. tive games over the Arizona DiamondPropelled by tight division races backs. The Rockies clinched it on and the pursuit of landmark October 15 by beating the Diaachievements by several players, mondbacks 6-4 at home. Matt Mike Lowell of the champion Boston Red Sox hits a Major League Baseball in 2007 Holliday, who slammed a threedouble in game two of the World Series on October established a new attendance run home run during a six-run 25. The 33-year-old third baseman hit .400 for the record for the fourth consecutive fourth inning, was voted MVP of series and was voted MVP. season. Despite weather probthe series. The Rockies, an exlems during the early portion of pansion team in 1993, thus the schedule in April, a total of earned their first trip to the 79.5 million spectators attended World Series. In the NL Division

ALMS

series team crown for LMP1s.

games, an increase of 4.5% over

Series, the Rockies nailed a three-

the previous mark of 76 million in 2006. Eight franchises established all-time highs, and 23 of

game sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies,

swept the Chicago Cubs. Regular

30 teams registered increases.

Allegations of steroid use dominated the news after the end of the season. In November Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly having lied to a federal grand jury in 2003 about his use of steroids. A month later Bonds and seven-time Cy Young Award winner

Roger

Clemens

Arizona

won

tical marks of 89-73, a tiebreaker

was required to determine the league’s wild-card team. Colorado won

9-8 in 13 innings to

advance to the four-team play-off as

the wild

card

(the second-

place team with the best record). The Rockies won 14 of their last

were

15 games to secure a postseason berth. The Cubs (85-77) won the

NL Central by two games the Milwaukee Brewers.

over The

Phillies (89-73) won the NL East

on the final day of the regular season by one game over the New Rhona Wise—epa/Corbis

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Season.

the NL West with a 90-72 record. When the Rockies and the San Diego Padres finished with iden-

among the more than 80 current and former players identified in George Mitchell’s long-awaited report to the baseball commissioner on the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport. The repercussions of 304

and the Diamondbacks

Sports and Games: Baseball

York Mets, who squandered a sevengame lead with 17 games to go. The Indians took the AL Central by eight games over the Detroit Tigers. The Red Sox shared the best record

Brandon Webb of Arizona threw 42 consecutive scoreless innings. Bobby Jenks of the White Sox retired 41 consecutive batters, tying a major league record. San Diego’s Greg Maddux became the first pitcher to win at least 10

At the Pan American Games, held in Rio de Janiero, Cuba defeated the U.S.

over the Yankees, who earned wild-card

passing Cy Young’s record. In other no-

3-] in the championship game to win its 10th consecutive title. Mexico and Nicaragua finished in a tie for third after their bronze-medal game was canceled owing to rain. The Monterrey Sultanes defeated the

honours. The Angels won the AL West by six games over the Seattle Mariners. Individual Accomplishments. Bonds broke baseball’s most hallowed record when he hit his 756th home run on August 7 against Mike Bacsik of the Washington Nationals. The home run, off a 3-2 pitch in the fifth inning at San

table

turned

Yucatán Lions (Leones) four games to

an unassisted triple play against the Atlanta Braves. The Red Sox tied a record with four consecutive home runs—by

three to win the Mexican League championship series. It was Monterrey's ninth Mexican League title but its first

Manny Ramirez, J.D. Drew, Lowell, and

since

Jason Varitek—in a triumph over the Yankees. The Rangers, in beating the

pitcher José Lima, playing with Saltillo, tied for the league lead in wins with 13 and was the leader in innings pitched

(96-66)

in baseball

and won

with

the Indians

the AL East by two games

Francisco’s AT&T

Park, allowed Bonds

to pass Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s mark of 714 home runs in 1974 and retired two years later with 755. Three days before he surpassed Aaron, Bonds hit his record-tying 755th home run in San Diego against Clay Hensley. Magglio Ordonez of the Tigers won the AL batting title with a .363 average; Holliday won the NL title with .340. Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees collected

games

in 20 consecutive achievements,

seasons,

Tulowitzki

sur-

Baltimore Orioles 30-3, became the first team in 110 years to score 30 runs.

The American League defeated the National League 5-4 in the annual AIIStar Game, played in San Francisco on July 10. The victory, which ensured the ALs World Series representative (Boston) home-field advantage, was the

10th in a row for the league. Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki, who was

credited with

the most home runs (54) and runs batted in (RBIs; 156) in the AL, earning

the first inside-the-park home run in All-Star Game history, was voted the game’s MVP. Little League World Series. A team from

the regular-season MVP honours. In the

Warner Robins, Ga., defeated Tokyo 3-2

NL,

to win the Little League World Series on August 26 in Williamsport, Pa. Dalton Carriker, age 12, hit the game-winning

Prince

Fielder

of Milwaukee

led

the league with 50 home runs, and Holliday led with 137 RBIs, but both lost out in the MVP balloting to Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins. Milwaukee's Ryan Braun was narrowly voted NL Rookie of the Year over Colorado shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. Beckett topped AL pitchers with 20 victories; however,

C.C. Sabathia, with an impressive ratio of 209 strikeouts to only 39 walks, won the AL Cy Young. The NL Cy Young went to Jake Peavy of San Diego, whose 19 wins were the most in the league. Jose Valverde led all major league pitchers with 47 saves. Sammy Sosa of the Texas Rangers became the fifth player in history to amass

600 home

runs; Frank Thomas

of the Toronto Blue Jays, Jim Thome of the Chicago White Sox, and Rodriguez each reached the 500 plateau. (Rodriguez, at 32, was the youngest player in history to achieve that milestone.) Craig Biggio of the Houston Astros registered his 3,000th hit. Tom Glavine of

the Mets became the 23rd pitcher in history to reach 300 victories, and San Diego’s Trevor Hoffman earned his 500th save, a record for relief pitchers. Mark

Buehrle

of the

White

Sox,

Justin Verlander of Detroit, and Clay Buchholz of Boston pitched no-hitters, with Buchholz achieving the milestone in only his second major league start.

home run, and Kendall Scott struck out

10 batters for Georgia, which rallied from a 2-0 deficit to become the third consecutive team from the U.S. to claim the title. Columbus, Ga., won in 2006. (ROBERT VERDI)

Latin

America.

Baseballs

1996.

with 160.

Former

major

league

(MILTON JAMAIL)

Japan. The Chunichi Dragons beat the Nippon Ham Fighters four games to one to win their first Japan Series championship in 53 years. Righthanded starting pitcher Daisuke Yamai and closer Hitoki Iwase combined on a perfect game in Chunichi’s 1-0 win in game five. Chunichi third baseman Norihiro Nakamura was named the series Most Valuable Player after having hit .444 with four runs batted in

(RBIs).

Closing pitcher Hitoki Iwase of the Chunichi Dragons celebrates a perfect 1-0 win over the Nippon Ham Fighters in game five of the Japan Series. The victory clinched Chunichi’s first title since 1954.

— 2007

Caribbean Series was held in Carolina,

PR., on February 2-7. The Cibao Eagles (Águilas Cibaefias), representing the Dominican Republic, won the title with a 5-1 record. The Carolina Giants (Gi-

gantes) from Puerto Rico finished with 4-2 record. The Aragua Tigers (Tigres) from

Venezuela

were

2-4,

while

the

Hermosillo Orange Growers (Naranjeros) representing Mexico, finished last with a 1-5 mark. In late August it was announced that the Puerto Rican Winter League had canceled its 2007-08 season because of financial problems. In Cuba, Santiago de Cuba defeated perennial rival and defending champion Industriales four games to two to win the 46th Serie Nacional (National

Series) championship. Santiago had defeated Camagüey three games to one in the quarterfinals and Villa Clara four games to three in the semifinals to advance. Las Tunas outfielder Osmani Urrutia hit .371 to win his sixth batting title in seven seasons. Kyodo/AP Images

305

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Basketball

In the regular season Chunichi finished second in the Central League (CL), but in the postseason the Dragons beat the third-place Hanshin Tigers two games to none and then defeated the first-place Yomiuri Giants in a threegame sweep to reach the Japan Series. Yakult Swallows outfielder Norichika Aoki led the CL with a .346 batting average.

His

teammate

Seth

11.5

Overall,

Japanese record-tying 46 saves.

In the Pacific League (PL), Nippon Ham ended the regular season in first place and advanced to the Japan Series with a three-games-to-two victory over the second-place Chiba Lotte Marines, who had beaten the third-place Softbank Hawks two games to one earlier in the play-offs. Nippon Ham’s Yu Darvish won the Sawamura Award as the best starting pitcher of the year; he had a league-leading 210 strikeouts and threw 12 complete games out of his 26 starts. Hideaki Wakui of the Seibu Li-

average,

Series

three

consecutive

championships

Japan

(1956-58),

and

two PL MVP titles (1957, 1958). (HIROKI NODA)

Professional. In June 2007 the San Antonio Spurs—featuring players from the U.S. Virgin Islands (Tim Duncan), France (Tony Parker), The Netherlands (Francisco Elson), Slovenia (Beno Udrih), and Argentina (Manu Ginobli

and Fabricio Oberto)—swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in four straight games in the National Basketball Association’s (NBA's) best-of-seven championship series. The sweep was the first in the NBA

Finals

since

2001-02,

when

the

his left foot.

Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs jumps past the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Aleksandar (“Sasha”) Pavlovic on June

14 in game four of the NBA Finals. Parker was named the series MVP after the Spurs swept to the franchise's third title in five years. Jeff Haynes—AFP/Getty Images

Mavericks

forward

Dirk

Nowitzki,

a

German who became the first European to be named the regular-season MVP. In the process of completely overmatching the Cavaliers, the Spurs won coming history similar Robert became

title in nine seasons,

be-

just the fifth team in league to have earned that many in a period of time. Spurs forward Horry won his seventh ring and only the second player to have

3.3

assists.

Parkers award followed that of Dallas 306

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

aes-

shot a

(PHIL JASNER)

College. Florida was nobody’s national championship choice when the 2005-06 college basketball season began, but at the start of the 2006-07 season, the Gators were just about everybody's choice to repeat. Within a few months, Florida had gone from a roster of unheralded players to one with the most recognizable faces in the sport. In the previous 34 years, only one team, Duke (1991, 1992), had suc-

cessfully defended giate

Athletic

its National

Association

Colle(NCAA)

championship. In an era when few ultrasuccessful underclassmen could resist the call of the National Basketball

Association

(NBA),

few

of the

Salley was the first, winning with the Detroit Pistons, the Los Angeles Lakers,

expectations, was more important than

and the Chicago Bulls.) Horry won in 2005 with the Spurs and previously with the Houston Rockets and the Lakers. This was also the fourth championship for Gregg Popovich, Spurs

the money and glory of the NBA.

won with three different teams.

(John

The common denominator on the court for all four of San Antonio's titles

and

lacked

championship teams stayed together long enough to try again. Florida was different, and the entire starting lineup decided that attempting to win another NCAA championship, regardless of the

Jersey Nets.

5 rebounds,

series

combined 41.1% from the floor and hit just 18 of 57 three-point attempts. The Cavaliers were hampered by the loss of starting guard Larry Hughes, who was unable to play after game two, having suffered from a torn plantar fascia in

coach for 11 years. (See BIOGRAPHIES.)

points,

the 2007

ries, either; James’s teammates

Los Angeles Lakers defeated the New Parker, the Spurs’ point guard in his sixth season, became the first European to be named the Finals’ Most Valuable Player (MVP), having averaged 24.5

2.25

shot a weak 35.696 from the floor. In his best effort, he was 10-for-30 in game four, which was won 83-82 by the Spurs. The Spurs did not allow any other Cavaliers to take charge in the se-

their fourth

BASKETBALL

and

points, 7.0 rebounds, and 6.8 assists but

ons won the most games, 17, while left-

run

assists,

thetic value, with the Spurs and Cavaliers combining to average just 83.5 points per game. The Spurs, though, displayed a fierce will at the defensive end, with veteran guard Bruce Bowen the key force in minimizing the effect of Cavaliers star 22-year-old LeBron James, who, coming directly from high school, was the number one overall pick in the 2003 draft. James averaged 22.0

was the top pitcher, with a 16-8 record. Kyuji Fujikawa of Hanshin took a

seasons (1956-69) with the Nishitetsu (later Seibu) Lions, retired with a 276-137 record, a career 1.98 earned

3.8

blocks in the 2007 finals. With his team champions once again, he said, "It never gets old. It never gets old."

Greisinger

handed pitcher Yoshihisa Naruse of the Marines had a league-best 1.817 earned run average. Rakuten Eagles slugger Takeshi Yamasaki led the league with 43 home runs and 108 RBIs. On November 13 Hall of Fame pitcher Kazuhisa Inao died in a Fukuoka hospital at age 70. Inao, who played 14

rebounds,

was

Duncan,

the 2.13-m

(7-ft) centre-

At the

2007

Final

Four

in Atlanta,

Florida's first game was against UCLA, the same team it had beaten for the 2006 championship. Florida again dominated in every way, this time winning by 76-66. In the championship matchup on April 2, Florida was the team with the veterans: Corey Brewer,

forward who was the MVP the first three times the Spurs won. Despite shooting an uncharacteristically low

Joakim

37.396,

freshmen Greg Oden and Mike Conley.

Duncan

averaged

18.3 points,

Green,

Noah,

Al

Horford,

and Lee Humphrey.

Taurean

Its oppo-

nent, Ohio State, had the two brilliant

Sports and Games: Bobsleigh, Skeleton, and Luge

The pair who had been high-school teammates in Indianapolis, played well enough in the final game, but they were up against superior forces, and Florida prevailed 84—75. A few days after the championship, with coach Billy Donovan at their sides, Brewer, Noah, Horford, and Green (all juniors) an-

nounced that this time they would be going to the NBA. Many basketball fans thought that the players' unselfish style of play and their having previously passed on the NBA when that would have been an easy, understandable decision might be their greatest legacy. In women’s

NCAA

action,

Tennessee

had been the dominant program for years, with six national titles. When the Lady Vols arrived in Cleveland for the 2007 Final Four tournament,

however,

almost a decade had passed since the team’s sixth title. Playing against a Rutgers team that nobody could have predicted would be in the championship game, Tennessee won

wide attention. At the 2008 Olympics, Iran would join host China, Spain (the 2006 world champion), and the other regional qualifiers. In the Eurobasket final Russia's American-born point guard J.R. Holden scored a jumper with 2.1 seconds remaining to beat Spain 60—59. Because

Spain had already qualified, however, this left the door open for the winner of the bronze-medal game between Lithuania and Greece to take the second European qualifying spot. Lithuania won 78-69, leaving Darius Songaila to comment,

Tl take this. . . . Now we're going to focus on the Olympics." The U.S., which had failed to live up to its past success in global competition since its dismal showing in the 2002 world championships, qualified for Beijing after brushing aside fellow qualifier Argentina 118-81 in the Americas final in

nessee’s star, 1.93-m (6-ft 4-in) Candace Parker, scored 17 points, 7 rebounds, and 3 assists

In the women's NCAA basketball final on Tennessee Lady Vols star Candace Parker against Epiphanny Prince of the Rutgers Knights. Parker earned MVP honours as defeated Rutgers 59-46 for the title.

in the Lady Vols’ 59-46 final victory and was named the tournament MVP. The title gave Tennessee’s Pat Summitt her seventh as a head coach. Summitt's career record of 947-180 was the best of any coach—man or woman—in college basketball history. (DICK JERARDI) International. The 2007 continental basketball championships for men and women provided only some of the qualifiers for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The Fédération Interna-

the

as usual, dis-

pensed with New Zealand’s Tall Blacks to qualify for Oceania. The three final Olympic slots were to be determined by the extra qualifying tournament, which would be contested by teams representing Africa (Cameroon and Cape Verde), the Americas (Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Canada), Asia (Lebanon and South Korea), Europe (Greece, Germany, Croatia, and Slovenia), and Oceania (New Zealand).

In Olympic women’s competition, host China and 2006 world champion Australia would be joined in Beijing by Mali (the qualifier from Africa), the U.S. (Americas), South Korea (Asia), Russia (Europe), and New Zealand (Oceania). Five more teams would

qualify

through Olympic

April 3, defends Scarlet Tennessee

the

women’s

tournament,

pre-

compris-

ing teams from Africa (Senegal and Angola), the Americas (Cuba,

Brazil,

and

Argentina),

Asia (Japan and Taiwan), Europe (Spain, Belarus, Latvia, and the

Czech (Fiji).

Republic),

and

Oceania

(RICHARD TAYLOR)

Bobsleigh. American pilot Steve Holcomb collected five gold and five silver medals in the 2006-07 men’s bobsleigh World Cup circuit on his way to winning the overall title and the two-man individual points title and finished second in the fourman standings behind Yevgeny Popov of Russia. Pierre Lueders of Canada and German André Lange ranked second and third overall, respectively. At the 2007 world championships, held in January-February in St. Moritz, Switz., Lange won medals in both disciplines, a gold in twoman and bronze in four-man. Ivo Rueegg of Switzerland took first in fourman and second place in two-man action. Holcomb was fourth in both disciplines. During the women’s World Cup

the "Olympic dream" burning a little longer by introducing preOlympic tournaments to be played in June-July 2008 between the "best of the losers." There was a surprise among the guaranteed men's qualifiers when, after beating Lebanon became

Australia,

BOBSLEIGH, SKELETON, AND LUGE

tionale de Basketball (FIBA) kept

Iran

competitions.

its

seventh national title by playing such superb defense that Rutgers never really had a chance. Ten-

74-69,

“It’s not a gold medal, but

Las Vegas. Angola secured its Olympic berth by beating Cameroon 86-72 for the country’s ninth African title in 10

first

team from outside East Asia to win the Asian championships. It was the first time that two teams from western Asia had contested

season,

German

Sandra

Kiriasis

earned a podium spot in seven of eight races, including five victories. She also took the gold medal at the world championships. American pilot Shauna Rohbock drove consistently to

the final, and Iran's 2.18-m (7-ft 2-in) centre Hamed Ehadadi,

who scored from the centre line on the half-time buzzer in the final, attracted unexpected worldJim McIsaac/Getty Images

307

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Boxing Charlie Booker; www.bobsleigh.de

earn second place in the World Cup standings and a world championship bronze. Cathleen Martini of Germany finished third in the rankings and took silver in St. Moritz. Skeleton. American sliders dominated throughout the 2006-07 skeleton season. Katie Uhlaender found her way consistently to the World Cup podium, earning five gold medals and the overall title. She finished third at the world championships in St. Moritz. Teammate Noelle PikusPace appeared on the World Cup podium five times in eight races to finish second in the overall rankings. In St. Moritz, PikusPace earned her only gold medal of the year, while Maya Pedersen of Switzerland finished second. In

men’s

action

Americans

part reality-TV-style

24/7, which featured both boxers

during the months leading up to the fight. The fight itself was

doubles

action,

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of an anticlimax;

La

after

Hoya,

a good

De

start,

permitted Mayweather to counterpunch his way to a 12-round split decision and win the World Boxing Council (WBC) super welterweight title. Mayweather followed the victory with a 10thround knockout of previously undefeated Ricky Hatton (U.K.) on December 8 in Las Vegas in

defense of the WBC and The Ring magazine welterweight titles. The bout was sold to approximately

American bobsleigh driver Steve Holcomb (seated)

and his team (shown competing at the 2007 world championships) won the 2006-07 combined and two-man World Cup titles and took second place in the four-man World Cup.

Germans

Patric Leitner and Alexander Resch returned to the track in full form and battled with Italys Christian Oberstolz and Patric Gruber throughout the nine-race World Cup season to eventually capture the overall title. At the world championships the German pair edged out Austrian cousins Tobias and Markus Schiegl for the victory. For the second straight time, Americans Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin won the world championships bronze. The German women continued their dominance in both the World Cup standings and the world championships—sweeping the podium in both instances. Silke Kraushaar-Pielach won seven out of nine World Cup races, while teammates Tatjana Hüfner and Anke Wischnewski finished second and third, respectively, in the overall stand308

somewhat

faded in the second half, which

Zach Lund and Eric Bernotas earned the top two spots in the overall World Cup rankings. Swiss slider Gregor Stahli secured his only win of the season at the world championships, ahead of Bernotas in second place and Lund in third. (JULIE URBANSKY) Luge. It was a record-breaking year for Italian luger Armin Zóggeler. Although he was upset by Germany's David Móller at the 2007 world championships, held in Igls, Austria, in February, Zóggeler broke the record for the most career wins on the World Cup circuit, with 36 at season's end, and captured his sixth overall title. Möller finished second in the overall standings, followed by Italian Reinhold Rainer. German Jan Eichhorn raced to the bronze in Igls. In men's

miniseries

ings. In Igls, Hüfner took the gold medal, beating out Wischnewski and Kraushaar-Pielach, respectively. (JANELE MAREK)

BOXING Responding to significant pressure from the growing popularity of mixed

850,000

pay-per-

view customers in the United States and Canada and another 1,200,000

in

the

U.K.,

which

made it the second largest grossing fight of the year. Miguel Cotto (P.R.), the World Boxing Association (WBA) wel-

terweight titleholder, established himself as Mayweather's chief rival with a trio of victories in 2007. On March

3 in

San

Juan,

P.R.,

Cotto

stopped Oktay Urkal (Germany) in the 11th round. Cotto knocked out former welterweight champion Zab Judah (U.S.) on June 9 in the 11th round in front of a sellout crowd of 20,658 at

De La Hoya. (See photograph on page 310.) The fight shattered all existing pay-per-view records when approximately 2.4 million homes purchased the bout, generating $134.4 million in

New York Citys Madison Square Garden. In his final bout of the year, Cotto returned to Madison Square Garden, where he won a 12-round decision over former International Boxing Federation (IBF) lightweight and WBC welterweight titleholder Shane Mosley (U.S.). Another boost to the sport came from the emergence of super middleweight Joe Calzaghe (U.K.) as a major boxoffice attraction. Calzaghe drew 35,000

revenue.

The live gate of $19 million,

fans to Millennium Stadium in Cardiff,

created by a capacity crowd of 16,700 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, was also a new record. Additional income

Wales, on April 7 to see him stop Peter

martial arts (see SIDEBAR), boxing en-

joyed a surprisingly good year in 2007, thanks in large part to the May 5 bout between American rivals Floyd Mayweather (see BIOGRAPHIES)

from closed-circuit sports

bars

and

and Oscar

television,

restaurants,

sales to overseas

rights, and merchandise pushed the overall gross to an estimated $165 million, which made it the richest boxing match in history. The unprecedented success of the Mayweather—De La Hoya fight was due to several factors, starting with De La Hoya’s enduring popularity and Mayweathers widely accepted status as, pound-for-pound, the best fighter in the world. Mainstream interest in the match was stimulated by HBO’s four

Manfredo, Jr. (U.S.), in the third round.

Calzaghe returned to the same venue on November 3 and won a 12-round unanimous decision over previously undefeated Mikkel Kessler (Denmark), a fight

that attracted more than 50,000 spectators. Calzaghe, unbeaten in 44 professional bouts, was recognized as world super middleweight champion by 7he Ring as well as the WBA and the WBC. The heavyweight division took a back seat to the lighter weight classes, as the alphabet titles remained split between three uninspiring fighters. Wladimir Klitschko

(Ukraine),

considered

the

(continued on page 310)

Sports and Games: Boxing

Mixed Martial Arts Makes Its Mark Originally decried in the 1990s as a brutal blood sport without rules (Arizona Sen. John McCain famously called cage combat "human cockfighting" and sought to have it banned), by 2007 mixed martial arts (MMA)—a hybrid combat sport incorporating boxing, wrestling, jujitsu and other disciplines—had gradually shed its no-holds-barred image and begun to challenge boxing for popularity. Although MMA remained too intense for many sports fans, it

using his jujitsu skills while lying on his back to defend against attacks or to launch a submission hold aimed at his opponent's joints. Most other early UFC fighters were one-dimensional, typified by the bearded brawler Tank Abbott, but as the sport grew, athletes began to study striking, wrestling, and jujitsu. In January 2001 Zuffa Inc. purchased the money-losing UFC for

was sanctioned in several countries and more than 30 U.S. states,

while fellow background. mates of the itable niche.

where the sport was regulated by the same bodies that governed boxing. The Las Vegas-based Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) was MMA's most successful promoter. In February 2007 the Associated Press, citing an unidentified industry executive, reported that the UFC's 10 pay-per-view events in 2006 generated more than $200 million. Francis Specker/Landov In 2007 the UFC cited 31 rules in five body-weight classes. UFC fights consisted of three fiveminute rounds, with a one-minute

break between each round. (Championship bouts were set for five rounds.) If a fight went the distance, the winner was decided by a

panel of three judges, using boxings 10-point must system (the winner of the round gets 10 points,

$2 million. UFC Pres. Dana White became the face of the sport,

co-owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta remained in the The UFC continued to lose money—with some estired ink at $40 million—before it began to find a profA trilogy of fights between Chuck ("the Iceman")

Liddell and Randy ("the Natural") Couture at UFC 43, 52, and 57

helped elevate MMA and the UFC. Liddell won two of those bouts and quickly became a menacing poster boy for the sport, with his shaved mohawk and tattooed head. Couture retired in February 2006 after his final loss to Liddell and was named to the sport's Hall of Fame. He returned in March 2007, upsetting Tim Sylvia for the heavyweight title at UFC 68. The sport received another boost by virtue of The Ultimate Fighter reality TV show, which kicked off its

the loser is awarded nine or fewer).

MMA referees and judges were assigned by state athletic commissions, which

conducted

medical

Mixed martial arts fighter Chuck Liddell (left) defends against a roundhouse kick by Keith Jardine in UFC 76 on September 22. Liddell was one of the sport's earliest stars.

and drug tests on fighters. Weight classes, rules, and judging format varied by region or organization; for instance, the Pride Fighting Championships (known as Pride) in Japan, where fans had long embraced the sport, and the International Fight League (IFL) in the

U.S. staged fights in a ring rather than a cage. The UFC was pushing for "unified rules" to standardize the sport globally. MMA was believed to date back to the ancient Olympic Games in 648 BC, when pankration—the martial training of Greek armies— was considered the combat sport of ancient Greece. More recently it resurfaced in Brazil via a combat sport known as vale tudo (" anything goes"). The sport came to the forefront in North America in 1993 when the Gracie family from Brazil decided to showcase its trademark Brazilian jujitsu against all comers. Royce (pronounced Hoyce) Gracie represented the family as its champion in a tournament, held in a caged ring, that came to be called UFC 1. The earliest aim was to pit fighters of different styles against each other: wrestler against boxer, kickboxer against judoka, etc. Initially, the only rules decreed no biting and no eye gouging. Bouts ended when one of the fighters submitted (tapping with his hand to signal that he had had

sixth season on the Spike cable network in September 2007. Divided into teams under celebrity fighter coaches, combatants lived

together and fought each other in a knockout format, with the final

winner earning a UFC contract. Graduates of the show included such UFC staples as Forrest Griffin, Rashad Evans, Keith Jardine, and

Diego Sanchez. In November 2006 the UFC moved to capitalize on the popularity of the sport by buying other MMA organizations, including the World Fighting Alliance (WFA) and World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC), and in March 2007 it purchased the Japan-based Pride for a reported fee of less than $70 million. The UFC disbanded the WFA,

acquiring top WFA fighters such as Quinton (“Rampage”) Jackson, but continued to operate WEC asa distinct entity with a special emphasis on lighter weight classes. The UFC had planned to have Pride and UFC champions meet annually in a so-called Super Bowl of mixed martial arts, but the Pride purchase proved to be problematic; the UFC did take on top Pride fighters, such as Mirko (“Cro

Cop") Filipovic and Antonio Nogueira. The UFC also took its brand of MMA to Europe; at UFC 70, held in April 2007 in Manchester,

enough) or one corner threw in the towel. The 1.85-m (6-ft 1-in), 82kg (180-lb) Gracie defeated all comers at UFC 1, held in Denver's

Eng., fighters from 10 countries were on the card. Meanwhile, increased scrutiny turned up problems such as positive drug tests in 2007 for Royce Gracie and UFC lightweight champion Sean Sherk (both fighters denied they cheated). In addition to steroids, fighters had tested positive for so-called social drugs, such

McNichols Arena on Nov. 12, 1993. Gracie was particularly deft at

as marijuana and cocaine.

(NEIL DAVIDSON) 309

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Cricket Gabriel Bouys—AFP/Getty Images

(continued from page 308)

best of a mediocre group, made a pair of easy defenses of the WBC title, knocking out journeyman Ray Austin (U.S.) in the second round of a March 10 bout in Mannheim, Ger. In his next

fight, on Klitschko (U.S.)

VLLL

© me ny ee

July 7 in Cologne, Ger., stopped Lamon Brewster

in the

sixth

round.

Although

Brewster had defeated Klitschko in 2004, he had since undergone eye surgery and failed to put up much resistance. Nikolay Valuyev (Russia) began the year as WBA titleholder and made a successful defense by stopping Jameel McCline (U.S.) on January 20 in the third round of a bout in Basel,

Switz. In his next fight, on April 14 in Stuttgart,

Ger.,

however,

the title to Ruslan

Valuyev

Chagaev

lost

(Uzbek-

istan) via a 12-round decision.

Linear and The Ring light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (U.S.) tallied another upset victory when he won a unanimous 12-round decision over Ronald (“Winky”) Wright (U.S.) on July 21 in Las Vegas. The 42yearold Hopkins was the first opponent to defeat Wright, the former undisputed junior middleweight cham-

Floyd Mayweather (left) punches fellow American Oscar De La Hoya in their WBC super welterweight title bout on May 5. Mayweather won the fight in a 12-round split decision.

heavyweight title on February 3 with a 12-round decision over Tomasz

Taylor in the seventh round and hand the champion his first loss. The victory gave Pavlik The Ring and WBC belts. Although he did not hold a major title in 2007, junior lightweight Manny Pacquiao (Philippines) continued to be the number one attraction among the lighter-weight boxers. On April 14 in

Adamek

San Antonio, Texas, Pacquiao knocked

pion, since 1999.

The heir apparent to the light heavyweight throne appeared to be Chad Dawson (U.S.), who won the WBC light

prolific fast bowlers. The pair formed the backbone of their country’s decadelong domination of the world game; they retired with 1,271 wickets—Warne with 708 (at an average of 25.41) and McGrath with 563 (average 21.64). With Brian Lara, the brilliant West In-

just once, winning a 12-round decision

dian batsman, also announcing his retirement after the World Cup, the international game lost three of its most charismatic players within the space of four months. The most eagerly anticipated Test series in the 2006-07 season proved to be an anticlimax, at least to England supporters, who thought that their team would put up a fight to retain the Ashes urn, the symbolic trophy contested by England and Australia. To the

over Julio Gonzalez

delight of Australian fans, however, re-

(Poland)

in Kissimmee,

Fla.

Dawson made two subsequent defenses, knocking out Jesús Ruiz (Mex-

out previously undefeated

ico) in the sixth round of a bout on June 9 in Hartford, Conn., and stop-

only other bout of the year, Pacquiao won a 12-round decision over Marco

ping Epifanio Mendoza (Colombia) in the fourth round of a bout held in

Antonio Barrera (Mexico) on October 6

(Mexico)

Jorge Solis

in the eighth round.

In his

ing Federation (IBF) light heavyweight

in Las Vegas. Between fights, Pacquiao entered Filipino politics and unsuccessfully ran for a congressional seat.

titleholder Clinton Woods (U.K.) fought

(NIGEL COLLINS)

Sacramento,

Calif.

International

(Mexico)

Box-

on Sep-

tember 29 in Sheffield, Eng. The WBA light heavyweight title was won by

CRICKET

venge

Test cricket was naturally curtailed by two International Cricket Council (ICC)

Stipe Drews (Croatia) in a 12-round decision over Silvio Branco (Italy) on

World Cups in 2007. The original 50-

April 28 in Oberhausen, Ger. In his first

over version, held in the West Indies in

defense—on

April, was retained by two-time defending champion Australia (see Sidebar), while the inaugural Twenty20 model was won by India, the leastexperienced of all the teams in that shortened form of the one-day game. The year marked the end of an era in Australian and world cricket with the

December

Australia—Drews

16

in Perth,

lost the title when

Danny Green (Australia) beat him via a

12-round decision. A new middleweight when

star surfaced

Kelly Pavlik (U.S.) knocked

out

reigning world champion Jermain Taylor (U.S.) in the seventh round of an ex-

citing fight held on September 29 in Atlantic City, N.J. The undefeated Pavlik was knocked down and badly shaken in the second round but rallied to stop 310

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

retirements

of Shane Warne,

then the

highest wicket taker in Test history, and of Glenn McGrath

one

of cricket's

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

most

consistent

and

2005

for the team’s Ashes was

swift and brutal.

defeat in Australia,

brilliantly led by Ricky Ponting, won the first three Tests to regain the Ashes and completed the first five-game whitewash in the series since 1920-21. Both Warne and McGrath were central to the crushing defeat of England, which was led by stand-in captain and 2005 hero Andrew Flintoff. Ponting was the dominant batsman in the series, and

Stuart

Clarke, who

took 26

wickets, was the most productive bowler. Only in the second Test in Adelaide did England put up a serious fight, with Paul Collingwood scoring a double century and Kevin Pietersen,

Sports and Games: Cricket

Ihe 2007 Cricket World Cup An ill-fated tournament from the start, the 2007 World Cup ended

in farce and near darkness on April 28, with Australia beating Sri Lanka by 53 runs ina rain-affected final in Bridgetown, Barbados. Australia, expertly led by Ricky Ponting, deserved to win its third successive trophy, but after 51 matches spread across 47 days and

(see BIOGRAPHIES), in his last international tournament before retirement, took 26 wickets at an average of 13.73 and went out as

Player of the Tournament. Only Sri Lanka, superbly marshaled by Mahela Jayawardene, matched the Australians in spirit and talent. In beating India, Bangladesh came of age in international competi-

nine Caribbean islands, not many fans outside Australia and Sri

tion, whereas Ireland, one of the lesser teams, surprised everyone—

Lanka truly cared about the outcome. Crowds at many matches were sparse—the result of high ticket prices and tight security— and with the early departure of Pakistan and India, the tournament lost two of its most lucrative drawing cards. It was not the standard of play (sometimes thrilling but mostly

including themselves—by playing some inspired and purposeful cricket in reaching the Super Fight phase. The antiseptic atmosphere was not helped by the dismal showing of the host team, which was nearly eliminated from the competition in the group stage. The West Indies’ final Super Eight game, a narrow one-wicket defeat by England, also marked the retirement

mediocre) that set the sombre tone for cricket's showpiece occa-

sion. The death of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer in his hotel room in Jamaica the night after his side's shocking defeat by Ireland in the group stages and the ensuing police investigation into his death

of Brian Lara, a true master of world cricket. With the stage set for

rendered the rest of the tournament irrelevant. (See OBITUARIES.)

virtue of stamina and efficiency rather than flair. In the end, the

Many thought that the tournament should have been halted then and there, a move never likely to be sanctioned by the International Cricket Council. Australia came into the World Cup on an unprecedented run of five defeats but did not lose a match when it mattered. Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden formed a destructive opening part-

two best teams contested the final, which was graced by an innings of sustained brilliance by Gilchrist. In a match reduced by

one last great innings, Lara was run out for 18 by his own teammate. South Africa and New Zealand reached the semifinals by

rain to 38 overs a side, the Australian wicketkeeper’s 149 took

Australia to 281 for 4. Sri Lanka's stubborn reply ended 53 runs short and in total confusion, with neither the umpires nor the players sure of the rules as rain and darkness fell.

nership on low, slow pitches. Meanwhile, bowler Glenn McGrath

England's South African-born batsman, making 158 runs. Warne worked his magic on the final day, however, and England lost the match to go down 2-0 in the series. By the last Test in Syd-

Centurion. The tirade was picked up by a microphone on the field, and Gibbs was banned for two matches. Pakistan

ney, in which Warne, McGrath, and the

At the fifth Ashes Test match against England, in Sydney in January, Australia’s devastating leg spinner Shane Warne bowls the final ball of his

Australian opening batsman, Justin Langer, were all playing their farewell Test, England was not just beaten but demoralized. Mohammed Yousuf of Pakistan also enjoyed a prolific year, scoring 1,788 runs in 2006 to break the record for the number of runs scored in a calendar year set in 1976 by West Indian Viv Richards. Yousuf began his career as Yousuf

Youhana,

a talented

Test career.

(ANDREW LONGMORE)

recovered in the second Test in Port Elizabeth to level the series 1-1 but lost the final Test in Cape Town on adifficult pitch. South African bowler Makhaya Ntini took 19 wickets (average 18.68) in the series and passed the 300-wicket career mark. India also lost to South Africa but recovered to claim its first series victory in England since 1986. Ably led by Rahul Dravid, India found a bowler of real penetration in Zaheer Khan, a left-armer who swung the ball prodigiously in propitious conditions and took 18 wickets (average 20.33). Khan was also at the centre of

the “jelly bean” incident, when he complained that the England fielders had scattered candy on the pitch during the second Test. There were several heated exchanges between the players, and both sides were warned about their behaviour. The achievement of the first ICC World Twenty20, held in South Africa in front of good crowds, and the growing popularity of the all-action 20overs-a-side game worldwide prompted debate about the future of the more traditional one-day internationals (played over 100 overs) and five-day Test cricket. Many observers thought that the successful Twenty20 tournament, which culminated in India’s narrow five-run victory over Pakistan in the fi-

middle-

order batsman most famous for being the only Christian on the Pakistan side until he converted to Islam. In the subsequent two years he had almost doubled his Test average and become one of the mainstays of a formidable Pakistan batting lineup. Yousuf’s nine centuries during the year included four in five innings against the West Indies, for which Lara hit the ninth double century of his career. Pakistan beat the West Indies at home but lost in South Africa in a fractious series that was marred by a racist outburst by South African batsman Herschelle Gibbs against a section of Pakistan supporters during the first Test in Rob Griffith/AP

311

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Curling Peter Dejong/AP

nal on September 24, could herald a significant shift in the structure of oneday cricket. In domestic cricket in England, Sussex just beat Lancashire to the county championship after a thrilling finish on the last day of the season, while Durham won the one-day trophy, the first in its 15-year history, and finished as runnerup in the championship. Tasmania won the Pura Cup in Australia for the first time with a 421-run victory over New

South Wales in the final. Queensland secured the one-day cup. The South Africa Supersport series was won by the Titans.

(ANDREW LONGMORE)

CURLING Canada won both the men's and women's world curling championships in 2007. The country had not taken both titles in the same year since 2000. Glenn Howard’s team downed Germany, led by skip Andy Kapp, 8-3 in

Alberto Contador of Spain (left, in the overall leader’s yellow jersey) leads the pack through the streets of Paris en route to victory in the Tour de France.

the men’s final in Edmonton, Alta. Todd

held

Birr and the U.S. team finished third. The order of the rest of the field was

Switzerland's in the final.

Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, France, Norway, Scotland, Australia, Denmark,

and South Korea. Kelly Scott doubled Denmark’s Angelina Jensen 8-4 to take the crown at the women’s world championship in Aomori, Japan. Kelly Wood of Scotland earned the bronze medal, followed by the U.S., Switzerland, Sweden, China, Germany, Japan, Russia,

Czech Republic, and Italy in the final standings. At the world junior championships in Eveleth,

Minn.,

Charley

Thomas

skipped Canada to the men’s title for a second straight year. The Canadians beat Sweden’s Niklas Edin 8-3 in the final. Christian von Gunten of Switzerland finished third. Scotland’s Sarah Reid secured the women’s championship as the Scots stole a point in an extra end to defeat Canada’s Stacie Devereaux 7-6 for the title. Madeleine Dupont of Denmark took the bronze medal. The world senior curling championships, for competitors aged 50 and over,

were

held

in

Edmonton.

The

Scots captured the men’s senior title, with Keith Prentice edging Canada’s Al Hackner 6-5 in the final. Sweden’s Góran Roxin was third. Ingrid Meldahl skipped Sweden to a second consecutive women’s senior championship by beating Canada’s Anne Dunn 8-5. Pam Oleinik of the U.S. earned the bronze medal. Rune Lorentsen of Norway won the world wheelchair championship, 312

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

> ss=

in

Sollefteå,

Swed.,

defeating

Manfred Bollinger 5-4 (DONNA SPENCER)

CYCLING Cycling endured another difficult year in 2007, with the Tour de France, the

premier road event, shrouded in controversy as the struggle to eliminate drugs and doping from the sport continued. Overall victory in the threeweek,

3,569.9-km

(about

2,218-mi)

race, which began in London on July 7 and finished in Paris on July 29, went to Alberto Contador, Spain's first winner since 1995. Contador inherited the lead when Danish rider Michael Rasmussen was dismissed by his team before the start of the 17th stage on July 26. It had emerged that Rasmussen, who took the leader’s yellow jersey on July 15, had missed four out-of-competition drug tests. Aleksandr Vinokurov of Kazakhstan and Italy’ Cristian Moreni both failed tests during the Tour and were excluded, along with their teams, while German rider Patrik

Sinkewitz was removed from the race after positive results for testosterone from a test administered in early June were released. In September, American Floyd Landis lost his appeal to the American Arbitration Association

against a two-year

suspension imposed following his positive test for testosterone during the 2006

Tour

de France,

which

he had

won. He was stripped of the title, and Oscar Pereiro of Spain, who had held

the yellow jersey for five days during the 2006 race before finishing in second place, was recognized as the official winner. The ProTour, a series of major road races run under the banner of the Union

Cycliste

Internationale

(UCI),

also ended in controversy when leader Danilo Di Luca was removed from the overall standings before the final round, the Tour of Lombardy (Giro di Lombardia). Di Luca, winner of the Tour of Italy (Giro d'Italia) earlier in

the season, was suspended by the Italian Olympic Committee for his links with a doctor who had served a ban (1995-2000) for providing athletes with doping products. Italys Paolo Bettini retained the men's elite title at the world road-race championships, held in September in Stuttgart, Ger. Local organizers had petitioned the court in an attempt to prevent Bettini from competing because he had refused to sign the UCI's antidoping pledge. Bettini objected to a clause under which riders given a standard two-year ban for any doping case would be fined a year's salary in addition to any stipulated fine. At the UCI world track championships in Palma, Majorca, Anna Meares of Australia set a new world record of 33.588 sec to win the women’s 500-m time trial, improving her own mark set in November 2006 by 0.356 sec. Wong Kampo became Hong

Kong's first world champion in cycling when he won the men’s 15-km scratch

race.

(JOHN R. WILKINSON)

Sports and Games: Equestrian Sports

EQUESTRIAN SPORTS Thoroughbred Racing. United States. The valiant eight-month battle to save the life of Thoroughbred racehorse Barbaro following a catastrophic injury to his right hind leg in the Preakness Stakes two weeks after he won the 2006 Kentucky Derby was lost on Jan. 29, 2007,

when

the colt was

euthanized.

Barbaro was the subject of worldwide attention during his recovery from surgery but after overcoming numerous setbacks, the colt ultimately was afflicted with the hoof disease laminitis, which affected both front feet, a com-

plication resulting from his inability to bear weight on his hind legs. Three events—the Dirt Mile, the Filly and Mare Sprint, and the Juvenile Turf—were added to the 2007 Breeders’ Cup World Championships, which were held over a two-day period (October 26-27) for the first time in the competition’s 24-year history. The 11 races, worth $23 million in total purses, were

held at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, N.J. Officials later announced the addition of three more races—the Turf Sprint, the Juvenile Fillies Turf, and the

Dirt Marathon—to the card in 2008. Prevailing convincingly over one of the most formidable fields ever assembled for the $5 million Breeders’ Cup Classic, Curlin teamed with jockey Robby Albarado for a 4!^-length victory over Hard Spun in 2:00.59 for the 1%4mi race. Curlin’s Classic triumph, along with wins earlier in the year in the Preakness Stakes and the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park, likely sealed Horse of the Year honours for the three-year-old colt. The quest for American Thoroughbred racing’s 2007 Triple Crown began with Street Sense, ridden by Calvin Borel, rallying from next to last in a field of 20 to win the 133rd Kentucky Derby by 2% lengths over Hard Spun as the 4.90-1 favourite. Curlin finished third. Five weeks later Rags to Riches became the first filly in 102 years (and only the third in history) to win the 1'^mi Belmont Stakes. Ridden by John Velazquez, the filly dueled with Preakness-winner Curlin for a quarter of a mile before defeating him by a head. In September, however, after suffering a hairline fracture on her right pastern following a second-place finish in the Gazelle Stakes, Rags to Riches was sidelined for the remainder of the year.

Presque Isle Downs’ one-mile, two-turn track used one of the revolutionary new weather-resistant synthetic racing surfaces. (See Sidebar.) On the business

front,

Jockey

José

Santos,

46,

announced

his retirement on July 30, one week before his induction into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. Santos had not ridden since breaking his back in five places in a spill on February 1 at Aqueduct Racetrack in New

Churchill

Downs, Inc., and Magna Entertainment

Corp., the two largest American racetrack owners, put competition aside in March to partner on the creation of TrackNet Media Group, which would distribute the racing content of the tracks owned by the two companies.

York. He rode 4,083 winners and accounted for more than $188 million in

purses during his career. The retirement of Argentine-bred Invasor, the 2006 Horse of the Year, was announced

Thoroughbred Sports Network (TSN) for $80 million to strengthen its posi-

on June 23 after it was revealed that he had suffered a fracture in his right hind ankle following a workout at Belmont Park. Invasor won 11 of 12 career starts, including the 2007 Dubai

tion in the Internet account

(U.A.E.) World Cup in March, and $7.8

Churchill Downs, Inc. in June purchased AmericaTAB, Bloodstock Research Information Services, and the

wagering

sector. Magna, which reported losses of

million in purses. Two-time Horse of the Year John Henry was euthanized on October 8 at age 32. During an eight-year track career, the legendary gelding had 39 wins

$20.9 million for the first six months of

the year, announced in September that it would sell Thistledown in Ohio and Portland Meadows in Oregon in addition to the previously announced Great Lakes Downs in Michigan. The company in 2007 also completed its purchase of the remaining interests in the Maryland Jockey Club. A world-record price for a broodmare, $10.5 million, was paid for five-year-old Playful Act during the first session of the November Breeding Stock Sale at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky. The Irishbred Group I stakes winner was purchased by John Ferguson on behalf of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai.

(16 in Grade 1 stakes) in 83 starts and

retired at age nine in 1984 as Thoroughbred racing’s all-time money winner, with $6,591,860. In November the

sport mourned the death of jockey Bill Hartack (see OBITUARIES).

Dale Baird,

72, the all-time leading trainer in number of wins, with 9,445, was

killed in

an automobile accident just outside Indianapolis on December 23. (JOHN G. BROKOPP)

International.

American-trained

Tho-

roughbred Invasor on March 31, 2007, won the $6 million Dubai (U.A.E.)

In the Belmont Stakes on June 9, Rags to Riches (left), ridden by John Velazquez,

defeats Preakness winner Curlin by a head. Rags to Riches was the first filly to win the Belmont in more than a century. JU

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Presque Isle Downs & Casino in Erie,

Pa., the first new racetrack to open in the U.S. since 2005, began its inaugural racing season on September 1. Julie Jacobson/AP

313

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Equestrian Sports

—Ó—

—

The trend toward replacing traditional dirt tracks with synthetic surfaces at Thoroughbred race tracks in the United States grew significantly in 2007, lending momentum to one of the most revolutionary concepts in the long history of the sport of horse racing. Although installation costs could run upwards of $10 million, the

synthetic surfaces—which

provided

a

more consistent, better cushioned, and weather-resistant running surface—were

seen as a way for tracks to reduce the number of career-ending and catastrophic injuries to Thoroughbred horses. A synthetic racing surface was first developed in England by Martin Collins, who patented what he called Polytrack, a blend of polypropylene fibres, recycled rubber, and silica sand covered in a wax coat-

ing. It was installed experimentally on a training track in 1987 and used competitively for the first time in 2001. Track owners in the U.S. began to take an interest in Polytrack as an all-weather alternative to dirt tracks. Its first application in the U.S. was in 2004 at the five-eighths mile training track at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., in 2005

became the first American track to conduct its races on a synthetic surface; it was fol-

lowed in 2006 by Keeneland and Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif. In 2007 three more California racetracks— Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Golden Gate—

unveiled synthetic surfaces in compliance with a 2006 mandate by California's Horse Racing Board that all tracks in the state adopt the technology by 2008. Arlington Park in Arlington Heights, IIl., and Presque Isle Downs in Erie, Pa., also made the con-

version during the year. In addition to Polytrack, patented synthetic racing surfaces were being marketed

World Cup at Nad al Sheba, beating horses from Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Japan. Horses from the United States (two), Hong Kong, Japan, and South Africa won the other races on the World Cup card. On the same day, it was announced that a new racecourse, Meydan, would be constructed

adjacent to Nad al Sheba. Meydan was 314

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

À

by Cushion Track, Tapeta Footings, and ProRide Racing. The sales environment for the technology was becoming extremely competitive as more tracks across the country

explored their options. With all synthetic tracks, drainage materials of varying density served as a base, along with a system of underground piping. The actual running surface was designed to be uniform at roughly 15 cm (about 6 in) in depth. And besides having superior drainage and reducing the maintenance costs of synthetic surfaces, the surface allowed for footing that proved to be safer, softer, and more

uniform than the unstable nature of dirt tracks, at least during the initial stages of observation under competitive conditions. A reduction in the number of injuries to Thoroughbreds was also documented. During the first year of use, Arlington Park documented a decrease from 22 injuries to 13, while at Del Mar injuries fell to 6 from

14. Turfway also showed a dramatic drop from 24 injuries on the dirt track in2004—05 to only 3 on the synthetic track in 2005-06, but the track’s subsequent increase to 14 injuries in 2006-07 raised questions about how these new surfaces would age. In some respects the technology changed the face of the sport by muffling the sounds of the horses’ hooves during races and by eliminating the slowdown of races run over muddy and even sloppy tracks as a result of heavy rain. Variants and track bias (common tools used by bettors who handicap races on dirt) also were

nonexistent on synthetic tracks. Slower running times over comparable distances on dirt tracks were recorded. Since the surfaces were precipitation resistant, observations were still being made as to what effect extreme heat and subfreezing temperatures would have on the synthetic material mix.

(JOHN G. BROKOPP)

al-Maktoum,

June; Manduro,

Invasor’s successor

the highest-rated

as

horse in the world;

Admire Moon, the best older horse in Japan; 2006 European champion two-

year-old Teofilo (injured in April and retired without racing again); and three U.S.-based horses—Kentucky Derby winner

Street

Sense, Hard

Spun,

and

Any Given Saturday. Yearling purchases included a Kingmambo colt for which Maktoum outbid Coolmore, paying $11.7 million, the second highest price ever. These deals raised Darley's holdings to 59 stallions in six countries, including Japan and Australia. Coolmore began the year badly. George Washington, the highest-rated three-year-old of 2006, proved infertile and was returned to training. Holy Roman Emperor, the principal rival to Teofilo, was hurriedly retired to stud in his place. Aidan O'Brien, who trained most

of the

Coolmore

horses,

was

therefore deprived of the chance of training Holy Roman Emperor for the classic

races,

but

he

still ended

as

champion trainer in Ireland and Britain, where he ran an unprecedented eight horses in the Derby. O'Brien was

ranked

sixth in France,

where he won the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe with Dylan Thomas, ridden by jockey Kieren Fallon. The following day Fallon appeared in court in London as one of three jockeys among six men charged with conspiracy to defraud customers of the betting exchange Betfair. The trial was predicted to last four months, and before the end of the first week, Fallon announced that he would

due to be completed in November 2009, and the 2010 Dubai World Cup was scheduled to be run there. Sheikh Muhammad

on the racecourse and in his breeding interests. He had responded by purchasing a number of leading performers as stallion prospects and had bought shares in active racehorses but left them with their current connections for the remainder of their racing careers. The major purchases for Maktoum's Darley Stallions included Authorized, winner of the Epsom Derby in

the

emir of Dubai and founder of Meydan, was very active in world racing. He had been on poor terms with the Coolmore stable for several years and had been outmaneuvered by his Irish rivals both

not ride again until it was over. The judge dismissed the charges against all six in early December. It was announced the following day, however, that Fallon had tested positive for cocaine when riding in France in August. He had served a six-month ban after a similar positive test. A longer ban was anticipated. Another 12 jockeys were banned in different cases in Britain without the necessity of a trial. Australian racing and breeding were thrown into chaos by an outbreak of equine influenza in New South Wales in mid-August. Queensland was also af-

Sports and Games: Football

fected, but Victoria escaped. Australia previously had been clear of the disease, which affected an estimated 42,000 horses and halted all movement

of equines in the two states involved. The three major Australian races survived. Master O'Reilly won the Caulfield Cup after the two favourites, Maldivian

and

Eskimo

Queen,

were

both injured in an unfortunate incident in the starting gate and had to be scratched. A week later El Segundo, runner-up in the 2006 Cox Plate, won the 2007 race. In the Melbourne Cup the home-trained Efficient triumphed over Purple Moon from England and O'Brien's Irish challenger, Mahler. There was another outbreak of influenza in Japan, and some meetings were canceled between July and September.

Prior to the outbreak,

Vodka

gained a significant success in the Tokyo Yushun (Derby), becoming the first filly to win the classic race since 1943.

In the Canadian Triple Crown, Emma-Jayne Wilson became the first woman jockey to win the Queen's Plate when she rode Mike Fox to victory over Alezzandro by half a length. Alezzandro went on to win the Prince of Wales Stakes but finished sixth behind winner Marchfield in the Breeders’ Stakes. Mike Fox ran poorly in both of the latter races. The Chicago-trained Cloudy's Knight beat the English favourite, Ask, by a nose in the Canadian International Stakes.

(ROBERT W. CARTER)

Harness Racing. Tim harness racing fans in lentless quest to win single season than any

Tetrick dazzled 2007 with his remore races in a other driver. The

native Illinoisan, who turned 26 in No-

vember, displayed remarkable reinsmanship and endurance as he often raced at one track in the afternoon and at another in a different state that night. His target was the record of 1,077 wins set in 1998 by driver Walter Case, Jr. Tetrick had won 677 races in 3,371 starts in 2006, but his pursuit in

2007 required a higher level of commitment,

so

he

moved

from

the

Chicago area to Eastern tracks, where opportunities to drive were more plentiful. Tetrick surpassed Case's record on November 27 when he won at Dover (Del. Downs. By the end of the 2007 season, Tetrick had compiled 1,188 wins from 4,728 drives, with earnings of more than $18.3 million. Meanwhile,

Canadian Hall of Famer John D. Campbell, who had suffered a severely broken leg in October 2006, earned Driver of the Year honours in February and

made an amazing return to the track in April. (See BIOGRAPHIES.)

Donato Hanover proved to be the dominator in 2007. The three-year-old bay colt was flawless throughout the season, winning major races with ease.

Among his triumphs were the $1.5 million Hambletonian

and

the

$742,000

Kentucky Futurity (the first and third legs of the Triple Crown for trotters), as well as the $970,000 Canadian Trotting

Classic. Donato Hanover was held out of the second leg of the Triple Crown, the Yonkers Trot (won by Green Day), to prepare for the $600,000 World Trotting Derby, where he prevailed by 1% lengths. As a two-year-old in 2006, Donato Hanover had finished third in his first race, a nonbetting affair. He won his next eight races in his freshman campaign and was syndicated for breeding purposes for $6 million. Despite great pressure on the champion as he returned for his second season, Do-

nato Hanover pushed his winning streak to 19 races with the 2007 Kentucky Futurity, in which his time for the mile of 1 min 50/5 sec tied the record. Pampered Princess, the best three-year-old filly trotter of 2007, tried her luck against Donato Hanover several times, always in vain. No three-year-old pacer dominated the way that Donato Hanover did the trotters. The honours in the pacer division were shared by Tell All (winner of the North America Cup and Little Brown Jug) and Southwind Lynx (winner of the Meadowlands Pace). Always A Virgin was a consistent contender in the divi-

Steeplechasing. Kauto Star had a spectacular 2006-07 steeplechase season and earned a bonus of £1 million (about $2 million) for winning the Bet-

fair Chase, the King George VI Chase, and the Cheltenham Gold Cup, all at three miles or farther. The French-bred champion also won the Tingle Creek Chase at two miles. Irish horses dominated elsewhere. Sublimity was the seventh Irish winner in the past nine runnings of England's Champion Hurdle, while Silver Birch was the fourth Irish winner of the Aintree Grand National in five years. Two Irish-owned horses prevailed in France, with Mid Dancer capturing the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris (his 17th consecutive victory in France) and Zaiyad winning the Grande Course de Haies d'Auteuil.

Karasi, bred in Ireland but

trained in Australia, won Japan's Nakayama Grand Jump, for the third straight year. (ROBERT W. CARTER)

FOOTBALL Association Football (Soccer). Europe. In

2007 national teams were occupied with qualifying for the final stages of Euro

2008,

the European

association

football (soccer) championship to be held jointly in Austria and Switzerland in 2008, but concerns were raised over

the proliferation of fixtures at both the club and the country level and the resulting physical demands on players. In the half century since the introduction of European cup competitions for leading clubs, the number of such matches

sion, but he encountered bad luck in the

had more

Meadowlands Pace when he broke stride and in the Little Brown Jug when he was boxed in until late in the race and was unable to gain racing room. France’s greatest trotting event, the Prix d’Amerique, held at the Vincennes track near Paris, was taken by Offshore Dream. He was one of the few five-yearolds to win this marathon test, usually won by older and more seasoned horses. Sweden’s Elitlopp was won by LAmiral Mauzun, an eight-year-old Frenchbased gelding that had proved his ability over a variety of distances. L'Amiral Mauzun’s French driving ace, JeanMichel Bazire, enjoyed extraordinary success in 2007 in the international trotting events. In Australia, Blacks A Fake took his second consecutive InterDominion Pacing Championship, again under the reins of trainer Natalie Ras-

tic fixtures had largely remained at the

mussen,

who in 2006 had become

first female

driver to win

Dominion final.

the

an Inter-

| (DEAN A. HOFFMAN)

than doubled, while domes-

same level. At the same time, there was

a similar increase in the size of the World Cup and European championship commitments. Injuries to key players ignited the ageold conflict of club versus country, but the congested calendar was put forward as a reason for the death at age 22 of Antonio Puerta, a Seville midfield

player who died three days after he collapsed in a Spanish league game. Two days later Clive Clarke, age 27, suffered a heart attack at halftime while playing for Leicester City in England. He recovered,

but

in

a

third

incident,

Chaswe Nsofwa, a 28-year-old Zambian international player died during a practice session with his Israeli club. Racist behaviour continued to be a problem, but despite heavy fines imposed by the Union des Associations Européennes

matches

de Football

staged behind

(UEFA)

closed

and

doors, 315

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Football

there seemed to be no improvement. In February an Italian policeman was killed during a riot between rival fans at the Catania-Palermo match. All Italian games were suspended, and it was several weeks before a resumption. UEFA

Pres. Michel Platini, the former

French player elected to the post in January, promised tough action against all violence and all forms of abuse by spectators, players, and coaches against match officials. High finance was never far removed from the soccer scene, and there was a

growing influx of foreign investors buying into English Premier League clubs. Eight of the 20 teams had overseas owners, and others were part-owned or had majority shareholders, while more

question. Allardyce subsequently became manager of Newcastle. The UEFA Champions League final, played on May 23 at the OACA Spyro

minutes later. In the penalty shoot-out, Seville prevailed 3-1. Chelsea, led by Cóte d'Ivoires Didier

Louis Stadium in Athens, featured the

win its third straight Premier League title in England but did secure both the

same matchup of teams as the 2005 contest. Liverpool was hoping to repeat its earlier success against AC Milan, the oldest team ever seen in the competition’s final, with an average age of 31 years 34 days. The English team had the better of a subdued first half and was unfortunate to go into halftime a goal down. From a 45th-minute free kick taken by Milan’s Andrea Pirlo, the ball struck the upper arm of Filippo Inzaghi and was diverted into the net, wrong-footing Liverpool goalkeeper José Manuel Reina Páez, who had had

waiting in the wings. At

the original shot covered. Liverpool re-

Manchester City, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand, was responsible for bringing back Swedish-born former England coach

newed its efforts in the second half, and

Steven Gerrard had the best chance to equalize, but his shot was not powerful enough to beat Brazilian goalkeeper

Sven-Goran Eriksson as manager. Even

Dida (Nelson de Jesus Silva) in the Mi-

teams in the second tier attracted serious money. The board of Queens Park Rangers accepted a bid from Formula One auto-racing multimillionaires Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone. (In contrast, there was no foreign ownership in Germany or Spain, while in Italy only Juventus had a small percentage interest from a Libyan source.) West Ham was fined a record £5.5

lan goal. Liverpool

suitors were

million (almost $11 million) by the Pre-

mier League over a breach of rules in the signing of two Argentine players, Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez. Tevez almost single-handedly saved West Ham from relegation, but other threatened teams claimed that a points reduction should have been implemented. Sheffield United even tried through the courts to reverse its own demotion but failed. Mascherano moved on to sign for Liverpool, and, after protracted negotiations,

Tevez was

traded to Manchester United in the summer. A lengthy inquiry conducted by Lord Stevens into allegations of illegal payments listed 17 trades that involved five English clubs: Bolton, Chelsea, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, and Ports-

mouth. Three managers—Sam Allardyce (formerly Bolton), Harry Redknapp (Portsmouth), and Graeme Souness (formerly Newcastle)—plus 15 agents were also investigated, but no evidence of wrongdoing was uncovered in the process. All of the individuals vigorously defended their reputations, and no action was taken, though the role of players’ agents again came into 316

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Benítez

withdrew

Manager Mascherano,

Rafael who

had performed with some success against the Brazilian-born playmaker Kaká

(Ricardo

Izecson

dos

Santos

Leite), for the attacking option of Peter Crouch, but it proved to be a crucial misjudgment. In the 82nd minute, Kaká found Inzaghi, who beat the offside trap and slid the ball under the advancing Reina. Dirk Kuyt belatedly reduced the arrears in the 89th minute with a headed goal from a corner, but Paolo Maldini (at 38 years 331 days the oldest finalist) lifted the trophy for AC Milan in his record 135th match. A week earlier, on May

16, the final

Drogba

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

failed

to

Football Association (FA) Cup and Car-

ling Cup trophies. In Scotland it was a fairy-tale rise for Gretna into the Premier League, its third successive promotion from the depths of nonleague English football, backed by wealthy owner Brookes Mileson. Montenegro, the 53rd UEFA member,

celebrated its first international match since independence from Serbia by beating Hungary 2-1. Gibraltar was denied UEFA membership, chiefly as the result of opposition from Spain. There was a photo finish to the championship in Spain, where Real Madrid ousted its eternal rival Barcelona on the last day. In The Netherlands PSV Eindhoven won the title on goal difference from Ajax. In Moldova, Serif remained unbeaten in 36 league games, a feat equaled by Dynamo Kiev in Ukraine over 30 matches. There was a surprise winner in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association Women’s World Cup when Germany defeated the favourite, Brazil,

2-0 in the final game in Shanghai on September 30, becoming the first country to retain the women’s title. The Brazilians showed flair and imagination throughout the finals to captivate the Chinese spectators, while the dour, de-

fensive Germans racked up five shutouts (plus a goalless draw). The organized, stifling tactics employed by German coach Silvia Neid in the final

of the UEFA Cup at Hampden Park in Glasgow, Scot., between two Spanish teams, Espanyol and Seville, had to be decided on penalty kicks after extra

match frustrated Brazil, which fell be-

time ended in a 2-2 draw. Seville, the

however, when Brazil’s Marta, the out-

defending champion, took the early lead in the 18th minute when Brazilian Adriano Correia Claro scored in a spirited breakaway movement. Ten minutes later Espanyol leveled the score when Alberto Riera Ortega’s shot was deflected off Daniel Alves da Silva. Only a quick reaction from Seville goalkeeper Andrés Palop Cevera prevented Riera from adding another goal. The match teetered one way and another until Espanyol was reduced to 10 players after Moisés Hurtado Pérez received his second yellow card. In extra time Frederic Kanoute restored Seville’s lead, turning in a corner kick in the 105th minute, only for Brazilian

standing player in the competition and the top scorer with seven goals, failed with a penalty kick that would have leveled the score (the German goalkeeper Nadine Angerer guessing correctly to

Jonatas

Domingos

to tie the score

10

hind 1-0 in the 52nd minute from a strike by Birgit Prinz (see BIOGRAPHIES). The real turning point came,

save

a weak

effort). Simone

Laudehr

headed a second goal for Germany after 86 minutes. The U.S., comprehensively beaten 4-0 by Brazil in the semifinal, defeated Norway 4-1 for third place. Attendance totaled 1,190,971 for an average of 37,218. (JACK ROLLIN)

The Americas. South America’s top association

football

(soccer)

countries,

Argentina and Brazil, finished 2007 in the top two places, respectively, of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association ranking, but Brazil re-

Sports and Games: Football Saurabh Das/AP

Zamalek in the Egyptian Cup final to force extra time and win 4-3 for a record 35th outright success in the competition.

On July 29 at the Gelora Bung Karno stadium

in Jakarta,

there

was

a sur-

prise winner of the Asian Cup when Iraq beat Saudi Arabia 1-0 in the final. Despite restrictive training facilities in their strife-torn country, the Iraqi players were disciplined and well organized. The winning goal came with a header from team captain Younis Mahmoud in the 71st minute. (JACK ROLLIN)

U.S. Football. College. Louisiana State University (LSU) won the top college football ranking for 2007-08 by defeating Ohio State University 38-24 in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) championship game on Jan. 7, 2008, in New Orleans. The Tigers overcame a 10-0 deficit by scoring on four straight possessions, and quarterback Matt Flynn passed for four touchdowns in leading LSU, which won the

The German women’ national association football (soccer) team members

celebrate Germany's 2-0 upset of Brazil in the final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. tained the Copa América, beating Argentina 3-0 in the final. The United States retained the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football)

Gold Cup with a victory over Mexico 2-1 in the final. Argentina’s Boca Juniors won South America’s most important club tournament,

the

Libertadores

de

América

Cup, for the sixth time, defeating Brazil’s Grémio 3-0 and 2-0 in the twostage final. The CONCACAF club championship went to Pachuca, which beat Guadalajara’s Chivas on penalties after a 2-2 goals aggregate in an all-Mexican final. À curious trend emerged in South America—the success of smaller clubs—most notably Argentina's Arsenal, which

won

the

South

American

Cup (its first-ever trophy). Arsenal defeated Mexico’s powerful América 3-2 in Mexico

and lost 2-1 at home,

thus

winning the title on the away-goals rule (with away goals counting double if aggregate goals are tied). The Argentine 2007-08 season opening championship was won by Lanus for the first time, with defending champion Boca Juniors only joint fourth. Just-promoted La Equidad reached the final of the Colombian closing championship. In Chile Audax Italiano won the closing championship’s league, and Universidad de Concepcion reached the final of

Southeastern Conference (SEC) with a

the play-offs. Danubio won the Uruguayan 2006-07 title, while Defensor Sporting won the 2007-08 season’s opening championship, leaving the country’s big clubs (Nacional and Pefiarol) titleless. San José won the Bo-

livian title for only the second time. In Peru Coronel Bolognesi captured its first closing championship, and Universidad San Martin became national champion by gaining the most points during the season. In U.S.

Major

League

Soccer,

the

Houston Dynamos once again defeated the New England Revolution in the MLS Cup—a 2-1 final victory on November 18 at Washington's RFK Stadium. In late July English superstar player David Beckham joined the Los Angeles Galaxy. His arrival in the U.S., with his celebrity wife, Victoria, created a media sensation, but ankle and knee

injuries games, for the Africa

caused Beckham to miss several and the Galaxy failed to qualify play-offs. (ERIC WEIL) and Asia. In March 2007 Ivo-

rian association football (soccer) star Didier Drogba (see BIOGRAPHIES) was

voted 2006's African Footballer of the Year, narrowly defeating three-time winner Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon. On the field Al-Ahly Cairo achieved the League and Cup double in Egypt, finishing five points ahead of its longtime Cairo rival Zamalek in the league championship and fighting back against

12-2 record. LSU became the first repeat champion since the BCS began in 1998 (having shared the title with Southern

California

in 2003-04)

and

gave the SEC 5 of the 10 BCS champions. (11-2)

Big Ten winner Ohio State became the fifth top-ranked

team in six years to lose the championship game. The Buckeyes still allowed the fewest points, yards, passing yards, and rushing yards per game in the big-budget Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS; formerly called Division LA), with average yields of 12.8 points and 233 yd, 40 yd fewer than the runner-up. The unprecedented season of upsets began on the first full weekend, when Appalachian State (N.C.) won 34-32 over

Michigan

(9-4),

the

first of 13

games that top-five teams lost to unranked teams. The 13-2 Mountaineers went on to win the lower-budget Football Championship Subdivision (FCS; formerly Division I-AA) title, their fifth in six years and third straight. FBS number one teams lost four regularseason games, the most since 1990, and number

two teams

lost six.

The top two lost on the same weekend for the first time in 11 years and then did it twice again in the regular seasons last two weeks; LSU and Kansas,

respectively, gave way to Missouri and West Virginia, whose own losses enabled idle Ohio State to climb from fifth to first as LSU bounced from first to seventh to second. 317

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Football David Drapkin/Getty Images

the 42-pass differential. He led league passers with 4,806 yd, 8.3 yd per attempt, and a 117.2 rating. Wide receiver Randy Moss also set a record with 23 touchdown catches, after having been virtually unwanted in the off

Kansas (12-1), under Coach of

the Year Mark Mangino, ranked second in points per game and fourth in points allowed and won the Orange Bowl 24-21 over Atlantic Coast Conference champion Virginia Tech (11-3). The Western Athletic Conference

season, and receiver Wes Welker's

112 catches tied Cincinnati’s TJ. Houshmandzadeh for the league lead. An early-season revelation

champion Hawaii (12-1) had the

top offense with 43.4 points per game as Colt Brennan extended his career record to 131 touchdown passes, but the Warriors lost 41-10

to Georgia

of cheating, however, stained the

(11-2) in

Patriots’ record Bowl victories

of three Super in four years

fined

Bill

(2002, 2004, and 2005). The NFL

the Sugar Bowl. Georgia ranked third in the coaches’ final USA Today poll and second in the reporters’ Associated Press poll, followed by Pacific-10 winner

coach

Belichick

$500,000 and the team $250,000

Southern California (11-2), the 49-17 Rose Bowl winner over Illinois (9-4). The coaches

and revoked the team’s 2008 first-round draft choice for having videotaped the New York Jets’ sideline signals on September 9, but the league declined to

ranked

investigate previous seasons.

Ohio

State

fourth, just

New England and Indianapolis

ahead of the writers’ choice, Missouri (12-2). West Virginia (11-2), sixth in both polls, won

(13-3) won their fifth straight di-

vision titles in the AFC East and South, respectively, while Seattle

the Big East as well as the Fiesta Bowl by 48-28 over Big 12 champion

Oklahoma

(11-3),

which

(10-6) won its fourth straight in

England Patriots against the New York Giants on December 29. The Patriots’ 38-35 victory completed their perfect 16-0 season, an NFL record.

ranked eighth behind Kansas and ahead of Virginia Tech. Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, the first sophomore Heisman Trophy winner, was the FBSS5 first player to score 20 touchdowns both on runs and on passes and ranked second in passing efficiency, behind Oklahoma's Sam Bradford. Tebow also received the Maxwell Award for the top player and the Davey O'Brien Award for quarterbacks. Heisman runner-up Darren McFadden of Arkansas won the Walter Camp award for the top player and the Doak Walker Award for running backs, while leading rusher Kevin Smith of Central Florida ran for 2,567

yd and scored a leading 180 points on 30 touchdowns. Texas Tech's top passing offense gained 470.3 yd per game behind quarterback Graham Harrell's FBS-leading 5,705 yd passing, 48 touchdown passes, and 71.896 completions, while freshman teammate Michael Crabtree led with 134 catches for 1,962

yd and 22 touchdowns in winning the receivers’ Fred Biletnikoff Award. For top defensive player, Penn State linebacker Dan Connor won the Chuck Bednarik trophy, and LSU defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey was awarded the Bronko Nagurski Trophy as well as the Outland Trophy for interior linemen and the Lombardi Award for linemen. Professional. The Indianapolis Colts of the American Football Conference 318

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

the NFC

West,

(11-5) repeated in the AFC West. Dallas, which finished 13-3 un-

der quarterback Tony Romo (see BIOGRAPHIES),

(AFC)

the

defeated

National

the Chicago

Football

Bears

of

Conference

(NFC) 29-17 to win Super Bowl XLI in the rain in Miami on Feb. 4, 2007, and

thereby made Tony Dungy the first black coach to win a National Football League (NFL) championship, in a game against his black protégé, Chicago coach Lovie Smith. Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning, named Most Valuable Player (MVP), completed 25 of 38 passes for 247 yd, one touchdown, and one interception, with help from Dominic Rhodes’s 113 yd on 21 carries and Joseph Addai’s 77 yd on 19 carries plus 66 yd on 10 catches. The New England Patriots overshadowed the Colts in the 2007-08

season,

becoming the first 16-0 team in NFL history. The Patriots were the first “perfect” team in the regular season since

and San Diego

ended

a

nine-

year drought between NFC East championships. Six of the 12 teams that qualified for the play-offs had missed the 2006-07 tournament: NFC Central winner

Green Bay (13-3), NFC

South

winner

Tampa Bay (9-7) AFC

North

winner Pittsburgh (10-6), and wild cards Washington (9-7) in the NFC and the AFC’s Jacksonville (11-5) and Tennessee (10-6). The New York Giants (10-6) earned the NFC’s other wild-card

berth for the best division runners-up. Green Bay was the year’s sentimental favourite as 38-year-old quarterback Brett Favre, Sports IMlustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, set career records of 442 touchdowns, 160 victories as a starter, 61,655 yd, and 5,377 completions; he also extended his records of 288 interceptions and 253 consecutive

came the first undefeated team to win an NFL championship game. The Patriots also set records with 75 touchdowns and 589 points (average 36.8 per game), and only four opponents held them below 30 points. Quarterback Tom Brady, the overwhelming choice

games started. Minnesota rookie Adrian Peterson set the single-game rushing record with 296 yd and led the league overall with 5.6 yd per rushing attempt, while Chicago kick returner Devin Hester's six touchdowns on punts and kickoffs broke his own record and included a record-tying four on punts. Despite Hesters success, the Bears

for the season MVP, threw a record 50

(7-9) were

touchdown passes with just eight interceptions, setting another record with

years to miss the play-offs the season after losing the Super Bowl.

the

1972

Miami

Dolphins

(14-0)

be-

the seventh

team

in nine

Sports and Games: Football

San Diego's LaDainian Tomlinson led NFL rushers with 1,474 yd and 15 touchdowns,

while

teammate

Antonio

Cromartie led with 10 interceptions and broke Hesters record with the maximum 109-yd return of a missed field goal. Tennessee kicker Rob Bironas topped the NFL with 35 field goals, including a record 8 in one game. Quarterback Michael Vick, whose At-

lanta Falcons replica jerseys once led all NFL sales, was sentenced December

10 to 23 months in federal prison for conspiracy to operate a dog-fighting enterprise. Virginia animal-cruelty charges and the NFUs indefinite suspension were still pending at year’s end. The 13-3 San Jose SaberCats won the Arena Football League championship 55-33 over 7-9 Columbus, which ended

Dallas's record 15-1 season with a playoff upset. Hamburg won the final NFL Europa championship as the NFL closed its 16-year-old developmental league after having renamed it and having disbanded all but one non-German team in the previous two years. (KEVIN M. LAMB)

Canadian Football. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the 2007 Canadian Football League (CFL) championship with a 23-19 Grey Cup victory over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on November 25 in Toronto. Andy Fantuz, the game's Outstanding Canadian, caught the decisive fourth-quarter touchdown pass of 29 yd from quarterback Kerry Joseph, the regular season's Most Outstanding Player It was the first Grey Cup for the Roughriders (12-6) since rookie coach Kent Austin was quarterback in 1989. Riders cornerback James Johnson was named the game's Outstanding Player for three interceptions and a touchdown as Winnipeg (10-7-1) played without injured starting quarterback Kevin Glenn. Saskatchewan and Winnipeg won play-off games over division winners British Columbia (14—3-1) in the West and Toronto (11-7) in the East, respec-

tively. Toronto gave up per-game league lows of 18.7 points, 306 yd total, and 230 yd passing, while Calgary (7-10) led the CFL in passing, rushing, and total yards behind quarterback Henry Burriss league-best 34 touchdown passes, 9.1 yd per attempt, and a 102.0 efficiency rating. The B.C. Lions led the league with 542 total points during the regular season (an average of 30.1 points per game) and dominated the individual statistics and awards. The Lions' league leaders

were running back 1,510 yd rushing and slotback Geroy Simon ceiving, running back 2,440

yd combined,

Joe Smith with 19 touchdowns, with 1,293 yd reIan Smart with defensive

back

Ryan Phillips with 12 interceptions, and defensive end Cameron Wake with 16 sacks. Wake received the Rogers awards for both Outstanding Rookie and Outstanding Defensive Player; the Outstanding Lineman was Rob Murphy at offensive tackle; and Outstanding Canadian went to Jason Clermont at slotback.

(KEVIN M. LAMB)

Australian Football. After a frustrating, heartbreaking drought dating back to 1963, Geelong finally returned to the premiership dais by storming to victory in the Australian Football League (AFL)

Grand Final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sept. 29, 2007. A crowd of 97,302 spectators packed in to see the Cats overpower Port Adelaide by a record-breaking 119 points—24.19 (163) to 6.8 (44). After finishing

the

2006 season in 10th place, Geelong lost only 4 of its 25 games (including finals) in 2007. Since winning the 1963 title, Geelong had played in five Grand Finals and lost them all. The star of the Grand Final was Geelongs Steve Johnson, who was presented with the Norm Smith Medal. Five days earlier Geelong’s Jimmy Bartel had won the AFLs most prestigious individual award, the Brownlow Medal,

as the competitions best and fairest player. Geelong also produced the AFLs Rising Star award winner, Joel Selwood, and the club had a staggering nine players on the AFL All-Australian team. In addition, Geelong’s second team won the Victorian Football League premiership. One of the few awards that Geelong did not win was the Coleman Medal, which went to Brisbane Lion Jonathan Brown, who

took the most goals (77) in the 22-game home-and-away season. (GREG HOBBS)

Rugby Football. At the 2007 Rugby Union World Cup, fans were shocked and invigorated to see the biggest surprise since the game turned professional 12 years earlier. The New Zealand All Blacks went into the World Cup—which was hosted by France—as the hottest favourites in the tournament’s history. The All Blacks proceeded to stroll through the pool stage, scoring a mammoth 309 points in their four games, including a 108-13 win over Portgual. New Zealand’s expected procession to the final on October 20 was halted in abrupt fashion, however,

as it lost to France 20-18 in the quarterfinals on an incredible day of rugby. Only a few hours earlier, England— written off after its 36-0 loss to South Africa in the pool stage—had beat Australia 12-10 to send the rugby world spinning.

After England

defeated France

14-9

in a dramatic semifinal, however, it was

South Africa that lifted the trophy—for a second time—with a 15-6 win over England in the final. The South Africa Springboks were without doubt the most consistent side in the tournament. In Percy Montgomery the Springboks had the competition’s leading scorer— with 105 points—and in Jake White they had a coach who had set out a four-year plan to win the Webb Ellis Cup.

Argentina’s progression was one of the most pleasing aspects of the competition as the Pumas

upset France in

the third-place game. The International Rugby Board (IRB), which welcomed more than two million spectators to the 2007 World Cup, declared afterward that the 2011 event, to be held in New

Zealand, would again have 20 teams after a campaign to reduce the tournament to 16 was defeated. Over the previous few seasons, the IRB had spent its vast profits from past World Cups by developing the game across the world and sponsoring more tournaments. The Junior All Blacks won the Pacific Nations Cup; Upolu Samoa prevailed in the Pacific Rugby Cup; Canada West triumphed in the North America 4 competition; and the Emerging Springboks were victorious in the Nations Cup, which was staged in Romania. France, with a 4-1 record, repeated as

the Six Nations champion, besting Ireland

(also 4-1)

on

points

difference.

New Zealand won the 2007 Tri-Nations title and picked up a world double when its Sevens team triumphed in the IRB World Series. On

the

domestic

front,

the

Bulls

kicked off a fabulous season for South African rugby by winning the Super 14, with a late try from Bryan Habana. In the Northern Hemisphere, the London Wasps and Leicester contested the firstever all-English Heineken Cup final in May, with the Wasps winning 25-9. In Britain’s Rugby Football League, St. Helens finished atop the Super League table and defeated the Catalan Dragons 30-8 in the Challenge Cup final on August 24. The Melbourne Storm captured Australia’s National Rugby League premiership on Septem319

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Golf Reed Saxon/AP

ber 30 with a 34-8 win over the Manley Sea Eagles in the Grand Final in Sydney. (PAUL MORGAN)

GOLF The four major men’s golf championships in 2007 produced four different winners. For three men—American

Zach Johnson, Argentina’s Angel Cabrera, and Irishman Padraig Harrington (see BIOGRAPHIES)—it

was

a first

major success, but for Eldrick ("Tiger") Woods it was victory number 13, placing him just five short of the record set by fellow American Jack Nicklaus. In the Masters Tournament at the Augusta (Ga.) National Golf Club in April, Johnson's one-over-par 289 matched the highest winning total in the history of an event that dated back to 1934. On a course that had been stretched in 2006 to a massive 7,445 yd—the second longest ever for a major—the 31-yearold Iowan

(ranked 56th in the world)

was not expected to do well. Among the 60 players who made the halfway cut, Johnson ranked 57th in driving distance. He did not attempt to reach the green in two strokes at any of the four par-five holes, but during the week he made 11 birdies and 5 pars on them. He played the other 14 holes in 12 over. With

birdies

on

the

13th,

14th,

and

16th holes on the final day, he could even afford a bogey on 17 to finish two strokes ahead of Woods and South Africans Retief Goosen and Rory Sabbatini. It was the first time since the ranking system was introduced in 1986 that a player from outside the top 50 had captured the title. More high scoring came as no surprise at the U.S. Open, held in June at the famously

difficult

Oakmont

(Pa.)

Country Club. The winning aggregate was 285, five over par, and victory went to Cabrera, the only player able to produce two below-par rounds. Cabrera, trying to become the first South American major winner since his Argentine

compatriot Roberto de Vicenzo in 1967, charged from joint seventh place at the start of the final round into a threestroke advantage with three holes to play. Cabrera’s bogeys at the 16th and 17th holes and a par on 18 for a finalround 69 gave hope to Jim Furyk and Woods. Furyk, however, also bogeyed the 17th while tied for the lead, and Woods, one stroke behind, could not

catch up either. A month later the world’s best were gathered again for the British Open at Carnoustie,

Scot. Andres

320

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Romero

had

Golfer Lorena Ochoa of Mexico hits a drive in the Samsung World Championship in Palm Desert, Calif., the seventh of her eight victories en route to an LPGA record-setting $4.36 million season.

the chance to give Argentina a second successive major win, but after a remarkable 10 birdies he went out of bounds on the 17th hole and finished with a double bogey and a bogey. Harrington led as a result, but on the 18th he twice went into the stream known as the Barry Burn, and his doublebogey six handed the advantage back to longtime leader Sergio García of Spain. García needed a closing-hole par to win, but his failure to get up and down from a green-side bunker left him tied with Harrington at 277, seven under par. In the four-hole play-off, Harrington opened with a birdie to García’s bogey and stayed in front to become the first major winner from the Republic of Ireland. A second-round 63, which equaled the lowest ever in majors, gave Woods a lead he never relinquished in the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA)

championship, held in August at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla. Playing in temperatures that exceeded

100 °F (38 °C), with the heat

index touching 110, the world number one player was only one stroke ahead of fellow American Woody Austin with four holes to play, but a birdie on the 15th and pars on the remaining three holes took the 31-year-old Woods to an eight-underpar aggregate of 272 and a two-stroke victory. It confirmed Woods as the greatest front-runner the sport had ever seen; he had held at least a

share

of first place with a round

to

play in 13 majors and each time went on to win. The PGA Tour in the United States, in

an attempt to improve the size of television viewing audiences, introduced a late-summer four-tournament play-off series and, with the sponsorship of FedEx, offered a deferred-annuity first prize of $10 million, the highest bonus ever paid in sports. As the top money winner

at the

time,

Woods

led

the

points standings going into the four tournaments. Although he controversially chose to miss the opening event (hardly a ringing endorsement of the Tours initiative when coupled with American Phil Mickelson’s absence from the third leg), Woods then finished second (behind Mickelson), first,

and first again to be crowned FedEx Cup champion. Woods won seven titles during the season, including two of the three World Golf Championships, and finished his 2007 PGA Tour campaign with $10,867,052, more than $5 million

more than runner-up Mickelson. Woods had 81 worldwide tournament victories to his name—and, when the FedEx Cup bonus was added, total career earnings (on the course) in excess of $100 million. Woods, whose Swedish wife, Elin,

gave birth to their first child in June, also helped the United States beat the International team 19%-14% in the Presidents Cup at the Royal Montreal Golf Club. In Europe 27-year-old Justin Rose became the youngest winner of the Order

Sports and Games: Gymnastics

of Merit since Ronan Rafferty in 1989, winning the closing Volvo Masters at Valderrama Golf Club in Sotogrande, Spain, to leap ahead of South African Ernie Els and Harrington with a season-ending total of €2,944,945 (about $4.3 million). In October Els took his

record number of victories in the HSBC World Match Play Championship, at the Wentworth Club in Virginia Water, Surrey, Eng., to 7 in 14 years. Harring-

ton also won the Irish Open at Adare Manor in County Limerick, where he became the first Irish winner since John O'Leary in 1982, while Spaniard Pablo Martin created history at the Portuguese Open, becoming the first amateur to win on the European Tour

since the tour was launched in 1971. The dominant figure in the women's professional game was Mexico's Lorena Ochoa

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

who

took

over from Annika Sórenstam as world

Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) when fellow student Seung Hui Cho shot dead 32 people and wounded 25 others before killing himself. Weaver, who ran for his life on hearing the gunfire, dedicated his victory to the Virginia Tech victims. Golf was due to enter a new era in 2008 with the start of drug testing on all of the major tours. Although South African Gary Player had made unsubstantiated claims about players’ having used performance-enhancing substances, Peter Dawson,

of the Royal and Ancient Club (one of golfs two rule-making authorities), said, “The R&A

has no reason

ation

(LPGA)

Tour

and,

with

the

to be-

lieve golf is anything other than a clean sport, but we've been supportive of a coordinated, international effort to test

for drugs for quite some time now so we can demonstrate our sport is clean and we can keep it that way." (MARK GARROD)

number one, was the first woman to earn more than $3 million in a season

on the Ladies Professional Golf Associ-

chief executive

GYMNASTICS

tha

Peszek,

Alicia

Sacramone,

and

Shayla Worley—came from behind after mistakes on the balance beam in the third round of competition to capture the countrys second team title. Two days later Johnson landed a tumblingpacked floor routine (complete with a double twisting, double back salto) for her last event to seal the individual allaround title with a score of 61.875 points. Romania’s Steliana Nistor (60.625

points)

finished

in

second

place. There was a tie for third in the all-around competition between Jade Barbosa of Brazil and Italy's Vanessa Ferrari, with each scoring 60.550 points. During apparatus finals, China’s Cheng Fei won her third consecutive world championship in the vault. Ksenia Semenova, a newcomer to the gymnastics scene from Russia, won the un-

even bars title. Liukin secured her second balance beam title in three years, while Johnson took top honours in the floor exercise to earn her third gold medal of the competition. On the men’s side, the Chinese team—

Women’s British Open, captured her first major title. The tournament was also the first women’s professional event ever to be staged on the Old

At the artistic gymnastics world championships, held in Stuttgart, Ger., during Sept. 1-9, 2007, the United

Course at St. Andrews, Scot. Earlier in

women’s team title over defending champion China (183.45 points) and Romania (178.10 points). The strong U.S. team—Ivana Hong, Shawn John-

Xiao Qin, Liang Fuliang, Chen Yibing, Yang Wei, Zou Kai, and Huang Xu— dominated the team competition, winning China’s eighth team title with 281.90 points, more than four points ahead of its closest competitor, Japan. Germany took the bronze medal. In the men’s individual all-around final, Yang

son, Anastasia (Nastia) Liukin, Saman-

won

the year, 18-year-old American Morgan Pressel became the youngest winner of a women’s major with her victory in the Kraft Nabisco Championship, held at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Suzann Pettersen, joint runner-up there, became Norway's first major champion only two months later in the LPGA championship at Bulle Rock, Havre de Grace, Md. When American Cristie Kerr emerged victori-

States

(with

Needles in Southern Pines, N.C., there

were four new women’s major champions. Kerr and Pressel were then part of the American team that retained the Solheim Cup with a 16-12 victory over Europe at Halmstad (Swed.) Golf Club.

Sórenstam unexpectedly finished the season without a single win. The U.S. captured its second straight men’s amateur Walker Cup against Britain

and

Ireland,

but

as in

2003 and 2005, the winner’s margin of victory was only one point. One mem-

ber

of the Walker

Knost,

Cup

team,

added the U.S. amateur

Colt cham-

pionship to the Public Links title, a double achieved only once before, by Ryan Moore in 2004. The winner of the British amateur crown was another American,

Drew

after he was

Weaver,

on campus

two

months

at Virginia Xinhua/Landov

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

points)

won

the

his

second

consecutive

title, in

At the artistic gymnastics world championships in September, Shawn Johnson of the U.S. dazzles in the floor exercise for her third gold medal of the competition. She had already secured the individual all-around title and a share of the team gold.

ous at the U.S. Women’s Open at Pine

Great

184.40

Sports and Games: Ice Hockey Jim Mclsaac/Getty Images

spite of a fall on the high bar in the last rotation. Germanys Fabian Hambüchen won the allaround silver medal, and Hisashi Mizutori of Japan took the bronze. Gymnasts from China also earned two of the six individual mens event titles as Xiao defended his world title on the pommel horse and Chen repeated as world champion on the still rings. Diego Hypolito of Brazil gained his second floor exercise title;

Scott Niedermayer, Anaheim’s smooth-skating defenseman,

was

awarded

Mitja Petkovsek of Slovenia and South Korean Kim Dae Eun tied for the gold medal on the parallel bars; and hometown favourite Hambüchen won the high bar. At the rhythmic world championships, held September 16-23, in Pa-

the Conn Smythe Trophy as the play-offs’ most valuable player (MVP). It was the fourth time he had won the NHL championship, having captured three Stanley Cups with New Jersey, and the 33-year-old Canadian hinted afterward that he might retire. Not only was Niedermayer a significant part of the Anaheim victory, but he also helped to create one of the enduring images of the Ducks’ on-ice celebration

tras,

the

when, as team captain, he

medal standings with a total of 13 medals, followed by Ukraine (4), Italy,

was presented with the championship trophy by

Belarus, and Bulgaria (2 each), and Azerbaijan (1). In the individual com-

league commissioner Gary Bettman. Niedermayer im-

petition, Anna Bessonova of Ukraine won four medals, including the allaround gold. Vera Sessina of Russia earned five medals, including the allaround silver, while her teammate Olga Kapranova won the all-around bronze. Russia captured the gold medal in the team competition with a commanding 183.05 points, followed by Belarus (168.775 points) and Azerbaijan (163.75 points) In the group all-

mediately turned and handed the Cup to his

Leszek Blanik of Poland won the vault;

Greece,

around,

Russia

Russia

won

dominated

the

gold,

while

Italy claimed the silver and Belarus the bronze.

(LUAN PESZEK)

brother

and

teammate,

Rob, as the Ducks began the traditional victory laps. It was the first time two brothers had shared in a Stanley Cup victory since

Brothers Scott (right) and Rob (left) Niedermayer of the Anaheim Ducks share the spotlight after their team defeated the Ottawa Senators in game five of the Stanley Cup finals on June 6 to capture Anaheim’s first NHL title. Scott was named the finals MVP.

Brent and Duane Sutter won together in 1983. A teary-eyed Teemu Selanne, long a fan favorite in the NHL, placed his hands on the Cup for the first time after having played in a storied 1,041 regular-season games in the league. Se-

lanne, a star winger from Finland, also

ICE HOCKEY North America. The National Hockey League (NHL) charted new territory during the 2006-07 season as the Stanley Cup was captured for the first time by a franchise based in California. Meanwhile, a teenaged phenomenon emerged as the face of the league. The Anaheim Ducks, an expansion team that entered the league in the 1993-94 season as the Disney-inspired Mighty Ducks, won the league championship with an impressive play-off performance that culminated in a victory over the Ottawa Senators by four games to one in the best-of-seven final series. In the clinching game, at Ana-

suggested that he might retire. While some of hockey’s greats talked about leaving the game, the NHLs regular season was led by a blossoming new star. Sidney Crosby, a 19-year-old from

Cole Harbour,

N.S., became

the

young stars, particularly a marketable player such as Crosby, was hugely significant to a league still trying to make inroads into an often-unreceptive American audience (as continuing low television ratings would suggest). Another rookie made headlines in dramatic fashion: Boston Bruins forward Phil Kessel was diagnosed in December 2006 with testicular cancer, but he had

surgery and returned in January to finish the season. He was awarded the Masterton Trophy for perseverance, sportsmanship, and dedication. Off the ice, league revenues rose—allowing the cap on team player salaries

youngest player to win the league’s scoring title when he finished with 120 points in 79 games. The Pittsburgh Penguins’ centre also won the Hart Trophy as the player judged to be the most valuable to his team and the Pearson Award, granted to the league’s best performer as voted by the players. Crosby was not the only young skater to make a mark. Penguins teammate Evgeni

Nashville Predators franchise after owner Craig Leipold said that he had

Malkin, who scored in his first six NHL

lost $70 million on the team since he

acquired

lighted a sellout crowd of 17,372 by using their tenacious defense, physical dominance, and timely scoring to

games and went on to finish with 32 goals, was named the league’s Rookie of the Year. Colorado's Paul Stastny set a rookie record during the season by

cruise

recording

heim

on June

6, 2007, the Ducks

to a 6-2 victory.

Ottawa

de-

man-

aged only 13 shots on goal, the lowest total by any team in the season's 81 play-off games. 322

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

points

in

20

consecutive

games. That eclipsed the mark of 16 established 26 years earlier by his father, Peter Stastny The development of

to rise from $44 million in 2006-07 to $50.3 million for 2007-08. Questions arose, however, about the future of the

wanted

the franchise to

sell the

in 1997.

Predators,

He

which

raised the possibility that the team might be relocated. Earlier there had been doubts about the viability of the Penguins’ remaining in Pittsburgh, but a new arena deal there solidified the franchise for the immediate future.

Sports and Games: Ice Skating

Some big-name stars were also on the move as free agents once the season had come to an end. Among them, Scott Gomez left New Jersey to sign with the New York Rangers, and Ryan Smyth moved from the New York Islanders to the Colorado Avalanche. Buffalo, the leagues top team during the regular season, with 113 points, lost two of its top three scorers when Chris Drury departed to join the Rangers and Daniel Briere left for Philadelphia. There was also turmoil in the office of the National Hockey League Players' Association. Executive director Ted Saskin, his leadership already in dispute, was fired when it was alleged that he was accessing the private e-mail accounts of some union members. International. The hockey world had a decidedly red and white hue in 2007 as Canada won the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) world cham-

pionships at the senior men's, womens, and junior (under-20) levels. The Canadian mens team, with an av-

erage age of 25, was the youngest contingent the country had ever sent to the IIHF championship. There were doubts in the hockey-mad country about the squad's ability to score, but Team Canada went undefeated in its nine games during the tournament, finishing its impressive run on May 13 with

a 4-2 victory over Finland in the gold medal match. It was Canada’s third men's championship in five years. In the final game, in Moscow's Khodynka Arena, Canada jumped to a 3-0 lead on goals from Rick Nash (of the NHLs Columbus Blue Jackets), Eric Staal (Carolina Hurricanes), and Colby Arm-

strong (Pittsburgh Penguins), but the Finns fought back with third-period goals by Petri Kontiola and Antti Miettinen (Dallas Stars). With just over

a

minute remaining, Canada's lead cut to 3-2, and the championship in doubt, Nash, the tournament MVP, put an em-

phatic exclamation point on the victory with a spectacular breakaway effort for his second goal of the game. Finland's Kari Lehtonen (Atlanta Thrashers) was

named the tournament' top goaltender. Russia won the bronze medal with a 3-1

win

over

Sweden.

Two

Russian

players won awards as Andrei Markov, on loan from the NHL Montreal Canadiens, got the nod as the top defenseman and Aleksey Morozov was named the top forward. The U.S. was eliminated in the quarterfinals, losing 5-4 to Finland

when

Jere

Lehtinen

(Dallas

Stars) beat American goaltender John Grahame

(Carolina Hurricanes) in the

penalty-shot contest. The U.S. finished fifth in the tournament. At the women’s world championship, staged in Winnipeg, Man., the Canadians beat the U.S. 5-1 in the final on April 10, 2007, to capture their ninth title in the tournament's 10-year history. (The Canadian victory avenged a loss to the Americans in the gold medal match in Sweden

in 2005, the last time

the

championship was held.) For the 2007 final some

15,000 fans were

on hand

when Canada broke open a scoreless game with three goals in the second period and then cruised to the win. Team captain Hayley Wickenheiser, often acknowledged as the best woman player in the world, scored one of those goals,

her tournament-leading eighth. She finished with 14 points in the tournament, a record

for a Canadian

woman,

and

was named the MVP as well as top forward. American Molly Engstrom was designated the top defender at the championship, while Noora Raty of Finland was selected as the best goaltender. Sweden won the bronze medal with a 1-0 victory over Finland. At the

IHF

under-20

tournament,

Canada continued its dominance with a 4-2

win

over

Russia

in the

final,

played in Leksand, Swed., on January 5. The Canadians jumped to a big lead late in the first period, scoring three goals in less than three minutes, and then held on for their third consecutive junior championship. The Canadian squad was not overly deep offensively— it barely squeaked by the Americans in a 2-1 shoot-out victory in the semifinal—but the Canadians allowed only seven goals in their six games of the tournament. That outstanding defensive record was largely credited to the stellar goaltending of Carey Price, a Montreal Canadiens’ prospect, who was named the tournament MVP. The Americans secured the bronze medal with a 2-1 win over Sweden on the strength of goals from Patrick Kane

Gold medalist Brian Joubert of France skates to James Bond film music in the short program at the world figure skating championships in March. Joubert was undefeated in seven competitions in 2007.

and Erik Johnson.

giving Japan two medals in the same event for the first time. Another Japan-

(PAUL HUNTER)

ICE SKATING Figure Skating. At the 2007 International Skating Union (ISU) world figure skating championships, held in March in Tokyo, only ice dancers Albena Denkova and Maxim Staviski of Bulgaria were able to retain the crown they had won a year earlier. After the 2006 Turin (Italy) Olympics ended in February, all of the gold medalists stepped away from competition, and many newcomers were able to replace them

on the podium at the 2006 world championships a month later. In 2007 the U.S. team returned from Tokyo with just one bronze medal (won by the reigning U.S. ice dancing champions, Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto), its lowest total since 1994. Japan’s home team made history, winning a gold and two silvers. Miki Ando became Japan’s fourth women’s world champion, and Mao Asada was second,

ese, Yukari

Nakano,

was

fifth. Mean-

while, South Korean prodigy Kim Yu Na took bronze, her dazzling short program followed by a free skate that put her on the way to victory until she ran out of energy and fell on two jumps in the final two

minutes.

Kim, who

had

missed nearly a month of training with back problems, nevertheless became her country’s first world medalist. The big loser was Kimmie Meissner of the U.S., who

had earned the 2006 world

title with a brilliant free skate before 323

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Ice Skating Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

capping a thoroughly inconsistent 2007 season with a fourth-place finish. Meissner won her first national title, in

January in Spokane, Wash., with a lacklustre performance and then failed to qualify for the Grand Prix Final before her mediocre showing in Tokyo. There was no jumper more consistent than Frances Brian Joubert, who un-

seated Switzerland's Stéphane Lambiel as world champion. Lambiel settled for bronze behind silver medalist Daisuke Takahashi of Japan. Joubert shook off a history of coming undone in big competitions by winning everything, big and small, in the 2007 season. He was

placed first in all seven competitions he entered—including the French, European, and world championships and the Grand Prix title—while landing 17 of the 19 quadruple jumps he attempted in those events. Evan Lysacek put on a stunning exhibition of jumping in Spokane to end Johnny Weir's three-year reign as U.S. champion. Lysacek landed a quad and eight triples in the free skate at the national event. At the worlds, however, where he had

been bronze medalist the previous two years, he was an uninspired fifth. Chinese pairs skater Zhao Hongbo knelt on the ice to propose marriage to Shen Xue, his skating partner of 15 years, after their gold-medal performance

speed-skating championships, Sven Kramer (right) Carl Verheijen and Erben Wennemars to the gold in the men’s team-pursuit final on March 11. golds as well as the season all-around title.

at the worlds, but Shen did not

recognize his intention. Zhao later proposed in a more straightforward way, and the couple were married on May 28. Shen and Zhao also announced their retirement from competition after a career that included two previous world

At the world single-distance leads his Dutch teammates medal in world-record time Kramer won two individual

titles

(2002,

2003)

and

two

Olympic bronze medals (2002, 2006). North American television broadcast rights of future world championships were in doubt. The ESPN network's four-year contract with the ISU was due to expire after the 2008 worlds, and no network was likely to ante up anything close to the $5 million ESPN annually paid for rights. In Canada the CBC already had declined to extend its broadcast contract that ended in 2007,

and no one had announced plans to pick it up. There was some good news for North American fans: NBC agreed to a three-year deal with the U.S. Figure Skating Association after ESPN/ABC

chose

not to continue

its

43-year association with the USFS, and the CBC signed a four-year deal with Skate Canada, replacing CTV, which had a nearly 30-year association with Canadian skating. As the steady decline in TV ratings for figure skating contin324

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ued, chances for a quick turnaround were dimmed by the lack of attentiongrabbing American stars. Speed Skating. American Shani Davis, once among the most outspoken of athletes, said only a few dozen words for public consumption in 2007, but his performances continued to speak volumes about the prodigious talent of the 25-year-old Olympic champion speed skater. Left unexplained was the reason for his subpar sixth-place performance in February at the world all-around speed-skating championships, held in Heerenveen,

Neth., which he had won

the previous two years. “Talk is cheap. I just want to skate,” the Associated Press quoted Davis as saying on March 4, after he broke his own world record in the 1,500 m with a time of 1 min

42.32 sec at the Calgary (Alta.) Olympic Oval. (That was 0.36 sec faster than the

mark he had set a year earlier at the same rink.) A week later Davis rallied to win two titles, the 1,000 m and 1,500

m, at the world single-distance championships in Salt Lake City, Utah. Davis'* effort in Calgary was one of the 10 world-record performances in long-track speed skating during 2007.

Sven Kramer of The Netherlands figured in four world records: one in the 5,000 m, two in the 10,000 m, and one

as a member of a Dutch team-pursuit trio. Kramer, aged 21, also won his first

all-around title after having finished third in 2005 and 2006. His compatriot Ireen Wüst matched Kramer’ achievement, taking her first women’s allaround championship. Wüst

was

runnerup

to

Germany's

Anni Friesinger at the world sprint championships, held in January in Hamar, Nor. South Korea's Lee Kyou Hyuk won the mens title, with Davis third—making him just the third American man (and the first since Eric Flaim in 1988) to have won overall

medals in both the sprint and the allaround championships. At the short-track world championships in Milan, South Korean Ahn Hyun Soo, triple gold medalist at the 2006 Olympics, won a fifth straight overall world title, cementing his place, at just 22 years old, as the most accomplished short-track speed skater in history. Jin Sun Yu of South Korea won her third consecutive women’s world championship. (PHILIP HERSH)

Sports and Games: Skiing

SAILING (YACHTING) In summer 2007 the Americas Cup completed its three-year course of almost

continuous

competition,

with

a

spectacular final series between defending Alinghi of Switzerland and challenger Emirates Team New Zealand. The ACC boats—Alinghi and New Zealand, respectively—were equal in speed, and the crews were professional in their performance, after three years of full-time preoccupation with the quest for the Cup. After four races the two teams were tied at two races each before Alinghi went ahead four races to two. The seventh and final race saw the lead change numerous times, the last time at the finish line, and A/-

inghi won by a scant one-second margin as New Zealand completed a penalty just before finishing. It was an exciting encounter, displayed beautifully in 3-D animation online and by worldwide television, using racetrack software to provide an overhead view of the competition. Almost immediately, the Swiss team announced new conditions for the next challenge in 2009, some of which appeared to favour the defender The potential challengers objected, and the American team Oracle filed an inde-

Switzerland Alinghi (left) surges ahead in the decisive seventh race of the 32nd America’s Cup, off Valencia, Spain. Alinghi defeated challenger New Zealand by a mere one-second margin to secure its second consecutive America’s Cup.

pendent challenge to take place in 2008. The New York Trust Court would decide the case, determining what could be done under the terms of the Deed of Gift of the Cup. The Sydney-Hobart Race in Decem-

SKIING Alpine Skiing. The 2006-07 Alpine skiing World Cup season saw some realignment among the top skiers. “Croatian

Sensation”

Janica

Kostelic,

who

had battled injuries throughout her ca-

ber 2006 was a hard bash to windward,

reer, took the winter off and then an-

conditions that posed an engineering challenge for the new canting keel speedsters. Wild Oats XI proved its met-

nounced her retirement in the spring. In Kostelic’s absence, Nicole Hosp of

tle, however, and repeated its 2005 first-

to-finish performance. The IRC (the British empirical one-number system) corrected-time winner was Love and War, a 1973 14-m (47-ft) S&S wooden boat that thrived in the conditions,

earning its third victory in this classic race. Wild Oats XI also won the 2007 race. In Europe there was no Admiral's Cup in 2007, but the Fastnet Race drew 300 entries (and more were turned away).

First to finish was ICAP Leopard, a 30m (100-ft) canting keel “supermaxi” that set a new course record of 1 day 20 hr 18 min for the 608-nm (nautical miles;

1 nm = 1.85 km) course (average speed 13.52 knots). The corrected-time winner

was Chieftain, an Irish Cookson 50. The Transpacific Race from California to Hawaii saw unusually light air, which was a disappointment to owners who had “turboed” their boats for strong winds astern. Even the big boats took a week to make the run. First to finish was Pyewacket (7 days 1 hr 11 min 56

Austria took the overall title with 1,572

points in 35 events, followed by fellow Austrian Marlies Schild (90 points back).

American

Julia

Mancuso,

the

2006 Olympic giant slalom (GS) champion, finished third overall as she won the first four World Cup races of her career and produced the best American women’s season since 1983. At the International Ski Federation (FIS) Alpine

world championships in Are, Swed., in February, local heroine Anja Parson (see BIOGRAPHIES) swept the first three women’s races—the supergiant slalom (super G), the downhill, and the super combined (one run of downhill, one of

slalom on the same day). Hosp was gold medalist in the GS, and Sarka Zahrobska of the Czech Republic captured the slalom. In men’s competition Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal erupted at the world championships to claim gold medals in the downhill and the GS, while Austrian

going the other way—from

Mario Matt repeated his 2001 gold medal in slalom. The other men’s champions were relative newcomers: Patrick Staudacher of Italy in the super G and Daniel Albrecht of Switzerland in the super combined. Svindals double triumph gave him the springboard to surge past defending World Cup king Benjamin Raich of Austria for the overall title with 1,268 points after 36 events. Controversial American Bode Miller fared poorly in Are. He lost the downhill lead when he skied into a fluke fog bank midway through the run and had to settle for seventh place; three days earlier he had led the downhill portion of the super combined but skied erratically in the slalom (run under lights at night) and dropped to sixth. Miller did win four World Cup races, which moved him to a career total of 25, only 2 fewer than the American record held by three-time World Cup overall champion Phil Mahre. Nordic Skiing. Germany's Tobias Angerer made it two men's World Cup cross-country overall titles in a row,

Saint Malo, France, to Guadaloupe—of

whereas Norwegian Marit Bjgrgen saw

7 days 17 hr 19 min 6 sec (at an average speed of 19.11 knots for the 3,542 nm), cutting 4 days off the previous time. (JOHN B. BONDS)

her two-year streak ended as Virpi Kuitunen of Finland overwhelmed the women’s field in 2006-07. Angerer and Kuitunen also won the inaugural FIS

sec), and Reinrag2 (J/125) was the cor-

rected-time winner under the ORR handicapping system (IMS derivative). The offshore handicap transition continued, with IRC gaining adherents in the grand prix fleets around the world while IMS and its measurement-based derivatives maintained a following, particularly among dual-purpose cruiser racers. Offshore one-designs remained popular, with the Farr 40 at the top of the pyramid. Box rule boats became increasingly favoured, led by the Transpac 52s, boasting a fleet of more than

20

in the

Mediterranean,

with

tight competition. Several new records were set in 2007. Groupama 3, a 32-m (105-ft) trimaran,

sailed across the Atlantic in 4 days 3 hr 57 min 54 sec, averaging 28.65 knots

for the 2,925 nm and setting a new 24hour distance of 794 nm in the process. The 18-m (60-ft) trimaran Gitana XI set

a record

Jose Jordan—AFP/Getty Images

325

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Squash

Tour de Ski. Tour races of the World Cup, but top athletes competed World Cup points were conclusion to the top world championships

were not part to ensure that in each race, awarded at the skiers. At the in Sapporo,

Japan,

had been side-

Kuitunen,

who

championship in Chennai (Madras), India, in December.

lined for two years after being involved in a doping scandal at the 2001 world championships, stormed her way to four medals, including three golds. In Nordic

combined,

Finn

Hannu

Manninen extended his World Cup reign to four consecutive seasons and ended his personal drought at the world championships. In Sapporo he captured the Nordic combined sprint for his first individual world or Olympic gold medal and then led Finland to a 28-second victory in the team event. Poland s Adam Malysz,

a three-time

(2001-03)

World

Cup ski jump titlist, made an epic comeback in 2007, turning up the heat in the final month to win six meets en route to his fourth World Cup jumping crown. He also won his fourth world championship gold medal, capturing the normal hill title in Sapporo. Freestyle Skiing. Poor snow conditions in Europe throughout the winter whittled the freestyle skiing World Cup schedule, especially for halfpipe, and forced a six-week delay in the world championships in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, which were finally held in March without ski halfpipe events. Despite the problems, it was another season of brilliant skiing for Canadian Jenn Heil and Dale Begg-Smith, the Canadian who skied for Australia. The 2006 Olympic moguls champions successfully defended their World Cup moguls titles and led the dual moguls points. At the world championships each won the dual moguls gold medal. In

skicross

(SX),

Norways

Audun

Grønvold and Ophélie David of France were World Cup champions; the SX gold medals in Madonna di Campiglio went to David and defending champion Tomas Kraus of the Czech Republic. In aerials, former World Cup champion Steve Omischl of Canada won his second crown, and Australian Jacqui Cooper collected her fourth. Han Xiaopeng, the 2006 Olympic champion, and Li Nina, both of China, were the aerial

world champions. Snowboarding. American Lindsey Jacobellis, who lost the Olympic gold medal in 2006 with an ill-conceived celebratory move just before crossing the snowboardcross

(SBX)

finish

line,

bounced back strongly in 2007. She successfully defended her SBX world 326

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nordic skier Virpi Kuitunen of Finland speeds through the snow in the Tour de Ski 3-km classic race on December 28. Kuitunen won the overall women's

title in the inaugural FIS Tour de Ski. Agence Zoom/Getty Images

championship and grabbed the World Cup title. Mathieu Crepel of France was a double champ at the world championships in Arosa, Switz., taking the big air gold medal and returning the next day as rain melted the 'pipe (creating soft snow

conditions)

to become

(PAUL ROBBINS)

left the field

clear for Australia and defending champion England to reach the final, with England retaining the title when Peter Barker beat Cameron Pilley in the deciding match. It was expected that Nicol David of Malaysia would retain her dominant position at the top of the women's game, but while the 24-year-old David kept the top spot in the Women's International Squash Players Association world rankings, she stumbled in two major championships. In the British Open final she squandered a fourthgame match ball before losing to former number one Rachael Grinham of Australia. When David lost in the second round of the World Open in Madrid, Grinham took advantage of the opportunity to win her first World Open title, defeating her younger sister Natalie in the final. In the world junior women's championships, played in Hong Kong, Egypt bested Malaysia in the team final after Egyptian Raneem El Weleily had beaten Camille Serme of France to retain her individual title.

the

surprise halfpipe world champion. Swiss rider Simon Schoch was World Cup parallel champion and parallel slalom gold medalist in Arosa. Women's halfpipe specialist Manuela Laura Pesko of Switzerland also won both the world and World Cup titles.

This

(ANDREW SHELLEY)

SWIMMING With swimmers from around the world focusing on the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the level of competition heated up in 2007. The highlight of the year was the 12th Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) world

SQUASH In 2007 Egyptian Amr Shabana not only retained his Professional Squash Association

(PSA) world

number

one

status for the full year (despite having his younger countryman Ramy Ashour breathing down his neck) but also won his third PSA World Open title, defeating Frenchman Gregory Gaultier 11-7, 11-4, 11-6 in the final, held on Decem-

ber 1 in Bermuda. By year’s end the lefthanded Shabana had completed 21 unbroken months as world number one. Number

two-ranked

Ashour,

age

20,

threatened to topple Shabana, but an ankle injury sidelined him for the last three months of the year. Meanwhile, Gaultier had the consolation of consolidating his number three ranking and of becoming the first French winner of the British Open, beating Thierry Lincou in an all-French final in September. Both Shabana and Gaultier were feeling the effects of an intense PSA Tour and faltered at the world men’s team

championships, held in Melbourne on March 17-April 1. Fourteen world records (11 individual and 3 relay marks) were broken in the temporary 50-m pool at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena. Although seven swimmers set individual

records,

American

Michael

Phelps turned in one of the most spectacular performances in the history of the sport. The 21-year-old former wunderkind shattered four individual world marks and led off a record-setting relay en route to winning seven gold medals. He was favoured to win an eighth in the 4 x 100-m medley relay, but the U.S. squad was disqualified in the preliminaries when another swimmer false-started. Phelps led off the third day of competition with a superb time of 1 min 43.86 sec in the 200-m freestyle, lowering the six-year-old record (1 min 44.06 sec) set

by Australian icon Ian Thorpe. Swimming the first 150 m in a virtual tie with 2000 Olympic champion Pieter van den Hoogenband of The Netherlands,

Sports and Games: Swimming Itsuo Inouye/AP

Phelps exploded off the final turn and, using his distinctive underwater dolphin kick, defeated his Dutch rival by more than two and a half seconds. Phelps followed with world-record swims of 1 min 52.09 sec in the 200-m butterfly, 1 min 54.98 sec in the 200-m individual medley, and 4 min 06.22 sec in the 400-m individual medley. He also outtouched another American, world record holder Ian Crocker, to win the

100-m butterfly and led off his team’s record-breaking 4 x 200-m freestyle relay (7 min 03.24 sec) and gold-medalwinning 4 x 100-m freestyle relay. In December Phelps was unanimously selected the male World Swimmer of the Year by Swimming World magazine. Aaron Peirsol took his own global standard in the 100-m backstroke down to 52.98 sec before fellow American Ryan Lochte upset him in the 200-m backstroke

(an event

Peirsol had not

lost in more than six years) and claimed a new world record along with the gold medal in 1 min 54.32 sec. Park Tae Hwan,

17, became

South Korea’s first

swimming world champion when he outstroked Oussama Mellouli of Tunisia and Australian defending titlist Grant Hackett to win the 400-m freestyle in 3 min 44.30 sec. Mateusz

Sawrymowicz

of Poland swam a swift 14 min 45.94 sec to take the 1,500-m freestyle. Among the women, Australian “golden girl’ Lisbeth (Libby) Lenton (see BIOGRAPHIES) earned five gold medals—three in individual events and two in relays. Lenton blazed to victory in the

50-m

(24.53

(53.40

sec) freestyle

100-m

butterfly

sec)

and

sprints

(57.15

sec).

100-m

and

the

She

fol-

lowed by leading off Australia's victorious 4 x 100-m freestyle relay and anchoring her country's 4 x 100-m medley relay to a world-record time of 3 min 55.74 sec. It was Lenton's ^world record that wasn't, however,

that caused the

greatest stir Just two days after the world championships, at the U.S. versus Australia Duel in the Pool, Lenton

led off the 4 x 100-m Australian mixed freestyle relay squad in a dazzling 52.99 sec. Unfortunately, FINA ruled that since the swim took place in an unofficial event—a mixed (men and women)

relay in which Lenton swam against Phelps—the record could not be ratified. Frances mercurial Laure Manaudou took gold in Melbourne in the 200-m and 400-m freestyle events, outdueling Germanys Annika Lurz on the final lap of the shorter race to touch in a worldrecord 1 min 55.52 sec, 16-hundredths of a second ahead of Lurz, who was

also under the 1-min 56.47-sec record set by Federica Pellegrini of Italy in the semifinals the day before. At year’s end Manaudou was named female World Swimmer of the Year. Natalie Coughlin of the U.S. finally lowered her own 100-m_ backstroke world record of 59.58 sec (set in 2002) when she touched in 59.44 sec, half a

stroke ahead of Manaudou. Coughlin also led off the American team’s recordsetting 4 x 200-m freestyle relay (7 min 50.09 sec). Katie

Hoff,

17, swam

one

leg of the same relay, won the 400-m individual medley with a world-record 4 min 32.89 sec on the breaststroke leg, and picked up another gold in the 200m individual medley (2 min 10.13 sec).

Other

standouts

included

Leila Vaziri, who swam

American

a world-record

28.16 sec in both the semifinal and the final of the 50-m backstroke; Australian Leisel Jones, who won the 100-m and

200-m breaststroke races in times only she had ever bettered; and 18-year-old American Kate Ziegler, who nipped Manaudou in the 800-m freestyle (8 min 18.52 sec) and came within a sec-

ond of American Janet Evans's 19-yearold 1,500-m record. At the TYR Meet of Champions in June in Mission Viejo, Calif., however, Ziegler shattered

Evans’s 1,500-m record by 10 sec with a time of 15 min 42.54 sec. Just days earlier, in a meet

in Barcelona,

Swe-

den’s Therese Alshammar had swum a 50-m butterfly record of 25.46 sec. At the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro in July, Brazilian Thiago Pereira won six gold medals, breaking the Pan Am mark of five set 40 years earlier by Mark Spitz of the U.S. In preparation for the first Olympic open-water

event

(10

km)

on

the

schedule in Beijing, Russia’s Larisa Ilchenko and Vladimir Dyatchin won at the Olympic distance in Melbourne. The year's outstanding open-water performance, however, was by Bulgarian Petar Stoychev on August 24, when he slashed more than six minutes off the record for swimming across the English Channel. Stoychev's time of 6 hr 57 min 50 sec was history first Channel crossing under seven hours. Diving. China dominated every major international diving meet in which it competed in 2007, especially the FINA world championships. The Chinese team, which combined veteran women

competitors

and

mostly

less-experi-

Guo Jingjing and Wu Minxia of China dive for the gold medal in the 3-m synchronized springboard final at the world swimming championships. Guo had defeated Wu in the solo 3-m event. China's Guo Jingjing, 26, reinforced her claim as the greatest female diver in history by winning two gold medals, raising her career total to a record nine medals (eight gold and one silver) in five world championships dating back to 1998.

topped

Undefeated

her teammate

since

2001,

Guo

and perennial

runner-up, Wu Minxia, to take the 3-m

springboard. Then the pair teamed up to win the 3-m synchronized event. He Zi, 17, used her high degree of difficulty to edge past defending champion Blythe Hartley of Canada and claim the gold in the 1-m springboard, while Wang Xin cruised to victory in the 10m platform. Teenagers Jia Tong and Chen Ruolin won the 10-m synchronized competition. The Chinese men were nearly as dominant. Qin Kai, the only male diver to take two gold medals, won the 3-m springboard over defending champion Alexandre Despatie of Canada and joined forces with veteran Wang Feng in the 3-m synchronized contest. Luo Yutong and He Chong took the top two spots in the 1-m springboard, while Huo Liang and Lin Yue defeated the Russian duo of Gleb Galperin and Dmitry Dobrosok in the 10-m synchronized event. Only Galperin's win in the 10-m platform, ahead of China's Zhou Luxin, prevented a Chinese gold-medal

enced men, won 9 of the 10 events con-

sweep.

tested in Melbourne and earned 14 of the 16 medals for which it was allowed

Synchronized Swimming. Russia continued its decadelong domination of synchronized swimming—winning six of

to compete.

327

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Tennis Xinhua/Landov

the seven contested events in Melbourne, including the team free and the team technical routines. The two Anastasiyas—Davydova and Yermakova— unbeaten since 2002, won three gold medals each, capturing the duet free, the free routine combination,

With Henin skipping the event while going through a painful divorce, Serena Williams reemerged. Williams had finished 2006 at number 95 in the world and looked overweight in Melbourne, but she survived some tumultuous contests, toppling six seeds in seven matches. Facing Nadya Petrova of Rus-

and the

duet technical. Natalya Ishchenko took the solo technical contest to account for the fourth Russian gold. Only France’s Virginie Dedieu, who came out of a premature retirement, could halt the Russian juggernaut; she turned in the single-most-spectacular performance of the meet, winning the free solo ahead of Ishchenko. It was Dedieu's third consecutive win in an event in which no other swimmer had ever repeated as champion. As in 2005, Spain and Japan tied for second place, with two silver and two bronze medals each. (PHILLIP WHITTEN)

TENNIS Off-court controversies sometimes overshadowed what happened on the tennis court in 2007. Russia’s Nikolay Davydenko, who finished the year

sia in the round of 16, Williams rallied

gamely from a deficit of 3-5 in the second set to prevail 1-6, 7-5, 6-3. In the

quarterfinals, Israel’s Shahar Peer (the number 16 seed) served for the match, but the American struck back for a 3-6,

6-2, 8-6 triumph. In the final, topseeded Mariya Sharapova of Russia, troubled by an ailing shoulder, was highly vulnerable, and Williams won 6-1, 6-2.

Justine Henin of Belgium competes in the final of the U.S. Open in September. Her straight-set victory over Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova secured Henin’s second Grand Slam title of the year.

much

Nadal

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

issued

Fed-

erer's only Grand Slam loss of the year, in the French Open. While Federer was nearly unbeatable at the biggest events, however, he captured only 8 of the 16 lesser tournaments in which he competed. His nine losses (including the French Open) during the season constituted the most setbacks he had suffered since

2003,

when

he was

beaten

17

times. As in 2003 and 2006, Belgian Justine Henin was the leading player in women’s tennis, taking the 2007 French Open and U.S. Open. The Williams sis328

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

for the

gifted

and he thoroughly

ranked number four in the world, was

under investigation by the ATP for allegedly having deliberately lost a match in Poland in August. Subsequently, a number of lower-ranked players came forward to report that they had been approached about possible bribes, unanimously saying that they had turned down the offers. Switzerland's Martina Hingis, the winner of five Grand Slam singles titles, announced her final retirement in November after having tested positive for cocaine at Wimbledon. Finishing as the player ranked number one for the fourth year in a row, Roger Federer of Switzerland added three more major singles titles to his collection in 2007, lifting his career total of Grand Slam championships to 12, just short of American Pete Sampras's men's record of 14. His Spanish rival Rafael

French Open. Nadal lifted his phenomenal clay-court winning streak to 81 consecutive matches in the weeks leading up to the French Open, but Federer, breaking out of a springtime slump, defeated the left-handed Spaniard on a clay court for the first time with a surprise final-round triumph in Hamburg, Ger. Nadal’s clay-court acumen was too

ters of the U.S. pulled off surprise triumphs at the majors, with Serena the victor at the Australian Open and Venus coming through at Wimbledon. Federer and Henin earned the most prize money, with the Swiss star setting a single-season record of $10,130,620. Henin secured $5,429,586 while capturing 10

of the 14 events in which she played. Remarkably, three Serbian players inched close to the top of the world charts. Novak Djokovic concluded the year ranked number three among the men, while Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic claimed number three and four, respectively, in the women’s rankings. Australian Open. Federer played the most flawless Grand Slam championship of his career, sweeping through the field on the hard courts in Melbourne without the loss of a set in seven matches. In capturing the tournament for the third time, Federer dis-

mantled

Chile’s flamboyant

Fernando

González 7-6 (2), 6—4, 6—4 in the cham-

pionship match. González made a spirited run to reach his first major final. Exploiting his blockbuster forehand, González defeated James Blake of the U.S. in the round

of 16, Nadal in the

quarterfinals, and Tommy Haas of Germany in the semifinals. In the first set of the final, González was serving at 5-4, 40-15, double set point but failed

to capitalize on his opportunity.

Swiss,

however,

deserved

his 6-3,

4-6, 6-3, 64 victory at Roland Garros.

For the third year in a row, Nadal was triumphant over Federer at the only major contested on clay. Henin also collected a third straight singles championship, refusing to concede even a single set in seven matches. The top-seeded Belgian took apart Serena Williams 6-4, 6-3 in the quarterfinals, removed Jankovic 6—2, 6—2 in the

semifinals,

and stopped Ivanovic 6-1,

6—2 in the final. Ivanovic, understand-

ably apprehensive in her first major final, had eclipsed a resurgent Sharapova (the number two seed) 6-2, 6-1 in

the semifinals. Wimbledon. Having already clashed in back-to-back

Roland

Garros

finals,

Federer and Nadal replicated that feat on the lawns of Wimbledon. It was the first time since American John McEnroe and Sweden’s Bjorn Borg did battle in 1980 and 1981 at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open that the same two men had met in consecutive major finals two years in a row. Nadal—who needed five days to complete a third-round five-set win over Sweden’s Robin Séderling because rain constantly intervened—moved agonizingly close to becoming the first man since Borg in 1980 to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same season. Nadal lost his opening-service game of the final match but did not drop his delivery

Sports and Games: Track and Field Sports (Athletics)

again until the fifth set. In the end, however, Federer, in his first five-set final at a major, prevailed 7-6 (7), 4-6, 7-6 (3), 2-6, 6-2 and established him-

self

as

the

first

man

since

Borg

(1976-80) to rule at Wimbledon years in a row. Henin,

victorious

at

least

once

five in

every other major, seemed ready to make her breakthrough at Wimbledon but played an inexplicably mediocre match in the semifinals, losing to number 18 seed Marion Bartoli of France 1-6, 7-5, 6-1 in a swirling wind. Bar-

toli, exploiting her two-handed strokes off both sides, also eliminated Jankovic

The U.S. won a record 32nd Davis Cup, defeating 2006 champion Russia 4-1 in the final. After Andy Roddick and Blake earned singles victories on opening day over Dmitry Tursunov and Mikhail Youzhny, respectively, the brothers Mike and Bob Bryan clinched the win for the U.S. with a straight-set doubles triumph over Davydenko and Igor Andreyev. In the Fed Cup final in Moscow, Russia beat Italy 4-0 as Kuznetsova and Anna Chakvetadze led the way for their country. It was the third time in four years that the Russian women had been victorious. (STEVE FLINK)

in a three-set quarterfinal. In the final, however, Venus Williams, at number 23

the lowest seed ever to capture the championship, overwhelmed Bartoli 6-4, 6-1. Williams came away with her fourth Wimbledon singles title and sixth Grand Slam tournament win. U.S. Open. Over the fortnight, Djokovic became the chief focus of public attention and gained a legion of new fans as he reached his first major final. Facing Federer in the final, the affable Serbian, who had upset the world number one only a few weeks earlier in Montreal, stumbled. Djokovic served at 6-5, 40-0 in the crucial opening set and failed to convert any of the five set points he had at his disposal. In the second set, with Federer serving at 6-5, Djokovic had two more set points, but once more he was stymied. Federer was typically composed and confident, methodically recording a 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2), 64 win for his fourth consecutive U.S. Open crown, a modern-

era record. Henin was back in form on the hard courts in New York, sweeping through the field without losing a set and winning a pair of exhilarating battles over Serena and Venus Williams. The topseeded Belgian stopped Serena in their third straight meeting at a major, coming through 7-6 (3), 6-1. In the semifinals, Henin beat Venus 7-6 (2), 6-4 be-

fore

easily moving

6-1, 6-3 to secure

past Kuznetsova her seventh Grand

Slam tournament win. Other Events. Federer and Henin underlined their supremacy at the elite season-ending events, designated for the top eight players. In Shanghai at the Tennis Masters Cup, Federer recovered from a round-robin defeat by Gonzalez and did not lose another set, finishing with a rout of Spain’s David Ferrer. At the Sony Ericsson championships in Madrid, Henin topped Sharapova 5-7, 7-5, 6-3 in a stirring final.

TRACK AND FIELD SPORTS (ATHLETICS) World Outdoor Championships. At the 2007 International Association of Athletics

Federations

(IAAF)

world

out-

door championships, held August 25-September 2 in Osaka, Japan, the United States led the medal count. The U.S. equaled its record for overall world championship medals (26), set in 1991 in Tokyo, and its record for golds (14) from the 2005 championships in Helsinki. Shot putter Reese Hoffa, the 2006 world indoor champion, took the U.S.’s first gold medal in the meet’s second final with three throws farther than defending champion teammate Adam Kazuhiro Nohi—AFP/Getty Images

Ethiopia’s Meseret Defar sprints across the finish line in the 5,000-m final at the IAAF world championships. In 2007 Defar was undefeated and set world records at three distances.

Nelson

could

muster.

Hoffa’s best of

22.04 m (72 ft 334 in) made him the sec-

ond longest thrower ever at a world championships. American

sprinters

Tyson

Gay

and

Allyson Felix won three gold medals each. For Gay, who placed fourth in the 200 m at the 2005 championships, a battle with world record holder Asafa Powell of Jamaica was expected in the 100 m. Although Powell had been slowed by injury earlier in the season, he displayed dominating acceleration in his quarterfinal and semifinal. Powell eased up at the end of both races, so much so in the semifinal that his second cousin, Der-

rick Atkins of The Bahamas, passed him to win. Gay’s 10.00-sec clocking in the other semifinal was the fastest of the preliminaries, but Powell was still expected to claim the gold. Powell led early in the final, but Gay passed him at about 75 m and pulled away to win in 9.85 sec; Atkins also passed Powell to take silver. Gay produced an even bigger effort in the 200 m, in which he reached 100 m in 10.15 sec (0.02 sec ahead of

early leader Usain Bolt of Jamaica) and surged in the homestretch to a meetrecord 19.76-sec win. Gay finished the meet as the third leg in the 4 x 100-m relay, which the U.S. team won with a time of 37.78 sec. (Only American Maurice Greene in 1999 had previously won this triple at the world championships.) Boosted by Powell’s astonishing 8.84sec anchor leg, Jamaica’s relay team (37.89 sec) edged Great Britain by 0.01 sec for the silver. Felix defended her 200-m title in a personal-record 21.81 sec, the fastest at a world championship since 1999. She then shared the gold in the 4 x 100-m and 4 x 400-m relays, running the second leg for the U.S. in each. The winning time of 3 min 18.55 sec on the long relay, with Felix contributing a lap of 48.0 sec, was the fastest at a world

championship meet since 1993. Only Marita Koch of East Germany, in 1983, had previously matched Felix’s triplegold performance in these events. American Jeremy Wariner defended his 400-m title in 43.45 sec, while his

U.S. teammate Bernard Lagat became the first athlete to win both the 1,500

m and 5,000 m at a world championship, taking each with a burst of unmatched speed in the final 100 m. Lagat had competed for Kenya at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games, in which he earned bronze and silver, respectively, in the 1,500 m. Lagat’s time of 13 min 45.87 sec was the slowest-ever 5,000 m

at a world championship,

as were the 329

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Volleyball

winning times in most other distance races. With the heat and humidity testing endurance athletes, the women's 3,000-m steeplechase was exceptional. Yekaterina Volkova of Russia won in 9 min 6.57 sec, a meet record and the sec-

ond fastest clocking ever. Swedish heptathlete Carolina

Klüft

(see BIOGRAPHIES) took the gold medal with a score of 7,032 points, the second

highest in history, trailing only world record holder Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the U.S. Hammer winner Ivan Tikhon's mark of 83.63 m (274 ft 4 in) earned

the Belarusian an event-record third consecutive title. Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva defended her title with a jump of 4.80 m (15 ft 9 in). International Competition. Although beaten in Osaka, Powell rebounded

at

his next competition (in Rieti, Italy, on September 9) to break the 100-m world record (in a qualifying heat) with a time of 9.74 sec. Powell had shared the old record, 9.77 sec, with Justin Gatlin

of the U.S. since May 2006. Although Gatlin subsequently received an eightyear ban for doping in 2006, as of the end of the 2007 season, the IAAF had

not yet nullified his mark. In Rieti Powell sprinted the final in 9.78 sec with a wind-reading of 1.7 m per sec, the fastest 100 m ever when adjustments for wind and altitude were taken into account. Through August, Gay dominated the sprints, winning 10 consecutive finals at 100 m and 200 m and taking the U.S. 200-m title in 19.62 sec, the second fastest time in history. Gay's unbeaten streak ended with his first race after the world championships, when his training partner Wallace Spearmon won the 100 m at a meet in Shanghai. At the same meet, Ethiopian distance star Kenenisa Bekele, unbeaten in 2007 in 10 track races of 2,000 m and above, ventured down to the 1,500 m and lost to Kenyan Daniel K. Komen. During

the season long-jump champion Irving Saladino of Panama was unbeaten in nine meets, giving him

17 consecutive

wins dating back to July 2006. In women’s competition Ethiopian Meseret Defar broke three distance world records in 2007—the indoor 3,000 m (8 min 23.72 sec) and the outdoor 5,000 m (14 min 16.63 sec) and two miles (8 min 58.58 sec)—and never

lost in her 10 races during the season. Isinbayeva, who won 18 straight major finals, set only one indoor record (4.93 m [16 ft 2 in]), but she claimed seven

of the nine seasonal vaults above 4.83 m (15 ft 10 in). Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasic won 18 of 19 outdoor fi330

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

nals and jumped 2 m (6 ft 6% in) or higher 20 times. The fortunes of American 400-m runner Sanya Richards, the 2006 IAAF Womens

Athlete

of the Year,

rode

a

rollercoaster in 2007. Richards’s spring training was set back bya viral illness. She rebounded to win her first two races in June, but when she tried a double at

the U.S. outdoor championships, she placed fourth in the 400 m and failed to qualify for the world championships. She bounced back the next day to place second in the 200 m behind Felix and qualify for Osaka in that event. At the Stockholm Grand Prix meet in early August, Richards again tried a double. She ran a then personal best 11.05 sec in the 100 m but lost to American Me'Lisa Barber Richards returned later in the evening for the 400 m but lost again to Felix. After finishing fifth in the 200 m at the world championships, Richards reeled off five straight 400-m wins. At season's end Richards and Isinbayeva, the only undefeated athletes in the five meets of the Golden League series, split the $1 million jackpot. Repercussions continued from the BALCO doping scandal, which broke in 2003. In October sprinter and long jumper Marion Jones pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to having lied to federal agents and admitted, after three years of denial, that in 1999 and 2000 she had used the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). Jones claimed that her coach, Trevor Graham, had initially mis-

led her that the drug, undetectable by doping tests prior to 2003, was flaxseed oil. After her admission Jones returned the five medals she won at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and announced her retirement. At year's end she faced an almost certain retroactive suspension by

sports authorities and a possible prison sentence. Graham was scheduled for trial on charges of having lied to federal agents. Meanwhile, Gatlin hoped to win early reinstatement from his doping suspension in return for his cooperation in the investigation of Graham. Cross Country and Marathon Running. On September 30 in Berlin, Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie broke the marathon world record with a time of 2 hr 4 min 26 sec. Taking part in his seventh serious marathon,

Gebrselassie earned his

24th world record by slashing onds from the standard set by Paul Tergat on the same course Twice, in February and March, Samuel Wanjiru improved on lassie’s former half-marathon

29 secKenyan in 2003. Kenya's Gebrserecord.

Wanjiru was timed at 58 min 33 sec in

the second race. On December 2, just 22 days after his 21st birthday, Wanjiru won his debut marathon, run in Fukuoka, Japan, with a course-record 2

hr 6 min 39 sec. Lornah Kiplagat of The Netherlands broke the women’s half-marathon world record at the world road running championships in Udine, Italy, in October. The 33-year-old Kenyan-born Kiplagat ran the distance in 1 hr 6 min

25 sec,

a

19-sec

im-

provement on the previous record. With a repeat victory at the Boston Marathon, Robert K. Cheruiyot of Kenya won the men’s title in the first two-year cycle (2006-07) of the World Marathon

Majors

(WMM),

in which

athletes earned points in the Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York

City marathons plus the world championships and Olympics. Cheruiyot split the $1 million prize with Gete Wami of Ethiopia, who placed second in London, won Berlin, and placed second in

New York to take the women’s WMM title. Wami and Kenyan Martin Lel, with wins in London and New York, led

in the 2007-08 series. At the world cross country championships, held in brutally humid heat in Mombasa, Kenya, Kiplagat won the senior women’s crown. Zersenay Tadesse of Eritrea prevailed in the men’s race. Bekele, undefeated in world

cross country the previous five years, suffered heat exhaustion and did not finish. (SIEG LINDSTROM)

VOLLEYBALL The United States swept the titles at the 2007 Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) world beach volleyball championship, held in July in Gstaad, Switz. In the women’s competition,

Misty

May-Treanor

and

Kerri

Walsh collected their third successive world title when they defeated Tian Jia and Wang Jie of China 21-16, 21-10. Americans Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser were crowned men’s world champions following a 21-16, 21-14 triumph over Russia's Dmitry Barsouk and Igor Kolodinsky. Brazil captured its fifth consecutive FIVB World League men’s volleyball title in 2007 by defeating Russia 18-25, 25-23, 28-26, 25-22. In the bronze medal match, the U.S. downed Poland 25-19, 25-21, 22-25, 25-19. This

marked the best American World League finish since 1992. Ricardo Garcia of Brazil was chosen the tournaments

The

Most

Valuable

finals were

played

Player

(MVP).

in Katowice,

Sports and Games: Wrestling

Pol,

where

Brazil

had

also won

the

2001 World League crown. The Netherlands captured its initial FIVB Grand Prix title after beating Russia

21-25,

25-18,

25-13,

20-25,

15-8. The Dutch women went undefeated in the five final-round matches. China and Italy placed second and third, respectively, while three-time defending champion Brazil finished fifth. Manon Flier of The Netherlands earned MVP honours for her performance. Italy, the women’s European champion, scored an 11-game sweep at the women’s World Cup (held in Japan in November) to win its first World Cup title. Brazil and the U.S. finished the tournament in second and third place, respectively, and thus qualified (with Italy) for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. At the men’s World Cup, played in Japan from November 18 to December 2, perennial powerhouse Brazil won for the second consecutive time. The Russian and Bulgarian men also qualified for the Beijing Olympics. (RICHARD S. WANNINGER)

WEIGHTLIFTING The world’s top weightlifters competed at the International Weightlifting Federation world championships in Chiang Mai, Thai., during Sept. 16-26, 2007. The tournament was not only the sport's most important event of the year but also the qualifying competition for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. A total of 580 athletes from 79 countries participated: 355 men in eight bodyweight classes and 225 women in seven body-weight classes. Ten world records were set: seven in the women’s division and three in the men’s. In women’s competition China, with 21 medals (14 gold), topped the rankings for the sixth straight year. China was followed by Russia with 15 medals

WRESTLING Freestyle and Greco-Roman. Wrestling medals were contested in three disciplines—men’s Greco-Roman, men’s freestyle, and women’s freestyle—at the 2007 Fédération Internationale des Luttes Associées world championships in September in Baku, Azer. The U.S. (31 points) came

back from

a 30-29

deficit to win its first Greco-Roman world championship competition,

legiate onship phers clones

Athletic Association champiin seven years; the Golden Gooutscored the Iowa State Cy98-88.5 before a record crowd

of 17,780 in Auburn

souri (80 points) hung on for third place; Northwestern (71.5 points) finished fourth; and four-time defending champion Oklahoma State (69 points) placed fifth.

ahead of Russia (30 points) and Geor-

Hills, Mich. Mis-

(ANDRE REDDINGTON)

Sumo. Mongolian-born ozeki (champion) Hakuho won consecutive yusho

gia (28 points). American Brad Vering earned an 84-kg silver, with teammates Harry Lester (66 kg) and Dremiel Byers (120 kg) taking bronze medals. The best previous finish by a U.S. GrecoRoman team at the world championship was third place in 2001 and

(victories) at the first two basho (grand tournaments) of 2007, the Haru (spring) Basho in March and the Natsu (sum-

2006.

years,

In men’s freestyle competition, Russia again took the team title, winning six of seven weight classes and posting a

Basho in January and the Nagoya Basho in July, but he suffered an unprecedented suspension from fighting in the two remaining tournaments—the Aki

combined

37-1

match

record,

with

a

team total of 68 points. Turkey (40 points) placed second, Cuba (34 points) third, and the U.S. (32 points) fourth.

Japan repeated as the women’s freestyle team champion, with four individual champions and 52 points, followed by Kazakhstan and Ukraine (tied with 39 points), China (36 points), and the U.S. (32 points). American Kristie

Marano tied heavyweight freestyle legend Bruce Baumgartner’s U.S. record by winning her ninth world medal (in nine trips to the worlds). In American collegiate wrestling, Minnesota won its third National Col-

mer) Basho in May, earning promotion to yokozuna (grand champion). Yokozuna Asashoryu, who had dominated competition the previous two won

the

Hatsu

(New

Years)

(autumn) Basho in September and No-

vembers Kyushu Basho—after he participated in a charity association football (soccer) game while claiming injury. Hakuho’s victories in those remaining bashos took place amid another scandal, the death of a trainee after an al-

legedly brutal hazing in the prestigious Tokitsukaze stable. The stablemaster (coach) was sacked, pending criminal charges, and active wrestler Tokitsuumi retired to immediately take his place. Other 2007 retirements included those of Tochiazuma, Takanowaka, Buyuzan, and Ichinoya. (KEN COLLER)

Hakuho (left) throws yokozuna (grand champion) Asashoryu to the ground in the Natsu Basho (summer sumo tournament) in May. Hakuho's 15-0 record

ensured his promotion to yokozuna status.

(4 gold), South Korea with 6 (3 gold), and Thailand with 5 (no gold). Women

from four other countries also captured medals. South Korean Jang Mi Ran won her third consecutive superheavyweight world title, this time with a worldrecord 319-kg (703.3-Ib) overall total.

China also topped the men's rankings with 12 medals (8 gold), ahead of Belarus with 7 (5 gold). Russia and Belarus were tied with 10 medals, includ-

ing 3 gold, but Russia earned more silver. The remaining medals went to men from nine other countries. Viktors Scerbatihs of Latvia won the men's overall title with a 442-kg (974.4-Ib) total result. (DRAGOMIR CIOROSLAN)

i

he

Jiji Press—AFP/Getty Images

331

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sporting Record ARCHERY FITA Outdoor World Target Archery Championships* Year

| Men's individual

Men's team

Winner

Points

Winner

Women's individual Points

Winner

Women's team Points

Winner

Points

2003

M. Frangilli (Italy)

113

South Korea

238

Yun Mi Jin (S.Kor)

116

South Korea

252

2005

Chung Jae Hun (S.Kor.)

102

South Korea

244

Lee Sung Jin (S.Kor.)

111

South Korea

251

2007

Im Dong Hyun (S.Kor.)

110

South Korea

224

N. Valeeva (Italy)

108

South Korea

226

*Olympic (recurve) division.

AUTOMOBILE RACING Formula One Grand Prix Race Results, 2007 Race

Driver

National Association for Stock Car Auto

Daytona 500

Racing (NASCAR) Nextel Cup Champions

Winner's time (hr:min:sec)

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

Avg. speed in mph

Australian GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

:25:28.770

2005

T. Stewart

2005

J. Gordon

135.173

Malaysian GP Bahrain GP

F. Alonso (Spain) F. Massa (Braz.)

:32:14.930 :33:27.515

2006 2007

J. Johnson J.Johnson

2006

J. Johnson

142.667

2007

K. Harvick

149.335

Spanish GP

F. Massa (Braz.)

:31:36.230

Monaco GP

F. Alonso (Spain)

:40:29.329

Canadian GP

L. Hamilton (U.K.)

:44:11.292

United States GP.

L. Hamilton (U.K.)

:31:09.965

French GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

British GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

European GP Hungarian GP

F. Alonso (Spain) L. Hamilton (U.K.)

Turkish GP

F. Massa (Braz.)

:26:42.161

Italian GP

F. Alonso (Spain)

:18:37.806

Belgian GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

:20:39.066

Japanese GP

L. Hamilton (U.K.)

Chinese GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

:37:58.395

Brazilian GP

K. Räikkönen (Fin.)

:28:15.270

WORLD

DRIVERS' CHAMPIONSHIP:

Ráikkónen

Indy Car Champions* Year

Driver

:30:54.200

2005

S. Bourdais (Fr.)

:21:43.074

2006

S. Bourdais (Fr.)

2:06:26.358 :35:52.991

2007

S. Bourdais (Fr.)

*Champ Car champion.

Indianapolis 500

2:00:34.579

110 points;

Year

Winner

Avg. speed in mph

2005

D. Wheldon (Eng.)

157.603

2006

S. Hornish (U.S.)

157.085

2007*

D. Franchitti (Scot.)

151.774

Hamilton 109 points; Alonso 109 points. *Race stopped after 415 mi because of rain. CONSTRUCTORS'

CHAMPIONSHIP:

Ferrari 204 points; BMW

101 points; Renault 51 points.

Le Mans 24-Hour Grand Prix d’Endurance Year

Car

Drivers

2005

Audi R8

T. Kristensen, J.J. Lehto, M. Werner

2006

Audi RIO

F. Biela, E. Pirro, M. Werner

2007

Audi R10

F. Biela, E. Pirro, M. Werner

Monte-Carlo Rally

Formula One drivers’ champion Kimi Year Ráikkónen of Finland speeds to victory ^ 5995

Car Ciwoen Xsara

Driver S. Loeb (Fr)

in the Brazilian Grand Prix.

2006

Ford Focus WRC

M. Grónholm (Fin.)

Roland Weihrauch—epa/Corbis

2007

Citroën C4 WRC

S. Loeb (Fr.)

All England Open Championships—Singles

Thomas Cup (men)

Year

Women

Year

Men

Winner

Uber Cup (women) Runner-up

Year

Winner

Runner-up

2005 2006

Chen Hong (China) Lin Dan (China)

Xie Xingfang (China) Xie Xingfang (China)

2001-02 2003-04

Indonesia China

Malaysia Denmark

2001-02 2003-04

China China

South Korea South Korea

2007

Lin Dan (China)

Xie Xingfang (China)

2005-06

China

Denmark

2005-06

China

Netherlands

World Badminton Championships Year

Men's singles

Women's singles

Men's doubles

Women's doubles

Mixed doubles

2005

T.Hidayat (Indon.)

Xie Xingfang (China)

H. Bach, T. Gunawan (U.S.)

Yang Wei, Zhang Jiewen (China)

N. Widianto, L. Natsir (Indon.)

2006

Lin Dan (China)

Xie Xingfang (China)

Cai Yun, Fu Haifeng (China)

Gao Ling, Huang Sui (China)

N. Robertson, G. Emms

2007

Lin Dan (China)

Zhu Lin (China)

M. Kido, H. Setiawan (Indon.)

Yang Wei, Zhang Jiewen (China)

N. Widianto, L. Natsir (Indon.)

332

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(Eng.)

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

BASEBALL Final Major League Standings, 2007

Caribbean Series

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Year

Winning team

Country

2005

Mazatlan Deer

Mexico

East Division

Central Division

Won

Lost

G.B.

*Boston

96

66

—

*N.Y. Yankees Toronto

94 83

68 79

Baltimore Tampa Bay

69 66

93 96

NATIONAL

West Division

Won

Lost

G.B.

*Cleveland

96

66

—

2 13

Detroit Minnesota

88 79

74 83

8 17

27 30

Chicago WSox Kansas City

72 69

90 93

24 27

Won

Lost

G.B.

94

68

—

Seattle Oakland

88 76

74 86

6 18

Texas

75

87

19

Won

Lost

G.B.

90

72

=

90 89

73 74

Y 1%

82 71

80 91

8 19

*L.A. Angels

(Venados) 2006

C

Li

2007

Cibao Eagles Águilas) (

queer

1

EE

Menezes

Dominican Republic

LEAGUE

East Division

Central Division Won

Lost

G.B.

*Philadelphia

89

73

—

N.Y. Mets Atlanta

88 84

74 78

Washington Florida

73 TI

89 91

West Division

Won

Lost

G.B.

*Chicago Cubs

85

d

1 5

Milwaukee St. Louis

83 78

79 84

2 7

16 18

Houston Cincinnati

73 32.

89 90

12 13

Pittsburgh

68

94

17

— . *Arizona *Colorado SanDiego L.A. Dodgers San Francisco

*Qualified for play-offs.

World Series*

Japan Series*

Year

Winning team

Losing team

Results

Year

Winning team

Losing team

Results

2005

Chicago White Sox (AL)

Houston Astros (NL)

4-0

2005

Chiba Lotte Marines (PL)

Hanshin Tigers (CL)

4-0

2006

St. Louis Cardinals (NL)

Detroit Tigers (AL)

4-1

2006

Nippon Ham Fighters (PL)

Chunichi Dragons (CL)

4-1

2007

Boston Red Sox (AL)

Colorado Rockies (NL)

4-0

2007 . Chunichi Dragons (CL)

Nippon Ham Fighters (PL)

4-1

*AL—American League; NL—National League.

*CL—Central League; PL—Pacific League.

BASKETBALL NBA Final Standings, 2006-07 EASTERN

CONFERENCE

Won

Lost

G.B.

Atlantic Division

*Toronto

35

*New Jersey — 41

41

8

35

47

33

24

New York

Boston WESTERN

Won

Lost

G.B.

Central Division

47

Philadelphia

Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championship—Men

—

Won

Lost

G.B.

Southeast Division

Winner

Runner-up

Score

2005

North Carolina

Minois

75-70

2006

Florida

UGLA

aa

2007

Florida

Ohio State

84-15

*Detroit

53.

29

—

*Miami

44

38

*Cleveland

50

32

3

*Washington

41

4

12

*Chicago

49

33

4

*Orlando

40

42

49

14

Indiana

35

47

19

Charlotte

33

49

11

Division I National Collegiate Athletic

58

23

28

54

25

Atlanta

30

52

14

Association (NCAA) Championship—Women

Milwaukee

—

Year

3

CONFERENCE

Northwest Division

Pacific Division

*Utah

51

31

*Denver

45

37

6

Portland

32

50

Minnesota

32

Seattle

31

Runner-up

Score

2005

Baylor

Michigan State

84-62

2006

Maryland

2007

Tennessee

Duke Rutgers

78-75 59-46

61

21

—

*Dallas

67

15

*L.A. Lakers

42

40

19

*San Antoni

58

24

9

19

*Golden State

42

40

19

*Houston

52

30

15

50

19

L.A. Clippers

40

42

21

New Orleans

39

43

28

World Basketball Championship—Men

51

20

Sacramento

33

49

28

Memphis

22

60

45

Year

Winner

Runner-up

*Qualified for play-offs.

2002 2004*

Yugoslavia Argentina

Argentina Italy

National Basketball Association (NBA) Championship

2006

Spain

Greece

Winner

Runner-up

Results

2004-05

San Antonio Spurs

Detroit Pistons

43

2005-06 2006-07

Miami Heat San Antonio Spurs

Dallas Mavericks Cleveland Cavaliers

42 4-0

—

Winner

*Phoenix

Season

—

Southwest Division

Year

*Olympic champion.

World Basketball Championship—Women Year

Winner

Runner-up

Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) Championship

2002 2004*

United States United States

Russia Australia

Season

2006

Australia

Russia

Winner

Runner-up

Results

2005

Sacramento Monarchs

Connecticut Sun

3-1

2006 2007

Detroit Shock Phoenix Mercury

Sacramento Monarchs Detroit Shock

3-2 3-2

*Olympic champion.

333

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record Gareth Copley—PA Photos/Landov

BILLIARD GAMES World Three-Cushion Championship*

World Professional Snooker

Year

Winner

Championship

2005

D. Sánchez (Spain)

2006 2007

Year

Winner

E. Merckx (Belg.)

2005

S. Murphy

R. Umeda (Japan)

2006

G. Dott

2007

J. Higgins

*Union Mondiale de Billard champion.

WPA World Nine-Ball Championships Year

| Men's champion

2005

Wu Chia-Ching (Taiwan)

2006

R. Alcano (Phil.)

2007

D. Peach (U.K.)

Year

Women’s champion

2005

not held

2006

Kim Ga Young (S.Kor.)

2007

Pan Xiaoting (China)

John Higgins of Scotland lines up a shot in the world snooker championship in May. Higgins, the 1998 champion, went on to win the second world title of his career.

BOBSLEIGH AND LUGE Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships Year

Two-man bobsleigh

Four-man/driver

Women’s bobsleigh

Men's skeleton

Women's skeleton

2005

P. Lueders, L. Brown (Can.)

Germany/A. Lange

S. Kiriasis, A. Schneiderheinze (Ger.)

J. Pain (Can.)

M. Pedersen (Switz.)

2006*

A. Lange, K. Kuske (Ger.)

Germany/A. Lange

S. Kiriasis, A. Schneiderheinze (Ger.)

D. Gibson (Can.)

M. Pedersen (Switz.)

2007

A. Lange, K. Kuske (Ger)

Switzerland/I. Rueegg

S. Kiriasis, R. Logsch (Ger.)

G. Stáhli (Switz.)

N. Pikus-Pace (U.S.)

Team

Germany

*Olympic champions.

Luge World Championships* Year

Men

Women

Doubles

Team

2005

A. Zöggeler (Italy)

S. Otto (Ger.)

A. Florschtitz, T. Wustlich (Ger.)

Germany

2006+

A. Zöggeler (Italy)

S. Otto (Ger.)

A. Linger, W. Linger (Austria)

2007

D. Möller (Ger.)

T. Hüfner (Ger.)

P. Leitner, A. Resch (Ger.)

*Artificial track.

Germany

tOlympic champions.

USBC Open Bowling Championships—Regular Divisions* Year

Singles

Score

All-events

Score

2005

D. Adam

791

S. Craddock

2,131

2006

W. MacPherson

812

D. Mitchell

2,189

2007

C. Aki

814

M. Rose, Jr.

2,198

*ABC championships until 2006.

Tommy Jones

USBC Women’s Bowling Championships—Classic Divisions* Year

Singles

Score

2005

L. Barrette

774

L. Barrette

2,231

2006

K. Stroud

771

K. Stroud

2,159

745

W. Macpherson

2,161

2007

T.Stanbrough

All-events

Score

*WIBC championships until 2006.

PBA Tournament of Champions

PBA World Championship

Year

Champion

Year

Winner

2004-05

S. Jaros

2004-05

P. Allen

2005-06

C. Barnes

2005-06

W.R. Williams, Jr.

2006-07

T. Jones

2006-07

D. Kent

334

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

focuses on his delivery in the final of the Professional Bowlers Association Tournament of Champions in April. Jones defeated Tony Reyes 257-222 to

take his second major PBA title.

Joan Taylor/Bowlingdigital.com.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

BOWLING (continued) World Tenpin Bowling Championships—Men Year

Singles

Pairs

World Tenpin Bowling Championships—Women

Triples

Team (fives)

Year

Singles

Pairs England Germany

1999 . G. Verbruggen (Belg.) 2003 M. Luoto (Fin.)

Sweden Sweden

Finland United States

Sweden Sweden

2003 2005

Z. Glover (Eng.) E. Cheah (Malay.)

2006

Sweden

South Korea

United States

2007

S. O'Keefe (U.S.)

R. Ong (Sing.)

South Korea

Triples Philippines Taiwan Sweden

World Heavyweight Champions No Weight Limit

World Super Middleweight Champions Top Weight 168 Pounds

World Welterweight Champions Top Weight 147 Pounds

WBA

WBA

WBA

Nikolay Valuyev (Rus.; 12/17/05) Ruslan Chagaev (Uzbek.; 4/14/07)

Mikkel Kessler (Den.; 11/12/04) declared unified champion in 2006

Miguel Cotto (P.R.; 12/2/06)

WBC Oleg Maskaev (U.S.; 8/12/06)

Anthony Mundine (Austl.; 3/7/07) Joe Calzaghe (Wales; 11/3/07; defeated Kessler)

declared unified champion in 2007

IBF

WBC

Wladimir Klitschko (Ukr; 4/22/06)

Mikkel Kessler (Den.; 10/14/06) Joe Calzaghe (Wales; 11/3/07)

World Cruiserweight Champions Top Weight 195 Pounds (WBC 200 Pounds) WBA

O'Neil Bell (U.S.; 1/7/06) declared unified champion in 2006

IBF Joe Calzaghe (Wales; 3/4/06) gave up title in 2006 Alejandro Berrio (Colom.; 3/3/07) Lucian Bute (Can.; 10/19/07)

Virgil Hill (U.S.; 1/27/06) Jean-Marc Mormeck (Fr.; 3/17/07; defeated Bell)

declared unified champion David Haye (U.K.; 11/10/07; defeated Mormeck)

declared unified champion Firat Arslan (Ger; 11/24/07; defeated Hill) WBC

O'Neil Bell (U.S.; 1/7/06) Jean-Marc Mormeck (Fr.; 3/17/07) David Haye (U.K.; 11/10/07) IBF

Krzysztof Wlodarezyk (Pol.; 11/25/06) Steve Cunningham (U.S.; 5/26/07)

World Light Heavyweight Champions Top Weight 175 Pounds WBA Silvio Branco (Italy; 10/19/06; declared champion)

Stipe Drews (Cro.; 4/28/07) Danny Green (Austl.; 12/16/07) WBC Tomasz Adamek (Pol.; 5/21/05)

World Middleweight Champions Top Weight 160 Pounds

Clinton Woods (U.K.; 3/4/05)

Kermit Cintron (P.R.; 10/28/06)

World Junior Welterweight Champions Top Weight 140 Pounds (also called super lightweight)

WBA

Souleymane M'baye (Fr.; 9/2/06) Gavin Rees (Wales; 7/21/07) WBC Junior Witter (U.K.; 9/15/06)

Juan Urango (Colom.; 6/30/06)

IBF Arthur Abraham (Arm.; 12/10/05)

Ricky Hatton (U.K.; 1/20/07)

gave up title in 2007 Lovemore N'Dou (Austl.; 2/12/07; declared

champion) Paul Malignaggi (U.S.; 6/16/07)

World Lightweight Champions Top Weight 135 Pounds WBA Juan Diaz (U.S.; 7/17/04)

declared unified champion in 2007

World Junior Middleweight Champions Top Weight 154 Pounds

José Alfaro (Nic.; 12/29/07)

(also called super welterweight)

Joel Casamayor (Cuba; 10/7/06)

WBA Jose Antonio Rivera (U.S.; 5/6/06) Travis Simms (U.S.; 1/6/07) Joachim Alcine (Can.; 7/7/07)

Chad Dawson (U.S.; 2/3/07) IBF

IBF

Javier Castillejo (Spain; 7/15/06) Mariano Carrera (Arg.; 12/2/06) stripped of title in 2007; Castillejo declared champion Felix Sturm (Ger.; 4/28/07, defeated Castillejo)

Kelly Pavlik (U.S.; 9/29/07)

Malaysia

Floyd Mayweather (U.S.; 11/4/06)

IBF

Jermain Taylor (U.S.; 7/16/05)

Malaysia Taiwan

WBC

WBA

WBC

Team (fives)

WBC

stripped of title in 2007 David Diaz (U.S.; interim 8/12/06)

declared champion in 2007 IBF Jesus Chavez (U.S.; 9/17/05)

WBC

Julio Diaz (U.S.; 2/3/07)

Oscar De La Hoya (U.S.; 5/6/06)

Juan Diaz (U.S.; 10/13/07)

Floyd Mayweather (U.S.; 5/5/07)

gave up title in 2007 Vernon Forrest (U.S.; 7/28/07)

World Junior Lightweight Champions Top Weight 130 Pounds

IBF

(also called super featherweight)

Cory Spinks (U.S.; 7/8/06)

WBA Edwin Valero (Venez.; 8/5/06) WBC

Marco Antonio Barrera (Mex.; 11/27/04) Juan Manuel Marquez (Mex.; 3/17/07) IBF Malcolm Klassen (S.Af.; 11/4/06) Mzonke Fana (S.Af.; 4/20/07)

335

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

BOXING (continued) World Featherweight Champions Top Weight 126 Pounds

World Junior Bantamweight Champions Top Weight 115 Pounds

World Junior Flyweight Champions Top Weight 108 Pounds

WBA

(also called super flyweight)

WBA

Chris John (Indon.; 9/26/03) interim champion 2003-05

WBA

WBC

Alexander Mufioz (Venez.; 5/3/07)

Chi In Jin (S.Kor; 12/17/06)

WBC

stripped of title in 2007 Jorge Linares (Venez.; 7/21/07) IBF

Orlando Salido (Mex.; 11/4/06) stripped of title in 2006 Robert Guerrero (U.S.; 2/23/07)

Nobuo Nashiro (Japan; 7/22/06)

Koki Kameda (Japan; 8/2/06)

gave up title in 2007 Juan Carlos Reveco (Arg.; 6/22/07) Brahim Asloum (Fr.; 12/8/07)

Masamori Tokuyama (Japan; 7/18/05) gave up title in 2007 Cristian Mijares (Mex.; interim 9/18/06) declared champion in 2007 IBF Luis Pérez (Nic.; 1/4/03) title declared vacant in 2006

WBC Omar Nifio (Mex.; 8/10/06)

stripped of title in 2007 Edgar Sosa (Mex.; 4/14/07) IBF

Will Grigsby (U.S.; 5/14/05) Ulises Solis (Mex.; 1/7/06)

World Junior Featherweight Champions Top Weight 122 Pounds

Dmitry Kirilov (Russia; 10/13/07)

(also called super bantamweight)

WBA

World Flyweight Champions Top Weight 112 Pounds

Celestino Caballero (Pan.; 10/4/06)

WBA

WBA

WBC

Lorenzo Parra (Venez.; 12/6/03)

Yutaka Niida (Japan; 7/3/04)

Israel Vázquez (Mex.; 12/3/05) Rafael Márquez (Mex.; 3/3/07)

stripped of title in 2007 Takefumi Sakata (Japan; 3/19/07)

World Mini-flyweight Champions Top Weight 105 Pounds (also called strawweight)

WBC

Israel Vázquez (Mex.; 8/4/07)

WBC

Eagle Kyowa (Japan; 8/6/05) Oleydong Sithsanerchai (Thai.; 11/29/07)

IBF

Pongsaklek Wonjongkam (Thai.; 3/2/01) Daisuke Naito (Japan; 7/18/07)

IBF

Steve Molitor (Can.; 11/10/06)

IBF

World Bantamweight Champions Top Weight 118 Pounds WBA

Muhammad

Rachman (Indon.; 9/14/04)

Florante Condes (Phil.; 7/7/07)

Vic Darchinyan (Austl.; 12/16/04) Nonito Donaire (Phil.; 7/7/07) Shuji Kajiyama/AP

Johnny Bredahl (Den.; 4/19/02) gave up title in 2004 Vladimir Sidorenko (Ukr; 2/26/05) WBC

Hozumi Hasegawa (Japan; 4/16/05) IBF

Rafael Márquez (Mex.; 2/15/03)

gave up title in 2007 Luis Pérez (Nic.; 7/7/07) Joseph Agbeko (Ghana; 9/29/07)

FIDE Olympiad—Open Year

Winner

Runner-up

2002

Russia

Hungary

2004 2006

Ukraine Armenia

Russia China

FIDE Olympiad—Women Year

Winner

Runner-up

2002 2004

China China

Russia United States

2006

Ukraine

Russia

336

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

In a WBC world flyweight title bout on July 18, Japan's Daisuke Naito (left) punches longtime champion Pongsaklek Wonjongkam of Thailand. Naito captured the title in a unanimous decision.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

Test Match Results, October 2006-September 2007 Host/Ground

Date

Scores

Result

Pakistan/Lahore

Nov. 11-14

W.Ind. 206 and 291; Pak. 485 and 13 for 1

Pak. won by 9 wickets

Pakistan/Multan

Nov. 19-23

Pak. 357 and 461 for 7; W.Ind. 591

Match drawn

Pakistan/Karachi

Nov. 27-30

Pak. 304 and 399; W.Ind. 260 and 244

Pak. won by 199 runs; Pak. won series 2-0

Australia/Brisbane

Nov. 23-27

Austl. 602 for 9 dec and 202 for 1 dec; Eng. 157 and 370

Austl. won by 277 runs

Australia/Adelaide Australia/Perth

Dec. 1-5 Dec. 14-18

Eng. 551 for 6 dec and 129; Austl. 513 and 168 for 4 Austl. 244 and 527 for 5 dec; Eng. 215 and 350

Austl. won by 6 wickets Austl. won by 206 runs

Australia/Melbourne Australia/Sydney

Dec. 26-28 Jan. 2-5

Eng. 159 and 161; Austl. 419 Eng. 291 and 147; Austl. 393 and 46 for 0

Austl. won by an innings and 99 runs Austl. won by 10 wickets; Austl. won series 5-0

New Zealand/Christchurch

Dec. 7-9

SriL. 154 and

N.Z. won by 5 wickets

New Zealand/Wellington

Dec. 15-18

SriL. 268 and 365; N.Z. 130 and 286

South Africa/Johannesburg

Dec. 15-18

ndia 249 and 236; S.Af. 84 and 278

South Africa/Durban

Dec. 26-30

South Africa/Cape Town

Jan. 2-6

ndia 414 and 169; S.Af. 373 and 211 for 5

S.Af. won by 5 wickets; S.Af. won series 2-1

South Africa/Centurion

Jan. 11-15

Pak. 313 and 302; S.Af. 417 and 199 for 3

S.Af. won by 7 wickets

South Africa/Port Elizabeth

Jan. 19-22

S.Af. 124 and 331; Pak. 265 and 191 for 5

Pak. won by 5 wickets

South Africa/Cape Town

Jan. 26-28

Pak. 157 and 186; S.Af. 183 and 161 for 5

S.Af. won by 5 wickets; S.Af. won series 2-1

England/London (Lord's) England/Leeds

May 17-21 May 25-28

Eng. 553 for 5 dec and 284 for 8 dec; W.Ind. 437 and 89 forO Eng. 570; W.Ind. 146 and 141

Match drawn Eng. won by an innings and 283 runs

England/Manchester England/Durham

June 7-11 June 15-19

Eng. 370 and 313; W.Ind. 229 and 394 W.Ind. 287 and 222; Eng. 400 and 111 for 3

Eng. won by 60 runs Eng. won by 7 wickets; Eng. won series 3-0

Bangladesh/Chittagong

May 18-22

ndia 387 and 100 for 6 dec; Bangl. 238 and 104 for 2

Match drawn

Bangladesh/Mirpur

May 25-27

ndia 610 for 3 dec; Bangl. 118 and 253

India won by an innings and 239 runs; India won series 1-0

Sri Lanka/Colombo Sri Lanka/Colombo

June 25-28 July 3-5

Bangl. 89 and 254; SriL. 577 for 6 dec Bangl. 62 and 299; SriL. 451 for 6 dec

SriL. won by an innings and 234 runs SriL. won by an innings and 90 runs

Sri Lanka/Kandy

July 11-14

Bangl. 131 and 176; SriL. 500 for 4 dec

SriL. won by an innings and 193 runs; SriL. won series 3-0

England/London (Lord's) England/Nottingham

July 19-23 July 27-31

Eng. 298 and 282; India 201 and 232 for 9 Eng. 198 and 355; India 481 and 73 for 3

Match drawn India won by 7 wickets

England/London (The Oval)

Aug. 9-13

ndia 664 and 180 for 6 dec; Eng. 345 and 369 for 6

Match drawn; India won series 1-0

170; N.Z. 206 and 119 for 5

S.Af. 328 and 265 for 8 dec; India 240 and 179

SriL. won by 217 runs; series drawn 1-1

India won by 123 runs S.Af. won by 174 runs

Cricket World Cup Year

Result

1999 2003

Australia Australia

133 for 2 359 for 2

2007

Australia

281for4

Pakistan India SriLanka

132 234 215 for 8

Canadian skip Kelly Scott (far right) poses with her women’s world champion curling teammates, (from left) Renee Simons, Sasha CURLING

Carter, and Jeanna Schraeder.

World Curling Championship—Men Year

Winner

Runner-up

2005

Canada

Scotland

2006 2007

Scotland Canada

Canada Germany

World Curling Championship—Women Year

Winner

Runner-up

2005 2006

Sweden Sweden

United States United States

2007

Canada

Denmark

Ng Han Guan/AP

337

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

CYCLING Cycling Champions, 2007 Event

Winner

WORLD

Country

CHAMPIONS—TRACK

Event

Winner

WORLD

Men

Country

CHAMPIONS—MOUNTAIN

BIKES

Men

Sprint

T. Bos

Individual pursuit Kilometre time trial

B. Wiggins C. Hoy

Points Team pursuit

Netherlands

Cross-country

J. Absalon

France

Great Britain Great Britain

Downhill 4-cross

S. Hill B. Lopes

Australia United States

J. Llaneras Rosello

Spain

Women

E. Clancy, T. Geraint,

Great Britain Cross-country

I. Kalentyeva

Russia

P. Manning, B. Wiggins

Keirin Team sprint

C. Hoy

Great Britain

Downhill

S. Jonnier

France

G. Bauge, M. Bourgain,

France

4-cross

J. Kintner

United States

A. Tournant Madison Scratch

F. Marvulli, B. Risi

Switzerland

Wong Kampo

Hong

Kong

Women Sprint

V. Pendleton

Great

A. Meares

Australia

Points

K. Bates

Australia

Keirin

V. Pendleton

Great Britain

Team sprint

V. Pendleton, S. Reade

Great Britain

Scratch

Y. González Valdivieso

Individual it ndividual pursui 500-m time trial

WORLD

Hus . Hammer

Britain

Untied Stat nited States

Cuba

CHAMPIONS—ROAD

MAJOR ELITE ROAD-RACE WINNERS Tour de France

A. Contador

Spain

Tour of

D. Di Luca

taly

D. Menchov

Russia

V. Karpets

Russia

O. Freire

Spain

Paris-Roubaix

A. Ballan S. O'Grady

taly Australia

Amstel Gold

S. Schumacher

Germany

Italy

Tour of Spain c :

our of Switzerland Milan-San Remo es

E our of Flanders :

i

te ix Liege-Bastogne-Lieége

Vattenfall

Cyclassics

GP Ouest-France

San Sebastian Classic

Men

Individual road race Individual time trial

P. Bettini

F Cancellara

Italy

Paris-Tours

Switzerland

Tour of Lombardy

Women

Individual road race

M. Bastianelli

Individual time trial

H. Kupfernagel

WORLD

Italy Germany

E. Vervecken M. Salvetat

Men

Women

taly

A. Ballan T. Voeckler

taly France

L. Bertagnolli A. Petacchi

taly taly

D. Cunego

taly

Paris—Nice

A. Contador

Spain

Ghent-Wevelgem Fléche Wallonne

M. Burghardt D. Rebellin

Germany taly

Tour of

T. Dekker

Netherlands

Libéré

C. Moreau

France

Tirreno-Adriatico

A. Klóden

Germany

Romandie

Dauphiné

CHAMPION—CYCLO-CROSS

D. Di Luca

Belgium France

EQUESTRIAN SPORTS The Kentucky Derby Year 2005 2006 2007

Horse | Giacomo Barbaro Street Sense

The Preakness Stakes Jockey

Year

M. Smith E. Prado C. Borel

2005 . Afleet Alex 2006 Bernardini 2007 Curlin

2,000 Guineas

| Horse

The Belmont Stakes Jockey

Year

J. Rose J. Castellano R. Albarado

2005 2006 2007

The Derby

Year

Horse

Jockey

Year

2005 2006

Footstepsinthesand George Washington

K. Fallon K. Fallon

2005 2006

2007

Cockney Rebel

O. Peslier

2007

Horse Motivator Sir Percy

Authorized

Horse

Jockey

J. Murtagh M. Dwyer

2005 2006

Scorpion Sixties Icon

F. Dettori F. Dettori

F. Dettori

2007

Year

Horse

Year

Year

1973

Secretariat

1918

Gainsborough

2005

1935 1970

Bahram Nijinsky

2006 2007

338

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

J. Rose F. Jara J. Velazquez

Year

Melbourne Cup

Seattle Slew Affirmed

Afleet Alex Jazil Rags to Riches

Jockey

Triple Crown Champions—British

1977 1978

Jockey

The St. Leger

Triple Crown Champions—U.S.

Winner

| Horse

Horse

Makybe Diva

Delta Blues Efficient

Lucarno

J. Fortune

The Hambletonian Trot Jockey

Year

Horse

Driver

G. Boss

2005

Vivid Photo

R. Hammer

Y. Iwata M. Rodd

2006 2007

Glidemaster Donato Hanover

J. Campbell R. Pierce

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

EQUESTRIAN SPORTS (continued) Major Thoroughbred Race Winners, 2007 Race

Won by

Jockey

Race

United States

Won by

Jockey

England

Acorn Stakes Alabama Stakes Alcibiades Stakes

Cotton Blossom Lady Joanne Country Star

J. Velazquez C. Borel R. Bejarano

One Thousand Guineas Two Thousand Guineas Epsom Derby

Finsceal Beo Cockney Rebel Authorized

K. Manning O. Peslier F. Dettori

American Oaks Invitational Apple Blossom Handicap

Panty Raid Ermine

E. Prado E. Castro

Epsom Oaks St. Leger

Light Shift Lucarno

T. Durcan J. Fortune

Arlington Million Ashland Stakes

Jambalaya Christmas Kid

R. Albarado R. Douglas

Coronation Cup Ascot Gold Cup

Scorpion Yeats

M. Kinane M. Kinane

Beldame Stakes

Unbridled Belle

R. Dominguez

Coral-Eclipse Stakes

Notnoweato

R. Moore

Belmont Stakes Beverly D. Stakes Blue Grass Stakes

Rags to Riches Royal Highness Dominican

J. Velazquez R. Douglas R. Bejarano

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes Sussex Stakes

Ramonti

E Dettori

Breeders Breeders’ Breeders’ Breeders’

Curlin . Corinthian Ginger Punch Maryfield

R. K. R. E.

Juddmonte International Stakes Champion Stakes

Authorized Literato

F. Dettori C. Lemaire

Lahudood War Pass

A. Garcia C. Velasquez

Poule d'Essai des Poulains Poule d'Essai des Pouliches

Indian Blessing Nownownow Kip Deu:

G. Gomez J. Leparoux C. Velasquez

Prix du Jockey-Club (French Derby) Prix de Diane (French Oaks) Prix Royal-Oak

Midnight

G. Gomez

Prix Jacques Le Marois

Manduro

S. Pasquier

2 a er m We

D 1T B 2

Grand Prix de Paris Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud

Zambezi Sun Mountain High

S. Pasquier K. Fallon

ed E . eue Charles Wittingham : : Memorial Handicap . : : Cigar Mile Handicap Citation Handicap

sd SEP e After Market

B E M Pe Mmm A. Solis

Mrs Lindsay Dylan Thomas : Rio De La Plata

J. Murtagh K. Fallon . F. Dettori

Daaher Lang Field

M. Luzzi J. Court

Prix Vermeille Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe : Prix Jean-Luc Lagarderes Grand Criterium

bru

xa

:beoe

Cockney Rebel

O. Peslier

Finsceal Beo . Soldier of Fortune FM xLu a= à Dylan Thomas

K. Manning S. Heffernan S E e Bp : eR pear

"e

ABER

Cup Cup Cup Cup

Glassie Dirt Mile Distaff Filly and Mare Sprint

Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf Breeders' Cup Juvenile Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf Breeders: Cup Mile Breeders Cup Sprint

dad Red Turf 2 en oe ti

D. pue

en American Oaks e

=3

Donn Handicap

f . Eddie Read Handicap Florida Derby Flower Bowl Invitational Frizette Stakes Haskell Invitational Hollywood Derby

Hollywood Gold Cup

a

ti

D

nvasor

ti

s

.

t

F. Jara

gaS

4 Solis Prado Garcia Gomez Gomez Smith

A. E. A. G. G. M.

Lava Man

C. Nakatani

Majestic Warrior

Jockey Club Gold Cup Joe Hirsch Turf Classi I E pue Kentucky Derby Kentucky Oaks Manhattan Handicap

Curlin English Ch: l neus ES Street Sense Rags to Riches Better Talk Now

Man o' War Stakes

Doctor Dino

Preci Kitt TE SH Corinthian Octave . Student Council Curlin of i

France

G. Gomez

R. Albarado J. Vel: e E C. Borel G. Gomez R. Dominguez O. Peslier

R. Bej d K. Desormeaux J. Velazquez M R. Migliore R. Albarado ib

rish Two Thousand Guineas rish A rish ich n 2 Tish Italy —

One Thousand Guineas Derby Oak M" i WERE i Champion Stakes

€

e

Gran Premio

L

Jockey

Club

del Jockey Clu

Deutsches Derby G ae Bad oe ed b MES TEIS VOD SOPS

Tania West Wind Allegretto

C. O'Donoghue C. Soumillon E Dettori F. Dettori R Moore

Melbourne Cup

x

- k

. Starke

Adlerflug Ga Su "m GIMAPAUEUL

F. Johansson uS a$ E pear

M. Rodd

Cox Plate : Caulfield Cup

El Segundo m Master O'Reilly

L. Nolen f V. Duric

United Arab Emirates Dubai World Cup

ivast

Pam

Dubai Sheema Classic f Dubai Duty Free

Vengeance of Rain : Admire Moon

A. Delpech

Admire Moon

Y. Iwata

Hong Kong Gold Cup

Vengeance of Rain

A. Delpech

Singapore International Cup

Shadow Gate

K. Tanaka

Mike Fox

E.-J. Wilson

Alezzandro Marchfield

T. Kabel P. Husbands

Asia

E

Japan Cup

Political Force

C. Velasquez

Travers Stakes Turf Classic Stakes ; TUE n SS k

Street Sense Sky Conqueror Du Ee h i

C. Borel J. Castellano ; J 2

Canada

n ent Stakes hada H t ds

ss i E B x Hee

enSEIS 2d ond

Prince of Wales Stakes Breeders' Stakes

tee D Wood Memorial

eT : S : Nobiz Like Shobiz

e C. Velasquez

Woodward Stakes Yellow Ribbon Stakes

Lawyer Ron Nashoba’s Key

J. Velazquez J. Talamo

Woodbine Mile : : Canadian International Stakes

ane

i Dee fi

Schiaparelli

Efficient

: M M. Smith . C. Nakatani J. Leparoux s

duk

Australia

ues Ties Tiago Lava Man Shamdinan 5 i ue s ets

`

Astronomer Royal Darjina

Germany

nd oe E Santa Anita Derby f . Santa Anita Handicap Secretariat Stakes ; zE SiakesHandi tepaen Foster Handicap Suburban Handicap

J. Murtagh

Ireland

After Market Scat Daddy Lahudood ndian Blessing Any Given Saturday Daytona

Hopeful Stakes

Matriarch Stak vb s Metropolitan Handicap Mother Goose Stakes Ws . Pacific Classic Preakness Stakes Re Gane II Challenge Cup

a

Albarado Desormeaux Bejarano Trujillo

Dylan Thomas

:

:

Queens Plate Stakes

Shakespeare i f Cloudy's Knight

Y. Take

G. Gomez . R. Zimmerman

339

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

FENCING

FIELD HOCKEY

World Fencing Championships—Men

World Cup Field Hockey Championship—Men

Year

Individual

Team

Foil

Épée

Sabre

Foil

Épée

Sabre

Year

Winner

Runner-up

2005

S.Sanzo (Italy)

P. Kolobkov (Russia)

M. Covaliu (Rom.)

France

France

Russia

1998

Netherlands

Spain

2006

P.Joppich(Ger)

Wang Lei (China)

S. Pozdnyakov (Russia)

France

France

France

2002 2006

Germany Germany

Australia Australia

2007

P.Joppich (Ger)

K. Kulcsar (Hung.)

S. Pozdnyakov

France

France

Hungary

(Russia)

World Cup Field Hockey Championship—Women

World Fencing Championships—Women Year

Individual

Year

Team

Foil

Épée

Sabre

Foil

2005

V. Vezzali (Italy) — D. Dmowska (Pol.)

A.-L. Touya (Fr.)

2006

M. Granbassi

T. Nagy (Hung.)

R. Ward (U.S.)

B. Heidemann

Ye. Netchayeva

South Korea Russia

Épée

Sabre

France

United States

China

France

France

France

Winner

Runner-up

1998 . Australia

Netherlands

2002 2006

Netherlands Australia

Argentina Netherlands

(Italy) 2007

V. Vezzali (Italy)

(Ger.)

Poland

(Russia)

FIFA World Cup—Men

FIFA World Cup—Women

Year

Result

Year

1998

France

3

Brazil

0

1999 . United States*

0

China

0

2002 2006

Brazil Italy*

2 1

Germany France

0 1

2003 2007

2 2

Sweden Brazil

1 0

*Won on penalty kicks.

Result

Germany Germany

*Won on penalty kicks.

Association Football National Champions, 2006-07 Nation Argentina Australia

League Champions

Cup Winners

Nation

Estudiantes (Opening) Melbourne Victory

San Lorenzo (Closing)

Mexico Morocco

FK Austria FC Brugge

Nigeria Northern Ireland

Austria Belgium

Salzburg Anderlecht

Bolivia Brazil

San Jose Sao Paulo

Fluminense

Norway Paraguay

Levski Sofia Cotonsport

Levski Sofia Cotonsport

Peru Poland

Bulgaria Cameroon Chile China Colombia Costa Rica

Colo Colo Changchun

not held

Atletico Nacional Saprissa

Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia

Croatia Czech Republic

Dynamo Zagreb Sparta Prague

Dynamo Zagreb Sparta Prague

Denmark Ecuador

FC Copenhagen Liga Deportiva Universitaria

Odense

(LDU) Quito

Scotland Senegal Serbia Slovakia Slovenia

League Champions

Cup Winners

Guadalajara (Opening) Olympique Khouribga

Pachuca (Closing) FAR Rabat

Enyimba Linfield

Dolphin Linfield

Brann Sporting Lugueno (Opening)

Lillestrom Libertad (Closing)

Universidad de San Martin Zaglebie

Groclin

Porto Dinamo Bucharest

Sporting Lisbon Rapid

Zenit Al-Hilal

Lokomotiv Moscow Al-Ahli

Celtic AS Douanes

Celtic Linguere

Red Star Belgrade Zilina

Red Star Belgrade Zlate

Domzale

Koper

England

Manchester United

Chelsea

South Africa

Mamelodi Sundowns

Ajax Cape Town

Finland France

Tampere United Lyon

Tampere United Sochaux

South Korea Spain

Pohang Steelers Real Madrid

Seville

Ameri Nuremberg

Sweden Switzerland

IFK Gothenburg Zürich

Kalmar Basel

Tunisia Turkey

Etoile Sahel Fenerbahce

Esperance Besiktas Dynamo Kiev

Georgia Germany Greece Holland Hungary reland

Olimpi Stuttgart Olympiakos PSV Eindhoven

Larisa Ajax

Debrecen Drogheda United

Honved Cork City

Ukraine United States (MLS)

Dynamo Kiev Houston Dynamo

srael taly

Beitar Jerusalem nternazionale

Hapoel Tel Aviv Roma

Uruguay Venezuela

Danubio Caracas

Japan

Kashima Antlers

340

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

FOOTBALL (continued) UEFA Champions League

UEFA Cup

Season

Season

Result

Result

2004-05

Liverpool FC (Eng.)*

3

AC Milan (Italy)

3

2004-05

CSKA Moscow (Rus.)

3

Sporting (Port.)

1

2005-06

FC Barcelona (Spain)

2

Arsenal FC (Eng.)

d

2005-06

Seville (Spain)

4

Middlesbrough (Eng.)

0

2006-07

AC Milan (Italy)

2

Liverpool FC (Eng.)

1

2006-07

Seville (Spain)*

2

Espanyol (Spain)

2

*Won on penalty kicks.

*Won on penalty kicks.

Libertadores de América Cup

Copa América

Year

Winner (country)

Runner-up (country)

Scores

Year

Winner

Runnerup

Score

2005

Sào Paulo (Braz.)

Atlético Paranaense (Braz.)

1-1, 4-0

2001

Colombia

Mexico

1-0

2006

Internacional (Braz.)

Sào Paulo (Braz.)

2-1, 2-2

2004

Brazil

Argentina

2-2, 4-2*

2007

Boca Juniors (Arg.)

Grémio (Braz.)

3-0, 2-0

2007

Brazil

Argentina

3-0

*Winner determined in penalty shoot-out.

MLS Cup

U.S. College Football National Champions

Year

Season

Champion

Result

2005

Los Angeles Galaxy

1

New England Revolution

0

2005-06

Texas

2006 2007

Houston Dynamo* Houston Dynamo

1 2

New England Revolution New England Revolution

1 1

2006-07* 2007-08*

Florida Louisiana State

*Won on penalty kicks.

*Won BCS championship game.

Rose Bowl

Orange Bowl

Season

Result

2005-06

Texas

2006-07 2007-08

41

Southern California Southern California

Southern California

32 49

Michigan Illinois

Season

Result

38

2005-06

Penn State

18 17

2006-07 2007-08

Fiesta Bowl Season

Louisville Kansas

26

Florida State

23

24 24

Wake Forest Virginia Tech

13 21

Sugar Bowl Result

Season

Result

2005-06

Ohio State

34

Notre Dame

20

2005-06

West Virginia

38

2006-07

Boise State

43

Oklahoma

42

2006-07

Louisiana State

41

2007-08

West Virginia

48

Oklahoma

28

2007-08

Georgia

Georgia

35

Notre Dame

41

14

Hawaii

10

NFL Final Standings, 2007-08 AMERICAN

CONFERENCE

East Division

North Division Won

Lost

Tied

*New England Buffalo

16 7

0 9

0 0

New York Jets Miami

4 1

12 15

0 0

NATIONAL

South Division Won

Lost

Tied

*Pittsburgh Cleveland

10 10

6 6

0 0

Cincinnati Baltimore

7 5

9 TI

0 0

*Indianapolis *Jacksonville Tennessee Houston

West Division Won

Lost

Tied

13 11

3 5

0 0

10 8

6 8

0 0

Won

Lost

Tied

*San Diego Denver

11 7

5 9

0 0

Oakland Kansas City

4 4

12 12

0 0

Won

Lost

Tied

10

6

0

8 5

8 11

0 0

3

13

0

CONFERENCE

East Division

North Division Won

Lost

Tied

*Dallas

13

3

0

*New York Giants *Washington

10 9

6 7

0 0

8

8

0

Philadelphia

South Division Won

Lost

Tied

13

3

0

Minnesota Chicago

8

8 9

0 0

Detroit

7

9

0

*Green Bay

West Division Won

Lost

Tied

*Tampa Bay

9

7

0

New Orleans Carolina

7 7

9 9

0 0

4

12

0

Atlanta

*Seattle Arizona San Francisco St. Louis

*Qualified for play-offs.

Super Bowl Season XXXIX XL

CFL Grey Cup* Result

Year

2004-05

New England Patriots

24

Philadelphia Eagles

21

2005

Edmonton Eskimos

38

Montreal Alouettes

35

2005-06

Pittsburgh Steelers

21

Seattle Seahawks

10

2006

British Columbia Lions

25

Montreal Alouettes

14

(AFC)

(AFC) XLI

Result

2006-07

Indianapolis Colts

(AFC)

(NFC)

(NFC) 29

Chicago Bears

(NEC)

(WD) (WD)

17

2007

(ED)

Saskatchewan Roughriders

*ED—Eastern

(wD)

Division; WD—Western

(ED)

23

Winnipeg Blue Bombers

(ED)

19

Division.

341

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

FOOTBALL (continued) AFL Grand Final Year

Result

2005

Sydney Swans

8.10 (58)

West Coast Eagles

7.12 (54)

2006

West Coast Eagles

12.13 (85)

Sydney Swans

12.12 (84)

2007

Geelong Cats

24.19 (163)

Port Adelaide Power

6.8 (44)

Rugby Union World Cup

Rugby League World Cup

Six Nations Championship

Year

Result

Year

Result

Year

Result

1999

Australia

35

France

12

1992

Australia

10

Great Britain

6

2005

Wales*

2003 2007

England South Africa

20 15

Australia England

17 6

1995 Australia 2000 . Australia

16 40

England New Zealand

8 12

2006 2007

France France

*Grand Slam winner.

Martin Bureau—AFP/Getty Images

South African centre Francois Steyn (with the ball) evades a tackle in the

Rugby Union World Cup final on October 20. The Springboks defeated defending champion England 15-6.

GOLF Masters Tournament

United States Open Championship (men)

British Open Tournament (men)

U.S. Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) Championship

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

2005

T. Woods (U.S.)

2006

P. Mickelson (U.S.)

2005

M. Campbell (N.Z.)

2005

T. Woods (U.S.)

2005

P. Mickelson (U.S.)

2007

Z.Johnson (U.S.)

2006 2007

G. Ogilvy (Austl.) A. Cabrera (Arg.)

2006

T. Woods (U.S.)

2006

T. Woods (U.S.)

2007

P. Harrington (Ire.)

2007

T. Woods (U.S.)

United States Amateur Championship (men)

British Amateur Championship (men)

United States Women's Open Championship

Women's British Open Championship

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

2005

E. Molinari (Italy)

2005

B. McElhinney (Ire.)

2005

B. Kim (S.Kor.)

2005

Jang Jeong (S.Kor.)

2006

R. Ramsay (Scot.)

2006

J. Guerrier (Fr)

2006

A. Sörenstam (Swed.)

2006

S. Steinhauer (U.S.)

2007

C.Knost (U.S.)

2007

D. Weaver (U.S.)

2007

C. Kerr (U.S.)

2007

L. Ochoa (Mex.)

Ladies Professional Golf

United States Women's

Ladies’ British Amateur

Association (LPGA)

Amateur Championship

Championship

Championship

Year 2005 2006

Winner L. Stahle (Swed.)

2007

C. Ciganda (Spain)

Year

Winner

Year 2005

2005

A. Sörenstam (Swed.)

2006

Winner M. Pressel (U.S.) K. Kim (U.S.)

2006

Pak Se Ri (S.Kor)

2007

M.J. Uribe (Colom.)

2007

S. Pettersen (Nor.)

B. Mozo (Spain)

World Cup (men; professional)

Solheim Cup (women; professional)

Ryder Cup (men; professional)

Year

Winner

Year

Result

Year

Result

2005

Wales (S. Dodd and B. Dredge)

2003

Europe 17%, United States 10%

2002

Europe 1544, United States 12%

2006 2007

Germany (B. Langer and M. Siem) Scotland (C. Montgomerie and M. Warren)

2005 2007

United States 151^, Europe 12% | United States 16, Europe 12

2004 2006

Europe 18%, United States 914 Europe 18%, United States 914

342

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record Xinhua/Landov

World Gymnastics Championships—Men Year

All-around team

All-around individual

Horizontal bar

Parallel bars

2005

not held

H. Tomita (Japan)

A. Pegan (Slvn.)

M. Petkovsek (Slvn.)

2006

China

Yang Wei (China)

P. Rizzo (Austl.)

Yang Wei (China)

2007

China

Yang Wei (China)

F. Hambüchen (Ger.)

M. Petkovsek (Slvn.)* Kim Dae Eun (S.Kor.)*

Year

Pommel horse

Rings

Vault

Floor exercise

2005

Xiao Qin (China)

Y. Van Gelder (Neth.)

M. Dragulescu (Rom.)

D. Hypolito (Braz.)

2006

Xiao Qin (China)

Chen Yibing (China)

M. Dragulescu (Rom.)

M. Dragulescu (Rom.)

2007

Xiao Qin (China)

Chen Yibing (China)

L. Blanik (Pol.)

D. Hypolito (Braz.)

*Tied.

World Gymnastics Championships—Women Year

All-around team

All-around individual

Balance beam

2005

not held

C. Memmel (U.S.)

A. Liukin (U.S.)

2006

China

V. Ferrari (Italy)

I. Krasnyanska (Ukr.)

2007

United States

S. Johnson (U.S.)

A. Liukin (U.S.)

Year

Uneven parallel bars

2005

A. Liukin (U.S.)

Cheng Fei (China)

A. Sacramone (U.S.)

2006

E. Tweddle (U.K.)

Cheng Fei (China)

Cheng Fei (China)

Yang Wei of China performs on

2007

K. Semenova (Russia)

Cheng Fei (China)

S. Johnson (U.S.)

the horizontal bar en route

Vault

Floor exercise

to his

second straight men’s all-around gymnastics title.

NHL Final Standings, 2006-07 EASTERN CONFERENCE Northeast Division

Atlantic Division Won

Lost

OTL*

Southeast Division Won

Lost

OTL*

Won

Lost

OTL* 11

TBuffalo

53

22

7

tNew Jersey

49

24

9

TAtlanta

43

28

TOttawa

48

25

9

TPittsburgh

47

24

11

TTampa Bay

44

33

Toronto

40

31

11

TN.Y. Rangers

42

30

10

Carolina

40

34

Montreal

42

34

6

1N.Y. Islanders

40

30

12

Florida

35

31

16

35

41

6

22

48

12

28

40

14

Won

Lost

OTL*

Boston WESTERN

Philadelphia

CONFERENCE

Central Division

Northwest Division Won

Lost

OTL*

TDetroit

50

19

13

+Nashville

51

23

St. Louis

34

Columbus Chicago

33 31

*Overtime losses, worth one point.

Pacific Division Won

Lost

OTL*

TVancouver

49

26

7

TAnaheim

48

20

14

8

TMinnesota

48

26

8

TSan Jose

51

26

5

35

13

TCalgary

43

29

10

+Dallas

50

25

42 42

7 9

Colorado Edmonton

44 32

31 43

7 7

Los Angeles Phoenix

27 31

41 46

14 5

tQualified for play-offs.

The Stanley Cup Season Winner 2004-05

canceled

2005-06 2006-07

Carolina Hurricanes Anaheim Ducks

ICE

Washington

Runner-up

Results

Edmonton Oilers Ottawa Senators

4-3 4-1

World Ice Hockey Championship—Men

World Ice Hockey Championship—Women

Year

Year

Winner

Winner

2005 2006

Czech Republic Sweden

2005 2006*

United States Canada

2007

Canada

2007

Canada

SKATING

*Olympic champion.

World Figure Skating Champions—Men

World Figure Skating Champions—Women

World Figure Skating Champions—Pairs

World Ice Dancing Champions Year Winners

Year

Year

Year

Winners

2005

2005

T. Totmyanina, M. Marinin (Russia)

2005 2006 2007

Winner

S. Lambiel (Switz.) S. Lambiel (Switz.) B. Joubert (Fr.)

2005 2006 2007

Winner

I Slutskaya (Russia) K. Meissner (U.S.) M. Ando (Japan)

2006

+

1

Pang Qing; Tong Jian (China)

2007

2006 2007

T. Navka, R. Kostomarov

(Russia) ai ulg.

A. pe

M. Staviski las M. Staviski

(Bulg.)

Shen Xue, Zhao Hongbo (China)

343

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

ICE SKATING (continued) World Ice Speed-Skating Records Set in 2007 on Major Tracks*

World Ice Speed-Skating Records Set in 2007 on Short Tracks

Event

Event

Name

Country

Result

MEN

Name

Country

Time

MEN

500m

Lee Kang Seok Jeremy Wotherspoon

South Korea Canada

34.25 sec 34.03 sec

none WOMEN

2x500m 1,000 m

Lee Kang Seok Pekka Koskela

South Korea Finland

68.69 sec 1 min 07.00 sec

none

1,500m

Shani Davis

United States

1 min 42.32 sec

Erben Wennemars

Netherlands

1 min 42.32 sect

World All-Around Speed-Skating Champions

6 min 07.48 sec

Year

Men

Women

5,000m

Sven Kramer

Netherlands

Enrico Fabris

Italy

6 min 07.40 sec

Sven Kramer

Netherlands

6 min 03.32 sec

2005

S. Davis (U.S.)

A. Friesinger (Ger.)

10,000 m

Sven Kramer

Netherlands

12 min 49.88 sec

2006

S. Davis (U.S.)

C. Klassen (Can.)

12 min 41.69 sec

2007

S. Kramer (Neth.)

I. Wüst (Neth.)

team pursuit

Sven Kramer Netherlands Netherlands National Team Netherlands

3 min 37.80 sec

(Sven Kramer, Carl Verheijen, Erben Wennemars)

World Short-Track Speed-Skating Championships—Overall Winners

WOMEN 100 mt

Year

Men

Women

2005

Ahn Hyun Soo (S.Kor.)

Jin Sun Yu (S.Kor)

pi

Ronmin ju

"a rs T es

Jenny Wolf

Germany

10.28 sec

Jenny Wolf

Germany

10.22 sec

Jenny Wolf

Germany

37.04 sec

Jenny Wolf

Germany

37.02 sec

World Speed-Skating Sprint Champions

2x500m

Jenny Wolf

Germany

74.42 sec

Year

Men

Women

5,000m

Martina Sablikova

Czech Republic

6 min 45.61 sec

2005

E. Wennemars (Neth.)

2006

J. Cheek (U.S.)

2007

Lee Kyou Hyuk (S.Kor.)

J. Rodriguez (U.S.) ] S. Zhurova (Russia) A. Friesinger (Ger.)

500m

: f Martina Sablikova . Mari Hemmer

10,000 mt : big combo

] Czech Republic Norway

*May include records awaiting ISU ratification at year's end. tNot an officially ratified event; best performance on record.

. 13 min 48.33 sec : 169,574 points

yun

s

Soo (S.Kor)

in

Sun

Yu (S.Kor)

3

tEquals world record.

JUDO Vanderlei Almeida—AFP/Getty Images

World Judo Championships—Men Year

Open weights

60 kg

66 kg

73 kg

2003

K. Suzuki (Japan)

Choi Min Ho (S.Kor.)

A. Miresmaeili (Iran)

Lee Won Hee (S.Kor.)

2005

D. Van der Geest (Neth.)

C. Fallon (GrBrit.)

J. Derly (Braz.)

A. Braun (Hung.)

2007

Y. Muneta (Japan)

R. Houkes (Neth.)

J. Derly (Braz.)

Wang Ki Chun (S.Kor.)

90 kg

100 kg

+100 kg

Year

81kg

2003

F. Wanner (Ger.)

Hwang Hee Tae (S.Kor.)

K. Inoue (Japan)

Y. Muneta (Japan)

2005

G. Elmont (Neth.)

H. Izumi (Japan)

K. Suzuki (Japan)

A. Mikhaylin (Russia)

2007

T. Camilo (Braz.)

I. Tsirekidze (Geo.)

L. Corréa (Braz.)

T. Riner (France)

World Judo Championships—Women Year

Open weights

48 kg

52 kg

57 kg

2003

Tong Wen (China)

R. Tamura (Japan)

A. Savon (Cuba)

Kye Sun Hui (N.Kor.)

2005

M. Shintani (Japan)

Y. Bermoy (Cuba)

Li Ying (China)

Kye Sun Hui (N.Kor.)

2007.

M. Tsukada (Japan)

R. Tamura Tani (Japan)

Shi Junjie (China)

Kye Sun Hui (N.Kor.)

Year

63kg

70 kg

78 kg

+78 kg

2003

D. Krukower (Arg.)

M. Ueno (Japan)

N. Anno (Japan)

Sun Fuming (China)

2005

L. Decosse (Fr.)

E. Bosch (Neth.)

Y. Laborde (Cuba)

Tong Wen (China)

2007

D. González (Cuba)

G. Emane (Fr.)

Y. Laborde (Cuba)

Tong Wen (China)

Men’s World All-Around Rodeo

Championship Year

2005 2006

Winner R. Jarrett T. Brazile

2007

T. Brazile

344

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

At the world judo championships, defending titlist Yurisel Laborde of Cuba (in white) grapples with Sae Nakazawa of Japan in the 78-kg final.

Laborde emerged with her second consecutive gold medal.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

ROWING World Rowing Championships—Men Year

Single sculls

Min:sec

2005

M. Drysdale (N.Z.)

7:16.42

2006

M. Drysdale (N.Z.)

6:35.40

2007

M. Drysdale (N.Z.)

6:45.67

Year

Coxless pairs

Min:sec

2005

G. Bridgewater,

6:52.51

6:18.00

Double sculls

Min:sec

Quadruple sculls

Min:sec

Coxed pairs

Min:sec

L. Spik, I. Cop (Slvn.)

6:37.61

Poland

5:34.96

S. Conrad, H. Cubasch — 7:16.61 (Austl.)

J.-B. Macquet, A. Hardy (Fr)

6:07.60

Poland

5:38.99

L. Spik, I. Cop (Slvn.)

6:16.65

Poland

5:49.42

M. Marjanovic, J. Popovic (Serbia) D. Paczes, L. Kardas (Pol.)

Coxed fours

6:51.27 7:00.10

Min:sec

Coxless fours

Min:sec

Eights

Min:sec

France

6:02.42

Great Britain

6:11.59

Germany

6:05.77

Great Britain

5:43.75

Germany

5:21.85

6:10.36

New Zealand

5:54.24

Canada

5:34.92

United States

5:22.75

N. Twaddle (N.Z.) 2006 2007

D. Ginn, D. Free (Austl.) D. Ginn, D. Free (Austl.)

6:24.89

United States

World Rowing Championships—Women

The Boat Race*

Year

Single sculls

Min:sec

Coxless pairs

2005

Ye. Karsten-Khodotovich (Bela.)

7:48.35

N. Coles, J. Haigh (N.Z.)

7:43.83

ear

2006 2007

Ye. Karsten-Khodotovich (Bela.) Ye. Karsten-Khodotovich (Bela.)

7:11.02 7:26.52

D. Marquardt, J. Rumball (Can.) Yu. Bichyk, N. Helakh (Bela.)

6:54.68 7:06.56

Year

Double sculls

Coxless fours

Min:sec

2005 2006 2007+

2005

7:08.03

Australia

6:55.56

2006

G. Evers-Swindell, C. Evers-Swindell (N.Z.) L. Kell, B. Pratley (Austl.)

6:47.67

Australia

6:25.35

2007

Li Qin, Tian Liang (China)

6:54.38

Year

Quadruple sculls

Min:sec

Eights

Min:sec

2005

Great Britain

6:09.59

Australia

5:58.10

2006

Great Britain*

6:12.50

United States

5:55.50

2007

Great Britain

6:30.81

United States

6:17.20

Min:sec

:

Min:sec

n

Winner's time

Margin of

Winer

(min:sec)

victory

Oxford Oxford Cambridge

16:42 18:26 17:49

2 lengths 5 lengths 1% lengths

*Annual race between the Universities of Cambridge and

United States

Oxford. 1 draw.

tHistoric record: Cambridge 79, Oxford 73,

6:37.94

*Original winner disqualified after one rower failed drug test.

America's Cup Year

Winning yacht

Owner

Skipper

Losing yacht

Owner

2000

Black Magic (N.Z.)

Team New Zealand

R. Coutts

Luna Rossa (Italy)

Prada Challenge

2003

Alinghi (Switz.)

Alinghi Swiss Challenge

R. Coutts

New Zealand (N.Z.)

Team New Zealand

2007

Alinghi (Switz.)

B. Butterworth

New Zealand (N.Z.)

Team New Zealand

Alinghi

World Class Boat Champions, 2007

Admiral's Cup

Bermuda Race* Year

Class

Winner

Country

Year

Winning team

Etchells 22 Finn

A. Beadsworth R. Trujillo

Great Britain Spain

2003 2005

Australia canceled

2002 2004

J/24 Laser

M. Santa Cruz T. Slingsby

Brazil Australia’

2007

canceled

2006

Winning yacht

Zaraffa Alliance Sinn Feint Lively Lady It

Owner

H. Sheldon D. Porco P. Rebovich W. Hubbard III

Laser Women

T. Drozdovskaya

Belarus

Transpacific Race

*St. David's Lighthouse Trophy winner.

RS:X (men’s boards) RS:X (women’s boards)

R. Santos Z. Klepacka

Brazil Poland

Year

Winning yacht

tWinner under Offshore Rating Rule (ORR) scoring. #Winner under IRC scoring.

470 (men’s)

N. Wilmot

Australia

2003

Alta Vita

B. Turpin

470 (women’s)

M. de Koning

Netherlands

2005

Rosebud

R. Sturgeon

49er

S. Morrison

Great Britain

2007

Reinrag2

T. Garnier

2.4 metre

L. Heselius

Sweden

C. Steele T. Hornos

New Zealand United States

Star Tornado

R. Scheidt F. Echavarri

Brazil Spain

Yngling (women’s) Farr 40

S. Ayton V. Onorato

Great Britain Italy

Optimist Snipe

Owner

345

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

SKIING World Alpine Skiing Championships—Slalom Year

| Men's slalom

Men's giant slalom

Men's supergiant slalom

Women's slalom

Women's giant slalom

Women's supergiant slalom

Team

2005

B. Raich (Austria)

H. Maier (Austria)

B. Miller (U.S.)

J. Kostelic (Cro.)

A. Parson (Swed.)

A. Parson (Swed.)

Germany

2006*

B. Raich (Austria)

B. Raich (Austria)

K.A. Aamodt (Nor.)

A. Parson (Swed.)

J. Mancuso (U.S.)

M. Dorfmeister (Austria)

2007

M. Matt (Austria)

A. Svindal (Nor.)

P. Staudacher (Italy)

S. Zahrobska (Cz.Rep.)

N. Hosp (Austria)

A. Párson (Swed.)

Austria

*Olympic champions.

World Alpine Skiing Championships—Downhill

World Alpine Skiing Championships—Combined

Year

Men

Women

Year

Men

Women

2005

B. Miller (U.S.)

J. Kostelic (Cro.)

2005

B. Raich (Austria)

J. Kostelic (Cro.)

2006*

A. Dénériaz (Fr.)

M. Dorfmeister (Austria)

2006*

2007

A. Svindal (Nor.)

A. Pärson (Swed.)

2007

*Olympic champions.

T.Ligety (U.S.)

J. Kostelic (Cro.)

D. Albrecht (Switz.)

A. Pärson (Swed.)

*Olympic champions.

World Nordic Skiing Championships—Men Year

Sprint

Team sprint

Double pursuit

15-km

2005

V. Rochev (Russia)

Norway

V. Vittoz (Fr.)

P. Piller Cottrer (Italy)

2006* 2007

B.Lind (Swed.)

Sweden

J.A. Svartedal (Nor)

30-km

A. Veerpalu (Est.)

Italy

A. Teichmann (Ger.)

Ye. Dementyev (Russia)

L. Berger (Nor.)

50-km

Relay

F. Estil (Nor.)

Norway

G. Di Centa (Italy)

Italy

O.-B. Hjelmeset (Nor)

Norway

30-km

Relay

M. Bjørgen (Nor.)

Norway

K. Neumannova (Cz.Rep.)

Russia

V. Kuitunen (Fin.)

Finland

*Olympic champions.

World Nordic Skiing Championships—Women Year

Sprint

Team sprint

Double pursuit

10-km

15-km

2005

E. Óhrstig (Swed.)

Norway

Yu. Chepalova (Russia)

K. Neumannova (Cz.Rep.)

2006*

C. Crawford (Can.)

Sweden

2007

A. Jacobsen (Nor.)

Finland

K. Smigun (Est.) O. Savyalova (Russia)

K. Neumannova

K. Smigun (Est.) (Cz.Rep.)

*Olympic champions.

World Nordic Skiing Championships—Ski Jump Year

Normal hill (90 m)*

Large hill (120 m)

2005

R. Benkovic (Slvn.)

J. Ahonen (Fin.)

2006}

L. Bystøl (Nor.)

T. Morgenstern (Austria)

2007

A. Malysz (Pol.)

S. Ammann

*95-m hill in 2006; 100-m hill in 2007.

Team jump

Team jump

Nordic combined

Nordic combined

Nordic combined

(normal hill)

(large hill)

(7.5-km)

(15-km)

Team

Austria

R. Ackermann (Ger)

R. Ackermann (Ger.)

Norway

Austria

F. Gottwald (Austria)

G. Hettich (Ger.)

Austria

Austria

H. Manninen (Fin.)

R. Ackermann (Ger.)

Finland

Austria

(Switz.)

t125-m hill in 2006; 134-m hill in 2007.

Alpine World Cup

Olympic champions.

Luca Bruno/AP

Freestyle Skiing World Cup

Year

Men

Women

Year

Men

Women

2005

B. Miller (U.S.)

A. Parson (Swed.)

2005

J. Bloom (U.S.)

Li Nina (China)

2006

B. Raich (Austria)

J. Kostelic (Cro.)

2006

T. Kraus (Cz.Rep.)

O. David (Fr.)

2007

A. Svindal (Nor.)

N. Hosp (Austria)

2007

D. Begg-Smith (Austl.) J. Heil (Can.)

Nordic World Cup

Snowboard World Cup

Year

Men

Women

Year

Men

Women

2005

A. Teichmann (Ger)

M. Bjørgen (Nor)

2005

P. Schoch (Switz.)

D. Meuli (Switz.)

2006 2007

T. Angerer (Ger.) T. Angerer (Ger.)

M. Bjørgen (Nor.) V. Kuitunen (Fin.)

2006 | nooverall champion 2007 S.Schoch (Switz.)

no overall champion D. Krings (Austria)

SQUASH British Open Championship—Men

British Open Championship—Women

Year

Winner

Year

Winner

2005

A. Ricketts (Austl.)

2005

N. David (Malay.)

2006

N. Matthew (Eng.)

2006

N. David (Malay.)

2007

G. Gaultier (Fr.)

2007

R. Grinham (Austl.)

World Open Championship—Men

World Open Championship—Women

Year 2005

Winner A. Shabana (Egypt)

Year 2005

Winner N. David (Malay)

Swedish skier Anja Parson shows off the three gold medals that she

2007

A. Shabana (Egypt)

2007

R. Grinham (Austl.)

championships in February.

2006

D. Palmer (Austl.)

346

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2006

N. David (Malay.)

captured at the Alpine world

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

SWIMMING World Swimming Records Set in 2007 in 25-m Pools* Event

Name

Country

World Swimming Records Set in 2007 in 50-m Pools* Time

Event

MEN

Name

Country

Time

200-m individual medley

Michael Phelps Aaron Peirsol Ryan Lochte Michael Phelps Michael Phelps ; Michael Phelps

United United United United United : United

e EQ 4 x 200-m freestyle relay

United States

United States

aad 7 min 03.24 sec

Federica Pellegrini

Ttaly

1 min 56.47 sec

Laure Manaudou Kate Ziegler Leila Vaziri Leila Vaziri Natalie Coughlin Katie Hoff United States (Natalie Coughlin, Dana Vollmer, Lacey Nymeyer, Katie Hoff) Australia (Emily Seebohm, Leisel Jones, Jessicah Schipper, Lisbeth Lenton)

France United United United United United United

. 1 min 55.52 sec 15 min 42.54 sec 28.16 sec 28.16 sect 59.44 sec 4 min 32.89 sec 7 min 50.09 sec

MEN

50-m freestyle 100-m freestyle 200-m individual medley 4 x 100-m freestyle relay

4 x 200-m freestyle relay

Stefan Nystrand Stefan Nystrand Thiago Pereira France (Fabien Gilot, Gregory Mallet, Romain Caffet, SF

PUE EH

Australia (Kirk Palmer, Grant Hackett,

Sweden Sweden Brazil France

20.93 45.83 1 min 3 min

sec sec 53.14 sec 08.29 sec

200-m freestyle 100-m backstroke 200-m backstroke 200-m butterfly Ao

Australia

6 min 52.66 sec

400-m

hind

individual

medley ^ Michael Phel a Ee

Grant Brits

United StatesBue = =

4 ermin 06.22

(Michael Phelps,

; , Kenrick Monk EERE

States — 1 min 43.86 sec States 52.98 sec States 1 min 54.32 sec States 1 min 53.71 sec States 1 min 52.09 sec > States 1 min 54.98 sec

Ryan y Lochte

enk)

Klete Keller,

WOMEN

i

Peter Vanderkaay)

50-m freestyle 4 x 100-m freestyle relay

Marleen Veldhuis Australia (Lisbeth

Netherlands Australia

23.58 sec 3 min 31.66 sec

WOMEN 200-m freestyle

Lenton, Melanie

Schlanger, Shaynel 1,500-m freestyle

Reese, Alice Mills)

50-m backstroke

*May include records awaiting FINA ratification at year's end.

100-m backstroke 400-m individual medley 4 x 200-m freestyle relay

4 x 100-m medley relay

States States States States States States

Australia

*May include records awaiting FINA ratification at year's end.

3 min 55.74 sec

tEquals world record.

Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

At the 2007 world swimming championships, Michael Phelps of the U.S. swims the butterfly in the 400-m individual medley, one of five events in which he won an individual gold medal. World Swimming and Diving Championships—Men Freestyle Year

2003 2005 2007

50m

100 m

200 m

400 m

800 m

1,500 m

A. Popov (Russia) R. Schoeman (S.Af.) B. Wildman-Tobriner (U.S.)

A. Popov (Russia) F. Magnini (Italy) F. Magnini (Italy)

I. Thorpe (Austl.) M. Phelps (U.S.) M. Phelps (U.S.)

I. Thorpe (Austl.) G. Hackett (Austl.) Park Tae Hwan (S.Kor.)

G. Hackett (Austl.) G. Hackett (Austl.) P. Stanczyk (Pol.)*

G. Hackett (Austl.) G. Hackett (Austl.) M. Sawrymowicz (Pol.)

Backstroke

2003 2005 2007

Breaststroke

50m

100m

200m

50m

100 m

200m

T. Rupprath (Ger.) A. Grigoriadis (Greece) G. Zandberg (S.Af.)

A. Peirsol (U.S.) A. Peirsol (U.S.)

A. Peirsol (U.S.) A. Peirsol (U.S.)

J. Gibson (U.K.) M. Warnecke (Ger.)

K. Kitajima (Japan) B. Hansen (U.S.)

K. Kitajima (Japan) B. Hansen (U.S.)

A. Peirsol (U.S.)

R. Lochte (U.S.)

O. Lisogor (Ukr.)

B. Hansen (U.S.)

K. Kitajima (Japan)

Butterfly 50m 2003 2005 2007

Individual medley 100m

M. Welsh (Austl.) I. Crocker (U.S.) R. Schoeman (S.Af.) — I. Crocker (U.S.) R. Schoeman (S.Af.) M. Phelps (U.S.)

200 m

200 m

M. Phelps (U.S.) M. Phelps (U.S.) P. Korzeniowski (Pol.) ^ M. Phelps (U.S.) M. Phelps (U.S.) M. Phelps (U.S.)

Team relays 400 m

4 x 100-m freestyle

M. Phelps (U.S.) L. Cseh (Hung.) M. Phelps (U.S.)

Russia United States United States

Diving 4 x 200-m freestyle 2003 2005 2007

Australia United States United States

4 x 100-m medley United States United States Australia

1-m springboard

3-m springboard

Xu Xiang (China) A. Despatie (Can.) Luo Yutong (China)

A. Dobrosok (Russia) A. Despatie (Can.) Qin Kai (China)

Platform A. Despatie (Can.) Hu Jia (China) G. Galperin (Russia)

3-m synchronized — 10-m synchronized Russia China China

Australia Russia China

*Original winner stripped after failing drug test.

347

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

SWIMMING (continued) World Swimming and Diving Championships—Women Freestyle Year

2003

50m

100 m

200 m

400 m

800 m

1,500 m

I. de Bruijn (Neth.)

H.-M. Seppala

A. Popchanka

H. Stockbauer (Ger.)

H. Stockbauer (Ger.)

H. Stockbauer (Ger.)

(Fin.)

(Bela.)

2005

L. Lenton (Austl.)

J. Henry (Austl.)

S. Figues (Fr.)

L. Manaudou (Fr)

K. Ziegler (U.S.)

K. Ziegler (U.S.)

2007

L. Lenton (Austl.)

L. Lenton (Austl.)

L. Manaudou (Fr.)

L. Manaudou (Fr.)

K. Ziegler (U.S.)

K. Ziegler (U.S.)

Backstroke

Breaststroke

50m

100 m

200 m

50m

100 m

200m

2003

N. Zhivanevskaya (Spain)

A. Buschschulte (Ger)

K. Sexton (U.K.)

Luo Xuejuan (China)

Luo Xuejuan (China)

A. Beard (U.S.)

2005

G. Rooney (Austl.)

K. Coventry (Zimb.)

| K. Coventry (Zimb.)

L. Jones (Austl.)

L. Jones (Austl.)

2007

L. Vaziri (U.S.)

N. Coughlin (U.S.)

M. Hoelzer (U.S.)

L. Jones (Austl.)

L. Jones (Austl.)

Butterfly

— J. Edmistone (Austl.) J. Hardy (U.S.)

Individual medley

Team relays

50m

100 m

200 m

200 m

400 m

4 x 100-m freestyle

2003

I. de Bruijn (Neth.)

J. Thompson (U.S.)

O.Jedrzejezak (Pol)

Ya. Klochkova (Ukr)

Ya. Klochkova (Ukr)

United States

2005

D. Miatke (Austl.)

J. Schipper (Austl.)

O.Jedrzejezak (Pol)

K. Hoff (U.S.)

K. Hoff (U.S.)

Australia

L. Lenton (Austl.)

J. Schipper (Austl.)

K. Hoff (U.S.)

Australia

2007

T.Alshammar (Swed.)

K. Hoff (U.S.)

Diving

4 x 200-m freestyle

4 x 100-m medley

1-m springboard

3-m springboard

Platform

3-m synchronized — 10-m synchronized

2003

United States

China

I. Lashko (Austl.)

Guo Jingjing (China)

E. Heymans (Can.)

China

China

2005

United States

Australia

B. Hartley (Can.)

Guo Jingjing (China)

L. Wilkinson (U.S.)

China

China

2007

United States

Australia

He Zi (China)

Guo Jingjing (China)

Wang Xin (China)

China

China

World Table Tennis Championships—Men

Australian Open Tennis Championships—Singles

Year

St. Bride’s Vase (singles)

Iran Cup (doubles)

Year

Men

Women

2003

W. Schlager (Austria)

Wang Liqin, Yan Sen (China)

2005

M. Safin (Russia)

S. Williams (U.S.)

2005

Wang Liqin (China)

Kong Linghui, Wang Hao (China)

2006

R. Federer (Switz.)

A. Mauresmo (Fr.)

2007

Wang Ligin (China)

Chen Qi, Ma Lin (China)

2007

JR. Federer (Switz.)

S. Williams (U.S.)

World Table Tennis Championships—Women

Australian Open Tennis Championships—Doubles

Year

G. Geist Prize (singles)

W.J. Pope Trophy (doubles)

Year

Men

Women

2003 2005

Wang Nan (China) Zhang Yining (China)

Wang Nan, Zhang Yining (China) Wang Nan, Zhang Yining (China)

2005 2006

W. Black, K. Ullyett B. Bryan, M. Bryan

S. Kuznetsova, A. Molik Yan Zi, Zheng Jie

2007

Guo Yue (China)

Wang Nan, Zhang Yining (China)

2007

B. Bryan, M. Bryan

C. Black, L. Huber

World Table Tennis Championships—Mixed Year

French Open Tennis Championships—Singles

Heydusek Prize

Year

Men

Women

2003

Ma Lin, Wang Nan (China)

2005

R. Nadal (Spain)

J. Henin-Hardenne (Belg.)

2005 2007

Guo Yue, Wang Liqin (China) Guo Yue, Wang Liqin (China)

2006

R. Nadal (Spain)

J. Henin-Hardenne (Belg.)

2007

R. Nadal (Spain)

J. Henin (Belg.)

World Table Tennis Championships—Team

French Open Tennis Championships—Doubles

Swaythling Cup (men)

Corbillon Cup (women)

Year

Men

Women

2005

J. Bjorkman, M. Mirnyi

V. Ruano Pascual, P. Suárez

2001

China

China

2006

J. Bjorkman, M. Mirnyi

L. Raymond, S. Stosur

2004 2006

China China

China China

2007

M. Knowles, D. Nestor

A. Molik, M. Santangelo

Year

Table Tennis World Cup

All-England (Wimbledon) Tennis Championships—Singles Year

Men

Women

2005

R. Federer (Switz.)

V. Williams (U.S.)

2006

R. Federer (Switz.)

A. Mauresmo (Fr.)

2007

R. Federer (Switz.)

V. Williams (U.S.)

Year

Men

2005

T. Boll (Ger.)

2006

Ma Lin (China)

2007

Wang Hao (China)

Year

Women

2005 2006

Zhang Yining (China) Guo Yan (China)

Year

Men

Women

2007

Wang Nan (China)

2005

S. Huss, W. Moodie

C. Black, L. Huber

2006

B. Bryan, M. Bryan

Yan Zi, Zheng Jie

2007

A. Clément, M. Llodra

C. Black, L. Huber

348

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

All-England (Wimbledon) Tennis Championships—Doubles

Sports and Games: Sporting Record Toshifumi Kitamura—AFP/Getty Images

TENNIS (continued) United States Open Tennis Championships—Singles Year

Men

Women

2005

R. Federer (Switz.)

2006

R. Federer (Switz.)

K. Clijsters (Belg.) M. Sharapova (Russia)

2007

R. Federer (Switz.)

J. Henin (Belg.)

United States Open Tennis Championships—Doubles Year

Men

Women

2005

B. Bryan, M. Bryan

L. Raymond, S. Stosur

2006

M. Damm,

2007

S. Aspelin, J. Knowle

N. Dechy, V. Zvonareva N. Dechy, D. Safina

L. Paes

Davis Cup (men) Year

Winner

2005

Croatia

2006

Runner-up

Russia

2007

Results

Slovakia

3-2

Argentina

3-2

United States

Russia

4-1

Runner-up

Results

Fed Cup (women) Year

Winner

2005

Russia

France

3-2

2006

Italy

Belgium

3-2

2007

Russia

Italy

4-0

TRACK AND FIELD SPORTS (ATHLETICS) World Outdoor Track and Field Championships—Men

Event

At the IAAF world outdoor championships, Tyson Gay of the U.S. lunges across the finish line to win the 100-m final, followed by Derrick Atkins of The Bahamas (bottom) and world record holder Asafa Powell of Jamaica (top). World Outdoor Track and Field Championships—Women

2005

2007

2005

2007

J. Gatlin (U.S.)

T. Gay (U.S.)

L. Williams (U.S.)

V. Campbell (Jam.)

200m 400 m

J. Gatlin (U.S.) J. Wariner (U.S.)

T. Gay (U.S.) J. Wariner (U.S.)

200m 400m

A. Felix (U.S.) T. Williams-Daring (Bah.

A. Felix (U.S.) C. Ohuruogu (U.K.)

800m

R. Ramzi (Bahrain)

A.K. Yego (Kenya)

800m

Z. Calatayud (Cuba)

J. Jepkosgei (Kenya)

R. Ramzi (Bahrain)

B. Lagat (U.S.)

,500m

T. Tomashova (Russia)

M.Y. Jamal (Bahrain)

5,000 m 0,000 m

B. Limo (Kenya) K. Bekele (Eth.)

B. Lagat (U.S.) K. Bekele (Eth.)

5,000 m 0,000 m

T. Dibaba (Eth.) T. Dibaba (Eth.)

M. Defar (Eth.) T. Dibaba (Eth.)

steeplechase

S.S. Shaheen (Qatar)

B.K. Kipruto (Kenya)

steeplechase

D. Inzikuru (Uganda)

Ye. Volkova (Russia)

10-m hurdles

L. Doucouré (Fr.)

Liu Xiang (China)

M. Perry (U.S.)

M. Perry (U.S.)

B. Jackson (U.S.)

K. Clement (U.S.)

00-m hurdles 400-m hurdles

400-m hurdles marathon

Yu. Pechonkina (Russia)

J. Rawlinson (Austl.)

J. Gharib (Mor.)

L. Kibet (Kenya)

P. Radcliffe (U.K.)

C. Ndereba (Kenya)

20-km walk 50-km walk

J. Pérez (Ecua.)

J. Pérez (Ecua.)

marathon 20-km walk

O. Ivanova (Russia)

O. Kaniskina (Russia)

S. Kirdyapkin (Russia)

N. Deakes (Austl.)

4 x 100-m relay

4 x 100-m relay

France (L. Doucouré, R. Pognon, E. de Lépine,

United States (D. Patton, W. Spearmon, T. Gay, L. Dixon)

United States (A. Daigle, M. Lee, M. Barber, L. Williams)

United States (L. Williams, A. Felix, M. Barber, T. Edwards)

4 x 400-m relay

Russia (Yu. Pechonkina,

United States (D. Trotter, A. Felix, M. Wineberg, S. Richards)

00m

,500m

L. Dovy) 4 x 400-m relay

United States (A. Rock, D. Brew, D. Williamson, J. Wariner)

United States (L. Merritt, A. Taylor, D. Williamson, J. Wariner)

high jump

Yu. Krymarenko (Ukr)

D. Thomas (Bahamas)

pole vault long jump

R. Blom (Neth.)

B. Walker (U.S.)

D. Phillips (U.S.)

I. Saladino (Pan.)

triple jump shot put

W. Davis (U.S.)

N. Evora (Port.)

A. Nelson (U.S.)

R. Hoffa (U.S.)

discus throw hammer throw

V. Alekna (Lith.)

G. Kanter (Est.)

I. Tikhon (Bela.)

javelin throw decathlon

Event 00m

O. Krasnomovets,

N. Antyukh, S. Pospelova) high jump pole vault

K. Bergqvist (Swed.) Ye. Isinbayeva (Russia)

Ye. Isinbayeva (Russia)

long jump triple jump

T. Madison (U.S.)

T. Lebedeva (Russia)

T. Smith (Jam.)

Y. Savigne (Cuba)

shot put discus throw

N. Ostapchuk (Bela.)

V. Vili (N.Z.)

F. Dietzsch (Ger.)

F. Dietzsch (Ger.)

O. Kuzenkova (Russia)

B. Heidler (Ger.)

I. Tikhon (Bela.)

hammer throw javelin throw

O. Menéndez (Cuba)

B. Spotakova (Cz.Rep.)

A. Varnik (Est.)

T. Pitkämäki (Fin.)

heptathlon

C. Klüft (Swed.)

C. Klüft (Swed.)

B. Clay (U.S.)

R. Sebrle (Cz.Rep.)

B. Vlasic (Cro.)

349

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

TRACK AND FIELD SPORTS (ATHLETICS) (continued) World Indoor Track and Field Championships—Men

2007 World Indoor Records—Women*

Event

2004

2006

Competitor and country

Performance

60m

J. Gardener (U.K.)

L. Scott (U.S.)

3,000 m

Meseret Defar (Eth.)

8 min 23.72 sec

200 m 400 m

D. Demeritte (Bah.) A. Francique (Grenada)

not held A. Francique (Grenada)

5,000 m 4 x 800-m relay

Tirunesh Dibaba (Eth.) Russia (Anna Balakshina, Natalya

14 min 27.42 sec 8 min 18.54 sec

800 m

M. Mulaudzi (S.Af.)

W. Bungei (Kenya) I. Heshko (Ukr)

pole vault

Pantelyeva, Anna Yemashova, Olesya Chumakova) Yelena Isinbayeva (Russia)

1,500 mm

P. Korir (Kenya)

4.93 m (16 ft 2 in)

3,000m 60-m hurdles

B. Lagat (Kenya)

K. Bekele (Eth.)

20-Ib weightt

Brittany Riley (U.S.)

24.57 m (80 ft 7% in)

A. Johnson (U.S.)

T. Trammell (U.S.)

Brittany Riley (U.S.)

25.05 m (82 ft 2% in)

4 x 400-m relay

Jamaica (G. Haughton,

United States (T. Washington,

Brittany Riley (U.S.)

25.56 m (83 ft 10% in)

L. Colquhoun, M. McDonald, D. Clarke)

Event

L. Merritt, M. Campbell, W. Spearmon)

high jump

S. Holm (Swed.)

Ya. Rybakov (Russia)

pole vault

I. Pavlov (Russia)

B. Walker (U.S.)

long jump

S. Stringfellow (U.S.)

I. Gaisah (Ghana)

triple jump

C. Olsson (Swed.)

W. Davis (U.S.)

shot put

C. Cantwell (U.S.)

R. Hoffa (U.S.)

heptathlon

R. Sebrle (Cz.Rep.)

A. Niklaus (Ger.)

*May include records awaiting IAAF ratification at year's end. event; best performance on record.

2007 World Outdoor Records—Men* Event

World Indoor Track and Field Championships—Women Event

2004

2006

G. N. N. M.

1,500m

K. Dulecha (Eth.)

Yu. Chizhenko (Russia)

60-m hurdles

P. Felicien (Can.)

D. O'Rourke (Ire.)

4 x 400-m relay

Russia (O. Krasnomovets, O. Kotlyarova, T. Levina, N. Nazarova)

Russia (T. Levina, N. Nazarova,

M. Defar (Eth.)

Competitor and country

Performance

100x 20,000 m

Asafa Powell Jam.) Haile Gebrselassie (Eth.)

9/4 sec 56 min 25.98 sec

one hour

Haile Gebrselassie (Eth.)

21.285 km

half marathont

Samuel Kamau Wanjiru (Kenya)

58 min 33 sec

Haile Gebrselassie (Eth.)

2 hr 04 min 26 sec

15-km road race

Samuel Kamau Wanjiru (Kenya)

41 min 29 sect

20-km walking 4x 110-m hurdles relay}

Vladimir Kanaykin (Russia) United States (Ron Bramlett, Anwar Moore, David Payne, Aries Merritt)

1 hr 17 min 16 sec 53.36 sec

*May include records awaiting IAAF ratification at year’s end.

tNot an officially ratified

marathont

$038 200 m 400 m 800 m

3,000 m

Devers (U.S.) Safronnikova (Bela.)* Nazarova (Russia) Mutola (Mozam.)

tNot an officially ratified

M. Barber (U.S) not held O. Krasnomovets (Russia) M. Mutola (Mozam.)

M. Defar (Eth.)

O. Krasnomovets,

N. Antyukh) Ye. Slesarenko (Russia)

event; best performance on record.

tEquals world record.

2007 World Outdoor Records—Women* Event

Competitor and country

Performance

two milest

T. Lebedeva (Russia) T. Lebedeva (Russia)

Ye. Isinbayeva (Russia) T. Kotova (Russia) T. Lebedeva (Russia)

5,000 m

Meseret Defar (Eth.) Meseret Defar (Eth.) Meseret Defar (Eth.)

9 min 10.47 sec 8 min 58.58 sec 14 min 16.63 sec

S. Krivelyova (Russia)* N. Gomes (Port.)

N. Khoroneko (Bela.) L. Blonska (Ukr.)

half marathont hammer throw

Lornah Kiplagat (Neth.) Tatyana Lysenko (Russia)

1 hr 6 min 25 sec 78.61 m (257 ft 11 in)

high jump pole vault

Ye. Slesarenko (Russia) Ye. Isinbayeva (Russia)

long jump triple jump shot put pentathlon

*Original winner disqualified after failed drug test.

*May include records awaiting IAAF ratification at year's end.

tNot an officially ratified

event; best performance on record.

2007 World Indoor Records—Men* Event

Competitor and country

Performance

2,000 mt

Kenenisa Bekele (Rth.)

4 min 49.99 sec

*May include records awaiting IAAF ratification at year’s end.

tNot an officially ratified

event; best performance on record.

Boston Marathon Year

Men

2005

H. Negussie (Eth.)

2006

London Marathon hr:min:sec

Year

Men

2:11:45

2005

M. Lel (Kenya)

R.K. Cheruiyot (Kenya)

2:07:14

2006

2007

R.K. Cheruiyot (Kenya)

2:14:13

Year

Women

2005

C. Ndereba (Kenya)

2006 2007

Berlin Marathon Year

Men

hr:min:sec

2:07:26

2005

P. Manyim (Kenya)

2:07:41

EF. Limo (Kenya)

2:06:39

2006

H. Gebrselassie (Eth.)

2:05:56

2007

M. Lel (Kenya)

2:07:41

2007

H. Gebrselassie (Eth.)

2:04:26

Year

Women

Year

Women

hr:min:sec

2:25:13

2005

P. Radcliffe (U.K.)

2:17:42

2005

M. Noguchi (Japan)

2:19:12

R. Jeptoo (Kenya)

2:23:38

2006

D. Kastor (U.S.)

2:19:36

2006

G. Wami (Eth.)

2:21:34

L. Grigoryeva (Russia)

2:29:18

2007

Zhou Chunxiu (China)

2:20:38

2007

G. Wami (Eth.)

2:23:17

hr:min:sec

Chicago Marathon Year

Men

2005

EF. Limo (Kenya)

2006

hr:min:sec

hr:min:sec

New York City Marathon Year

Men

hr:min:sec

2:07:04

2005

P. Tergat (Kenya)

2:09:30

R.K. Cheruiyot (Kenya)

2:07:35

2006

M. Gomes dos Santos (Braz.)

2:09:58

2007

P. Ivuti (Kenya)

2:11:11

2007

M. Lel (Kenya)

2:09:04

Year

Women

Year

Women

hr:min:sec

2005

D. Kastor (U.S.)

2:21:24

2005

J. Prokopcuka (Latvia)

2:24:41

2006

B. Adere (Eth.)

2:20:42

2006

J. Prokopcuka (Latvia)

2:25:05

2007

B. Adere (Eth.)

2:33:49

2007

P. Radcliffe (U.K.)

2:23:09

350

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

hr:min:sec

hr:min:sec

Sports and Games: Sporting Record

TRACK AND FIELD SPORTS (ATHLETICS) (continued) World Cross Country Championships—Men

World Cross Country Championships—Women

Year

Individual

Team

Year

Individual

Team

2005

K. Bekele (Eth.)

Ethiopia

2005

T. Dibaba (Eth.)

Ethiopia

2006

K. Bekele (Eth.)

Kenya

2006

T. Dibaba (Eth.)

Ethiopia

2007

Z. Tadesse (Eritrea)

Kenya

2007

L. Kiplagat (Neth.)

Ethiopia

Beach Volleyball World Championships

World Volleyball Championships

Year

Women

Year

Men

Women

Men

2003

R. Santos, E. Rego (Braz.)

M. May, K. Walsh (U.S.)

2002

Brazil

Italy

2005

M. Araujo, F. Magalhães (Braz.)

M. May-Treanor, K. Walsh (U.S.)

2004*

Brazil

China

2007

P. Dalhausser, T. Rogers (U.S.)

M. May-Treanor, K. Walsh (U.S.)

2006

Brazil

Russia

*Olympic champions.

WEIGHTLIFTING World Weightlifting Champions, 2007 WOMEN

MEN

Weight class 56 kg (123 Ib) 62 kg (136.5 Ib) 69 kg (152 Ib) 77 kg (169.5 Ib) 85 kg (187 1b) 94 kg (207 Ib) 105 kg (231 Ib) +105 kg (+231 Ib)

Winner (country)

Performance

Cha Kum Chol (N.Kor)

283 315 347 363 393 397 423 442

Yang Fan (China)

Zhang Guozheng (China) Ivan Stoitsov (Bulg.)

Andrey Rybakou (Bela.) Roman Konstantinov (Russia) Andrey Aramnau (Bela.) Viktors Scerbatihs (Latvia)

kg kg kg kg kg kg kg kg

Weight class

(623.9 (694.5 (765.0 (800.3 (866.4 (875.2 (932.5 (974.4

Ib) Ib) Ib) Ib) Ib) Ib) Ib) Ib)

48 53 58 63 69 75

ke kg kg kg kg kg

(105.5 Ib) (116.5 Ib) (127.5 Ib) (138.5 Ib) (152 Ib) (165 Ib)

+75 kg (+165 lb)

Winner (country)

Performance

Chen Xiexia (China)

214 kg (471.8 Ib)

Li Ping (China)

219 kg (482.8 Ib) 238 kg (524.7 Ib)

Qiu Hongmei (China)

Cao Lei (China)

257 kg (566.6 Ib) 276 kg (608.5 Ib) 286 kg (630.5 Ib)

Jang Mi Ran (S.Kor.)

319 kg (703.3 Ib)

Liu Haixia (China) Oksana Slivenko (Russia)

World Wrestling Championships—Freestyle Year

55 kg

60 kg

66 kg

74 kg

2005 2006 2007

D. Mansurov (Uzbek.) R. Velikov (Bulg.) B. Kudukhov (Russia)

A. Dudayev (Russia) S. Mohammadi (Iran) M. Batirov (Russia)

M. Murtazaliyev (Russia) B. Zadick (U.S.) R. Shahin (Tur.)

B. Saytyev (Russia) I. Aldatov (Ukr.) M. Murtazaliyev (Russia)

84 kg

96 kg

120 kg

2005

R. Mindorashvili (Geo.)

K. Gatsalov (Russia)

A. Polatci (Tur.)

2006

S. Sazhidov (Russia)

K. Gatsalov (Russia)

A. Taymazov (Uzbek.)

2007

G. Ketoyev (Russia)

K. Gatsalov (Russia)

B. Makhov (Russia)

Year

World Wrestling Championships—Greco-Roman Style Year

55 kg

60 kg

66 kg

74 kg

2005

H. Surian-Reyhanpur (Iran)

A. Nazaryan (Bulg.)

N. Gergov (Bulg.)

V. Samurgashev (Russia)

2006

H. Surian-Reyhanpur (Iran)

J. Warren (U.S.)

Li Yanyan (China)

V. Shatskym (Ukr.)

D. Bedinadze (Geo.)

F. Mansurov (Azer.)

Y. Yanakiev (Bulg.)

2007

H.SSurian-Reyhanpur (Iran)

Year

84kg

96 kg

120 kg

2005 2006 2007

A. Selimau (Bela.) M. Abdelfatah (Egypt) A. Mishin (Russia)

H. Yerlikaya (Tur.) H. Nabi (Est.) R. Nozadze (Geo.)

M. López (Cuba) K. Boroyev (Russia) M. López (Cuba)

Sumo Tournament Champions, 2007 Tournament Hatsu Basho (New Years tournament) Haru Basho (spring tournament)

Location Tokyo Osaka

Winner Asashoryu Hakuho Hakuho

Winner's record 141 13-2

Natsu Basho (summer tournament)

Tokyo

Nagoya Basho (Nagoya tournament)

Nagoya

Aki Basho (autumn tournament)

Tokyo

Hakuho

13-2

Kyushu Basho (Kyushu tournament)

Fukuoka

Hakuho

12-3

Asashoryu

15-0

14-1

351

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

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4

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs New GOVERNMENTS formed in Australia and the U.K., while a VACUUM was left in the leadership in Belgium and Lebanon. Though "THE TROUBLES" in Northern Ireland came to an end, unrest gripped much of the world in 2007. STATES OF EMERGENCY were called in Pakistan and Georgia; MONKS

demonstrated in Myanmar (Burma); civil war flared again in Sri Lanka; and SUICIDE BOMBERS in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed hundreds of lives. Meanwhile, countries worldwide

grappled with the effects of GLOBAL WARMING.

UNITED NATIONS hroughout 2007 the upsurge in UN peace and security op-

erations continued to break all-time

levels, with

Darfur

province in The Sudan leading the list of major humanitarian crises. Efforts to halt nuclear weapons proliferation met with mixed success. Progress on attaining the Millennium

Taliban

and

al-Qaeda

forces,

driven from Afghanistan half a decade earlier,

had

returned

and

had

been

sonnel in the field. The total was expected to exceed 140,000 when previously authorized missions were fully deployed. A total of 119 UN member states were contributing uniformed personnel to these operations, with

gathering strength since late 2006. Afghanistan’s illegal opium trade was more active than ever before during 2007 and provided important financing for the Taliban resurgence, while NATO and Afghanistan’s feeble central government did little to halt it. More than five million Afghan refugees had returned since 2002, yet another three million remained in Iran and Pakistan. On July 31, 2007, the Security Council authorized the African Union/United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID). The main purpose of UNAMID was to support the implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement and to protect civilians and humanitarian relief workers. When fully deployed, the mission would consist of up to

Pakistan, Bangladesh,

19,555 troops,

Development Goals (MDGs) was not on

target, but the fight against HIV/AIDS showed signs of improvement. The United Nations began the year with a new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, who faced unprecedented financial woes and challenges on many fronts. Peacekeeping and Security. In November 2007 the United Nations was engaged in 18 peacekeeping operations and 13 additional peace-related field missions and offices, with well over 100,000 per-

and India lead-

ing the list. In late July 2006 the government of Iraq and the United Nations, with the support of the World Bank, launched the five-year International Compact with Iraq. This agreement committed the UN to assisting Iraq in rebuilding a stable and prosperous postwar polity. The UN found itself in an extremely dif ficult position,

however.

The

U.S.,

one of the UN’s major member 354

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

as

states

in the country to more than 1,000,000. On a more positive note, the UN Inte-

grated Office in Burundi, which was established in late 2006 to support the September 2006 Comprehensive Ceasefire Agreement between the Burundi government and the rebel National Liberation Forces, helped to facilitate the formation in November 2007 of a new government in Bujumbura.

and a permanent member of the Security Council, closely guarded its prerogatives as the main arbiter of conditions in the region. By the end of 2007, the International Compact was largely illusory as Iraq remained mired in violence and instability. The

violence in 2007, and between February and December more than 600,000 people fled from strife-ridden Mogadishu, bringing the total displaced population

In September the Security Council, in cooperation with the European Union, created a new multidimensional “presence” in Chad and the Central African Republic, designed to create the conditions necessary for reestablishing security and peace. The new presence included the creation of a small peace mission, the United Nations Mission in

the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT).

The

maximum

author-

ized strength of MINURCAT was 300 police and 50 military liaison officers, along with civilian personnel, but initially it consisted of only three military observers. Nuclear Proliferation. In mid-November 2007 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran's nuclear program was moving forward and that it had missed a crucial reporting deadline. Although Iran had made new disclosures about its nuclear program, the information it provided to the IAEA was incomplete. The report stated that Iran had ignored the Security Council's demand that it stop enriching uranium and that the country had increased centrifuge production 10-fold during the previous

year

With

trifuges in operation, Iran the capacity to uranium to make a within 12-18 months.

some

3,000

cen-

this would give produce enough nuclear weapon The report also

6,432 police, and more

said, however, that the centrifuges were

than 5,000 civilian personnel. The oneyear approved budget to June 30, 2008,

operating well below their capacity and that there was no evidence that Iran was enriching bomb-grade uranium. After years of tension, a major breakthrough was made in October 2007 regarding North Korea's nuclear program. The country agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program, disable its three production facilities, hand over details of its nuclear program by De-

was $1.48 billion.

While Darfur occupied centre stage on the Security Council's African agenda, the ongoing conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea persisted as a major concern, and in November the UN Security Council urged leaders in those two countries to settle their decadelong conflict peacefully. Somalia again erupted in

cember 31, and return to the IAEA and

World Affairs: United Nations

United Nations Ongoing Peacekeeping Missions

the nuclear nonproliferation treaty at an early date. In exchange, North Korea was to receive 250,000 tons of heavy fuel

oil, and

the

United

States

and

Japan agreed to take steps toward normalization of diplomatic relations with Pyongyang.

Development. The Millennium Development Goals continued to serve as the main focal point for the UN system's development activities. The year 2007 marked the midpoint of the MDG process, which was targeted to conclude

in 2015,

and so far the results

were mixed. On the one hand, many countries were achieving rapid poverty reduction, and globally extreme poverty was declining to below the one billion mark. At the same

time, however,

the

world was not on target for achieving the MDGs, and the world's poorest peoples remained mired in squalor. The World Bank's Africa Development Indicators 2007 reported that fundamental change was occurring in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Many African countries

were

demonstrating

sus-

tained growth rates, but such growth was

very

uneven.

Large

oil-exporting

countries accounted for more than 60% of total net foreign direct investment in the region. Those countries with expanding and diversified economies were also moving ahead. Nigeria and South Africa accounted for more than half of all gross domestic product in the region. Countries being left behind were generally those with few natural resources and little to trade or those that were prone to internal conflict. The eighth identified goal (known as MDG 8) focused on building a global partnership for development, with three primary targets: trade, aid, and debt. MDG 8 called for the further development of an open rule-based, predictable, and nondiscriminatory trading and financial system. The World Trade Organization’s latest series of trade negotiations—the Doha round—continued its on-again, off-again character. After having made some progress in get-

^ Source: United Nations

MINURCAT

MINURSO MINUSTAH MONUC

UNAMID UNDOF UNFICYP UNIFIL UNMEE

United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad; since September 2007 (3) United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Wester Sahara; since April 1991 (220) United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti; since June 2004 (8,889) United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; since November 1999 (18,382) United Nations/African Union HybridOperation in Darfur; authorized July 2007 United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (in the Golan Heights); since June 1974 (1,100) United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus; since March 1964 (922) United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon; since March 1978 (13,264) United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea; since July 2000 (1,676)

UNMIK

UNMIL UNMIS UNMIT

UNMOGIP UNOCI UNOMIG UNTSO

United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo; since June 1999 (37)? United Nations Mission in Liberia; since September 2003 (15,872) United Nations Mission in the Sudan; since March 2005 (10,106) United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste; since August 2006 (1,496) United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan; since January 1949 (44) United Nations Operation in Côte d'Ivoire; since April 2004 (10,296) United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia; since August 1993 (147) United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (in Jerusalem); since June 1948 (150)

Parenthetical figures indicate military and police personnel as of October 31, 2007. !Up to 25,987 military and police personnel authorized. 22,050 civilian police are also assigned to UNMIK.

donor

countries—Denmark,

Luxem-

bourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—had reached the 0.7% of gross national income target consensu-

ally agreed to by participants

at the

2002 Monterrey Conference on Financ-

ing for Development. On the other hand, debt relief for the world’s poorest countries moved ahead. As of October 2007, 41 countries were involved in

the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) process and were eligible or potentially eligible for $68 billion in debt

United States and other countries to move beyond denying the problem of global climate change and join in finding solutions. In October the IPCC and former U.S. vice president Al Gore were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” (See NOBEL PRIZES.)

tariffs and quotas on most imports from less-developed countries, talks had stalled in 2006 over reducing agricul-

HIPC “completion point” making debt relief irrevocable. Ten additional countries were receiving some relief under HIPC, and another nine were potentially eligible for such relief. Climate Change. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Health. HIV continued to be the world’s most serious infectious disease. The 2007 AIDS Epidemic Update, using significantly revised and improved epidemiological data and analyses, reported that the percentage of people newly infected with HIV had been leveling off, even though the total number of persons living with HIV continued to

tural subsidies,

industrial

(IPCC) in 2007 issued its fourth assess-

increase.

market access. Negotiations resumed in June 2007 but again broke down when the so-called Group of Four—the U.S.,

ment report, which concluded that irrefutable scientific evidence showed that climate change was occurring and that there was high certainty that the cause was human. (See Special Report on page 170.) The secretary-general and other world leaders inside and outside the UN increased pressure on the

lion people were living with HIV; 2.5 million were newly infected during the year, and 2.1 million others died of AIDS-related causes. The new methodology, when applied to 2006 data, reduced the previous estimate of 39.5 million people living with HIV in 2006 by 16% to 32.7 million. The new UNAIDS

ting countries

to commit

tariffs,

to eliminate

and

the EU, India, and Brazil—were unable

to find common ground for agreement. After several years of increases, official development assistance fell in 2006 by 5.1% to $103.9 billion. Only five

relief, and 22 had reached the so-called

In December

2007, 33.2 mil-

355

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: European Union

epidemiological methodologies indicated that global HIV prevalence peaked in the late 1990s, and the total number of persons dying from AIDS-related illnesses had declined in the past two years. Sub-Saharan Africa remained the most severely affected region, with 68% of the global total, but even there a significant reduction in new infections had occurred since 2001. Eight countries in that region accounted for one-third of the new cases. Humanitarian Affairs. The cooperative response to the crisis in Darfur was the largest relief effort in the world. More than

12,000

humanitarian

assistance

workers from 13 UN agencies, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and more

than 80 nongovernmental organizations were engaged in delivering more than $650 million in aid. Unfortunately, as 2007 drew to a close, the security situation in the region continued to decline, and humanitarian

workers were

targets of violence and abduction. U.S. Pres. George W. Bush in 2007 reiterated his position that the United States would not seek a seat on the Human Rights Council, created by the General Assembly in 2006 to replace the Commission on Human Rights. The human rights situation in Myanmar (Burma) had reached the point by the fall of 2007 that it became a major focus of international attention both within and outside the UN. The total number of refugees and other persons of concern to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

rose

dramatically in 2006 from 21 million at the beginning of the year to 32.9 million at year’s end. Although part of the increase resulted from changes in the way that UNHCR statistics were reported, most of the 56% increase reflected increases in the real numbers of cases. The most dramatic change occurred in regard to internally displaced persons (IDPs). For the first time, the number of

IDPs surpassed the number of refugees under the UNHCRS watch, doubling in 2006 from 6.6 million to 12.8 million. An estimated

40,000-50,000

Iraqis

were

fleeing their homes every month, and it was calculated that by the end of 2007 approximately 2.3 million persons would be internally displaced within Iraq. Other IDPs were concentrated in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of

from 1.2 million Iraqis who fled their war-torn country for refuge in Syria and Jordan. Afghanistan continued to lead the list of country of origin for most refugees, with 2.1 million refugees dispersed across 71 countries. Iraq was second with 1.5 million refugees, the number of refugees from Iraq having increased more than fivefold in 2006. Pakistan and Iran topped the list of refugee-hosting countries, followed by the U.S., Syria, Germany,

Jordan, and

Tanzania. South Africa became the main destination for those newly seeking asylum in 2006, followed closely by the U.S. The number of stateless persons more than doubled in 2006 to 5.8 million. Administration and Finance. On Jan. 1, 2007, Ban, formerly South Korea’s min-

ister of foreign affairs, succeeded Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general. The administration and financial issues confronting Ban were daunting. During the year, the combined total UN budget— regular budget, peacekeeping, tribunals, and capital master plan—increased from

$5.6 billion to $9.2 billion, but

nonpayment and underpayment of dues plagued the organization and endangered the UN’s financial health. As of October

31, some

$836 million in as-

sessed dues to the regular budget and $3.5 billion of assessments for peacekeeping remained unpaid. The vast majority of countries that were in arrears were financially unable to pay. On the other hand, the vast majority of unpaid money was owed by the U.S., which could easily pay its legally binding dues. The U.S. accounted for 94% of arrears to the regular budget and 39.8% of arrears for peacekeeping. At the end of October, the UN was unable to pay $731 million to member states that had provided troops and equipment for peacekeeping operations that the U.S. had voted to authorize. In June the General Assembly approved the secretary-generals plan for restructuring the Department of Peacekeeping Operations—“Peace Operations 2010.” The new Department of Field Support, headed by an undersecretary-general for field support, was given the mandate to provide “responsive expertise” in areas of personnel, finance

and

budget,

communications,

first time since 2002, to a total of 9.9 mil-

information technology, and logistics. The Peacebuilding Commission concluded its first full year of operations in December. Postconflict peacebuilding in Burundi and Sierra Leone was high on the commission’s agenda, with special priority given to good gover-

lion. Most of this 14% increase resulted

nance,

the Congo, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Timor (Timor-Leste), and Uganda.

East

The number of refugees rose for the

356

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

democracy

consolidation,

rule

of law, security-sector reform, and job creation. Each of these countries was eligible to receive $35 million from the Peacebuilding Fund to support these activities. (ROGER A. COATE)

EUROPEAN UNION Berlin, for so long the symbol of a divided Europe, was chosen as the venue to celebrate the European Union’s 50th birthday at the end of March 2007. The German capital staged a series of emotionally charged events that marked the unquestioned ceremonial highlight of the EU’s year. Heads of state and government from the 27 member countries came together near the Brandenburg Gate—a short distance from what had been the route of the now dismantled Berlin Wall—for gala dinners, concerts,

and fireworks to hail the achievements of the union formed by the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The symbolism passed no one by as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, expressed Europe's pride in the successful union of West and East. The high spirits of the Berlin birthday party could not conceal doubts that dogged the European venture throughout 2007. European leaders knew that the EU had reached a crossroads in its development and had yet to decide down which route to turn. Less than two years earlier, the EU project—until then driven forward by the founding fathers’ belief in the moral necessity of “ever closer union"—had been thrown into disarray when plans for an EU constitution (with many of the trappings of statehood) were rejected by voters in France and The Netherlands. The "no" votes meant that the constitution had to be scrapped. European leaders had been unsure of what to do about the EU’s future, and in 2007 many of the fundamental questions remained unresolved. The year opened optimistically enough with the admission of two more

former

Romania

Eastern

and Bulgaria,

bers of the EU, which

bloc

countries,

as full memthus stretched

the European Union boundaries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. In the two capitals, Bucharest and Sophia, respectively, the sanguine atmosphere evoked memories of the fall of the Iron Curtain 17 years earlier. In much of Europe, however, opinion was mixed about expansion. One EU-wide opinion survey found that people in countries that had joined recently overwhelmingly supported more expansion, while only 41% of citizens in preexpansion

World Affairs: Multinational and Regional Organizations

countries wanted to admit more members in years to come. Merkel, whose country held the EU presidency for the first six months of the year, was definite in her vision that Europe should not retreat from its bold ambitions for further expansion and deeper integration. In January she made it clear that she wanted the EU to bring back to life large elements of the rejected constitutional treaty that had caused such division in 2005. In countries with a tradition of reticence about transferring powers from their national governments to the EU—notably the U.K., Denmark, and The Netherlands—

Merkel’s enthusiasm to revive most of a treaty that had been rejected as democratic votes did not go unnoticed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, preparing to step down after a decade in office, urged the EU to turn its attention away from institutional reform to subjects such as the need to tackle global warming and deliver economic liberalization in the face of mounting competition from countries such as India and China. At the EU summit in Brussels in March, leaders of the 27 member coun-

tries agreed to binding targets that would require them to cut greenhousegas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. There were also commitments to increase the proportion of energy provided by renewable sources, such as wind, wave, and solar power.

An era of European politics ended in May when 52-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac, age 74, as president of France. Chirac had driven the European Union forward for 12 years, combining

a strong pro-integra-

tion philosophy with consistent defense of France’s national interest. Sarkozy hinted that although he was just as enthusiastic about the EU as his predecessor had been, he might also foster relations between Paris and Washington that were warmer than the frosty atmosphere that had existed under Chirac. On economic policy, however, Sarkozy’s arrival created new tensions. Unlike Blair, he warned the EU against focusing too much on economic liberalization. He made it clear that he would continue France’s protectionist tradition—known in the EU as “economic nationalism”—and asserted that Europe had a moral purpose beyond merely advancing the interests of free trade. “It [the European Union] must not become

the Trojan Horse for globalization’s ills,” Sarkozy declared upon taking office. In June the debate on what to do about the constitution came back in earnest.

Germany applied heavy pressure for a replacement treaty to be agreed upon by the time it handed over the presidency to Portugal at the end of the month. Most member countries acknowledged that much of the substance of the treaty was necessary for the efficient working of the EU. There was a need to reduce the policy areas that were subject to unanimous voting. The European Commission (the EU’s executive arm) had to be streamlined, and it was vital that the

EU expand its role in areas such as the fight against international terrorism and drug trafficking. Supporters also emphasized that the EU needed to increase its influence in international affairs with the creation of a new permanent president of the Council of Ministers and a new foreign policy chief. Behind closed doors EU leaders agreed that their best chance of selling to their people a treaty that was essentially the same as the rejected one would be to drop the word constitution from the title and strip the new documents of proposals for a new EU anthem and EU flag, which looked so much like the trappings of statehood. What emerged from the June summit was a differently worded and slightly slimmed-down reform treaty—devoid of references to flags and anthems but otherwise much the same as the rejected constitution. Having secured a deal that did not require a repeat referendum, Sarkozy seemed to have done enough to persuade the French people, and it appeared that the Dutch parliament was more relaxed, arguing that it had been given a new role of keeping the EU in check. The revival of key elements of the constitutional treaty presented a real headache for Gordon Brown (see BIOGRAPHIES), who had succeeded

Blair as British prime minister on June 27. Blairs government had promised a U.K. referendum on the constitution in 2005 but never had to call one because French and Dutch voters had killed the treaty. Now—as he tried to head off calls for a referendum— Brown had the difficult task of arguing that the new treaty was fundamentally different from the old one. In September there were signs of a major shift in French policy on European and transatlantic defense issues as Sarkozy signaled that Paris was preparing to rejoin NATO's military command after a 40-year absence. The move was intended to reassure Washington that France's enthusiasm for closer cooperation between EU countries on defense and military issues was not, as the U.S.

feared,

intended

to

undermine

the

transatlantic alliance. French Defense Minister Hervé Morin told a defense conference in September that he was "convinced that European defence will make no progress unless France changes its political behaviour within NATO." Meanwhile, Sarkozy was developing plans for a new committee of EU "wise men" to examine the EU's role until 2030. It was agreed in December that the group would be chaired by former Spanish prime minister Felipe González. At the same time, Sarkozy was preparing to unveil his ideas on closer defense cooperation between member countries. The 27 heads of state and government met again in Lisbon in October to agree on the final wording of the revived reform treaty—which was then renamed the Lisbon Treaty. Only Ireland, which was bound under its constitution to hold

referenda

on

such

issues,

had

committed itself to holding a national vote. Brown was holding out, arguing that the U.K. Parliament should ratify the treaty, but with MPs of all parties demanding that he grant a national vote, he remained under intense pressure. The treaty was signed by all 27 EU leaders on December 13 at a ceremony in Lisbon. On November 6 the European Commission published its report on the difficult issue of Turkey's progress toward admission into the EU (which was not

expected for at least a decade). The report indicated that Turkey still fell short in several areas. At the request of France, a document adopted on December 10 by the EU foreign ministers referred to "intergovernmental" rather than "accession" conferences with Turkey. This was considered in some circles to be a victory for Sarkozy, who opposed Turkey's accession to the EU. Enthusiasts for Turkey's admission, including the British, claimed, however, that the word-

ing had no hidden significance. It was clear that new tensions were already building over the next phase of the EU's development. (TOBY HELM)

MULTINATIONAL AND REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Demands for more peacekeeping operations dominated the African Union's (AU’s) summit in late January 2007. With troops in Cóte d'Ivoire, Burundi,

the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Darfur region of The Sudan, however, the AU got few responses to requests for troops for Somalia. The vulnerability of the small, lightly armed 357

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Dependent States Stuart Price—AMIS/AP

summit in Australia culminated in a similar pledge by all member countries. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations

(ASEAN)

at the

November

summit in Singapore marked its 40th anniversary with the signing of a new charter that was intended to give it legal identity and lead to a more European-style economic community by 2015. Opposition from its newer members—Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Vietnam—all of which

=

-

e

——

©

-

—

t

E

At a peacekeeping base in the Darfur region of The Sudan, injured African Union soldiers are carried to a waiting helicopter to be evacuated for medical treatment. The camp was attacked by Sudanese Liberation Army rebels on September 30. AU force in Darfur was underscored on September 30 when rebels from the Sudanese Liberation Army overran an AU peacekeeping base, killing 12 soldiers. A large joint AU-UN force was authorized by the UN Security Council in late July, and in late October the two organizations convened peace talks in hopes of securing a cease-fire prior to deployment. The key Sudanese rebel groups declined to participate, however, and the rocky start to the conference did not bode well for the AU-UN force of 26,000 soldiers due to arrive in

The Sudan in early 2008. During the Arab League's annual summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in March,

member countries reaffirmed their commitment to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. The league sent two representatives to Israel for the first time to present the plan for regional peace. Another precedent was set when the league reached a consensus decision to attend the U.S.sponsored Middle East peace conference

at Annapolis,

November.

Md., at the end of

In late October the league

meeting in Khartoum,

Sudan, focused

ercise, which involved more than 6,000

troops from six countries (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan)

and focused on com-

bating terrorism. The exercise was widely hailed as a success, sparking some talk of the SCO as a counterweight to NATO, but regional rivalries, especially between Russia and China, remained strong. The Group of Eight (G-8) meeting hosted by Germany in June addressed climate change. Consensus was reached on the need to establish a common goal for cutting carbon and other emissions by 2050. The U.S. resisted setting a mandatory reduction but did agree to participate

in UN-sponsored

negotia-

tions on a new climate agreement. The G-8 also agreed to launch a dialogue (the Heiligendamm

emerging

Process) with five

economies—India,

Brazil, Mexico,

China,

and South Africa—for

closer cooperation on climate protection and other challenges. Following a meeting with representatives from Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, the AU, and Ethiopia, the G-8 offered to in-

on the situation in Darfur and concluded with a pledge to extend assistance to the

crease funding to $60 billion a year by

AU-UN joint peacekeeping operation.

and malaria in Africa. Many perceived this as a step back from G-8 promises in 2005 to double development assistance by 2010.

Spikes in oil prices throughout the year put pressure on OPEC, despite the fact that the organization had relatively little control over prices. Leaders of OPEC countries in November held only their third summit in 47 years, focusing on the topic of prices, along with security of oil supplies and, for the first time ever, the subject of carbon emissions and environmental protection. In August the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conducted Peace Mission 2007, its first joint training ex358

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2010

to fight HIV/AIDS,

Asia-Pacific

Economic

had authoritarian regimes, led to a watering down of the document at the summit. Instead of a shift from the long-standing “ASEAN Way” of decision making by consensus to voting procedures, the charter affirmed existing procedures. The charter also reaffirmed the policy of noninterference in members’ internal affairs and omitted proposed mechanisms for enforcing compliance. Its economic blueprint set a time line for various reforms, such as

the elimination of nontariff barriers. The “ASEAN Minus X” provision, however, allowed members to opt out of certain

economic

commitments.

The

charter did call for the creation of a new human rights body but provided no means of enforcing human rights standards. The Economic Community of West African

States

(ECOWAS)

was

in the

process of developing a Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF). A group of 60 experts in November approved a draft that would go to the Council of Ministers and then to the Heads of State and Government for approval. The document was intended to make conflict prevention a central part of the organization’s programs and to enhance its ability to promote human security and build peace in the region by delineating key areas for intervention. The 14 proposed initiatives included an early-warning mechanism, controls on hate media, governance.

and natural resource (MARGARET P. KARNS)

tuberculosis,

Cooperation

(APEC) also approved a nonbinding agreement on climate change, which focused more on improving energy ef ficiency than on cutting emissions. APEC trade ministers endeavoured to revive the Doha round with a statement in July that strongly reaffirmed their commitment to a successful conclusion of negotiations. The September APEC

DEPENDENT STATES Europe and the Atlantic. On April 2, 2007,

ceremonies were held in the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas and in London to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Falklands War between the U.K. and Argentina. Just days before the ceremonies, the Argentine government, which still claimed sovereignty over the islands, scrapped a deal that would have allowed Argentina and Britain to share revenue from oil exploration around the Falklands.

World Affairs: Dependent States

On October 11 Gibraltar held its first general election under the constitution that went into effect on January 2. The new constitution retained the territory's ties of sovereignty to the U.K., which would continue to be responsible for external affairs and defense. Gibraltar

however, would exercise greater noncolonial self-governance. Chief Minister Peter Caruana's ruling Gibraltar Social Democrats won reelection, holding all 10 GSD seats in the 17-seat Parliament,

with a slim 49-45% majority of the vote over former chief minister Joseph Bossano’s Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party-Liberal Party coalition. St. Helena’s new governor, Andrew Gurr, was inaugurated on November 11, after a six-month delay. In his inaugural address, Gurr stressed the need for increased transparency, openness, and consultation in local government. He sent separate messages to Tristan da Cunha and Ascension Island, which

were also in his purview, promising to visit them in 2008. Greenland remained prominent in the international debate over global warming. (See Special Report on page 170.) In August a scientific expedition from Denmark set out to gather seismic data and map the seabed below the icebound Lomonosov Ridge, off Greenland. (See MAP on page 362.) Meanwhile, Greenland residents were experiencing a

Inuit fishermen maneuver their boat around melting ice near the town of Ilulissat, Greenland, on August 30.

Residents of Greenland were experiencing a longer growing and fishing season.

longer growing and fishing season. In July researchers reported in Science magazine that DNA extracted from the 3-km (1.9-mi)-long Greenland Ice Core

Project confirmed that some 450,000800,000 years ago the southernmost part of the island was covered by boreal forests.

(MELINDA C. SHEPHERD)

Caribbean and Bermuda. The debate continued throughout 2007 on whether Puerto Rico should become a fully fledged U.S. state, attain complete independence, or forge a new type of commonwealth relationship with the U.S.

A U.S.

congressional

committee

examined these options in various hearings. As usual, independence remained the least popular of the various possibilities. In April all government agencies in Puerto Rico were ordered to begin recycling programs as part of an effort to achieve the goal of recycling 35% of the territory's rubbish. At a constitutional conference in London in February, the British government agreed to devolve more power to the British Virgin Islands (BVI). Though the islands still remained a colony, the local chief minister and his cabinet would share responsibility for external affairs and internal security with the British-appointed governor. The number of “captive” insurance companies in the BVI numbered 400 in April, which made the islands the third largest insurance centre in the Caribbean. In the August general election, the National Democratic Party lost control of the government to the Virgin Islands Party (VIP), which obtained 10 of the 13 seats

at stake in the 15-seat Parliament. VIP leader Ralph Telford O’Neal was sworn in as premier (as the former chief minister was now called under the revised constitution adopted in July). WAPA, the U.S. Virgin Islands power utility, in January presented a $1.2 billion, 10-year plan designed to break its dependence on oil-fired generation by substituting increasing amounts of renewable energy. WAPAS current generating capacity was 261 MW.

The Netherlands Bonaire,

Sint

Antilles

Eustatius,

islands and

of

Saba,

which were due to achieve the status of Dutch local authorities in 2008 following agreement

on

a new

constitution

(which also conferred local autonomy on Curagao and Sint Maarten), said in March that they would not permit samesex weddings, even though such ceremonies were already recognized in The Netherlands. The April 2006 elections that brought to power Prime Minister Emily de Jongh-Elhage would be the last

held before the Netherlands Antilles was formally dissolved. Aruba received high marks in September from American ratings agency Fitch, which commented favourably on the island's marketfriendly institutional environment, high per capita income, and political and social stability. In December officials on Aruba closed their investigation into the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway, missing since 2005. The Turks and Caicos government acquired a fleet of American-operated helicopters to assist in the fight against crime and illegal immigration in March. Legislators insisted in May that Anguilla’s tourism-based economy was being threatened by an upsurge in crime; a motion calling for “urgent action” by the government was approved by the House of Assembly. The volcanowracked British colony of Montserrat required $187 million to achieve “economic sustainability” over the next five years, insisted Chief Minister Lowell Lewis in July. Damage to the economy from the Soufriére Hills volcano had been estimated at about $2 billion, ac-

cording to Lewis. In the local elections on Bermuda on December

Progressive 52.35%

18, Premier

Liberal

Ewart

Brown's

Party (PLP)

won

of the vote and 22 seats, com-

pared with 47.25% and 14 seats for the United Bermuda Party. It was the PLP’s third successive election victory and left the balance of parliamentary power unchanged.

(DAVID RENWICK)

Pacific Ocean. French Polynesia had another tumultuous year in 2007 after the pro-independence government of Pres. Oscar Temaru was deposed in December 2006. Pres. Gaston

Tong Sang, whose

coalition advocated autonomy, announced that the territory would secede from France. Tong Sang was soon deposed by members of his own party, however, and Temaru returned in September to win election as president for the third time in three years. France, seeking a solution to the ongoing instability, proposed to shorten the local assembly’s term and to change the electoral system. The reform proposal seemed to be universally unpopular in the territorial assembly, but given France’s financial influence, it was likely to succeed. After temporary setbacks, two nickelmining plants in New Caledonia were scheduled to go ahead. The $3.2 billion Goro nickel-cobalt project, which was stalled after cost blowouts of 72%, was

now owned by the Brazilian company CVRD

(renamed Vale in 2007) and was

due to commence

production in May

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

359

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Antarctica Gregory Boissy—AFP/Getty Images

II, died at

ing amid triumphant scenes outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Richard Gif

The Cook Islands government, periodically destabilized by MPs’ shifting political allegiance, moved to limit this with legislation that would prevent “party hopping.” The 2006 coup in Fiji and improved air services increased

ford, the solicitor for the islanders (known as Ilois), thanked Lord Justice

ruler, Tomasi Kulimoetoke age 89. (See OBITUARIES.)

tourist

Pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru appears with supporters in Papeete on September 13 after winning election as president of French Polynesia for the third time. 2009, with full production in 2011. The Koniambo project in the Northern Province also had a new owner, XStrata PLC of Switzerland, and construction

was scheduled to begin in 2010. In May nearby Wallis and Futuna's traditional Dependent States! Australia

United Kingdom

Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Anguilla Bermuda

Norfolk Island Denmark

British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands

Faroe Islands Greenland

Falkland Islands Gibraltar Guernsey

ranc

Isle of Man -

French Guiana French Polynesia Cusdsieup A Martinique Mayotte New Caledonia

Jersey

Montserrat Pitcairn Island Saint Helena Tristan da Cunha Turks and Caicos Islands

numbers,

which

created

a

labour shortage in the Cook Islands, whose citizens traveled freely to New Zealand for better-paid work. The territory mourned the death in July of 90year-old former prime minister Sir Thomas Davis. The first Cook Islander to qualify in medicine, Davis worked in the U.S. at NASA before returning to the Cooks, where he led a resurgence in the construction of traditional ocean-voyaging canoes. Niue’s population declined to 1,200, leaving the island no longer workable as a state without $12.5 million in aid

from New Zealand. The drop occurred despite attempts to persuade some of those who resided in New Zealand (roughly 90% of the Niuean population) to return home and forced the government to reconsider offering residence to non-Niueans in an attempt to

remain viable. The premier was looking into land reform to gain access to areas that had been practically abandoned. In the meantime, pressure to meet the budget led to increases in the cost of living and to cuts in civil servants’ salaries, which seemed likely to persuade more Niueans to leave. U.S. remilitarization of the Pacific led to an increase in the number of American soldiers in Guam. In August, as 22,000 U.S. troops were involved in exercises off Guam, Russia deployed two strategic bombers to the area for the first time since the Cold War. American Samoa experienced labour shortages as U.S. nationals traveled to the U.S. for job opportunities and local reservists departed for military service in Iraq and elsewhere. Despite its pop-

Réunion Saint-Barthélemy Saint-Martin

American Samoa

ulation of 59,000, the territory had to

Saint-Pierre and

Guam

look to independent Samoa for labour for its tuna-canning plants. The Amer-

Miquelon Wallis and Futuna

Netherlands; The Aruba Netherlands Antilles

United States

Northern Mariana Islands Puerto Rico

Virgin Islands (of the U.S.)

New Zealand Cook Islands Niue

Tokelau ‘Excludes territories (1) to which Antarctic Treaty is applicable in whole or in part, (2) without permanent civilian population, (3) without internationally recognized civilian government (Western Sahara), or (4) representing unadjudicated

unilateral or multilateral territorial claims.

360

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ican

Samoan

government

commis-

sioned a labour survey as part of a bid to secure new industries. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

Indian Ocean. In May 2007 the families who were expelled between 1967 and 1973 from the Chagos Archipelago to make way for a U.S. air base on Diego Garcia won their long battle to return home, defeating British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who had taken the case to the court of appeal. Speak-

(Sir Stephen) Sedley and the making the ruling that the ties a people to a homeland were mental that no executive order rogate them. It was third time llois

leader

Olivier

court for that bind so fundacould ablucky for

Bancoult,

who

changed tactics and sought to return not to Diego Garcia itself (which would have deprived the U.S. ofa vital strategic base in the Indian Ocean) but rather to other

islands in the archipelago. Lord Justice Sedley explained that a natural or manmade disaster could warrant the removal of a population for its own safety, but the court could not condone the permanent exclusion of a whole population from its homeland for reasons unconnected with their collective well being. Illegal immigrants continued to drown while attempting to cross from the Comoros islands to the relatively prosperous island of Mayotte. In one incident in August, at least 17 people were confirmed dead and another 19 were missing when a primitive wooden vessel known as a kwassa-kwassa capsized in rough waters off Mayotte. French

Immigration

Minister

Brice

Hortefeux lamented the tragedy and vowed that the French government would fight against human traffickers seeking to exploit would-be migrants’ poverty. (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

ANTARCTICA Ice averaging 2,160 m (7,085 ft) in thickness

covers more than about 98% of the continent of Antarctica, which has an area of 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq mi). There is no indigenous human population, and there is no land-based industry. Human activity consists mainly of scientific research. The 46-nation Antarctic Treaty is the managerial mechanism for the region south of latitude 60? S, which includes all of Antarctica. The treaty reserves the area for peaceful purposes, encourages cooperation in science, prescribes environmental protection, allows inspections to verify adherence, and defers the issue of territorial sovereignty. On March 1, 2007, the International Polar Year (IPY) began with an official

ceremony

in Paris,

coordinated

with

events in the United States (New York City and Anchorage, Alaska), Australia, Chile, India, and Japan. The IPY

brought together polar experts from more than 60 countries to study the North and South poles in depth with

World Affairs: Arctic Regions

attention to their role in global climate processes. ernments and international organizations met for the 30th Antarctic Treaty

stations on King George Island. This was first time that a UN secretary-general had visited Antarctica. National programs continued to improve operations and introduce inno-

Consultative

vations

Representatives

from

Meeting

some

(ATCM)

50 gov-

in New

Delhi from April 30 to May 11. The delegates issued a resolution on long-term scientific monitoring and environmental observation. They also made recommendations to discourage Antarctic landings of tourist ships carrying more than 500 passengers, encouraged tour operators to coordinate their activities so that only one ship at a time would land at a particular site, with no more

in Antarctica.

In August

the

37,506 tourists visited Antarctica, with

Chinese began a $13 million renovation project of one of its Antarctic stations, which was due to be completed by the end of the year. The renovations would make the station more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient; in addition, a new research building and a waste- and sewage-treatment facility would be erected. The Belgian program built a zero-emission station that would be powered by solar panels and wind turbines and would thus have minimal impact on the environment. The 700sq-m (about 7,500-sq-ft) station was constructed in Belgium and transported to Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica, late in the year. The U.S. was scheduled to dedicate its new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in early January 2008. The Chilean government significantly increased funding for Antarctic research during 2007 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Chile’s first Antarctic expedition. In April the Argentine icebreaker Almirante Irízar caught fire off the Argentine coast north of the Antarctic Treaty area on its way back from Antarctica, where it supported the Argentine program. The crew and military personnel on board were rescued by a Panamanian tanker and Argentine and Uruguayan fishing vessels. A German-led international research expedition documented more than

more than 35,000 arriving by ship. Of

1,000 species in the Weddell

these, nearly 25,000 Antarctic Treaty area,

cluding 674 species of isopods. Over a three-year period, they collected samples of creatures living up to 6 km (3.7

than 100 visitors in each excursion, and

discouraged tourism that could contribute to long-term degradation of the environment.

As part of the ATCM, the Committee for Environmental Protection held its 10th meeting from April 30 to May 4 and adopted a five-year work plan. The committee established an informal group to analyze new and revised Protected Area management plans. It also endorsed India's comprehensive environmental evaluation on the construction

of a new

station

in Larsemann

Hills as well as one other new Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA), and it revised management plans for two Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPAs)

and one new Historic Site or

Monument (HSM). Following the larger group’s adoption of these plans, there were 6 ASMAs, 67 ASPAs, and 82 HSMs in Antarctica.

During the 2006-07

austral summer,

landed in the a 14% increase

over 2005-06. Air/land-based and air/cruise-based tourism accounted for 1,082 visitors, and overflights of Antarctica included another 1,046. In

November the Canadian-chartered tour ship Explorer struck ice near the South Shetland Islands and sank. The Norwegian tour ship Nordnorge rescued all 100 passengers and 54 crew and transported them to nearby Chilean and Uruguayan stations, but the incident raised more concerns about the potential damage that could result from increased tourism. To emphasize Antarctica’s role in global climate and the effects of climate change, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Antarctica in No-

vember. Accompanied by an official Chilean delegation, Ban visited Chilean, Uruguayan, and South Korean

Sea, in-

mi) below the surface. Hundreds of the

species cataloged had never before been seen. The team’s findings surprised the researchers, who had expected to find a low-biodiversity pattern similar to that commonly found in the Arctic Ocean. Four new lakes were discovered underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Reporting in Nature

magazine,

scientists

times more detailed than any previously made. The images came from the U.S. Landsat 7 satellite, which provided coverage to about 83° S. This created a “hole” in the data that was filled in with images from two other U.S. satellites. The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica was available on a U.S. government Web site (http://lima.usgs.gov) and for use on Google Earth. The Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) program—which was a multinational project involving more than 200 scientists, drillers, engineers, technicians, students, and educators from

Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.—surpassed all expectations in its second season by drilling more than 1,100 m into the seafloor of Mc-

Murdo Sound. It was the second deepest rock core drilled in Antarctica, exceeded

only by the 1,285 m recovered by the 2006 ANDRILL effort. These cores provided the world's scientists with more than 1 km (0.6 mi) of pristine rock core

that recorded the history of climate and glacial fluctuations in Antarctica over the past 20 million years. ANDRILL was one of about 220 projects endorsed by the IPY. (WINIFRED REUNING)

ARCTIC REGIONS The Arctic regions may be defined in physical terms (astronomical [north of the Arctic Circle, latitude 66? 30' N], climatic [above the 10 °C (50 °F) July isotherm], or vegetational [above the northern limit of the tree line]) or in human terms

(the territory inhabited by the circumpolar cultures—Inuit [Eskimo] and Aleut in North Amer. ica and Russia, Sami [Lapp] in northern Scandi

navia and Russia, and 29 other peoples of th Russian North, Siberia, and East Asia). No sing

national sovereignty or treaty regime govern he region, which includes portions of eighT+n countries: Canada, the United States, Russia, Fin and, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Greenlan a part of Denmark). The Arctic Ocean, 14.09 mi ion sq km (5.44 million sq mi) in area, constiutes about two-thirds of the region. The land

area consists of permanent ice cap, tundra, or aiga. The population (2007 est.) of peoples beonging to the circumpolar cultures is about

indicated that understanding how the lakes interact with the ice sheet was critical to predicting climate change. They believed that the lakes affect how rapidly ice moves from the Antarctic interior to the coast.

530,000 (Aleuts [in Russia and Alaska], more han 4,000; Athabascans [North America], 45,000; Inuits [or Eskimos, in Russian Chukhotka, North America, and Greenland], 160,000; Sami

Using more than 1,000 images, Amer-

250,000). International organizations concerned

ican and British scientists completed the first high-definition map of Antarc-

with the Arctic include the Arctic Council, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat. International scientific cooperation in the

tica. With a resolution down to 15 m (1

m

= about 3.28 ft), the map was

10

Northern Europe], 70,000; and 41 indigenous peoples of the Russian North, totaling about

361

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Arctic Regions

Arctic is the focus of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the University of the Arctic, a circumpolar network of member institutions.

Gihorek SRUSSIA

In 2007 Arctic sea ice melted dramatically. The new record-low ice extent, set on September 16, was 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq mi). This extent of

sea ice was 23% less than that recorded in 2005, when the previous record low was set, and 39% below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000. The loss in ice extent was accompanied by losses in ice thickness. In March the International Polar Year (IPY) was launched to

begin a major two-year campaign of polar research. Studies set to measure the thickness of the sea ice found that there was a significant decline in thicker, perennial ice and that this in turn led to a more intense melt in the 2007 season. Rapid loss of sea ice continued to place pressure on Northern cultures and species. In December 2006 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that polar bears be classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. At the same

time, sea ice loss increased

activity around polar transportation routes, oil and gas exploration, sovereignty, and boundary disputes.

160°

PACIFIC

OCEAN

0 0

500 500

1000 mi

1000 1500km

Claims [1

Russia

——— =

[ ] United States L] Canada

E

Norway Denmark

[E] disputed by Russia and Norway

iceland

With the decrease in sea ice in 2007,

200 nautical mile line (countries have exclusive economic rights from their coastline to this line) other nautical boundaries The Northwest Passage The Northeast Passage

a corresponding failure to properly maintain pipelines that led to corrosion and caused the largest-ever onshore oil spill in Alaska when in March 2006 one of the major transit oil pipelines at Alaska's Prudhoe Bay spilled 1,010 cu m

level in the Amundsen Basin, alongside

the Northwest Passage became ice free for a short period of time. This was the first occurrence in recorded history of a completely open passage. Canada, which maintained that the passage through the Arctic archipelago was a domestic waterway, announced that it was building eight Arctic patrol ships capable of cutting through 1 m (3.28 ft) of ice and began work on a deepwater port in Nanisivik at the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. The U.S. and the

the Lomonosov ridge. (See MAP.)

EU, however, held that the route was an

on Climate Change (IPCC) released its

The Russians made this claim as part of the UN Convention on the Law of

international passage. In February Russia launched the 50 Let Pobedy, an Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker, the largest in the world as of 2007. A preliminary study recommended a new 2,500-km pipeline to connect the oil and gas fields on Russia’s Yamal

fourth major assessment report. The report confirmed that the Arctic had experienced the greatest warming of any region on the planet, at twice the global average. (See Special Report on page

In August

a Russian

research

team

aboard the icebreaker Rossiya mounted an expedition to map and measure the geology of the Lomonosov ridge (an underwater mountain chain extending between the Russian and North American continental shelves). As part of the mission,

the

Russian

team

used

manned submersibles to place a Russian flag at the North Pole on the seabed 4,300

m

the Sea.

(about

14,000

ft) below

(Under the convention,

sea

each

country would have 10 years from the time that it ratified the document to submit claims for an extension of its exclusive

economic

zone.)

The

U.S.,

Canada, and Denmark challenged Rus-

peninsula (in northwestern

sia’s claim, and Canada

continued a program to show that the Lomonosov ridge is connected to the Canadian-Greenland shelf. The U.S.

the existing pipeline grid in the Komi Republic. This pipeline would run partly offshore, crossing the Baydaratskaya Bay and thus avoiding the

had still not ratified the Law of the Sea,

Ural

but there was renewed interest to consider the document in the Senate. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the entire Arctic held 2596 of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves and in 2007 began a comprehensive study to refine this estimate.

Gov. Sarah Palin called for initial proposals to build the 5,600-km Alaska Gas Pipeline, which was expected to cost

362

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

and Denmark

Mountains.

Siberia) to

Meanwhile,

Alaskan

more than $20 billion.

Early results from a U.S. congressional committee indicated that it was cost cuts by British Petroleum PLC and

(267,000 gal) onto the tundra. BP con-

tinued to have problems with its Alaska operations through 2007, with leaks, fires, and resulting reductions in production. In response, BP began remedial work to replace its transit pipelines. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel

170.) In October

the Nobel

Prize for

Peace was awarded jointly to the IPCC and former U.S. vice president Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." (See Nobel Prizes.) Also nominated was

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, past chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, for her work to raise awareness about the impact of global warming on the Inuit and other indigenous peoples of the North. (JOHN STREICKER)

World Affairs: Albania

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan.

In July, 23

South Korean missionar-

ies were kidnapped and 2 were killed before the Taliban released the remaining Area: 645,807 sq km (249,347 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 27,145,000 (including

2,400,000 Afghans [refugees and nonrefugees] in Pakistan and about 1,000,000

Afghan refugees in Iran) Capital: Kabul Chief of state and head of government: President Hamid Karzai Afghanistan's government, supported by almost 50,000 NATO

and U.S. soldiers,

in 2007 faced a Taliban resistance that had refocused its tactics. Pres. Hamid Karzai worked to extend the reach of government authority while balancing the need for international assistance against the appearance of favouring foreign interests over Afghan ones. With only a small national army of its own, Kabul was forced to rely on international forces for security in many parts of the country. Opponents who accused Karzai of cooperating with the enemies of Afghanistan and Islam gave support and sanctuary in the Pashtun tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Taliban fundamentalists sympathetic to al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The Taliban influence was greatest among the Pashtun population in the south and east of Afghanistan. The year saw heavy fighting in Helmand,

Uruzgan,

Kandahar,

and Khost provinces, as well as an upsurge in targeted attacks and suicide bombings in Kabul and across the country.

As winter ended, NATO officials spoke of resistance fighters massing in the south for a spring offensive, and Taliban spokesmen boasted of having 2,000 trained-and-ready suicide bombers. On February 27 a suicide bomber killed 23 people outside the U.S. military base at Bagram while U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney was inside. In March a suicide bomber drove into a U.S. embassy convoy driving through the capital. Top Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah (see

OBITUARIES) was killed in May in fighting in Helmand province. The spring offensive did not erupt as expected, but by midsummer a new Taliban strategy was unfolding. Suicide bombing, kidnapping, and other tactics similar to those used by al-Qaeda in Iraq were becoming typical of the resistance in

captives

some

six weeks later—after the South Korean government pledged to begin withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan by year’s end. In March a number of civilians were killed when U.S. forces responded to enemy attacks, and President Karzai condemned the loss of innocent Afghan lives at the hands Afghan policemen destroy opium poppies during an of foreign troops. Civilian eradication sweep in Uruzgan province on April 29. deaths and presidential condemnation for the losses continued throughout the year. Afghanistan's relations with the U.S., NATO and U.S. officials said that the Talthough extremely close, were compliiban used civilians as “human shields.” cated when it came to Pakistan and In an attempt to ease factionalism, Iran. Karzai blamed Pakistan for not the parliament passed, and in March doing enough to cut off help to the TalKarzai approved, a controversial naiban from supporters in Pakistan, and tional reconciliation bill granting he saw the U.S. as reluctant to push amnesty to all Afghans involved in the Pakistan harder on this point. U.S. ofcountrys 25 years of occupation and ficials, for their part, repeatedly blamed conflict—Taliban as well as muIran for supplying weapons to the Taljahideen. Critics of the bill feared that iban. During a visit by U.S. Defense it would allow those responsible for Secretary Robert Gates to Kabul in war crimes to go unpunished, but othJune, and again in August on the eve of ers insisted that national reconciliation a meeting with U.S. Pres. George W. was necessary for the country’s future. Bush, Karzai spoke warmly of his Though Taliban leaders had disapcountry’s close relations with Iran, sayproved of and greatly reduced opium ing they had never been better. (STEPHEN SEGO) cultivation while in power, they now encouraged poppy growing for the monetary

support it gave

their cause.

Opium cultivation contributed almost one-third of Afghanistan’s overall GDP, and a UN report estimated that as much as 93% of the worlds opium came from Afghanistan. Despite continued calls for unity and

ALBANIA

trust, Karzai and Pakistan Pres. Pervez

Musharraf remained at odds. Karzai complained repeatedly of support and sanctuary given the resistance fighters from outside the country, while Musharraf insisted that Taliban operations were led and conducted from inside Afghanistan. In August a four-day peace jirga was convened in Kabul, where more than 600 tribal elders and government officials from Pakistan and Afghanistan met to promote peace and cooperation. Musharraf attended the meeting only on the final day and pointed out that not all Taliban were die-hard militants. The Taliban did not participate.

Area: 28,703 sq km (11,082 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,176,000

Capital: Tirana Chief of state: Presidents Alfred Moisiu and,

from July 24, Bamir Topi Head of government: Prime Minister Sali Berisha

Early bania tween tion,

in 2007 the political scene in Alwas dominated by a dispute bethe government and the opposiled by the Socialist Party of

Albania

(SPA),

over

rules

and proce-

dures to be followed in local elections. After both sides agreed on a compro363

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Algeria

mise designed to prevent double voting, the opposition dropped its threat to boycott the February 18 vote. Prime Minister Sali Berisha's Democratic Party of Albania (DPA) argued that the balloting was a show of support for his reforms.

(Berisha's

coalition

received

47.86% of the countrywide votes for town and city mayors.) The opposition, however, managed to win the majority of large municipalities, including Tirana, where Socialist mayor Edi Rama was reelected. EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn contended that procedural shortcomings in preparation and conduct had marred the polls, specifically referring to the inability of the Albanian government to prepare

a new

voter registry prior to

the elections. Both political camps accepted the validity of the election results, however.

On March 12 Berisha reshuffled his government, giving the health portfolio to his coalition ally, Christian Democratic Party leader Nard Ndoka. Analysts described the move as an attempt by Berisha to secure support for DPA candidate Bamir Topi in the upcoming presidential elections. In the fourth round on July 20, Topi won the presidency, defeating Neritan Ceka of the Democratic Alliance, a small opposi-

Albania’s newly elected president, Bamir Topi, calls for political unity after being sworn into office in Tirana on July 24.

tion party. Though the SPA and its allies urged their deputies to boycott the vote, at least seven did not obey the call. Foreign Minister Besnik Mustafaj resigned unexpectedly on April 24 and was succeeded by former transport minister Lulzim Basha. The opening on March 21 of a new airport terminal in Tirana marked a symbolic milestone in Albania’s modernization of its infrastructure. The

that were held in May 2007 in Algeria. Even though the National Liberation Front (FLN), the largest party in the three-member coalition government, lost 67 seats in the lower parliamentary chamber, its two allies in the coalition gained seats, with the result that the three-party alliance held 249 of the 389 seats (the upper chamber was indirectly elected). Because the FLN was also the party of Pres. Ab-

€50 million (about $65 million) termi-

delaziz

nal, which

stered presidential political hegemony.

was

built by a German-

American consortium,

opened prior to

the landmark visit to Tirana on June 10 of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush, who declared that days of “endless dialogue” over the future of neighbouring Kosovo were over and that the mainly ethnicAlbanian-inhabited region should become independent. The government presented its ambitious economic-reform program, which included lower taxes and the introduction by early 2008 of a 1096 corporate and income flat tax. A number of efforts to increase transparency, fight corruption, and attract foreign investors had resulted in a tripling since 2002 of foreign direct investment. In preparation for future membership in NATO, Albania planned to spend 296 of GDP for defense in 2008 and in July destroyed its last stockpiles of chemical weapons. In addition, the government successfully cracked down on organized crime, breaking up numerous groups, and allowed the stationing in the country of an organized-crime task force of American FBI agents. The government, which in 2006 banned the private ownership and use of powerful motorboats, also effectively put an end to the smuggling in speedboats of illicit drugs and humans across the Adriatic and Ionian seas. (FABIAN SCHMIDT)

In the wake

elections on November 29, the FLN won 30.5% of the seats, and its coali-

tion partners won an additional 35.8%. Constitutional reform was again delayed. The proposed reform would extend the presidential term to seven years and allow incumbents to stand for reelection indefinitely (rather than only twice) and would make the government answerable to the presidency, rather than to the parliament. Following the sudden death in August of Smain

Lamari,

the head of civilian

security, observers worried that President Bouteflika would try to appoint his own nominee to the post, against the wishes of the army and the advice of Mohamed

Mediéne,

who

was

in

charge of military security. Bouteflika’s own

position was

tenuous;

it was

be-

lieved that he was still recovering from a serious illness that had resulted in his hospitalization in late 2005. Furthermore, presidential programs to provide one million new housing units and one million new permanent jobs by 2009 were seriously behind schedule. Many in government also faced embarrassing questions about the Khalifa affair, Algeria’s biggest financial scandal in re-

2006;

Chief of state: President Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Head of government: Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem

was

a

dismal

35%,

a

record low, for the legislative elections

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a new

(GSPC),

which

claimed

to have

joined al-Qaeda in September 2006. Following the explosion of two truck bombs at police stations in Reghaia, several persons were killed in October

Capital: Algiers

364

of the elections,

bol-

Political violence increased, owing to youth radicalization and attacks by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Com-

Area: 2,381,741 sq km (919,595 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 33,858,000

Gent Shkullaku/AFP/Getty Images

outcome

law excluded from future elections smaller parties that did not achieve a specific electoral threshold. In local

bat

turnout

the

cent years.

ALGERIA

The

Bouteflika,

a bus

carrying

Brown

& Root

personnel was ambushed in December 2006; and in February 2007 multiple targets were struck simultaneously in Kabylia—all police or gendarme stations. On April 11 coordinated suicide bombings, the first in Algeria in many years, wrecked the offices of the prime minister and the Interior Ministry, as

World Affairs: Angola

shops, restaurants, and

services dependent

on

tourism. An estimated 11.6 million tourists visited Andorra annu-

ally, but

it was

pre-

dicted that the number for 2007, the worst sea-

son in 20 years, would drop by at least 1096. One of Andorra's drawbacks—and a

Victims of a suicide bombing wait and plead for help to arrive in Batna, Alg., on September 6.

AP

large part of its charm—was the difficulty in arriving there. Spain announced an agreement to build a new airport only 15 minutes’ drive from the Spanish-Andorran border.

well as a police station; 33 persons were killed and 200 injured. In July, just a few days after a suicide truck bomber destroyed a barracks at Lakhdaria

and

killed

10

soldiers,

a

mass assault was waged on a paramilitary base at Yakouren. While a crowd awaited the arrival on September 6 of

In

2007,

the

closest major airports were located two and a half hours away in Barcelona or Toulouse, France. The proposed airport would be located in Seu d'Urgell, and the first flights were scheduled to begin in 2010 or 2011. The 1,370-m (4,500-ft)

runway would accommodate

commer-

President Bouteflika, a suicide bomber

cial aircraft with 60-80 seats, as well as private jets.

detonated an explosive that killed 22 persons and injured more than 100. Two days later a naval barracks in Dellys, on the Kabyli coast, was attacked by a car bomb; 34 people per-

Andorra generally rated high in rankings of quality of life. The Economist magazine named Andorra first in the world for life expectancy, at an average age of 83 years. (ANNE ROBY)

ished. On December 11, two car bombs

in Algiers, one at a UN compound, killed 37 people. (GEORGE JOFFÉ)

ANGOLA

golan government was eager, however, to encourage Angolan companies and individuals to become directly involved in the petroleum industry, in addition to supplying overseas companies with local produce and services. Hitherto, little of the wealth accrued from that industry had reached the vast majority of the population. Further international recognition of Angola’s achievements followed in May with the country’s election as a member of the UN Human Rights Council, and in June an Angolan delegation took part in a meeting of member countries of the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic. The Angolan government established extensive links with neighbouring countries and played an active role in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), assuming the presidency in August of the SADCS politics, defense, and security committee. In June it was agreed at a meeting in

Luanda that military relations with South Africa would be strengthened, while South Africa's ambassador to Angola announced that his country intended to increase trade with Luanda. July and August were months of intensive diplomatic activity. An Angolan delegation to Harare exchanged plans with its Zimbabwean counterparts for improving tourism, and representatives

of Angola and Namibia agreed to synchronize their campaigns against polio. Those two countries, together with Botswana, also discussed means of improving telecommunications. Discussions to promote cooperation in a

ANDORRA

range of activities also took place with Guinea, Area: 1,246,700 sq km (481,354 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 12,264,000 Area: 464 sq km (179 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 82,600

Capital: Andorra la Vella Chiefs of state: Co-princes of Andorra, the president of France and the bishop of Urgell, Spain Head of government: Chief Executive Albert Pintat Santolària The economy of Andorra sustained a serious blow in 2007. No snow fell until the middle of March, and the usual ski-

ing season (October-April) was therefore crippled. This knockout punch to the travel industry—the country's major source of revenue—set off a ripple effect throughout the economy, affecting

Capital: Luanda Chief of state and head of government: President José Eduardo dos Santos, assisted by Prime Minister Fernando da Piedade Dias dos Santos Despite heavy rainfall in January that caused widespread flooding and food shortages in the region around the capital, Angola made significant advances on a number of fronts in 2007, owing mainly to its status as the second largest producer of crude oil in Africa south of the Sahara. On January 1 the country became the 12th full member of OPEC. Angola, already China’s largest supplier of crude oil, began negotiating deals with Russia. The An-

Cóte

d'Ivoire,

Guinea-Bissau,

Liberia, Mozambique, and Algeria. In July the visit to Angola of Pres. Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo facilitated discussions about ways to avoid disputes over the two countries common border and to strengthen ties of friendship. During July 25-27 the second stage of a nationwide campaign against polio took place, and hundreds of thousands of children were immunized in provinces as far apart as Cabinda, Huambo, and Cunene. Improvement of the country’s infrastructure remained a priority, and provision was made for road improvements in the provinces of Luanda, Lunda Norte, and Malanje.

In March it was announced that the long-awaited elections to the National Assembly would take place in 2008, and

opposition

tion to prepare

parties

went

into

for the contest.

ac-

The 365

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Antigua and Barbuda

leading opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA),

ARGENTINA

held its annual con-

ference in July and reelected Isaias Samakuva as its president. Later in the month the politburo of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) met to discuss the party's problems, while the Solidarity and

Area: 2,780,403 sq km (1,073,520 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 39,531,000

Conscience Party (PSCA) held its con-

Capital: Buenos Aires

gress in September.

Head of state: Presidents Néstor Kirchner and, from December 10, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

(KENNETH INGHAM)

ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA On

Oct.

28, 2007,

Cristina

Fernandez

de Kirchner (see BIOGRAPHIES) became

the first woman in Argentina’s history to be directly elected president. In July her Area: 442 sq km (171 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 85,900

Capital: Saint John's Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth II,

represented by Governors-General Sir James Carlisle and, from July 17, Louise Lake-Tack Head of government: Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer

husband,

Pres.

Néstor

Kirchner,

decided not to seek reelection to another four-year term, and instead he nominated Fernández de Kirchner as the governing Front for Victorys presidential candidate. Fernández de Kirchner handily won the election with 4596 of the popular vote, nearly double that of her closest competitor former national deputy Elisa Carrió of the Civic Coalition, who

The World Trade Organization

(WTO)

ruled in favour of Antigua and Barbuda in March 2007 in its case against the U.S. for not complying with the WTO's 2005 ruling to cease discriminatory treatment of foreign Internet gambling operations. In a case first taken before the WTO in 2003, Antigua and Barbuda challenged a U.S. law that blocked non-U.S. gambling operations from operating inside U.S. borders. In May, Antigua and Barbuda called on other WTO members to support its demand for compensation from the U.S. On December 21 the WTO ruled that Antigua and Barbuda could violate U.S. copyrights on music and films up to a value of $21 million. Meanwhile, Antigua and Barbuda continued to take steps to ensure that the country’s financial system was not used for money laundering. Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer spent most of the first half of 2007 engaged in a public spat with Antigua and Barbuda’s premier investor, American financier Allen Stanford, following the latter’s strong criticism of living conditions in several of the country’s electoral constituencies, including Spencer's. A survey released at midyear found that 18% of the country’s population lived below the poverty line. (DAVID RENWICK)

366

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tallied 2396. The presidential field was rounded out by former economy minis-

Senate (where the Front for Victory and allied parties controlled a total of 155 and 48 seats, respectively). She was expected to have no difficulty in the immediate future in obtaining the passage of her legislative program, which included initiatives to address poverty and increase infrastructure investment. The opposition was left extremely fragmented at the national level. The Argentine economy experienced robust growth during the year with GDP

increasing by 896. Optimism

re-

garding the growth rate was tempered by mounting inflationary pressures, however. In January the Kirchner government intervened in the operation of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), reportedly manipulating the calculation of the inflation rate in order to keep the official figure artificially low. Few observers considered the INDEC inflation statistics to be credible. Independent estimates of Argentina’s inflation rate placed it at approximately 20% for 2007, and there were concerns that it could rise even higher in 2008. (MARK P. JONES)

ARMENIA

ter Roberto Lavagna (1796), San Luis Gov. Alberto Rodríguez Saá (896), for-

mer national deputy Fernando ("Pino") Solanas (296), and nine other candidates

who combined garnered 696. Fernández de Kirchner was the plurality winner in 21 of Argentina's 23 provinces, losing only to Lavagna in Córdoba and to Rodríguez Saá in San Luis; she also lost to Carrió in the federal capital district. Elections to renew 130 of the 257 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 24 of the 72 seats in the Senate were held concurrently with the presidential contest. The Front for Victory and allied parties supporting the candidacy of Fernández de Kirchner won 83 Chamber and 16 Senate seats. The largest opposition group (the Civic Coalition and its allies supporting the Carrió candidacy) claimed 23 Chamber and 4 Senate seats. The Radical Civic Union (UCR), historically the country's second largest party, won only 11 Chamber and 2 Senate seats. The five sitting UCR governors—including Mendoza Gov. Julio Cobos, who won the vice presidency— broke with the national UCR leadership (which backed Lavagna) and supported Fernández de Kirchner's candidacy. Fernández de Kirchner thus assumed office on December 10 with ample majorities in both the Chamber and the

Area: 29,743 sq km (11,484 sq mi). About

16% of neighbouring Azerbaijan (including the 4,400-sq-km [1,700-sq-mi] disputed region of Nagomo-Karabakh [Armenian: Artsakh]) has been under Armenian control

since 1993. Population (2007 est.): 3,002,000 (plus 138,000 in Nagorno-Karabakh)

Capital: Yerevan Chief of state: President Robert Kocharyan Head of government: Prime Ministers Andranik Markaryan and, from April 4, Serzh Sarkisyan Armenian Pres. Robert Kocharyan named Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisyan, a prominent member of the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), prime

minister

after

Prime

Minister

Andranik Markaryan died suddenly of heart failure on March 25, 2007. HHK

emerged the clear winner in the May 12 parliamentary elections, garnering 65 of the 131 seats. The Prosperous Armenia party polled second with 25 seats, followed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (16), the Country

World Affairs: Australia

litically motivated. After spending four months in an isolation ward of the National

Security

Service,

Arzumanyan

was inexplicably released. The strong economic growth of recent years continued as GDP increased by 11.2% in the first six months of 2007. On March 19 Kocharyan and Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held the inauguration of the first section of a pipeline that provided Armenia with Iranian natural gas. The January 19 murder in Istanbul of Armenian author Hrant Dink (see OBIT-

UARIES) triggered widespread outrage in Armenia. Armenian officials nonetheless continued trying to persuade Turkey to open its border as a prelude to establishing diplomatic relations. (ELIZABETH FULLER)

A crowd gathers in Freedom Square in

AUSTRALIA

Yerevan, Arm., on January 23 to

honour the memory of slain Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was gunned down outside his newspaper office in Istanbul. of Law party (9); and the Heritage party (7), led by former foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian. On June 6 HHK

and Prosperous Ar-

menia signed an agreement to form a coalition government headed by Sarkisyan; in the arrangement

which

Capital: Canberra Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

sented by Governor-General Michael Jeffery Head of government: Prime Ministers John Howard and, from December 3, Kevin Rudd

Prosperous

Armenia was given three ministerial posts. The coalition partners then signed a separate cooperation agreement with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,

Area: 7,692,208 sq km (2,969,978 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 20,857,000

also would

control

three posts. Opposition parties began talks in July on forming an alliance to back a single candidate to run against Sarkisyan in the presidential ballot due in early 2008 (Kocharyan was barred from seeking a third consecutive term), but they failed

Domestic Affairs. Australia’s major preoccupation throughout most of 2007 was the possibility that Prime Minister John Howard might be defeated in the next election, bringing an end to more than a decade of conservative government. In mid-October, after months of pres-

minister in charge of climate change and water resources. Wong, who performed well in the long election campaign, replaced former rock singer Peter Garrett, previously the party's leading conservationist. Garrett was stripped of his climate change role as an apparent punishment for blunders he made during the campaign, when he joked that if the ALP was elected to government, the ALP policies announced before the election would change. Howard’s parliamentary defeat left the Liberal-National coalition in disarray, especially after outgoing treasurer Peter Costello, widely expected to succeed Howard as Liberal Party leader, declined to accept the position. Liberal Party MPs selected outgoing defense minister Brendan Nelson over Malcolm Turnbull by a vote of 45-42 to replace Howard as party leader. Turnbull was named shadow treasurer. Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile retained his seat in Parliament but resigned as leader of the National Party and was replaced by former cabinet minister Warren Truss. Public opinion during the year was deeply affected by the plight of Aboriginal children

in remote

communities,

and many people demanded that the Howard government take measures to end domestic violence and sexual assaults. Parliament in August passed laws to allow federal intervention in Aboriginal communities. Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough (who later

The newly elected prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, standing next to his wife, Therese Rein, waves to the

crowd at an election-night event in Brisbane.

sure to name a date, Howard dissolved

Parliament and scheduled the balloting for November 24. Polls showed a big lead for opposition leader Kevin Rudd

to reach any agreement. Former presi-

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

and the Australian

dent Levon TerPetrosyan emerged from obscurity in August to meet with supporters and on October 26 announced his presidential candidacy. Nagorno-Karabakh war veterans Zhirayr Sefilyan, Vardan Malkhasyan, and Vahan Aroyan, arrested in late 2006 on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the Armenian government, were sentenced on August 6 to between 18 months’ and two years’ imprisonment. Former foreign minister Alexander Arzumanyan, head of a small opposition group, was arrested on May 7 on charges of money laundering, which he claimed were po-

Labor Party (ALP), but the final tally was even more one-sided than anticipated, as Howard lost not only the premiership but also his own seat in Parliament. (See Sidebar.) Rudd, who was sworn in as prime minister on Decem-

ber 3, announced immediate changes to Australian domestic and international policies. The new cabinet featured seven women, including Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Reacting to the environmental concerns of the electorate in a country wracked by severe drought, Rudd chose South Australian Sen. Penny Wong as Australia’s first Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images

367

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World Affairs: Australia

Australia's 2007 Election: The End of an Era On Nov. 25, 2007, headlines around the world announced that the

Australian Labor Party's (ALP's) victory in that country's parliamentary election the previous day marked the end of a conservative era and the beginning of a period of substantial social change. The ALP captured 43.496 of the vote for 83 seats (an increase of 23) in the

150-seat House of Representatives. Prime Minister John Howard's conservative Liberal Party (LP) secured 36.696 of the vote and fell from 69 seats to 55, with the LP's minority coalition partner, the

National Party (NP), garnering only 5.596 and 10 seats. The Greens took 7.8% but won no seats. Two independents retained their seats. The ALP triumph capped a series of victories at the state level since 2001, and when party leader Kevin Rudd (see BIOGRAPHIES) was

sworn in on December 3 to succeed Howard as the country's 26th prime minister, there was not a single conservative political leader in power in any of Australia's states or territories. Howard, prime minister since March 1996, went into his fifth elec-

tion presiding over a country with unprecedented prosperity. Australians enjoyed near full employment, but the industrial relations landscape had changed, and many Australian workers sought a return to a system of collective bargaining rather than having to rely on individual workplace agreements with employers to set pay and working conditions. When he was defeated by former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Maxine McKew, Howard became only the second prime minister in Australian history to have lost his seat in Parliament. In his concession speech he endorsed his treasurer, Peter Costello, as his successor as the head of the LP. Costello, however,

declared that he would not accept the role of leader of the opposi-

lost his seat in Parliament) promised to spend more than $A 587 million (about U.S.$470 million) in a wide-ranging reform program that involved changes to the system requiring permits for entering Aboriginal land, banning alcohol and pornography, and acquiring control of townships through five-year leases. The Economy. The fundamentals of the Australian economy remained strong in 2007. A small increase in inflation caused the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates in midyear. The decision was unpopular, because housing affordability was declining in all major cities. Interest-rate anxiety was quickly overtaken by concern about damage done to the Australian economy by world financial volatility. Glenn Stephens, governor of the Reserve Bank, counseled that the

fallout from the mortgage market crisis in the United States had triggered investor behaviour that bordered on the irrational. (See United States: Sidebar, below.) Treasurer Costello revised the

budget estimate upward in August after reporting that he was pleased that the countrys books were in better shape 368

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

tion and that he would leave Parliament as soon as possible. He publicly blamed Howard for the landslide defeat and expressed the view that the coalition would have done better if Howard had handed over power and taken the distasteful advice of his ministers to accept the verdict of the preelection voting predictions; pollsters had asserted that it would be the ruin of the conservatives if Howard led them into battle. While playing it safe and endorsing many conservative policies that had coincided with a decade of economic growth, Rudd was

criticized by many of his supporters for not providing significant alternatives. His campaign did differ markedly from Howard's on environmental issues and the question of Australian participation in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but Rudd had learned from past experience how easily Australian voters could be spooked by the possibility of fast-tracked political change. In another break with tradition, Rudd selected his own ministers rather than having individuals thrust upon him by factional "warlords" in the party machine. Like the new prime minister, many of the new government ministers came from regional Australia, and when Rudd's cabinet met for the first

time, his leadership group was largely without any experience of power in government. Rudd (whose campaign emphasized his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese) spent his early career as a junior diplomat. From this experience he became convinced of the importance ofAustralia's future links with Asia. Although he reassured the electorate that Australia would remain a close friend of the U.S., the new government's priority remained to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq at the earliest possible opportunity. (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

than expected. Strong company tax receipts and less expenditure on welfare provided a surplus of $A 17.3 billion (about U.S.$14 billion).

This report proved to be unduly optimistic, however. On December 4 Wayne Swan, Costellos replacement as treasurer, responded to reports of lower company profits, a jump in inflation, and a record trade deficit by promising that curbing inflation would be his "number one priority." Foreign Affairs. Australia's foreign policy priority under Howard was to remain a strong ally of the United States in Iraq. The botched attempt to detonate car bombs in Glasgow, Scot., and

London thrust Australia into what Howard described as the borderless world of Islamist terror. Six foreigntrained doctors were questioned in the U.K., and an Indian doctor, Mohamed Haneef, was arrested in Australia. Ha-

neef was granted bail but was immediately detained by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, who deprived Haneef of his visa. The charge against Haneef was dropped on July 27, however, and

his visa was restored in December. The Howard government announced that it intended to sell uranium to India for peaceful purposes. Howard also decided to canvass possible sales of uranium to Russia and signed a deal with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin when Putin visited Australia during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in September. The APEC

summit, which was

held in Sydney, was the largest gathering of international world leaders ever hosted by Australia. During the summit threats of demonstrations against U.S. Pres. George W. Bush overshadowed more pressing concerns of global warming and climate change. Rudd’s victory signaled a turnaround on several issues. Immediately after taking his oath as prime minister, he fulfilled one of his campaign promises by signing the necessary documents to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which Howard had vehemently opposed. Rudd also said that he would withdraw Australian troops from Iraq. (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

World Affairs: Azerbaijan

AUSTRIA

Area: 83,871 sq km (32,383 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 8,319,000

Capital: Vienna Chief of state: President Heinz Fischer

Head of government: Chancellors Wolfgang Schüssel and, from January 11, Alfred Gusenbauer

In January 2007 a majority "grand coalition" government comprising the Social Democratic Party (SPÓ) and the centre-

right Austrian People’s Party (OVP) entered office. This brought an end to more than three months of negotiations between the parties after the inconclusive result of the general election in October 2006, when an unlikely victory for the SPÓ over the ÓVP had left neither party able to form a stable majority with its preferred political allies. The coalition's first year in office was marked by bitter fighting as both parties took time to adapt to political realities. Naturally eager to stamp its authority on the coalition after seven years in opposition, the SPÓ leadership was nevertheless hampered by its decision during the postelection talks to concede most of the prestigious cabinet posts (including finance, foreign affairs, and economy) to the OVP—a move that drew strong criticism of the new SPÓ chancellor,

Alfred

Gusenbauer,

from

party supporters. With the OVP reeling from its poor performance at the election and disinclined to acknowledge the SPO’s more "senior" role in the coalition, relations between the parties were far from cordial. In July, Austrian Pres. Heinz Fischer publicly admonished the behaviour of both parties, calling on them to show more mutual respect. Despite these tensions, the coalition reached agreement on a number of important reforms, including the introduction of a national minimum monthly wage (from 2008), increased investment on education and transport infrastructure, and the partial opening of the labour market to workers from the 10 EU member states that joined the EU in 2004 (in response to evidence of a shortage of skilled workers in certain sectors of the economy). SPÓ supporters were far from pleased, however, with the partys decision to backtrack on two key preelection pledges: namely,

to abolish university tuition fees (which had been originally signed by an OVPled government in 2003) and to cancel

AZERBAIJAN

a controversial €2 billion (about $2.77

C*

billion) contract for the purchase of 18 Eurofighter military jets. After months of debate and a truncated parliamentary investigation into allegations of corruption over the Eurofighter deal, the SPO defense minister reached a revised agreement in June to purchase 15 military aircraft at a total cost of €1.6 billion

(about $2.2 billion). The

OVP

and the SPO each laid claim to having achieved “the best possible deal for Austria,” but neither side emerged from the long-running (and at times rather murky) affair with much credit. In early 2007 the government clashed with the European Commission over the latter's rejection of a quota system for medical students at Austrian universities. The system had been introduced in 2005 in an effort to stem a surge in ap-

Area: 86,530 sq km (33,409 sq mi), including the 5,500-sq-km (2,100-sq-mi) exclave of

Nakhichevan and the 4,400-sq-km (1,700-sq-mi) disputed reaion (with Armenia)

of Nagomo-Karabakh Population (2007 est.): 8,120,000

Capital: Baku Head of state and government: President Ilham Aliyev, assisted by Prime Minister Artur Rasizade The political stagnation in 2006 that followed the crushing defeat of the opposition in the November 2005 parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan persisted in 2007. Efforts by the opposition New Equality Party (YMP) to mobilize public protest in January against steep increases in the price of electricity, natural gas, and gasoline met with little success. Following a protracted and acrimonious dispute, the opposition Democratic Party of Azerbaijan (ADP) split in February and quit the opposi-

plications from German students, many of whom had been unable to obtain a place in their national universities because of stricter admittance rules than those in Austria. The government argued that a quota system was necessary to safeguard the future of the university sector and prevent the crowding out of domestic applicants, but the Commission ruled that it was discriminatory and Onlookers surround the site of a deadly building should be abolished. collapse in Baku in late August. Pope Benedict XVI made athree-daytrip toAustriain September. During his stay the pontiff strongly urged Roman Catholics to return | to traditional values. Crowds were smaller than expected—only partly, it was said, because of miser-

able weather conditions. The economy grew at its

fastest rate in eight years in 2007, driven by strong demand for Austrian exports (particularly from Germany) and robust business

investment

in

the booming manufacturing and construction

sec-

tors. Household spending was relatively subdued. In June,

mestic bought maker

Voestalpine,

a do-

steel group, specialist steelBöhler-Uddeholm,

forming the country’s second largest industrial company. (NEIL PROTHERO) 369

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Bahamas, The

tion Freedom bloc. Supporters of party chairman and self-exiled former parliament speaker Rasul Guliyev founded a

BAHAMAS, THE

(1992-97 and 1997-2002). PLP leader and outgoing prime minister Perry

Christie promised "intense" and "sustained" opposition. Analysts did not predict any major changes in government policy, since both parties were committed to the free

new party—Open Society—in April. Opposition representatives began con-

sultations in early summer on possibly aligning behind a single candidate to challenge Pres. Tham Aliyev in the presidential election due in October 2008, but they failed to reach any con-

Area: 13,939 sq km (5,382 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 331,000

Former health minister Ali Insanov and former economic development minister Farhad Aliyev (no relation to the president) were put on trial in February and May, respectively, following their arrest in October 2005 on suspicion of having plotted to overthrow the Azerbaijani leadership. They were charged with embezzlement and abuse of their official

sented by Governor-General Arthur Dion Hanna

line.

Capital: Nassau

Head of government: Prime Ministers Perry Christie and, from May 4, Hubert Ingraham

In

January

2007

a

April to 11 years’ imprisonment. Farhad

would undergo a $250 million expansion; in recent years the Bahamian port had emerged as one of the main transshipment hubs in the region. The U.S. and The Bahamas agreed in January that the antidrug effort between the two countries would remain fully operational, despite the planned withdrawal of seven helicopters from The Bahamas by October. The aircraft would be replaced in 2008 by three other helicopters and additional drugfighting equipment.

was

sentenced

Aliyev was given a 10-year prison sen-

tence on October 31. Economic growth continued, with an estimated 35% increase in GDP. Annual inflation

reached

20%,

however,

and

BAHRAIN

spokesman of The Bahamas announced that the Freeport Container Port (FCP)

Insanov

(DAVID RENWICK)

government

in

positions.

and fiscal

prudence. In his first policy statement, Prime Minister Ingraham announced the privatization of Bahamasair, the money-losing government-owned air-

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

crete agreement.

market, foreign investment,

Area: 728 sq km (281 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 749,000

Capital: Manama Chief of state: King Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifah Head of government: Prime Minister Khalifah ibn Sulman al-Khalifah

the consortium developing the huge Shah Deniz natural gas field in the Caspian Sea warned of a possible oneyear delay in expanding output. In August a high-rise building under conBahrain issued a sharp protest to Iran struction in Baku collapsed, killing 19 following the publication on July 9, 2007, of an article in Kayhan, the Iranpersons. During the recent building boom, many contractors had failed to The Free National Movement (FNM) ian government’s semiofficial newspasecure official permits, and safety party, led by Hubert Ingraham, defied per, in which Hossein Shariat-Madari, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Sayyed Ali measures were being skirted. the pundits and won the general elecPresident Aliyev met in June in St. Petion in The Bahamas in May by a relaKhamenei, the spiritual leader of Iran, tersburg with Armenian Pres. Robert tively comfortable margin. The FNM renewed Tehran’s claim to Bahrain. (Iran had made such claims since the Kocharyan to continue talks on how to obtained 23 seats, and the Progressive resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; Liberal Party (PLP) won 18. The FNM 18th century, but the matter was thought Azerbaijani officials subsequently achad held power twice previously to have been settled in 1970, when a cused Armenia of intransigence popular referendum—held in and rejected the participation in Bahrain under UN auspices future talks of representatives and with the cooperation of Hubert Ingraham, leader of the opposition Free from the unrecognized NagornoIran—overwhelmingly rejected National Movement party, flashes a victory sign Karabakh Republic. In a ballot Bahrain’s becoming a province of after winning the general election in The Bahamas not recognized as legal by the inIran. The following year Bahrain on May 2. ternational community, former declared its independence.) In an security service head Bako Saeffort to soothe tensions, Iranian hakyan was elected on July 19 to Foreign Minister Manouchehr succeed Arkady Ghukasyan as Mottaki flew to Manama on July Nagorno-Karabakh president. 13 and publicly stated that Iran Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin had no designs on Bahrain. suggested on June 7 that the joint In the realm of women’s afuse by Russia and the U.S. of the fairs, some progress was made. Gabala radar station in AzerbaiOn March 28 Bahraini lawyer jan could obviate the need for the and diplomat Haya Rashid Alplanned U.S. antimissile defense Khalifa, president of the 61st system in Poland and the Czech session of the UN General Assembly, became the first woman Republic. Azerbaijani, Russian, and U.S. officials inspected the to deliver a speech at the Arab Gabala facility in early SeptemLeague summit conference, which was held in conservative ber, but no decision was made. (ELIZABETH FULLER) Saudi Arabia. 370

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Barbados AFP/Getty Images

During the year there were a number of violent protests, in which demonstrators demanded more social and political freedom as well as an increase in jobs for the unemployed. In response, the government established a labour fund to identify areas in which there was a shortage of skills and in which Bahrainis could be trained. In addition,

the government encouraged workers to pursue nontraditional careers. (LOUAY BAHRY)

BANGLADESH

Area: 147,570 sq km (56,977 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 140,661,000

Capital: Dhaka Chief of state: President lajuddin Ahmed Head of government: Chief Advisers lajuddin Ahmed (interim), Fazlul Haque (acting January 11—12), and, from

January 12, Fakhruddin Ahmed As Bangladesh prepared for elections on Jan. 22, 2007, apprehension

mounted,

and many feared that the outcome would be marred by bloodshed. The opposition Awami League (AL) and its allies were poised to boycott the event because the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its coalition allies had

selected the head of the caretaker government entrusted to run the election and effectively controlled the election commission. Prior to the balloting, however, the head of the caretaker government, Iajuddin Ahmed (who simultaneously served as president), resigned and implanted a new caretaker government. The election was canceled; a state

of emergency was declared; and basic human rights were withheld. For the first time in its history, Bangladesh saw two

successive

caretaker

governments

(a neutral administration created to oversee elections) formed without elec-

tions' being held. Backed by the military, the new caretaker government, under Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed, launched a purge to free the country from corruption. The first to be arrested were the most recent government ministers and lawmakers who were perceived by many as untouchable. The dragnet also fell on AL bigwigs who ruled from 1996 to 2001. Most of the influential politicians

Children displaced by severe flooding in Bangladesh reach for bags of supplies distributed by relief workers in Dhaka on August 9. from both parties were behind bars— either convicted of corruption or awaiting trial. One of the most prominent to be charged with graft was Tarique Rah-

9.2%, but steeper price hikes were reported for food items. Other worrying signs surfaced. Exports dipped year-on-

man,

ready-made-garment sector faced an order dearth; knitwear exports decreased; and woven exports barely made the target. Banks complained of a slowdown in credit applications, and the real-estate sector reported a 7096 dip in

the

eldest

son

of former

BNP

prime minister Khaleda Zia. The caretaker government embarked on another mission, popularly known as the “Minus Two Formula,” to rid the

country of the battling begums—Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wazed (president of the AL). Though the government initially tried to exile both of them, it lifted a ban on Hasina’s returning home from a tour outside the country and rescinded an order that Zia seek exile in Saudi Arabia. Both were later arrested (Zia on corruption charges and Hasina on extortion charges). Meanwhile, election and political reforms were being put in place prior to elections to be held by December 2008. The volatility of the situation in Bangladesh was highlighted in August when a brawl between a few university students and some soldiers on a petty issue turned into countrywide violence. Students and other civilians (mostly small traders and hawkers who had been evicted from footpaths earlier in the year) bashed scores of cars and vandalized shopping malls. To quell the violence, the government imposed a curfew and made numerous arrests. Fakhruddin Ahmeds government faced perhaps its biggest challenge in soothing widespread public discontent over rising prices for essential products. Officially, in June inflation stood at

year in June (from 27.8496 to 9.5296); the

sales. In addition, two back-to-back floods caused more than 1,000 fatalities,

along with huge losses to infrastructure and crops. Thousands more deaths were caused by a cyclone that struck southern Bangladesh in mid-November. (See Disasters.)

(INAM AHMED)

BARBADOS

Area: 430 sq km (166 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 294,000

Capital: Bridgetown Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, represented

by Governor-General Sir Clifford Husbands Head of government: Prime Minister Owen Arthur Negotiations (stalled for more than three years) on a bilateral fishing treaty between Barbados and neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago resumed in Janu371

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Belarus

ary 2007, following the 2006 ruling by the UN Convention on the Law of the

ported from Russia was reduced from

Sea (UNCLOS)

pay an additional tariff on exports of products from Belarusian enterprises that were produced from imported Russian oil. Despite the energy problems, economic performance was not affected. Over the first nine months of the year, GDP rose by 8.4% compared with the same period the previous year, maintaining pace with an official estimate of 8-9%. Industrial output rose by 8.2% and consumer goods by 7.3%. The national birth rate also increased by 8.8%, while the mortality rate dropped by 4.2% compared with 2006—the first such positive indicator in 12 years. At the meeting of the Second Congress

on the delimitation of

the exclusive economic zone. The UNCLOS arbitration panel, which marked the maritime boundary with a line midway between the two Caribbean countries, also urged that Trinidad and Tobago, while making provision for conservation, permit Barbadian fishermen to continue their historic practice of fishing in Trinidadian waters. In March,

Barbados

Prime

Minister

Owen Arthur set 2025 as the year by which Barbados should become “a fully developed country.” He envisioned Barbados driven primarily by a service economy and able to provide its citizens with “full employment” and “widespread material prosperity.” Energy Minister Elizabeth Thompson confirmed in May that Barbados would forge ahead with the importation of natural gas by pipeline from Trinidad and Tobago. The project had been pursued for some time by the Eastern Caribbean Gas Pipeline Co., a private firm. In June Barbados launched its first open-bid round for offshore oil and gas acreage. International companies could bid on 24 blocks in the continental shelf and deep water. An offshore exploratory well drilled by ConocoPhillips six years earlier, however, did not prove to be commercial.

| (DAVID RENWICK)

BELARUS

Area: 207,595 sq km (80,153 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,692,000

Capital: Minsk Head of state and government: President Alyaksandr H. Lukashenka, assisted by Prime Minister Syarhey Sidorski The year 2007 began in Belarus with a fractious dispute with Russia over natural gas prices. Belarus agreed to pay Gazprom $100 per 1,000 cu m for imported Russian gas, more than double the 2006 rate. Moreover, it was agreed that the price would rise each year to reach the European rate (at that time about $265) by 2011. On January 12, after a three-day closure of the Druzhba pipeline, Minsk and Moscow also signed an agreement on oil transit. The tax Belarus was paying on oil im372

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

$180 to $53 per ton, though it was to

of Democratic

lated.

(DAVID R. MARPLES)

BELGIUM

Forces, which was held

on May 26-27 at the Minsk Automotive Factory's Palace of Culture, a system of cochairs was instituted to replace the sole leadership of Alyaksandr Milinkevich. In anticipation of an economic crisis, the group also launched a “national round-table" campaign that would undertake discussions with the government. The congress approved a 44-member Political Council and concluded with the election

Belarusian government and the actual situation in the country. As a result of this and other reports, Belarus bid for membership in the UN Human Rights Council was denied. On July 17 Lukashenka dismissed KGB chief Stsyapan Sukharenka, replacing him with Yury Zhadobin. The appointment followed a spy scandal in which four Belarusians and a Russian were arrested, allegedly for working with Polish intelligence forces, although it was unclear whether the two events were re-

of four cochairs

Area: 30,528 sq km (11,787 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,597,000

Capital: Brussels Chief of state: King Albert Il Head of government: Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt

(Anatol

Lyabedzka, Syarhey Kalyakin, Vintsuk Vyachorka, and Anatol Lyaukovich), who represented the main opposition political parties. A proposed fifth chair was designated for Milinkevich, but he opted to lead a Movement for Freedom that would focus on street protests. Such protests continued throughout the year, though the number of participants remained small. At commemorations on March 25 of the 89th anniversary of the Belarusian Democratic Republic, antigovernment demonstrators turned out in force. The government attempted to divert attention from the event by offering alternative activities—a Russian ballet and a concert. The anniversary of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was commemorated after Milinkevich visited the affected zones in late April, and on October 14 a large pro-EU rally with about 7,000 participants took place; most of the opposition groups cooperated. The authorities permitted the

Belgium experienced its most serious political crisis in decades following the countrys general election on June 10, 2007, as political parties struggled to form a government. The polls signaled the end of the outgoing Liberal-Socialist coalition, which had governed for four years under Flemish Liberal Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. In Dutchspeaking Flanders there were major gains for the Christian Democrats and losses for the Liberals and Socialists. In Francophone Wallonia the Socialists

event, but numerous

partners, however,

activists were

ar-

rested beforehand on various pretexts (the most common were for "petty hooliganism" and "swearing in public"). The government of Pres. Alyaksandr H. Lukashenka did not relax its authoritarian hold. In May Human Rights Watch issued a report that noted the wide gap between pledges made by the

also lost seats, the Christian Democrats

made modest gains, and the Liberals emerged as the largest political force. The clear winner was Yves Leterme,

the leader of the Flemish Christian Democrats. His party gained eight seats, returning 30 deputies to the 150-member House of Representatives. His demands for wide-ranging constitutional reforms and increased autonomy for the regions, notably Flanders, met firm opposition from potential French-speaking and stalled the for-

mation of a Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition. After almost 200 days of stalemate, an interim coalition government

under Verhofstadt was formed shortly before Christmas. This government would remain in office until March 23,

2008, allowing Leterme more time to try to put together a ruling majority.

World Affairs: Bhutan

An Organisation for Economic Co-op-

eration and Development report in March noted that the Belgian economy was recovering strongly and that public debt was declining as a percentage of GDP. It forecast growth of 2.3% for 2007 and 2.1% for 2008. A survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium placed Belgium as the fifth largest destination for American investment in 2005. The total stock of American investment had reached $36.7 bil-

lion by 2005—double years earlier. Brussels

Airlines,

the level of five the

result

BELIZE

On March

vised, mostly cash, offer of €72 billion (about $102 billion). After the takeover

was completed, Fortis, which was previously in 20th position, became the 15th largest bank in Europe in terms of capitalization. Belgium used its powers under the law of universal competence (which allowed the country to judge crimes wherever they were committed) to try a former Rwandan army officer, Maj. Bernard Ntuyahaga, for the murder of 10 Belgian paratroopers in Kigali, Rwanda, in April 1994. The soldiers were part of a UN force monitoring the cease-fire between the Hutu and the Tutsi. After an 11-week trial, Ntuyahaga was found guilty in early July and sen-

of

Capital: Belmopan

Pres. Thomas Yayi Boni was attacked by armed gunmen as it passed near the town of Parakou in central Benin. Although Boni survived the assassination attempt without injury several Presidential Guards were wounded by unknown assailants. In the March 31 legislative elections, the ruling Forces for an Emerging

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, represented

Benin (FCBE), a coalition of 20 parties

by Govemor-General Sir Colville Young Head of government: Prime Minister Said Musa

supporting President Boni, won 35 of the 83 seats. The two major opposition parties also made strides; the Alliance for a Dynamic Democracy (which included the party of former president Nicéphore Soglo) gained 20 seats, and the Democratic Renewal party of Adrien Houngbédji garnered 10 seats. Minor parties took the remaining 18

Area: 22,965 sq km (8,867 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 306,000

of a

merger in November 2006 between Virgin Express and SN Brussels Airlines (the latter the offspring of the defunct national carrier, Sabena), began operating in March. At the end of May, the Belgo-Dutch bank, Fortis, joined the Royal Bank of Scotland and Spain’s Banco Santander Central Hispano and made an offer for Dutch bank ABN AMRO. This consortium faced competition from a rival bid from British bank Barclays. ABN AMRO shareholders supported Fortis’s cash-and-share offer, while the bank’s supervisory and management boards favoured Barclays’s all-share bid. In October ABN AMRO accepted the consortium’s re-

15, 2007, the motorcade

The government of Belize took a bold step in 2007 to tackle the unsustainable debt burden that had shackled Belmopan to its creditors during the previous few years. Most of the creditors agreed to exchange their claims for new bonds that would mature in 2029. The bonds, with a face value of $546.8

million, would amortize starting in 2019. This relief in fiscal restructuring received an additional boost when the newly formed Statistical Institute of Belize reported that the country's economic growth for the first six months of 2007 was 4.496. The emerging petroleum industry, the services sector, and the manufacturing industry were responsible for the growth. Unfortunately, the devastation inflicted in August by Hurricane Dean resulted in an estimated $98.6 million loss, about one-

third of the government revenues for the April 2007-March 2008 period. The September visit of UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura signaled the significance of Belize's participation in that world body. During his stay he designated Belizean singer, composer, and cultural icon Andy Palacio UNESCO Artist for Peace, a rare award

seats. In this election, the fifth since the

transition to multiparty democracy in 1990, voters ousted 80% of the incum-

bents. On May 3 Minister of Higher Education Mathurin Coffi Nago, a member

of the

FCBE,

was

elected

the

parliamentary president. Boni and his cabinet organized a 10km (6.2-mi) “march against corruption,” which took place on July 16. In a speech delivered on August 1, Benin’s Independence Day, Boni made a stinging denunciation of corruption and vowed to fulfill his election promises by wiping it out.

On June 3 it was announced that the French Institute of Patent Rights had granted Benin scientist Jéróme Fagla Médégan a patent for his discovery of a new treatment for a strain of sickle-cell anemia. This marked the first time that an African had been given a patent for a new drug.

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

BHUTAN

given to only a select few who have demonstrated a capacity to build peace through dialogue across world cultures. (JOSEPH O. PALACIO)

tenced to 20 years in prison.

Tennis player Justine Henin separated from her husband, Pierre-Yves Hardenne (and reverted to her maiden

name), but she had a good year on the court, winning the French and USS. Open championships and regaining the number one ranking. In contrast, her great rival Kim Clijsters married Belgium-based American basketball player Brian Lynch in July and retired from tennis at the age of 23. Clijsters won 34 titles during her career and was ranked number one for 19 weeks in 2003. (RORY WATSON)

BENIN

Area: 38,394 sq km (14,824 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 658,000 (excluding

Area: 112,622 sq km (43,484 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 8,079,000 Capital: Porto-Novo (executive and ministerial offices remain in Cotonou)

Head of state and government: Thomas Yayi Boni

President

more than 100,000 refugees in Nepal) Capital: Thimphu Head of state: Druk Gyalpo (King) Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk Head of government: Prime Ministers Lyonpo Khandu Wangchuk and, from July 31, lyonpo Kinzang Dorji Mock elections were held in April 2007 as Bhutan prepared to transition from 373

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Bolivia

an absolute monarchy to a multiparty democracy. Bhutan’s first general elections were scheduled for 2008. A new king was crowned in December 2006 after King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, who had ruled for 34 years, abdicated in favour of his Oxford-educated eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk. The

fate

of

more

than

100,000

Bhutanese refugees staying in UN High Commissioner for Refugees-administered camps in eastern Nepal remained uncertain. Though the U.S., Canada, Norway, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand announced

early in 2007 that they were ready to resettle the refugees, little progress was made. The U.S. offered to take at least 60,000

refugees.

Meanwhile,

internal

security was threatened when the Bhutan Communist Party (MarxistLeninist-Maoist), a group that had formed in 2003 in the Nepalese refugee camps, announced plans to wage a people’s war. Following the completion during the year of the Tala Hydroelectric Project, which supplied India with power, plans were approved for work to begin in 2008 on the Punatsangchu-I project. India and Bhutan updated their 1949 Peace and Friendship Treaty in February 2007, when King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk visited New Delhi. No headway was made, however, in the

stalled

border

talks between

and China.

Bhutan

(KESHAB POUDEL)

A protester participates in a demonstration on July 20 against a proposal to move the Bolivian government from La Paz to its former seat in the city of Sucre. creased between the Indian-dominated western highlands and the resourcerich eastern lowlands. The rivalry between the regions was further aggravated by a proposal to transfer the political capital back to Sucre (the sole capital until 1899), sparking massive protests in La Paz.

BOLIVIA

Area: 1,098,581 sq km (424,164 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,525,000 Capitals: La Paz (administrative) and Sucre (judicial)

Head of state and government: President Evo Morales Ayma Pres. Evo Morales forged ahead in 2007 with his bold attempt to restructure Bolivia on terms more favourable to its impoverished Indian majority. He scored some successes, significantly boosting the government's share of revenue from natural gas and mineral resources. The constituent assembly drafting a new constitution made little progress, however, and tension in374

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

As South America’s first Indian president, Morales was

determined

to lock

in the political gains represented by his 2005 election. His followers in the assembly pushed for the recognition of Indian nations with extensive political rights and control over resources. Morales’s opponents said that such conditions could lead to the breakup of the country and sought priority for regional governments to reinforce the power of non-Indian elites. Agreement proved difficult, and the assembly’s yearlong mandate, scheduled to expire in August, was renewed for four months with the possibility of further extensions.

Repercussions from the 2006 nationalization of the gas industry dominated the economic scene. In May, after tense negotiations, Brazil's state-owned petroleum company agreed to sell back two oil refineries it had bought from Bolivia in 1999. Brazil was Bolivia’s major gas customer, and the refinery dispute highlighted Bolivia’s role in the

wider

struggle

States,

Brazil,

between and

the

United

Venezuela

for re-

gional influence. Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chavez provided aid pledges of $800 million for the year. The Morales government pushed ahead with other nationalization plans, opening negotiations with the Italian majority owners of the telephone system and signaling a similar move with the electrical utility. It also moved to capitalize on world metals by raising its share of mineral royalties. Despite the tension in several sectors, high commodity prices and the absence of crippling foreign-debt payments allowed Bolivia to register a measure of economic growth. Morales’s Zero Malnutrition program, which aimed to wipe out a scourge affecting 40% of the population, was praised by the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food. The personal popularity of Morales remained strong, although he was criticized for doling out aid from Chavez as personal favours to allies. Cocalero, a documentary film about Morales’s life, was favourably received outside Bolivia and added lustre to his image. Protests mounted in Bolivia after world football (soccer) officials banned

international

matches

in

stadiums

more than 2,500 m (8,200 ft) above sea

level, citing possible threats to players’

World Affairs: Botswana

health. The Bolivian campaign included well-publicized trips by Morales to play football on alpine fields, and the ban was eventually modified to allow matches to be played at the stadium in La Paz (about 3,600 m [11,800 ft]. Meanwhile, scientists warned that

global warming was steadily reducing the size of Andean glaciers, endangering water supplies for about two million Bolivians.

(PAUL KNOX)

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Area: 51,209 sq km (19,772 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,855,000

Capital: Sarajevo Heads of state: Nominally a tripartite (Serb, Croat, Muslim) presidency with a chair that rotates every eight months; members in 2007 were Nebojsa Radmanovic (Serb; chairman), Zeljko Komsic (Croat; chairman from July 6), and Haris Silajdzic (Muslim).

Final authority resides in the Office of the High Representative and EU Special Representative, Christian Schwarz-Schilling (Germany) and, from July 2, Miroslav Lajcak (Slovakia)

Head of government: Prime Ministers Adnan Terzic and, from January 11 to November 1 and again from December 29, Nikola Spiric Leaders from Bosnia and Herzegovina's two entities, the Muslim-Croat Federa-

tion and the Republika

Srpska (Bos-

nian Serb Republic; RS), failed in 2007

to endorse a comprehensive reform of the country's postwar constitution. The sticking point remained with the RS's refusal to accept amendments that would create a strong unified government and replace the country's ethnically based structure with economic regions. Bosnian Serb leaders were unanimous in their rejection of any further integration and failed to adopt the reforms. Their refusal to compromise remained one of the main obstacles encountered in rebuilding the country since the 1992-95 war ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement. In May the UN appointed Bosnia's sixth high representative, Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajcak, who—shortly after taking up the post in July—stressed that “there is no better future for Bosnia than its EU future.” Lajcak

scored some successes by brokering the formation of a government in the Hercegovina-Neretva

Canton, persuad-

ing Bosnia’s parliament to adopt reforms in higher education, removing 35 police officers in the RS who were suspected of involvement in the 1995 Srebenica massacre, and warning RS Prime

Minister

Milorad

Dodik

(who

considered the RS a “permanent category’) to refrain from inflammatory statements or face sanctions. Lajcak’s efforts toward implementing longawaited

police reform,

however,

were

spurned by both entities. European Union Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn reiterated that the EU would not sign a stabilization and association agreement with Bosnia unless its leaders agreed to reform the country’s police forces. On November 1 Prime Minister Nikola Spiric resigned his post to protest Lajcak’s efforts to institute new rules on decision making in the central parliament. Bosnia’s parliament reappointed Spiric on December 29. According to a report issued by

some of the less-prominent cases from the ICTY,

continued

its work

investi-

gating some three dozen suspects. A Sarajevo-based nongovernmental research institute released a report showing that the 1992-95 war resulted in the deaths of 97,207 people, more than 40% of whom were civilians. Previously, Bosnian and international officials had often cited 200,000 deaths as

the official number. (MILAN ANDREJEVICH)

BOTSWANA

Area: 582,356 sq km (224,848 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,882,000

Capital: Gaborone Head of state and government: President Festus Mogae

Bosnia’s Office of Auditors, about 65%

of the state’s 2007 budget was earmarked for salaries of government officials, often exceeding €1,800 monthly (€1 =about

$1.40).

Local

media

and

government watchdog activists criticized the government for widespread corruption,

extensive

waste,

and poor

Controversy in Botswana

continued in

2007 over the eviction of Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Though the high court had ruled in December 2006 that the eviction had been unlawful, Attorney General Athaliah Molokomme interpreted the judgment as applying only to the 189

accounting. Average monthly salaries hovered around €350 for regularly employed Bosnians. Some 40% of workers Two female members of the Bushmen tribe sit were unemployed, and outside their dwelling in the Central Kalahari Game nearly half the population Reserve in Botswana; they were among the few left lived at or below the after most of their tribe had been evicted. poverty level. Conditions were reportedly even worse in the RS, and offi-

cials there said that some relief might be on the way following the sale (for €646 million) of 6596 of its telecommunications com-

pany, Telekom Srpske, to Serbia’s Telekom Srbija. For the first time in its 14-year history, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

(ICTY)

met

in

Sarajevo, to hear testimony bya jailed Bahraini who fought with Bosnian Muslim forces during the 1992-95

war.

Meanwhile,

the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia's

State

Court,

set up in 2005 to take over 375

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Brazil

petitioners of the case and their immediate families. Returnees who hunted with firearms and imported goats into the reserve were initially prosecuted but later acquitted. Meanwhile, in May, De Beers sold its diamond prospect at Gope, in the southeastern corner of the reserve,

for $17

million,

and

a new

small privately owned mine was expected to open. The transfer of sales and distribution of Botswana's diamonds from London to Gaborone proceeded, but not without controversy. The De Beers Groups Diamond Trading Co. neared completion of a $450 million sorting centre near Gaborones international airport. New foreign-owned diamond-cutting and polishing workshops, however, came into conflict with local unions over issues related to minimum wages. Constitutional tension continued between presidentialism and the vestiges of parliamentary sovereignty. The parliament stalled the presidential cabinets privatization of Air Botswana on the grounds that the airline had been established by an act of parliament and that the cabinet had exceeded its prerogative. The parliament also insisted on oversight of the operations of a new national security bill that was presented by the cabinet and included draconian provisions.

Malaysian-owned Limkokwing University of Creative Technology opened a Gaborone campus in March. The government announced that it would financially sponsor students at Limkokwing and other new private institutions of higher education within Botswana, as well as continue to send students to South African and Australian universities. This drastically reduced the annual student enrollment at the University of Botswana.

(NEIL PARSONS)

BRAZIL

ond four-year term; 27 state governors also assumed office. In his inaugural speech, Lula highlighted economic growth and public security as themes of his administration. Over the course of the year bolstered by a continuingly successful monetary policy that kept inflation under control and attracted foreign and domestic capital investment, Brazil exhibited signs of entering a “virtuous cycle” of economic growth that placed strong demands

on infrastructure, environment,

and human resources. On January 22 Lula unveiled the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) as his second adminis-

tration’s signature policy initiative. The PAC, steered by Chief of Staff Dilma Rouseff, aimed at boosting economic growth to 5% annually in part by funding an array of development projects.

In early February the Congress convened,

and

the

Senate

reelected

Alagoás Sen. Renan Calheiros of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement

(PMDB)

as

its president.

Calheiros was a central figure in a number of corruption scandals that plagued the upper house during the year. In late May several accusations of corruption surfaced against Calheiros, including allegations that a construction firm lobbyist made payments on Calheiros's behalf to a former journalist with whom the Senate president had an out-of-wedlock child. The Senate Ethics Council held hearings on the evidence and on whether to strip Calheiros of his mandate. With Calheiros using his office to maneuver and influence colleagues, he evaded losing his mandate, yet his troubles paralyzed the Congress. Calheiros requested a temporary leave of absence from his post on October 11 to prepare his defense. Finally, on December 4, he stepped down permanently as Senate president, returning to assume his seat representing Alagoás. This move forced the Senate into new leadership elections; Rio Grande do Norte Garibaldi Alves Filho (PMDB)

Area: 8,514,877 sq km (3,287,612 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 189,335,000

Capital: Brasilia Head of state and government: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

On Jan. 1, 2007, Brazilian Pres. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) was sworn in for his sec-

376

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Sen. was

chosen as Senate president on December 12. Calheiros’s resignation also cleared the obstacles for voting on important legislation favoured by Lula, such as extension of the Provisional Contribution on Financial Transactions (CPMF)

tax,

an

important

revenue

source for social programs. The two most significant opposition parties, the Brazilian Party of Social Democracy and the Democratas (formerly the Liberal Front Party), had been reluctant

to move forward on the CPMF with Calheiros still installed. On December 13 the Senate rejected a constitutional amendment to extend the CPMF. The tax

bill,

which

needed

49

votes

to

reach the 60% approval threshold for constitutional

amendments,

fell four

votes short. The defeat represented perhaps the greatest setback of the year for the Lula administration. The CPMF was set to expire at the end of 2007.

On April 25 Minister of Environment Marina Silva announced significant structural and personnel changes that split the Brazilian Environmental Institute (IBAMA) into two entities, one re-

sponsible for conservation and the other responsible for environmentalimpact

assessments,

authorizations,

and licenses. For the Lula administration, the lack of progress on environmental licensing was stalling progress on the PAC, particularly the multibillion-dollar power-generation projects on the Madeira River in Rondônia. To the dismay of IBAMA workers who ended a two-month strike on July 13, IBAMA gave initial approval on July 9 for the two Madeira River hydroelectric projects, Santo Antônio and Jirau.

Violence and public safety in Rio de Janeiro continued to be a major issue in 2007. In April Lula authorized the armed forces to help quell violence in Rio de Janeiro, which hosted the Pan

American Games in July. The Games were seen as a precursor to Brazil's hosting greater international events, such as the World Cup or the Olympics; on October 30 the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Joseph Blatter, announced

that Brazil would host the 2014 World Cup.

On July 17 Brazil suffered its worstever air traffic disaster when a TAM Airbus crashed on landing at Sáo Paulo Congonhas airport. (See DISASTERS.) The accident, which occurred at night amid rainy conditions, killed 199 people, including all the passengers and crew members and several people on the ground. Following so soon after the 2006 disaster involving a Brazilian Gol Airlines plane that claimed 155 lives, the TAM crash shook Brazilian civil aviation to its core. On July 25 Lula named former Supreme Court chief justice Nelson Jobim minister of defense; in his post Jobim replaced directors of the National Civil Aviation Agency and proposed several sets of structural changes to improve Brazilian aviation. Throughout 2007 air passen-

World Affairs: Bulgaria

gers were confronted with aviation work stoppages, delays, and airport shutdowns as Brazil coped with the sectors operational and management problems. On August 22 the Brazilian Supreme Court began to hear accusations against 40 persons involved in the 2005 mensaláo ("monthly allowance") payola scandal. On August 25 the Supreme Court voted to move forward with indictments against all 40, a group that included former Lula chief of staff José Dirceu and former Workers' Party president and current Sao Paulo Federal Deputy Jose Genoino.

The economy showed signs of strengthening. The benchmark discount interest rate, set by the central banks Open Market Committee, began the year at 13.2596 and, through a series of interest-rate declinations that carried through to October, settled at 11.2596. Bolstered by increased corporate transparency and a sequence of at-

tractive initial public offerings—many of them in the fast-growing biofuels sector—the Sao Paulo Stock Market (Bovespa) opened the year at 45,382 points; as of market closing on December 4, the Bovespa index had reached 63,482 points, a gain of almost 40%. While opening the year with international reserves

of $85.8 billion, by the

end of October Brazil had international reserves of $167.9 billion, nearly approaching its announced external debt of $194.6 billion. With the government's macroeconomic policy of targeting inflation, Brazil showed an inflation rate

in 2007 to diversify the economy. The government launched a landmark project to build the country’s first petrochemical production plant, a $400 million methanol plant that was being constructed in a joint venture with Japan’s Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co. and Itochu Corp. Brunei and Malaysia reached a tentative

agreement

in resolving

maritime

border issues during the August visit to Bandar Seri Begawan of Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who met with Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu‘izzaddin Waddaulah. In other royal news, Crown Prince Haji Muhtadi Billah continued his many working visits to state institutions. The new parliament building in the capital neared completion. The Islamization process accelerated. A

new

bank,

the

Islamic

Bank

of

Brunei Berhad, was created by merging two existing banks, the Islamic Bank of Brunei Darusslam and the Islamic Development Bank of Brunei. In August Sultan Hassanal initiated the country’s second university, the Islamic University of Sultan Sharif Ali, which opened its doors to an initial 152 students. In addition, the former Islamic Teachers’

Training College was elevated to the status of university college. Brunei also held a major international Halal (religiously permitted food) exhibition in Bandar Seri Begawan.

(B.A. HUSSAINMIYA)

BULGARIA

of 4.1226 for the 12 months ended in October. Growth in GDP measured by the Brazilian Census Bureau for the 12month period ended in July reached 4.896, close to the targets set by the PAC.

(JOHN CHARLES CUTTINO)

BRUNEI

us Area: 5,765 sq km (2,226 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 393,000

Capital: Bandar Seri Begawan Head of state and government: Sultan and Prime Minister Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu‘izzaddin Waddaulah In line with the state ideology of Malay Islamic Monarchy, Brunei made efforts

2006 to 7.06% in August 2007, Bulgarian wages stayed low, while prices continued to increase rapidly. Major contributors to the rises were the 7.8% increase in energy prices and an aver-

age 3.9% price hike in food items; the latter boost was aided by prolonged drought and a negative outlook for the fall harvest. Overall price pressure prompted educators to stage protest strikes in their quest for higher salaries, and the government agreed to partially satisfy their demands. Real-estate prices saw rapid growth of 15% for the first six months of the year. Foreign demand for recreation homes in the countryside and high levels of investment in urban areas drove a number of banks to increase mortgage rates for fear of running low on reserves. The fast-developing real-estate sector also put Bulgaria in danger of infringing on the Natura 2000 ecological network established by the EU to protect wildlife. Bulgaria’s EU accession helped put an end to the more-than-eight-year ordeal of six medical workers (five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor) ac-

cused of having deliberately infected some 400 Libyan children with HIV. In spite of continued rejections of the accusation and several reports from AIDS researchers confirming that the epidemic had started before the Bulgarians

arrived

Capital: Sofia Chief of state: President Georgi Purvanov Head of government: Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev After putting aside the initial euphoria of Bulgaria’s accession into the European Union in January 2007, Bulgari-

ans realized that the road to becoming an integral part of wealthy and ambitious Europe was almost as difficult as the path from communism to democracy. Foreign investment poured into the country, and although the rate of unemployment plummeted from 9.6% in

the medical

workers had been sentenced to death in 2004. After complex negotiations between Libya and the EU (notably France), the government of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi lessened the sentence to life imprisonment. The prisoners were flown home, where they were pardoned by Pres. Georgi Purvanov upon their arrival in Sofia on July 24. In June

Area: 111,002 sq km (42,858 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 7,645,000

in the ward,

the

European

Commission

identified corruption as a continuing hurdle to Bulgaria’s full integration into the EU. While visiting during the summer,

U.S.

couraged

Pres.

George

President

W. Bush

Purvanov

en-

and

Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev to es-

calate measures against organized crime. Many Bulgarians believed that the governments failure to take action in these areas stemmed from the governments own involvement in illegal deals. This notion was highlighted when the list containing the names of citizens who collaborated with State Security during Bulgarias communist regime included the names of many political figures, most notably that of President Purvanov. (IVA IOVTCHEVA; BORIS YOVCHEV) 377

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Burkina Faso

BURKINA FASO

seats.

Former

Zongo was June 4.

ambassador

named

prime

Tertius

minister

on

Results of the December 2006 census published in April showed a total population Area: 267,950 sq km (103,456 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 14,326,000

Capital: Ouagadougou Chief of state: President Blaise Compaoré Head of government: Prime Ministers Paramanga Ernest Yonli and, from June 4, Tertius Zongo Burkina Faso Pres. Blaise Compaoré expanded his role in international affairs with his election in 2007 as head of both the Economic Community of West African States and the West African Economic and Monetary Union. The summit meetings of both organizations were held in Ouagadougou on January 19-20. In March Compaoré hosted a meeting between Cóte d'Ivoire Pres. Laurent Gbagbo and Ivoirian

rebel leader

Guillaume

Soro;

the talks resulted in a new peace agreement designed to end the four-year-old civil war in that country. In the May 6 elections, the ruling Congress for Democracy and Progress won a substantial majority in the National Assembly, taking 73 of the 111 (Left to right) Cóte d'Ivoire Pres. Laurent Gbagbo, Burkina Faso Pres. Blaise Compaoré, and Ivoirian rebel leader Guillaume Soro join hands on March 4 after signing a new peace agreement aimed at ending the civil war in Cóte d'Ivoire. The three leaders held talks in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou.

Ahmed Ouoba—Maxppp/Landov

378

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

of 13,730,258,

an

increase

of

more than 3.4 million people in 10 years. Despite years of internationally funded aid programs, Burkina Faso remained among the poorest countries in the world, with nearly half the population living on less than $1 daily. A deadly meningitis epidemic, low cotton prices, and severe summer flooding throughout the country added to Burkina Faso’s economic woes. (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

BURUNDI

Area: 27,816 sq km (10,740 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 8,391,000 (including fewer than 400,000 refugees in Tanzania)

Capital: Bujumbura Head of state and government:

A series of ousters, firings, and resignations within the highest ranks of the ruling party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDDFDD), splintered the party and threatened Burundi’s political stability. Hussein Radjabu, chairman of the CNDD-FDD,

was voted out of office on

February 7. His ouster was followed by the firings of the second vice president, Marina Barampama, and several other governmental leaders. Following suit, several governors and 30 MPs, all supporters of Radjabu, resigned to protest his exit. In April Radjabu was arrested for having organized rebel forces to destabilize the country, and his trial began in December. Burundi’s economy was bolstered following the country’s acceptance in April into the East African Community, a regional trade and development bloc. A funding crunch in the UN’s World Food Programme and its refugee agency, the UNHCR, threatened ongoing repatriation operations that by August had successfully repatriated 10,000 Burundian refugees from camps in Tanzania.

(MARY EBELING)

President

Pierre Nkurunziza

The strides toward reconciliation made in 2006 between the power-sharing government of Burundi and the last remaining rebel group were reversed in 2007. Following the winding down at year’s end 2006 of UN peacekeeping operations in Burundi, the National Liberation Forces (FNL), agreed to a

cease-fire accord with the government in January 2007. Talks to iron out details of the pact continued until June, but in July the process was derailed when the FNL withdrew from negotiations for a second time. The original cease-fire deal, signed in September 2006 by Pres. Pierre Nkurunziza and FNL leader Agathon Rwasa, was never implemented owing to unresolved issues, namely the release of FNL prisoners. Violence in Bujumbura increased significantly during August 2007, forcing the army to beef up security throughout the city. The violence was attributed to alleged dissent within the FNL ranks and the stalled peace talks. In September the FNL turned down calls by the UN for a return to the negotiating table and an offer from South Africa to help in peace negotiations. The rebel group refused to resume talks with the government.

CAMBODIA

Area: 181,035 sq km (69,898 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 13,893,000

Capital: Phnom Penh Chief of state: King Norodom Sihamoni Head of government: Prime Minister Hun Sen

In Cambodia in 2007 the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (officially the Extraordinary Chambers continued

in the Courts of Cambodia) to move forward in a slow,

almost tortuous process. On July 18, prosecutors recommended that five senior Khmer Rouge leaders be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the Pol Pot regime (1975-79). Although Kaing Khek Iev (known as “Duch”) and Nuon

Chea were the only ones officially charged, the Cambodian press speculated that others named internally might include Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Khieu Thirith. Samphan, head of state during the regime, contracted French attorney Jacques Verges,

World Affairs: Canada Xinhua/Landov

famous for having defended notorious international figures. Kaing Khek Iev, head of the infamous S-21 Pol Pot detention centre, was the only potential defendant in government custody when the tribunal was formed. He was officially charged and moved to the tribunals detention facility on July 31. Nuon Chea, the regime's second ranking figure after Pol Pot, was charged on September 19. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal proceedings reportedly came close to breaking down in negotiations between Cambodian and international judges over internal procedural rules. The most-publicized sticking point—the exact fees to be paid by foreign defense attorneys to the Cambodian Bar Association— seemed trivial, but it was clearly only the last of many issues debated with much brinksmanship. The internal rules,

under

consideration

since

councils

CAMEROON

Area: 475,442 sq km (183,569 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 18,060,000

Capital: Yaoundé Chief of state: President Paul Biya Head of government: Prime Minister Ephraim Inoni

No-

vember 2006, were not formally approved until June 13. The tribunal was also still several million dollars short of its $56.3 million budget and would need to secure the funds by mid-2008. The dominant Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) overwhelmingly won commune council elections in April, further consolidating its position. The CPP won 61% of the popular vote and was in a position to dominate 98.2% of the commune

bodian economy. The country was expanding its navy to protect the offshore sites. In other news, a major epidemic of dengue fever had by mid-October infected 38,000 people and resulted in 389 deaths, mostly rural children. (JOHN A. MARSTON)

(all but 28 of the

Some

20 members

of the Southern

Cameroon National Council (SCNC) were arrested on Jan. 20, 2007, while

trying to hold a press conference. The SCNC, which had been banned in 2001

after a number of violent conflicts with the police, was demanding the secession of the two western English-speaking provinces and the establishment of an independent Anglophone Cameroon. In contrast

to the ongoing

separatist

1,621 communes). The Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) received 26% of the popular vote. A split in the royalist party— with both FUNCINPEC and the Norodom Ranariddh Party claiming its mantle—put it in an especially weak

debate, many young people were adopting a new language, dubbed “Camfranglais,” in an effort to improve com-

position. In March, in the course of an other-

(a mixture of English, French, and the

wise nonpolitical march by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations and labour unions, human rights activist and former political prisoner Kem Sokha announced informally the creation of a new political party; the Human Rights Party was launched officially in July. The long-anticipated move was criticized by the SRP, which feared that the new party would draw from its membership and otherwise divide political opposition. New reports predicted that Cambodian offshore oil fields might yield more than initially expected. Several international companies were engaged in

exploration. A September IMF study indicated that Cambodia could begin generating approximately $174 million in oil income by 2011, with production peaking at $1.7 billion in 2021—significant revenue in relation to the Cam-

munication

in a country

with

more

than 250 African languages. Teachers complained in February that Franglais creole language) was having a profound effect on how students spoke and wrote French and English, Cameroon's two official languages. In Douala hundreds of homes and businesses were bulldozed in April by orders of the city council to make way for new roads. Although owners claimed that they had paid property taxes to the local government, the council insisted that the structures were illegal and had never received

Chinese Pres. Hu Jintao Liu Yongqing, pose for a Cameroonian Pres. Paul wife before their meeting

and his wife, photo with Biva and his in

Cameroon's capital, Yaoundé, on January 31. In January,

Chinese

Pres. Hu Jintao

paid a state visit to Yaoundé. Presidents Hu and Biya signed a series of cooperative agreements and concessionary loans, including an interest-free $3.86

million loan for projects to be determined at a future date by the Cameroonian government. Tragedy struck on February 5 when a motorized canoe carrying more than 100 passengers and heavy cargo sank after leaving the port of Tiko en route to Oron, Nigeria; more than 20 people drowned. Then, on May 5, minutes af-

ter taking off from the Douala airport, a Kenya Airways plane crashed into marshlands, killing all 114 passengers and crew.

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

CANADA

planning permission.

Despite a reportedly low voter turnout (6296) for the July 22 legislative and municipal elections, Pres. Paul Biya's Democratic Rally of the Cameroonian People (RDPC) won a landslide victory. The RDPC increased its absolute majority in the 180-seat parliament from 149 to 152 seats and won control of more than 300 of the country's 363 local governments.

Area: 9,984,670 sq km (3,855,103 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 32,945,000

Capital: Ottawa Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

sented by Governor-General Michaélle Jean Head of government: Prime Minister Stephen Harper 379

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Canada

Domestic Affairs. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority government entered its second year in office in 2007. Harper's first year had been dedicated to pursuing a five-point legislative agenda based on his campaign platform. His Conservative Party expected to call a snap election in hopes of capitalizing on the disarray in the opposition

parties,

but

issues

arising

from Canada's part in NATO's mission in Afghanistan and accusations by the opposition and the media that the government was adrift prevented the governing party from improving substantially in the polls during the first half of the year. Defense Minister Gordon O'Connor found himself embroiled in a scandal in April when the national media reported claims of torture from prisoners who were detained by Canadian forces and were being held by Afghan security forces. Speaking to MPs in the House of Commons in May 2006, O'Connor had stated that the International Committee of the Red Cross had signed an agreement with Canada to examine prison conditions and to report any inhumane or illegal treatment. In March, however, the Red Cross disputed that such a deal had ever existed. The scandal deepened when a national newspaper published excerpts from a heavily censored internal government document that warned of the potential for trouble in Afghan-run prisons. O'Connor apologized for misleading Parliament and announced that a new deal with the Afghan government had been signed, but in August he was demoted to minister of national revenue in a cabinet shuffle. Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay

re-

placed O’Connor at the Defense Ministry,

and

Maxime

Bernier

took over as foreign minister. Following his cabinet reshuffle Prime

Minister

Harper

that Canada would not meet its Kyoto Protocol carbon-emissions-reduction targets and that the country’s military commitments in Afghanistan could extend beyond the current February 2009 end date. The latter two statements were designed to provoke the opposition

parties

into

voting

against

the

speech from the throne, a matter of confidence in Parliament. Although the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) and the separatist Bloc Québécois announced that they could not support the government’s agenda, the centre-left Liberal Party—the official opposition— said that it would abstain from key votes in order to prevent an election. The Liberals’ reluctance to fight an election was related to a series of federal by-election losses in Quebec in September. Since 1993 the Liberals had been the main federalist party in the province battling the Bloc Québécois. Following a small Conservative breakthrough in the 2006 federal election, however, and the lingering effects of a sponsorship scandal involving the federal Liberals in the province, the usual polarization in the province broke down. On September 17 the Conservatives won the riding of Roberval-LacSaint-Jean, which the Bloc Québécois had held since 1993, and finished a

close second to the winning Bloc candidate in St. Hyacinthe-Bagot. The Liberals finished a distant third and fourth, respectively. In a much more worrying loss for the party, the Liberals lost the riding of Outremont—which they had held for all but five years since its 1935 creation—to

the New

Demo-

crats; it was only the second NDP victory ever in the province. Liberal leader Stéphane

among

BIOGRAPHIES)

its

1,338

residents,

concerns

about new cultural groups in larger centres prompted a code that prohibited stoning or burning women with acid, wearing face-covering garments, or carrying ceremonial weapons (such as the Sikh kirpan). There were several other incidents in Quebec that generated debate. A young Muslim player was ordered to remove her hijab (veil) as a safety precaution during an association football (soccer)

tournament in February. When she refused,

her

team

withdrew

from

the

competition to support her. A tae kwon do team consisting of mostly Muslim girls was expelled from a tournament near Montreal for the same reason. An article in the Montreal police force’s internal newsletter, which encour-

In the small Quebec town of Hérouxville, a Muslim

woman voices her objection to the town's adoption of a code of "norms" for prospective immigrants.

pro-

aged women to let male officers handle encounters with some religious groups, provoked a terse response from women’s groups in late 2006. A Montreal community centre that held womenonly prenatal classes to accommodate

Muslim,

Sikh,

and

Hindu women was criticized by some members of the media and the public. A YMCA, also in Montreal, that initially complied with a Hasidic synagogue’s request to cover windows through which women could be seen exercising later reversed its decision when the story became public. On March 26, for the first time

in more than 100 years, Quebecers elected a minority government in provincial elections. The ruling Liberal Party, under Premier Shaun Best—Reuters/Landov

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(see

downplayed the losses, but he came under public attack from some members of the Quebec wing of the party. Quebec garnered many other national headlines in 2007. On September 10 a special commission investigating the issue of tolerance for multiculturalism and "reasonable accommodation" for minority groups in the province began to hold hearings. The commission, called by Premier Jean Charest, was the result of several widely reported incidents in which Quebecers revealed deep concerns about some religious and ethnic minorities. Early in the year the small rural town of Hérouxville adopted a code of "norms" for prospective immigrants. Although the town had only a single immigrant family

rogued Parliament and announced that a new session would begin on October 16. Throughout the spring the media and opposition parties had suggested that a sparse legislative agenda was an indication that the government had lost its direction. In the speech from the throne to open Parliament, the Harper government announced plans for new legislation to toughen crime statutes and to enhance initiatives to assert the countrys claims to Arctic sovereignty. The speech also indicated 380

Dion

Charest,

was

returned

to

World Affairs: Cape Verde

office but could pass legislation only with the support of one of two opposition parties in the National Assembly. Since the early 1970s the province's political scene had been polarized between the federalist Liberals and the separatist Parti Québécois. In the 2007 election the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a right-wing party that promoted provincial autonomy from Canada but not outright separation, won the second largest number of seats.

The

ADQ,

under

Dumont, formed the tion, pushing the Parti third place—its worst since 1973. In the final

leader

Mario

official opposiQuébécois into electoral result tally the Liber-

als (with 3396 of the vote) won 48 seats, the ADQ (3196) 41 seats, and the Parti Québécois (2896) 36 seats. Parti Québé-

cois leader André Boisclair resigned after the defeat and was replaced by Pauline Marois, finance minister in a previous Parti Québécois government.

Marois announced that sovereignty would not be an immediate objective if her party returned to power but rather a long-term goal. (Quebec had held unsuccessful referenda on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995.) Other provincial and territorial elections showed mixed results. In Manitoba, Premier Gary Doer’s centre-left

centre-right

Progressive

Conservatives

and the NDP taking 26 and 10 seats, respectively. The central issue in the campaign was an unpopular proposal by the Conservatives to publicly fund faith-based schools. In a concurrent referendum Ontario voters also decided against changing their electoral system from a first-past-the-post model to a form of proportional representation. On November 7 the NDP was soundly defeated after 16 consecutive years in office in Saskatchewan as Brad Wall’s centre-right Saskatchewan Party won a majority government with 38 of the 58 seats. The NDP took all 20 of the remaining seats. The Northwest Territories held a general election on October 1 for its nonpartisan, consensus-style legislature. Northwest Territories Premier Joe Handley stepped down following the election and was replaced by veteran legislator Floyd Roland. Roland promised a more aggressive style in dealing with the federal government in hopes of achieving provincelike powers and more control The Economy. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on March 19 unveiled a balanced budget for 2007-08. The original forecast

of a Can$3.3

billion

U.S.$2.8 billion) surplus

(including

contingency fund) was revised on September 27 when a fiscal update revealed that the government was on

19 seats,

and the centrist Liberals took 2 seats. The New Democrats’ campaign platform included reinvestment in the public health care system and new training programs geared toward the new economy. Six days later in Prince Edward Island, Premier Pat Binns's centre-right Progressive

Conservatives

were

de-

feated by the centre-left Liberal Party after 11 years in office. (Liberal leader Robert Ghiz's father was provincial pre-

track

billion

to

[about U.S.$2.5

Minister

Harper spoke at the end of a three-day trip to the Canadian Arctic. (See MAP on page 362.) He reiterated Canadian sovereignty over the region and announced the construction in Nunavut of new facilities on Resolute Bay and of a port at Nanisivik to bolster Canada’s jurisdiction over its northern coast.

(WILLIAM STOS)

match

a

Can$13.8

CAPE VERDE

billion]

billion

Area: 4,033 sq km (1,557 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 496,000

(about U.S.$13.7 billion) surplus posted in fiscal 2006-07. Flaherty announced

Capital: Praia

a Can$39 billion (about U.S.$38.6 bil-

Head of government: Prime Minister José

lion) budget item to fix a perceived fiscal imbalance among the provinces through a revised equalization program. The program, which ensured that all provinces could provide approximately the same level of social service,

was

a source

of conflict

be-

mier from 1986 to 1993.) The Liberals

tween the federal and provincial gov-

won 23 of the province’s 27 seats, with approximately 53% of the popular vote. In another landslide victory, Newfoundland’s centre-right Progressive Conservative Party was reelected on October 9. Led by wildly popular Premier Danny Williams, known for his heated battles with the federal government over equalization transfer payments, the party won 43 seats; the centrist Liberals were reduced to just 3 seats, and the NDP won only 1. The following day Ontario’s voters reelected the centrist Liberal Party, under Premier Dalton McGuinty. The Liberals

ernments. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,

won 71 of Ontario’s 107 seats, with the

under the North Pole, Prime

a

a third consecutive majority, winning 36 of 57 seats. The centre-right Prowon

global warming reduced the ice pack and opened the possibility of future access to Arctic natural resources and shipping routes. (See SPECIAL REPORT on page 170.) The government in July announced plans to buy up to eight new ships to patrol the Northwest Passage and other Arctic waterways. On August 10, barely a week after Russian scientists planted a flag on the seabed

(about

Can$3

Conservatives

region. Sovereignty over the Arctic was a growing international issue in 2007 as

over its natural resources.

NDP government on May 22 cruised to

gressive

ties rose. Canadian troops, deployed in Kandahar province since early 2006, had been subjected to frontline combat and suicide bombings in the troubled

and Saskatchewan raised strong objections to the new scheme. The overall economy performed exceptionally well in 2007. The Canadian dollar, which had soared in value since

2002, in September reached parity with the U.S. dollar for the first time since November 1976. In October the countrys unemployment rate also reached its lowest level since November

1974,

falling to 5.896. Foreign Affairs. Public opinion polls revealed a decline in support, particularly in Quebec,

for the NATO

Afghanistan as the number

mission

in

of casual-

Chief of state: President Pedro Pires Maria Neves

Cape Verde

enjoyed political stability

and a tourism

boom

in 2007,

follow-

ing the election of Prime Minister José Maria Neves to a second five-year term in 2006. New direct flights brought Europeans from Portugal and Britain, and new international airports were being built on two of the islands. Along with the tourist boom came concerns about the spread of HIV/AIDS, though prevalence remained relatively low. There was an accompanying property boom, with the largest single investment by a Spanish consortium on the island of Boa Vista. Few of the more than 500,000 Cape Verdeans living

abroad

returned,

however,

and

they continued to outnumber those living on the 10 islands of the archipelago. Half of those living abroad resided

in the U.S.,

and

contacts

re-

381

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Central African Republic Richard Wainwright/Corbis

mained close between the two countries. The large sums in remittances sent home, along with donor money from the European Development Fund, Japan, and others, continued to keep Cape Verde afloat. In 2007 a number of West Africans who were trying to reach the Spanish Canary Islands by boat ended up mistakenly in Cape Verde. They were designated illegal immigrants and housed temporarily in poor conditions prior to their deportation back to West Africa. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

Area: 622,436 sq km (240,324 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,343,000

CAR to allow their military forces to cross each other’s border to pursue rebels wreaked further misery upon civilians caught in the cross fire. In March bandits reportedly began kidnapping children and adult herdsmen for ransom. Two volunteer health workers were abducted in May by armed men,

and Doctors Without Borders re-

ported the fatal shooting on June 11 of one of its workers. The following day all aid agencies in the north of the country suspended operations. Various cease-fire agreements were drafted and signed between the government and some rebel groups, but none took hold. The International Criminal Court in The Hague opened an investigation on May 22 into alleged war crimes committed in 2003 in the aftermath of a military coup led by Francois Bozizé against the government of Pres. AngeFélix Patasse. The inquiry would focus primarily on hundreds of rape cases.

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

Capital: Bangui Chief of state: President Francois Bozizé Head of government: Prime Minister Élie Doté

CHAD

Residents of eastern Chad fleeing violence in the neighbouring Darfur region of The Sudan make their way toward a camp for internally displaced persons near the village of Goz Bagar. ern Chad to protect the camps. EU troops were expected to be in place before years end. The leader of the AIliance for Democratic Change and other rebels said they feared that the peacekeeping force would aid the Déby government, which in the past had counted on French assistance. Having switched support from Taiwan to Beijing in 2006,

The crisis in northern Central African Republic (CAR) worsened during 2007, with tens of thousands of civilians forced to flee their homes and farms as fighting between dissident groups and the army intensified. The violence led to the abandonment

of entire

towns,

and relief agencies estimated that at least one million people were in need of basic provisions. An agreement signed between the governments of Chad and

Area: 1,284,000 sq km (495,755 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,239,000, excluding

nearly 250,000 refugees from The Sudan Capital: N'Djamena Chief of state: President Lieut. Gen. Idriss Déby Head of government: Prime Ministers Pascal Yoadimnadji, Adoum Younousmi (interim)

from February 23, and, from February 26, Delwa Kassire Koumakoye Children displaced by the fighting in northern Central African Republic sit at a makeshift camp near the village of Bodouli. ——

Chad continued to be affected in 2007 by both the conflict across its border in the Darfur region of The Sudan and the ongoing low-intensity warfare between various rebel factions and the government of Pres. Idriss Déby. Déby and his ruling Zaghawa group were accused of having committed human rights abuses and of having misused oil revenues. By September there were an estimated 250,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur in camps in eastern Chad, and more

the Déby government had a new ally in the Chinese, with whom an oil agreement was signed after an announcement of the discovery of new oil fields. Once again, Transparency International

found Chad to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In

an

effort

at

reconciliation,

March Déby appointed as minister of defense

Mahamat

Nour,

leader of the

Tama and a coalition of rebel groups. Despite this, the Tama were involved in fighting that resumed in August near the town of Guéréda, but exceptionally heavy rains led to such extensive flooding in the east of the country that both continued attacks and relief work for refugees were severely hampered. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

CHILE

uà

than 100,000 Chadians in the east had

been forced from their homes. As raids by mounted armed men from Darfur continued, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the French government called for a UN-European Union peacekeeping force to be established in eastReuters/Landov

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in

Area: 756,096 sq km (291,930 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 16,598,000

Capitals: Santiago (national) and Valparaíso (legislative)

Head of state and government: President Michelle Bachelet

World Affairs: China

Chilean Pres. Michelle Bachelet had a difficult and turbulent second year in office in 2007. Her January 2006 election as the country’s first woman president had raised a number of hopes; she promised to be more accessible, to adopt a nonpatriarchal style, and to implement programs to help the poor and disadvantaged. Her election also raised hopes for a revitalization of the centre-left coalition that had stayed in power longer than former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. A series of problems, however,

many of which antedated Bachelet’s presidency, eroded her popularity. A poll taken in September showed a decline in her approval rating from 53% (following her election victory) to 35%. One major headache for the Bachelet administration was the February implementation of Transantiago, a plan formulated by former president Ricardo Lagos to reorganize and better integrate Santiago’s bus and subway system. The reorganization of the transit system was a disaster; thousands of commuters were stranded or arrived hours late to work. Because the capital was home to a third of the country’s population, the continuing transit foulups caused economic hardships. Bachelet apologized publicly and named René Cortázar the new transit minister; he promised to fix the problems before years end or resign. Another area of ongoing concern was the high level of student disturbances and significant labour mobilizations. The latter included a strike by subcontracted workers in the state-owned copper industry, Codelco, and a march by the labour umbrella organization, the CUT, which protested the ruling Concertaci6n coalition’s free-market economic policies. In addition, street disturbances, on the 34th anniversary of the September 11 military coup, were disturbingly violent. There was also some positive news. In the realm of human rights, arrests and trials continued of those who had committed offenses during the military dictatorship. There was resistance from one

accused

officer, who

tried to flee,

and four police officers committed suicide rather than face trial. A pensionreform bill wended its way through Congress, and a key Bachelet promise to help women was realized with the establishment of several new programs and of more preschools and women’s domestic-violence shelters. Even after his death in December 2006, Pinochet continued to be a political lightning rod. Bachelets govern-

ment denied the former dictator, a selfdeclared president, a state funeral, al-

10th National People’s Congress in March and the 17th National Congress

though the armed forces gave him a military funeral with full honours. The ensuing controversy demonstrated the fissures and scars still remaining in Chile. Despite Pinochet's death, the judiciary continued its efforts to prosecute those involved in the financial scandal set off by the 2004 discovery of millions of dollars hidden in secret bank accounts. In October more than 30 people closely linked to Pinochet were arrested and charged with corruption, including his widow, his five children, and three top generals (now retired) from the Pinochet era, though a later court decision rescinded the arrests and ended the investigation. The economic picture continued to be strong. The price of copper, Chile’s largest single export, reached its highest level in more than 40 years, and there were both a large budget surplus and a positive trade balance. Economic growth, although slower than in the preceding year, ran at close to 5%. Inflation, however, crept up and by the last quarter was running at 6%. The U.S. dollar continued to fall, sliding below 500 pesos (its lowest level since 1999) and raising worries about competition between export producers. Difficulties in energy supply also contin-

of the Communist Party of China (CPC)

ued

owing

to

uncertainties

in

Argentina's supply of natural gas. The Bachelet government approved the development of alternative energy, including nuclear power and additional dams for hydroelectric generation, both of which were opposed by environmentalists.

(LOIS HECHT OPPENHEIM)

CHINA

Area: 9,572,900 sq km (3,696,100 sq mi), in-

cluding Tibet and excluding Taiwan and the special autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau Population (2007 est., excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau): 1,317,925,000

Capital: Beijing Chief of state: President Hu Jintao Head of government: Premier Wen Jiabao Domestic Politics. In China the notable political events of 2007 were the holding of the Fifth Plenary Session of the

in October. The former was the scene of some breaks with convention and a shift toward populist politics, while the October congress was widely seen as having failed to achieve the complete consolidation of power by Pres. Hu Jintao that most Chinese and foreign observers had expected. The March National People’s Congress was attended by representatives from China’s provinces and municipalities. In a first, foreign journalists were given unrestricted access to People’s Congress

members.

Premier

Wen

Ji-

abao's government report for 2006 was seen as a departure from the norm insofar as it addressed populist issues. Heading the bill were pressing domestic issues such

as health care,

educa-

tion, and rural poverty, but the report also dwelled at some length on moresensitive issues such as the environment and corruption, particularly in relationship to real estate—an area that had seen large-scale collusion between business and local political interests. (See Special Report on page 180.) Wen paid particular attention in his report to the Three Rural Issues, or san nong, which referred to agriculture, rural communities, and peasants. He made a commitment to provide funding for infrastructure and new technologies to aid China’s more than 800 million rural dwellers, whose living standards and incomes dragged significantly behind China's increasingly affluent urban population. Other issues addressed by Wen included the virtual absence of rural insurance and a new plan to provide basic rural health care. In terms

of education,

Wen

made

a

commitment to abolish all tuition fees for rural children. In a rare hint at possible future political reform, Wen also spoke briefly of the need for "government transparency" and "public participation" in politics. Perhaps of most significance at the Fifth Plenary Session, however, was the

passing of the Property Law of the Peoples Republic of China, which had failed to pass in seven readings since 2002 owing to content disputes. The law covered the creation, transfer, and

ownership of property and was widely seen as an important development in the creation of a market economy and a civil code. Falling short of abolishing the constitutional right of the government

theless

to own

all land, the law never-

provided

new

protections

for 383

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: China Imaginechina/AP

owners of private homes, for businesses, and for farmers with long-term leases on land. The law, which covered

both state and private ownership, had long been mired in controversy; more-

»

conservative party members were criti-

cal of the legislation because it seemed to erode the fundamental principle that state ownership came first. Hints at the need for political reform in the National Peoples Congress came amid some unusually public debate on the subject in 2007. In a widely publicized speech in June, President Hu followed up on Wen's March comments by acknowledging growing public demand for a say in political decisions. Although the president did not set an agenda for changes leading to increased participatory politics, he did say that changes should be expanded in an “orderly way.” In late September, in the Beijing magazine China Across the Ages, Li Rui, a 90-year-old former secretary to Mao Zedong, called for expanded citizens’ rights and limits to party power. Li argued that democratization needed to keep apace of market reforms if China was to maintain stability. His comments appeared on the eve of the CPC National Congress. In the months ahead of the party congress, in which the CPC set government agenda for the next five years, an Internet crackdown was carried out. Across the country, police shut down IDCs (Internet data centres), the com-

puters that Web sites rent to host their content.

Meanwhile,

ISPs

(Internet

service providers) voluntarily disabled forums and chat rooms that were possibly unacceptable to authorities. These moves came amid international criticism that Beijing was violating a commitment to the International Olympics Committee that it was prepared to make substantial improvements in human rights ahead of the 2008 Olympics. The CPC National Congress began on October 15 in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. It voted in a new Cen-

Pa ud 9

"

P

à

O

€.

pa =

— m. A

Bi Workers make dolls at a toy factory in Guangdong province, China. Safety scares emerged during the year over Chinese exports of lead-tainted tovs and other toxic consumer goods. tired predecessor Jiang Zemin, was said to have had broad influence ahead of the National Congress in the negotiations on the new leadership lineup. A reshuffle of the People's Liberation Army top brass, with older officers retiring in favour of a younger lineup, reflected Hu's dominance as chairman of the Central Military Commission. Of particular note was that Hu promoted a number of generals with Taiwan-affairs experience—most prominently a new chief of general staff, Gen. Chen Bingde, who had previously served as head of the Nanjing Military Region, which had direct responsibility for the Taiwan Strait.

The promotions were a sign of increasingly icy relations with Taiwan ahead of a Taipei referendum to enlist support for a UN membership bid under the name Taiwan rather than the Republic of China. Under the leadership of Taiwanese Pres. Chen Shuibian, the self-ruled island in 2007 con-

tinued to make no concessions to China's claims of sovereignty, failing to open

Political Bureau and Political Bureau Standing Committee, the innermost circle of power in China. The Central Committee elevated four new members to the Political Bureau Standing Com-

and refusing to allow the Olympic torch to pass through Taiwan on its

province, owed his promotion to Hu's patronage. Shanghai party boss Xi Jinping also joined the Political Bureau Standing Committee. Outranking Li, he was considered more likely to succeed Hu in 2012 as chief of state. Hu's re384

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

a

a

tral Committee, which endorsed a new

mittee, but only one of them, Li Keqiang, party secretary of Liaoning

anl

up

Taiwan

to

Chinese

tourism

way to Beijing.

The Economy. In 2007 China's economy continued its meteoric rise. GDP grew

at around 1196; the trade surplus approached $260 billion at year's end; foreign exchange reserves were up a spectacular

$135.7

billion

in

the

first

quarter of 2007 from year's end 2006; and the Chinese renminbi continued to appreciate against the U.S. dollar at an annual rate of about 596. In late Sep-

tember the Chinese government launched Asia's biggest state-owned investment company—a $200 billion sovereign wealth fund—after massive trade surpluses boosted the country's currency reserves to a record $1.33 trillion. Such good news

came,

however,

amid a rising tide of voices warning of risks and challenges. The main areas of concern were surging inflation—which reached a 10-year high in 2007—an emerging stock-market bubble, the environmental fallout from China's fastgrowing economy, and corruption. In August consumerprice inflation

surged to 6.5%, while fixed-asset investment in urban areas jumped 26.7% in the first half of 2007 year on year, prompting China’s highest leadership to call on officials at all levels to take steps to stop the economy from overheating. The call followed a warning in May by the National Bureau of Statistics that the economy was “at risk of going from rapid growth to overheating.” Beijing responded at midyear by raising benchmark interest rates for the fourth time since April 2006 and raising banks’ reserve ration requirement for the eighth time since July 2006. Meanwhile, China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite index continued to reach record highs throughout 2007, having surged more than 400% in the past two years despite government attempts to cool the market by imposing transaction taxes and higher interest rates. Chinese exporters struggled to redeem their image after a succession of product recalls of tainted goods. Safety scares emerged over Chinese shipments

World Affairs: Colombia

of dangerous and toys as well as seafood,

toxic toxic

and automotive

lead-tainted toothpaste, tires, among

other goods. Early in the year, more than 100 pet-food products were pulled from American shelves, and toy manufacturer Mattel, Inc., recalled nearly 20

million Chinese-made products, most of which contained lead-tainted paint. In July the former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration was executed

for having

taken

$850,000

in

bribes from eight pharmaceutical companies and for having approved fake drugs during his tenure (1998-2005). In September the government appointed Vice-Premier Wu Yi to head a panel that was tasked with overseeing a fourmonth war on tainted food, drugs, and exports.

Corruption hit the headlines with the prosecution in late July of former Shanghai party chief Chen Liangyu. Chen had been the subject of a highprofile one-year investigation after some

$390

million

was

found

to be

missing from Shanghai's pension fund. Another 20 local officials were implicated. For some observers the prosecution was evidence that China was doing more to combat what was seen as an endemic problem, but for others the Chen case was simply the tip of the iceberg, and his prosecution was seen, at least in some quarters, as being politically motivated by his association with the so-called Shanghai clique, political rivals to President Hu and Premier Wen.

The environmental consequences of China's economic boom came under increased

government

scrutiny.

Reports

emerged showing that just 196 of China's approximately 560 million urban residents were breathing air considered safe by the European Union, and some 500 million people lacked access to clean drinking water. A 2007 World Bank report said that some 500,000 Chinese died annually as a result of pollution. Meanwhile, China was expected to become the global leader in terms of greenhouse emissions by the end of 2007. This toxic side effect of China’s economic success story was thought to be behind thousands of incidents of social unrest across the country, and in July the head of China’s environmental agency, Zhou Shengxian, called for a “struggle” against polluters. Most such incidents passed unreported, owing to a muzzled media, but in May thousands of people in Xiamen, Fujian province, took to the streets to protest a dirty petrochemical

plant. Another sign of China’s growing environmental crisis was an outbreak of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Tai in the Yangtze River delta; the water supplies for nearly two million people were poisoned. Foreign Relations. There were signs in 2007 that China was moderating its foreign policy—possibly ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008—so

as to

be more of a global “team player,” particularly in its most contentious foreign policy alignments: North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), and The Sudan.

China had long been North Korea’s most important ally, but after a test explosion of a nuclear device by North Korea in October 2006, China worked

hard to bring North Korea to the negotiating table. Six-country negotiations early in 2007 succeeded in achieving a solution that saw North Korea agree to dismantle its nuclear program in return for compensation. China’s foreign policy came under intense pressure when monk-led protests erupted in Myanmar in September. Although China helped arrange for a UN envoy to visit Myanmar during the crisis and called on the government and demonstrators

to show

restraint,

Beijing re-

sisted calls for sanctions in keeping with its policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. Despite Beijing’s opposition, additional sanctions were imposed by the U.S. and the EU independently of the UN as the crisis continued

into October,

and

China increasingly came to be seen as Myanmar’s major backer despite the fact that India,

also the the was

Russia,

and

Thailand

had important relationships with ruling junta in Yangon. For China, long-term significance of the crisis that its support for the Myanmar

government

was

seen

as

support

for

other countries with controversial human rights records. China also continued to oppose international sanctions against the Sudanese government but allowed UN Security Council Resolution 1769, authorizing the deployment of peacekeepers to The Sudan, and helped persuade the Sudanese government to accept them. Like Myanmar, The Sudan was an important source of natural resources, and China imported 7% of its oil supplies from there. In a sign of the close relations between the Sudanese government and China, President Hu visited The Sudan in February. China also committed to investing $20 billion in Africa in 2007. This commitment brought China closer to Zimbabwean

Pres. Robert Mugabe, whose regime was increasingly dependent on Chinese aid. Relations with the U.S. got off to a rocky start after China shot down a weather satellite during an unannounced test, demonstrating the countrys military-space capabilities. Continuing trade tensions led U.S. lawmakers to introduce legislation intended to force China to revalue its currency. While attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sep-

tember, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush accepted an invitation by Hu to attend the 2008 Olympics, but in October Bush angered Beijing by appearing in public with the Dalai Lama as the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader received a Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi condemned the appearance, stating that it "seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China's internal affairs." Relations between Germany and China were also strained over the Dalai Lama after German Chancellor Angela Merkel met the spiritual leader in Berlin. In response to the meeting, China canceled human rights talks with Germany scheduled for December. Sino-Japanese relations thawed as Premier Wen visited Japan in April and agreed to hold talks on disputes over territorial waters. The sudden resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in September elevated Yasuo Fukuda

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

who

suc-

ceeded Abe. Fukuda's moderate views on China promised to help improve relations between the two economic giants. Fukuda also indicated that as prime minister he would not visit the Yasukuni Shrine (where Japan's war dead,

notably those

of World

War

II,

are enshrined); trips by Japanese leaders to the memorial had proved a perennial relations.

irritant

in Sino-Japanese (MICHAEL R. FAHEY)

COLOMBIA

Area: 1,141,568 sq km (440,762 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 42,870,000

Capital: Bogotá Head of state and government: President

Álvaro Uribe Vélez 385

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Colombia Jorge Enrique Botero—El Tiempo/AP

capital. The families of many hostages feared that any government effort to free hostages—including former member of congress and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was reported alive in May by an escaped hostage—through military means would result in a similar catastrophe. President Uribe's decision to unilaterally release 150 hostages did not

meet

with

a

commensurate

re-

sponse from the FARC. At years end Uribe agreed to allow Venezuela to lead a rescue of three hostages held by the FARC, but the plan collapsed, with Uribe accusing rebels of reneging on their promise to hand over the hostages and the FARC alleging obstruction of the plan by the Colombian military. Given such events, it was perhaps surprising that Uribe’s popularity dropped as little as it did, slipping from a high of 75% in April to 66% at midyear.

FARCS second in command, Raul Reyes (left), meets with Sen. Piedad Córdoba

in an unidentified location in the Colombian jungle on September 14. Despite difficult circumstances, the government of Colombian Pres. Álvaro Uribe remained steadfast in its policies during 2007. Several of Uribe’s supporters, including his cousin Sen.

not receiving the treatment the government had promised, and the Supreme Court ruled that rank-and-file fighters could not be found guilty of—and then pardoned for—sedition. On the other

Mario Uribe, were embroiled in a scan-

side, the victims of abuses at the hands

dal that linked them to the right-wing paramilitaries—the United Self-De-

of the paramilitaries, human rights groups, and Democrats in Washington,

fense Forces

D.C., claimed that far too little was being done to carry out justice.

of Colombia

(AUC). The

scandal initially widened when Foreign Minister

María

Consuelo

Araüjo

re-

signed in an effort to disassociate the government from accusations that focused on Sen. Álvaro Araüjo, her brother. The impact of the scandal was likely to be reflected in subnational election results; paramilitaries often gained access to public funds through connections with mayors and governors. Regional and local election campaigns in late October were again marked by violence. Gubernatorial candidates affiliated with President Uribe’s coattails won 15 of 32 races. Left-ofcentre candidates performed particularly strong in urban areas—winning the mayoralties of Colombia’s three largest cities. Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA) candidate

Samuel Moreno

convincingly won the mayoral race in Bogota.

Meanwhile, paramilitary leaders threatened to end their cooperation with government investigations, and some of the 31,000 rank-and-file fighters who had stood down were rearming. The leaders argued that they were 386

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

On the left the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

(FARC) continued

to demand a demilitarized zone before it would begin to discuss a prisoner exchange, and the government continued to refuse to consider ceding territory to the group (talks with the National Liberation Army [ELN]

vana). Venezuelan

continued

in Ha-

Pres. Hugo Chavez

offered to mediate, however, and Uribe’s

ally Sen. Piedad Córdoba met with the FARC's

second

in

command,

Raul

Reyes, and later with Chávez. The 11 provincial legislators held by FARC since 2002 were killed when the guerrillas came under attack from what the FARC said was an "unidentified group." The government denied engaging FARC forces in the area. The FARC agreed to hand over the bodies to an international forensics team but waited more than a month to reveal the location where the dead were buried. The state of the remains and the fact that the bodies had been washed and the clothes changed rendered the forensics tests useless. The incident sparked massive protests in the

European

governments

at-

tempting to broker peace were disheartened, however, by the government’s links to paramilitaries, and international human rights groups were quick to point out that the ongoing scandals were just a reminder of the relationship between the government’s security forces and the AUC. The Democrat-controlled Congress in Washington refused to even consider approval of a free-trade agreement with Bogota. Uribe’s government repeatedly pointed out that if policies failed to bolster the legal economy, Colombians were driven into the illegal cocaine trade. This message was often drowned out as violent repression of labour leaders reinforced the claim that the government was interested in persecut-

ing the left while turning a blind eye when the right was guilty of atrocities. Despite the drama in other areas, the governments market-oriented, business-friendly economic policies continued. Inflation spiked but was expected to settle at about 4%. The growth rate remained strong at nearly 8%, and the central government's deficit continued to decline. Plans went forward to simplify the tax structures while improving collections. A modified version of the government's proposal for rationalizing transfers to state and local governments was adopted. In an effort to counter opposition to the government's privatization of a portion of Ecopetrol, the state-owned petroleum company, the 20% of shares on sale could be purchased only by Colombians (though they were free to resell them) through installment payments. (BRIAN F. CRISP)

World Affairs: Congo, Democratic Republic of the

COMOROS

Bacar claimed victory in elections that he staged that day. The African Union (AU) and the national government

re-

fused to recognize the election results and declared that the Bacar government was illegal. The presidential elections on Grande Comore and Mohéli Area: 1,862 sq km (719 sq mi), excluding the 374-sq-km (144-sq-mi) island of Mayotte, a de facto dependency of France since 1976 Population (2007 est.): 629,000 (excluding 194,000 on Mayotte)

Capital: Moroni Chief of state and head of government: President Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi The recent stability enjoyed in Comoros was interrupted in 2007 when the country faced a serious political crisis. The three autonomous islands of Grande Comore,

Anjouan,

and

Mohéli

each

chose local presidents every five years, but Anjouan Pres. Col. Mohamed Bacar, who was elected to the office in 2002 after having seized power a year earlier in a coup, defied federal orders to step down in the run-up to local presidential elections planned for June 2007. In clashes between forces loyal to Bacar and the federal army, two army soldiers died. Owing to the ongoing strife, the government postponed the elections to be held on June 10 in Anjouan, but

Anjouan strongman Mohamed Bacar is pictured at his inauguration ceremony on June 14 following his victory in the local presidential elections he staged days earlier; his government was declared illegal.

were

held without

incident,

however,

and Mohamed Abdouloihabi and Mohamed Ali Said were sworn in as presidents, respectively. In an effort to break the deadlock, in October the AU

imposed travel and economic sanctions on Anjouan leaders. Comoros had endured 19 coups or attempted coups since gaining independence in 1975 from France. Mercenary Bob Denard, who was involved in several of those coups, died in Paris. (See OBITUARIES.) (MARY EBELING)

CONGO, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE

dan rebel militia fighters, the rebels continued to harass the civilian population and forced some 650,000 people to flee their homes. Other violent episodes were symptomatic of the unsettled conditions along the entire eastern border. Congolese journalist Serge Maheshe, working for an influential UN-sponsored radio station in Bukavu, was shot and killed on June 13 in South Kivu province, and on July 9 the provincial secretary of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) party was murdered in Goma, the capital of North Kivu. Two men suspected in the killing of the journalist were arrested on June 14, but fighting between government troops and rebel militia intensified, making it difficult for aid workers to supply food to the displaced persons. Relations with Uganda along the northeastern DRC border in the Ituri district were also strained. At the end of March, Uganda threatened to send troops to the DRC to deal with rebels, who, Kampala claimed, were threaten-

Area: 2,344,858 sq km (905,355 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 62,636,000

Capital: Kinshasa Head of state: President Joseph Kabila Head of government: Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga Despite agreement by both candidates (the victorious Pres. Joseph Kabila and his opponent, Jean-Pierre Bemba) to accept the voting results in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 2006 presidential election, fighting broke

out in Kinshasa

on March

22,

2007, between supporters of the two men. After several hundred people were killed, the violence was brought to an end by the intervention of the UN and the EU. Bemba took refuge in the South African embassy but he agreed to seek temporary exile in Portugal after Kabila accused him of treason. The peacekeeping UN Organization

Mission

in

the

Democratic

Republic of the Congo (MONUC) launched an investigation into human rights violations by both parties and insisted that henceforward the Congolese security forces act in conformity with the law. Troubles in North Kivu province on the eastern frontier proved less easy to settle. Although government troops inflicted heavy casualties there on Rwan-

ing their border. Although assurances by the Congolese government and MONUC temporarily reduced tension, Uganda resumed its threats in August, accusing the Congolese authorities of encroaching upon Uganda's exploration for oil near Lake Albert. MONUC troops were not themselves guiltless of misdemeanours, and the UN was forced to investigate claims that Pakistani peacekeeping troops had been selling arms to militia groups in exchange for gold. In response to international pressure, the Congolese government launched a review of the mining contracts entered into during the recent war and later by the unelected government. The deals, it was suggested, had brought little benefit to the country but had been used to the advantage of different elements in the civil war. In spite of these reverses, progress was made in some areas. In the first half of the year, thousands of weapons were taken from rebels in Ituri and were destroyed. More constructively, in May the UN sponsored a four-day training course for members of the National Assembly. That same month the UN children’s agency reported that there had been a dramatic increase in the number of children vaccinated against poliomyelitis, and in June the World Bank approved a $150 million grant to encourage the expansion and improvement of education in the country. (KENNETH INGHAM)

AFP/Getty Images

387

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Congo, Republic of the

CONGO, REPUBLIC OF THE

mosquito nets for delivery to remote medical clinics along the southwestern coast.

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

celed $12.6 million of Costa Rica’s debt

in October in exchange for Costa Rican spending to conserve biodiversity. Also in October,

Capital: Brazzaville Head of state and government: President

elected to

serve as a member of the UN Security Council in 2008-09 after the Dominican Republic withdrew its candidacy.

COSTA RICA Area: 342,000 sq km (132,047 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,768,000

Costa Rica was

(MITCHELL A. SELIGSON)

©

COTE D'IVOIRE

Denis Sassou-Nguesso Area: 51,100 sq km (19,730 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,445,000

The preparations for the June 24, 2007, parliamentary elections in the Republic of the Congo were marked by controversy between opposition parties and the government of Pres. Denis SassouNguesso. The dispute concerned the role and composition of the new National Electoral Commission (CONEL).

Claiming that CONEL would not be sufficiently independent of the ruling Congolese Labour Party (PCT), the opposition refused to take part in the April 27 National Assembly vote, which thereby ensured a landslide victory in the vote for the establishment of the CONEL. Although some 40 opposition parties boycotted parliamentary elections, former rebel Frédéric Bitsangou, from the troubled Pool region, announced on June 7 that his National Council of Republicans would participate. Severe organizational problems were reported in the first round

of the elections, when

53 of the 137 seats were decided outright. To counter opposition charges of fraudulent voting lists, the government postponed the second round until August 5 in an effort to issue new voting

cards to the electorate. The PCT won a landslide victory, claiming 124 seats in the new parliament. On September 5, PCT member Justin Koumba was overwhelmingly elected president of the National Assembly. Congolese health authorities blamed poor hygiene for the severe cholera outbreak (about 6,500 cases were reported) in Pointe-Noire in January; at least 62

people died. On June 7 the government declared that in an effort to expand the availability of health care, it would seek to use traditional herbal remedies as a complement to modern medicine. In July the Ministry of Health announced that 400,000 children under the age of five had been vaccinated against polio, despite a continuing shortage of trained medical staff. Sponsored by the government and UNICEF, a special train left Pointe-Noire on August 9, carrying 300,000 insecticide-treated antimalaria 388

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Capital: San José Head of state and government: President

Óscar Arias Sánchez Area: 320,803 sq km (123,863 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 19,262,000

In Costa Rica’s first-ever national referendum,

held on Oct. 7, 2007, citizens

voted in favour of the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the United

De facto capital: Abidjan Chief of state: President Laurent Gbagbo Head of government: Prime Ministers Charles Konan Banny and, from April 4, Guillaume Soro

States, becoming the last Central American country to ratify the agreement. When the ballots were counted, 51.696 of

Promising steps were taken in 2007 to-

voters supported CAFTA. The turnout of eligible voters was 6096, well above the required 4096 required to make the results binding. Pres. Óscar Arias Sánchez, who spent much of his term trying to secure passage of the agreement, said that the treaty would bring long-term eco-

ward unifying been divided civil war. On Ouagadougou, Pres. Laurent

nomic growth to Costa Rica.

During the days leading up to the referendum,

massive demonstrations

and

riots broke out in the normally peaceful country. The pro-CAFTA side was marred by the discovery of a memo sent by a planning minister in Arias’s administration that suggested that there would be a cutoff in funding to municipalities whose mayors did not support CAFTA.

Mayoral elections, traditionally conducted at the same time as legislative elections, were

held months

after the

national elections. In December 2006 Arias’s ruling National Liberation Party (PLN) scored a major victory, winning 58 of the 81 posts, though turnout was low among registered voters compared with presidential elections. The opposition Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC), which in the previous elections

had won 48 races, emerged victorious in only 11 races. On June 1 Costa Rica officially established diplomatic relations with China in an effort to promote trade and economic cooperation, meanwhile breaking off 60 years of formal ties with Taiwan. Economic growth remained strong, hovering near 7%. The U.S. can-

Céte d' Ivoire, which had after nearly five years of March 4 at a meeting in Burkina Faso, Ivoirian Gbagbo and New Forces

(FN) leader Guillaume

Soro

signed a

peace agreement that called for a new transitional government, pending presidential and legislative elections to be held within

10 months.

On March

17,

in accordance with the terms of the pact, the president also created a new military command to be composed equally of government and rebel soldiers. The prime objective of the new structure would be the disarmament of all militias. The UN endorsed the agreement but said that its peacekeepers would remain in place until full security had been restored. Soro took office as prime minister on April 4 and on April 7 announced the composition of his coalition cabinet (11 members of the presidential party, the Popular Front; 7 ministers from the FN;

and 5 each from two leading opposition parties). Three days after a general amnesty was declared on April 13 for all crimes committed during the civil war, the dismantling began of barricades marking the buffer zone in the centre of the country. Pro-government militias in the western region made a symbolic gesture by handing over arms and ammunition in accordance with the Ouagadougou Agreement. At the end of May, the first steps were taken toward resolving the major source of

World Affairs: Croatia

1993 Medak Pocket military operation of at least 29 Serbian civilians and at least 5 captured soldiers. On October 15 Branimir Glavas, a former strongman of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union, along with six other co-defendants, faced trial for having tortured and murdered Serb civilians in 1991 while he held the post of war commander in the besieged city of Osijek. Relations with neighbouring Slovenia warmed. Sanader and Slovene Prime Minister Janez Jansa agreed in August

Ivoirian firefighters control the "flame of peace," weapons handed over by rebel soldiers in a symbolic act of reconciliation and set ablaze during a ceremony in Bouaké on July 30.

to resolve festering border disputes by seeking arbitration before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. They also agreed to resolve their dif ferences over the jointly owned Krsko nuclear plant. During the second wave of privatization of the Croatian telecommunication company T-HT on September 17, the government put up for sale 23% of its 35% stake in the firm; a week later it

the hostilities. The government announced that it would begin the process of issuing new identity papers for millions of undocumented Ivoirians. Although unnamed dissidents fired rockets at Soro’s plane from Bouaké Airport, the peace process continued. On September 13 the head of the Independent Election Commission announced that presidential elections would be held within one year, provided that the process of identifying and certifying voters, due to commence September 25,

was completed as scheduled. Months of drought ended in August, when massive floods inundated the country. On February 13 the Dutch trading group Trafigura agreed to pay the Ivoirian government $198 million to be used to compensate the thousands of victims (at least 10 people died and more than 100,000 sought medical attention) affected by the August 2006 illegal dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan.

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

CROATIA

Area: 56,594 sq km (21,851 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,440,000

Capital: Zagreb Chief of state: President Stipe Mesic Head of government: Prime Minister lvo Sanader

Croatia continued in 2007 to redress problems stemming from its war of national liberation during the 1990s, and the country’s anticorruption strategy, spearheaded by Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, bore fruit during the year. In early March retired general Vladimir Zagorec was charged with having embezzled $5 million upon leaving his post in 2000 as assistant minister of defense. He stood accused of having stolen diamonds and jewels that were allegedly given to the Ministry of Defense by German arms dealer Josef Rothaichner as collateral for a 1993 missile-system purchase scheme. Having failed to appear in court, Zagorec was

arrested in Vi-

enna on March 13, and the judge at the Vienna provincial court ruled on July 25 that he could be extradited to Croatia. In June Croatian authorities carried out their largest anticorruption sting operation, code-named Maestro. They arrested and indicted eight people, including four senior officials of the Croatian Privatization Fund, for having taken bribes of more than $4 million in

exchange for facilitating the illegal sale of several state-owned companies. On September 11 the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organized Crime, the country’s main anticorruption institution, expanded its investigation to include two new suspects. Croatia also continued its progress in prosecuting suspected war criminals. On June 18 retired generals Mirko Norac and Rahim Ademi were charged, on the basis of command responsibility, with the unlawful killing during the

raised the offer to 32.5%. The sale attracted wide interest among Croatian citizens, who were

offered shares at a

discount price. On October 5 the T-HT shares hit the Zagreb and London stock markets. Croatian GDP growth for 2007 was

an

estimated

6%;

inflation

held

steady at 2.8%; unemployment dropped to 14%; and the budget deficit was trimmed to 3% of GDP. Tourism, mean-

while, grew an estimated 8% year-onyear and was expected to generate more

than $9 billion in revenue, a record. Ivica Racan (see OBITUARIES), former prime minister (2000-03) and leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the

single largest opposition party, died on April 29. In 1990, as president of the Croatian

League

of

Communists,

Racan had cast the decisive vote that prevented then Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic from seizing control of the Yugoslav federation and called for multiparty elections in Croatia, a key political development that led to the eventual dissolution of the communist country.

On

June

2, 2007,

the

SDP

elected Zoran Milanovic party head. On June 27 the country lost poet and intellectual Dragutin Tadijanovic (“the Bard”), thought by many to be one of Croatia’s greatest 20th-century literary figures. Croatia also mourned the deaths on August 30 of 12 firemen who perished while battling a wildfire on the Adriatic island of Kornat. On November 25 Croatia held its fifth parliamentary elections since independence. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) won

66 of the 153 seats

in the parliament, while the SDP took 389

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Cuba

56 seats; smaller parties shared the remainder On December 15 Pres. Stipe Mesic asked Prime Minister Sanader to form

a new

majority

government,

poising the centre-right HDZ to govern for another four years. (DAVORKA MATIĆ)

CUBA

Je

Area: 109,886 sq km (42,427 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 11,238,000

Capital: Havana Head of state and government: President of the Council of State and President of the Council of Ministers Raúl Castro Ruz (acting for Fidel Castro Ruz)

In 2007 longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro remained largely out of sight while his brother and provisional president

Raúl

Castro

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

managed the island’s affairs. Following a severe

stomach

illness,

Fidel

had

stepped down from power in July 2006, and his absence continued to weigh heavily on Cuba's political system. In May 2007 Cuban National Assembly Pres. Ricardo Alarcón announced that Fidels recovery was going very well, and Fidel appeared in a prerecorded television interview. Though he made no public appearances during Cuba's July 26 holiday or to mark his 81st birthday on August 13, Fidel made his voice heard by authoring a series of articles called "Reflections" that were critical of globalization and the U.S. Other top officials began to take on more prominent roles, including Vice Pres. Carlos Lage, Foreign Minister Fe-

lipe Pérez Roque, and the president of the central

bank,

Francisco

Soberón.

Cuban officials began their preparations for the National Assembly elections due in January 2008 and vowed that Fidel's name would be on the ballot. On September 21 Fidel appeared on television, regaling viewers with his insights into current affairs and squelching rumours that his health had deteriorated. Cuba's relations with Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez continued to deepen. Chávez met with Fidel several times, and Vice President Lage traveled to Venezuela to discuss a regional trade pact and joint ventures in telecommu390

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro (right) reads from a book during a meeting with Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez in Havana on October 13. nications. In February the two countries signed agreements for $1.5 billion in projects, including the development of 11 ethanol plants. In August the Venezuelan state oil company announced that it was partnering with Cuban enterprises to explore for offshore oil in Cuban waters. Havana enjoyed warmer ties with a wide range of countries. Honduras named its first full ambassador to Cuba in 45 years, and in April Spain’s foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, became the highestlevel Spanish official to have visited Cuba in nearly a decade. He met with Raul and carried a letter to Fidel from King Juan Carlos. Top Chinese officials also met with Raúl to pledge continuing political and economic cooperation. Russia announced that it was considering restructuring Cuba's $166 million debt. U.S.-Cuban relations remained frozen. Raúl made several offers to engage in dialogue with the U.S., but he was rebuffed by U.S. authorities. In the

ber the U.S. Senate tion

that

allocated

approved legisla$45.7

million

for

pro-democracy movements in Cuba. Cuba remained politically stable, but there were worrying signs of tension below the surface. Two army conscripts killed two soldiers in May during an attempt to hijack an aircraft and escape the country, but they were later captured and tried. In July two Cuban boxers attempted to defect during the Pan American Games in Brazil, but they were later detained and returned to Cuba.

At home,

five dissidents

held

jority introduced several proposals to repeal trade and travel sanctions, but most initiatives were never brought to a vote. U.S. officials said that they

without trial since July 2005 were sentenced in February to two years in prison. In April the well-known Roman Catholic magazine Vitral, which was often critical of the government, was closed when a conservative new bishop was appointed to the province. The leading domestic human rights group reported that the government had not improved the plight of dissidents but acknowledged that the number of political prisoners in Cuba had fallen below 250, a 20% drop from the previous year. Though the government forecast put Cuba’s growth for 2007 at 10%, outside analysts put that figure closer to 6%. Several top officials alluded that the

would

government was considering economic

U.S. Congress,

a new

be unable

Democratic ma-

to fulfill the 20,000

annual visa requests for Cubans seeking entry to the U.S., which prompted strong criticism from Cuba. In July Raúl Castro called for dialogue with the U.S. in a speech in which he also said that the Cuban system needed to undertake structural changes. In Septem-

changes, but only minor were implemented. Vilma

adjustments

Espín (see OBITUARIES),

Raúl

Castros wife of more than 40 years, died in June after a long illness. Espín was one of the most powerful women in Cuba.

(DANIEL P. ERIKSON)

World Affairs: Czech Republic

CYPRUS

equipment, mixing bowls, and herbs left at a site in Pyrgos when the area was buried by an earthquake about 1850 Bc. The discovery indicated that a perfumedistilling industry had once existed in Cyprus.

Area: 9,251 sq km (3,572 sq mi) for the entire

island; the area of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), proclaimed unilater-

(GEORGE H. KELLING)

CZECH REPUBLIC

ally (1983) in the occupied northern third of the island, 3,355 sq km (1,295 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): island 1,047,000;

to

TRNC only, 266,000 (including Turkish settlers and Turkish military) Capital: Nicosia (also known as Lefkosia/Lefkosa) Head(s) of state and government: President

Area: 78,866 sq km (30,450 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,302,000

Capital: Prague

Tassos Papadopoulos; of the TRNC, President

Chief of state: President Vaclav Klaus

Mehmet Ali Talat

Head of government: Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek

The violence of previous years in Cyprus abated in 2007, and Cypriots from both sides routinely crossed the border to shop and work. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council voted to extend its peacekeeping operations in Cyprus through mid-December. Though the island’s Greek and Turkish leaders made little progress on border- crossing rules, the Turkish Cypriots removed a controversial footbridge, and the Cyprus government dismantled a wall in Nicosia; both removals signified a step toward establishing a pedestrian buffer zone. Problems persisted, however; title to confiscated real estate remained vexatious, and truck drivers in

Turkish Cyprus staged a strike in late March to protest the shipping of goods out of Greek Cypriot ports. European Union membership enhanced prosperity and provided economic stimulus to both zones. The Greek Cypriot state accepted the EU's invitation to adopt the euro as its currency on Jan. 1, 2008; the Turkish lira

would remain the currency in the Turkish Republic. For the first six months of the year, Greek Cypruss unemployment stood at 3.9%, compared with the euro zone’s 6.9%, while on the Turkish side the in-

flux of foreign labour rose by tens of thousands. Tourism revenue increased on both sides. The government of Cyprus announced that it planned to license 11 offshore blocks within its exclusive economic zone for the exploration of oil and natural gas. Cyprus experienced major forest fires that caused water and power shortages. In March archaeologists unearthed 4,000-year-old perfumes, distilling

rich, the right claimed that the measures failed to simplify the taxation system. Both sides questioned whether the fiscal package would reduce the countrys deficits, particularly since major changes to the health care and pension systems were delayed. Uncertainty over whether the package would gain approval continued until just before the parliament s vote on August 21. AIthough the two CSSD rebels promised

Though the year 2007 was challenging for the Czech Republic from a political perspective, the country continued to perform well economically. More than seven months after the June 2006 elections, a new centre-right government finally managed to gain parliamentary approval on Jan. 19, 2007, under the leadership of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek. Although the three ruling parties—the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), the Christian Democrats (KDUCSL), and the Greens—had a combined

total ber was from

of just 100 seats in the 200-memparliament, the confidence vote approved after two rebel deputies the opposition Social Democrats

(CSSD)

agreed

to leave

vote

in

favour,

continued.

Pres.

northern Moravian town. Despite pres-

sure

from

the media,

re-

party from the cabinet. In August the case against Cunek was mysteriously dropped, owing to the alleged unreliability of available witnesses. A new scandal erupted in October with allegations that Cunek had collected social

Protesters stage a rally in Prague on June 4 against the possible installation of a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic.

Klaus,

who opposed the formation of a cabinet that depended on backing from opposition rebels, referred to the confidence vote as "the beginning of a path toward early elections." Public finance reform was the most important policy issue during 2007. The government's proposed fiscal package included a shift to a flat tax on personal income, a gradual reduction in corporate tax rates, an increase in the lower rate of value-added tax, and the

introduction of fees for health care services. Critics emerged on both ends of the spectrum; while the left argued that the reforms would help only the Samuel Kubani—AFP/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Topolanek

fused to fire Cunek, who, as KDU-CSL chairman, could have withdrawn his

the chamber

Vaclav

dissent

emerged within both the ODS and the KDU-CSL. The ODS critics finally gave in, but one KDU-CSL MP voted against the bill. Thus, the package was approved by the narrowest possible margin, 101-99. Several ministers came under fire in 2007. Early in the year charges were brought against Deputy Prime Minister Jiri Cunek for alleged corruption in 2002, during his term as mayor of a

during the vote, amid claims of political corruption. The ODS was given half of the 18 governmental posts, while the others were divided between its two junior partners. The confidence vote brought temporary relief to the postelection political stalemate, but tensions

internal

World Affairs: Denmark

welfare benefits in the late 1990s while amassing millions of koruny in private savings. Cunek finally left his government post in November. In September, Education Minister Dana Kuchtova came under criticism after irregularities in applications for European Union funds

were

revealed.

Kuchtova,

who

represented the Greens, agreed to leave her post in mid-October. The CSSD tried to take advantage of the government's weakness by initiating a vote of no confidence on June 20. The vote was based on the planned public finance reforms, in addition to the cor-

ruption case against Cunek. The motion attracted

only 97 votes, however,

and

the cabinet survived. By August most public opinion polls indicated that CSSD support had surpassed that of the ODS for the first time since late 2002. On

the economic

front, Czech

GDP

continued to rise rapidly in 2007, while unemployment declined and the foreign trade surplus widened. Nonetheless, some structural problems emerged as a growing labour shortage drove up real wages, with worrying implications for inflation. From an international perspective, an

issue that triggered substantial public debate was the decision by the U.S. to build a radar base in the Czech Republic, an action most Czechs opposed. U.S. Pres. George W. Bush traveled to Prague in early June, however, to discuss plans for the base. (SHARON FISHER)

DENMARK

Area: 43,098 sq km (16,640 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,454,000

Capital: Copenhagen Chief of state: Queen Margrethe II

Head of government: Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen After months of political stalemate, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's six-yearold Liberal-Conservative coalition won a third term in office in snap elections on Nov. 13, 2007, securing a 90-seat majority in the 179-

seat Folketing (parliament) with the support of allies, notably the far-right anti-immigration Danish People's Party. The aim of the election was to "clear the 392

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

air" prior to all-party negotiations on widespread reforms to Denmark’s ^womb-to-tomb" social-welfare system. In October EU leaders reached agreement on the Treaty of Lisbon—a package designed to reform the EU following its recent citing Justice

expansion. Rasmussen, Ministry constitutional

experts, rejected opposition calls for the holding of a referendum on the issue, insisting that the new treaty contained no transfer of Danish sovereignty—which would have warranted such a vote. Following his reelection, Rasmussen promised that referenda would be held on the questions of Denmark’s joining the euro zone and of the country’s exemptions from closer EU cooperation in defense and legal matters. With polls showing persistent opposition among Danes to their country’s continued presence in Iraq, Denmark in August withdrew its 460-strong military force from southern Iraq, where it had been operating since 2003 under overall U.K. command. This left a squadron of four observation helicopters and 55 troops to support British forces in the Basra province. The move paved the way for Defense Minister Søren Gade to increase the size of Denmark’s contingent in Afghanistan’s turbulent Helmand province to 520 soldiers

(an

increase

of

100).

In

September police arrested eight young people—primarily Danish citizens of Afghan, Pakistani, Somali, and Turkish

origin—suspected of being members of a terrorist cell with links to al-Qaeda. In another

case, two

Danish

muslims

and an Iraqi Kurd were found guilty of having planned terrorist bomb attacks; they were given prison sentences ranging from 4 to 11 years. International disapproval of Denmark’s tight immigration policy continued, with the Council of Europe challenging Rasmussen’s government to soften its contentious stipulations for family reunification, drop stiff bank guarantees for immigrants, and call off cuts in welfare benefits for newly arrived immigrants. The UN slammed Denmark’s intolerance of immigrants, while reports by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the EU Commission gave the country miserable ratings for the integration of immigrants into the labour market. After Russian scientists planted a flag under the North Pole to assert Russia’s claim to potentially lucrative natural resources

in the Arctic,

Denmark

dis-

patched a scientific mission to gather

Denmark’s Crown Princess Mary holds her infant daughter, Princess Isabella, during her baptism in Fredensborg Palace Church, near Copenhagen, on July 1. seismic data and map the seabed below the icebound Lomonosov Ridge, off Greenland

(a Danish

territory).

(See

MAP on page 362.) Meanwhile, Denmark enjoyed a robust economy, with almost four years of uninterrupted growth, the lowest unemployment in 33 years (about 3%), no foreign debt, and a budget surplus in excess of 3% of GDP. On April 21 Australian-born Crown Princess Mary, wife of Crown Prince Frederik, gave birth to a second child. Princess Isabella would be third in line to the throne after her father and older brother, Prince Christian. (CHRISTOPHER FOLLETT)

DJIBOUTI

Area: 23,200 sq km (8,950 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 496,000

Capital: Djibouti Chief of state and head of government: President Ismail Omar Guelleh, assisted by Prime Minister Dileita Muhammad Dileita In January 2007 the United States military launched air raids on suspected al-Qaeda hideouts in southern Somalia from the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, which was based

World Affairs: Dominican Republic

in Djibouti. The base from which the raids were

launched,

Camp

Lemonier,

was the only official U.S. military presence in Africa. Djibouti Pres. Ismail Omar Guelleh condemned the raids as being counterproductive to the diplomatic efforts being made to end the clashes in Somalia. In March President Guelleh refused a summons to appear before a French judge who was probing the death in 1995 in Djibouti of Bernard Borrel, a French judge who had been investigating Guelleh during his 1995 presidential campaign. Allegations were made that Frances former president Jacques Chirac had colluded with the Djibouti government, as well as with President Guelleh, in a cover-up surrounding Borrel's death. By August two more governmental officials had been served with summonses. The ongoing French investigation into the suspicious death soured relations between the two countries. Àn estimated 53,000 Dijiboutians faced malnutrition and hunger when in April and May the UN World Food Programme halted its feeding programs, owing to a shortfall in funding. Over the previous five years, the country had endured several droughts; the most se-

country. The project would be funded under the PetroCaribe oil-assistance program introduced by Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chavez to help Caribbean territories hard hit by rising oil costs. The opposition United Workers Party insisted, however, that the government

did not have a mandate to establish a refinery in Dominica and that such a development would undermine the country’s status as a “nature-oriented” tourism destination. In March, Energy Minister Reginald Austrie told Domlec, the U.S. majorityowned power company, that it should provide a more efficient service or leave the country. Domlec had been engaged in a long-running dispute with the government over a litany of alleged sins, including excess profits, failure to reduce electricity rates, and resistance to the government's wish to liberalize the electricity sector, in which Domlec was the sole licensed provider. (DAVID RENWICK)

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

vere one occurred in 2006. (MARY EBELING) Area: 48,671 sq km (18,792 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,366,000

DOMINICA

Capital: Santo Domingo Head of state and government: President Leonel Fernández

cial contrasts. The burgeoning economy of the previous three years continued with an increase of 8.3% in GDP (one of the highest in Latin America),

an improved fiscal regulatory system, better tax collection, and a manageable inflation rate of 6%. Business confidence was strengthened in March with the implementation of the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. The social indexes, however,

showed

that the news was not all good. The Dominican Republic ranked 79 out of 177 countries in the 2007-08 UN Human Development Report and 26 out of 108 less-developed countries on the UN Poverty Index. No progress was made on endemic electrical outages, and there was only little improvement in the severe water shortages in urban areas. The quality of public education and public health remained poor, and the government invested more in the capital's subway project than in both of those sectors combined. Little discernible headway was made against corruption.

Citizens

went on strike in July and October to protest the lack of social reform, but the conflicts had only a marginal impact on Pres. Leonel Fernándezs5 political standing. President Fernández defeated his opponent, Danilo Medina, by a wide margin as the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) candidate for the May 2008 presidential elections. Extravagant campaign spending was not curbed by the PLD. At the end of October, the country's southeast was battered by Tropical Storm Noel, which resulted in extensive

Area: 750 sq km (290 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 70,600

Capital: Roseau Chief of state: President Nicholas Liverpool Head of government: Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit

In January 2007 Prime

In 2007 the Dominican Republic remained a country of economic and so-

damage and the loss of nearly 100 lives. A further blow was delivered in mid-December by Tropical Storm Olga.

Pres. Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic (vight) talks with Haitian Pres. René Préval at the National Palace in Santo Domingo on March 16.

Minister Roo-

sevelt Skerrit remarked that the measures implemented under the three-year, $11.6 million IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility were primarily responsible for Dominica’s 4% growth rate in 2006. That same month Dominica launched its own Growth and Social Protection Strategy, which provided a framework for achieving poverty reduction and fiscal growth. Dominica began exploratory talks in January with Venezuela concerning the building by Caracas of a small $80 million, 1,600 bbl-per-day refinery in the Orlando Barria—EFE/Corbis

395

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: East Timor

In attempts to control drug trafficking, the Dominican Republic created the Specialized Frontier Security Corp to patrol its border with Haiti. In its first days of operation, more than 3,000 undocumented Haitians trying to cross the border were returned to Haiti. During Haitian Pres. René Préval’s visit to Santo Domingo in July, the two heads of state agreed to work together to bet-

destroyed in the worst-hit towns between Viqueque and Bancau, Fretilin’s strongest support base. Australian peacekeeping soldiers reported that youths hurling rocks were causing mayhem and that the troops were confronted with the worst violence they had faced in months. President RamosHorta subsequently met with the leaders of both major parties and appealed

ter relations between their countries; however, there was no discussion about the treatment of the more than 500,000

for calm.

illegal Haitian residents already in the Dominican Republic.

(A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

ECUADOR

(JOHN W. GRAHAM)

EAST TIMOR (TIMOR-LESTE) Area: 272,045 sq km (105,037 sq mi), includ-

P

ing the 8,010-sq-km (3,093-sq-mi) Galapagos Islands Population (2007 est.): 13,341,000 (Galapagos Islands, about 20,000) Capital: Quito

Area: 14,919 sq km (5,760 sq mi) Population (2007 est.) 1,155,000

Chief of state and head of government:

Capital: Dili Chief of state: Presidents Xanana Gusmáo and, from May 20, José Ramos-Horta Head of government: Prime Ministers José Ramos-Horta, Estanislau da Conceição da Silva from May 19, and, from August 8,

Presidents Alfredo Palacio Gonzalez and,

from January 15, Rafael Correa Delgado

the Fretilin leader, former prime min-

The inauguration of Pres. Rafael Correa in January 2007 added Ecuador to the list of South American countries in which elected leftist leaders sought to implement major political, economic, and social change. Correa moved swiftly to overhaul the constitution and Ecuador's discredited political institutions. In an April referendum, voters overwhelmingly approved the creation of a constituent assembly with the power to dissolve the National Congress and draft a new charter. Fiftyseven legislators who had sought to block the vote were stripped of their posts by the electoral court. A consti-

ister Mari Alkatiri, refused to contem-

tutional court ordered them reinstated,

plate governing in any deal made with the party of former president Xanana Gusmao. To break the deadlock Ramos-

but Correa’s alliance won a majority of seats in September elections for the assembly. On November 29 the constituent assembly began working and immediately dissolved the Congress. Correa's opponents accused him of an unconstitutional power grab. He was denounced as a tyrant by wealthy banana grower Álvaro Noboa, his opponent in the 2006 elections. The presidents personal popularity remained high among Ecuadorans weary of corruption and mismanagement, and he appeared to favour political reform as a

Xanana Gusmão

Prime Minister José Ramos-Horta won

East Timors

presidential runoff elec-

tion in May 2007. Ramos-Horta,

cipient

of the

Peace, was May 20.

1996

sworn

Nobel

core-

Prize

in as president

for on

The general elections in late June resulted in widespread violence and arson. Fretilin, the ruling party, won the most

seats with 2996 of the vote, but

Horta swore in Gusmão

as prime min-

ister, even though Gusmão’s party had polled only 23% of the vote and had won fewer seats than Fretilin. Explaining his decision, which Fretilin considered illegal and unconstitutional, Ramos-Horta said that he was forced to appoint

Gusmão

because

attempts

to

form a government of national unity, which the president considered essential for national security, had failed. Two days of rioting followed in which dozens of buildings and cars were set on fire. UN police counted 142 houses 394

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

priority over economic nationalism. He

said that he would disavow debts contracted corruptly or illegally, but fears

that Ecuador would default on foreign debt payments due in February proved unfounded. The government said that it would renegotiate agreements with private oil companies to increase its share of revenues but at the same time signaled its desire to keep Ecuador attractive

to

investment.

Nevertheless,

protests by Indians and settlers in the Amazon region continued to disrupt oil production. Ecuador declined to participate in a U.S.-led inter-American naval exercise. Correa stated that he favoured U.S. legislation to extend the existing Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (which gave trade preferences to Ecuador in exchange for antinarcotic aid) but opposed its replacement, a bilateral free-trade agreement between Ecuador and the U.S. The economic impact of remittances was highlighted when a Spanish firm unveiled an automated system that allowed

the estimated

400,000

Ecuado-

rans living in Spain to select and pay for goods that their relatives could collect in Ecuador. The countrys groups who produce the high-quality straw headwear known as Panama hats for a

Newly installed Ecuadoran Pres. Rafael Correa waves from a balcony at the Government Palace in Quito on

January 16.

World Affairs: Egypt

living said that their industry faced extinction, in part because of competition from cheap paper imitations produced in China. The UN declared the faunarich Galapagos Islands an endangered World Heritage site, and strict curbs on tourism were proposed. Newly installed Defense Minister Guadalupe Larriva, her daughter, and five army officers were killed in January in a helicopter collision near the Manta air force base. (PAUL KNOX)

Area: 997,739 sq km (385,229 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 73,358,000

Capital: Cairo

Egyptian authorities using DNA from a tooth identified a mummy found a century ago as that of Queen Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty.

Chief of state: President Hosni Mubarak

Head of government: Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif

Egypts prospects for more vigorous economic growth were mixed in 2007, and restrictions on the exercise of human rights and freedom of speech increased. The government intensified its campaign to contain political dissent led by the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition group in the parliament, and initiated a series of arrests and a freeze on the group's funding sources. In March Pres. Hosni Mubarak called for a referendum to amend 34 articles of the constitution. Despite stiff resistance by opposition parties (who boycotted the vote) and professional unions, all amendments passed easily (75.996), but voter turnout was low (the official number was 27%). The contro-

versial amendments included a new antiterrorism law, which would replace the 1981 emergency law and provide the police with increased powers of arrest

and

surveillance;

a new

election

law that would eliminate the need judicial monitoring of each ballot during elections; and a ban on the ation of political parties based on gion (widely viewed as aimed at Muslim

Brotherhood).

Most

for box crerelithe

of the

amendments were seen as expanding the powers of the presidency. Elections and appointments to renew half the seats of the 264-member Shura (consultative)

June

amid

Council

charges

were

by human

held

in

rights

monitors and independent electoral observers that they were barred from carrying out their duties because of heavy interference by security forces. The winning candidates came predominantly from the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). President Mubarak

appointed 44 selected members to the Council, which serves as the upper house of the parliament. No independent candidates were elected or selected from the Muslim Brotherhood. Four editors in chief of opposition newspapers were convicted, fined, and sentenced to jail terms of one year each for having insulted “the symbols of the NDP” by publishing rumours about the health of President Mubarak; the court

ruled that the reports tended to insult and degrade him. A fifth editor was fined and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of offending and undermining the prestige of the judiciary and circulating false rumours about Mubarak’s health. The sentences, which

were being appealed, raised a furor among journalists, and 22 opposition and independent newspapers staged a strike on October 7 to protest the judgment and other journalists’ arrests. The government-appointed National Council for Human Rights called for the implementation of Mubarak’s pledge to the 2004 General Conference of Journalists to abolish convictions of journalists for freedom of expression. The U.S. issued a statement that expressed deep concern about the imminent closure of the

Association of Human Rights Legal Aid as well as the conviction and sentencing of several newspaper editors. Meanwhile, an Egyptian administrative court rejected the plea of jailed opposition leader Ayman Nour for release on the grounds of poor health. Though government economic indicators showed an inflow of foreign investment

($11.1

billion

for 2006-07)

and a decline in unemployment (from 10.9% in 2005 to 9.5% in 2006) and the rate of inflation (from 12.8% in March to 8.5% in June), there was a

10.5% rise retail food cities and balance of mated

$5

in the cost of living, with prices soaring 16.4% in the 19.3% in rural areas. The payments showed an estibillion

surplus,

and

the

budget deficit was reduced by 5.5% of GDP. In the first quarter of 2007, economic growth registered 7.1%, compared with 6.9% during 2005-06. Nonetheless, 14 million Egyptians, representing 20% of the population, were classified as poor. On the cultural side, during excavations at the western desert oasis of Siwa, Egyptian archaeologists discovered what could be the oldest footprint in history, possibly dating back two million years. Egyptologists also confirmed the identity of the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. The broken tooth that they found in a wooden box associated with Hatshepsut fit in the jaw socket of the mummy. (AYMAN M. EL-AMIR) 395

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: El Salvador

EL SALVADOR

The murder in Guatemala of three Salvadoran deputies to the Central Amer-

ment, along with an increase in organized crime connected with drug trafficking. Salvadoran gang members were also a problem in several U.S. cities, particularly Los Angeles, home to about one million Salvadoran immigrants. In May the U.S. and El Salvador agreed on a cross-border plan to reduce gang violence by sharing training methods and intelligence to better monitor Salvadorans crossing the borders (immigrants and deportees). A close ally of the U.S. (despite President Saca’s criticism of U.S. immigration policy), El Salvador continued to boycott Cuba and was the only Latin

ican Parliament on Feb. 19, 2007, jos-

American

tled El Salvador’s government. The deputies belonged to El Salvador’s ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance

Iraq, despite widespread opposition from El Salvador’s populace. The Salvadoran contingent in Iraq dropped in

(ARENA) and included a son Roberto D'Aubuisson, the founder

August,

Area: 21,041 sq km (8,124 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,857,000

Capital: San Salvador Head of state and government: President Elías Antonio Saca González

of of

ARENA, which suggested that the killings might have been politically motivated. A Guatemalan investigation later revealed that drug-trafficking gangs were behind the murders. The increase in gang activity dominated much of Pres. Antonio Saca's time. He pursued tough anticrime measures aimed at reducing the gangs (maras) that had contributed to El Sal-

vadors high murder rate. Thousands of gang members were arrested and jailed, which led to overcrowded prisons and criticism of civil rights violations from international human rights groups as the country appeared to be returning

to its repressive past. Para-

military death squads also joined the attacks on the MS-13,

or Mara

Salva-

trucha, and other gangs. The rise of these gangs reflected El Salvador's widespread poverty and unemploy-

country

however,

to

keep

from

troops

380

to

in

280

troops. The administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush rewarded Salvadoran support for its foreign policy with leniency regarding the deportation of illegal immigrants back to San Salvador. Nearly one-third of native-born Salvadorans lived in the U.S., and their remittances of about $2.5 billion annu-

ally aided El Salvador’s weak economy. El Salvador enjoyed a rise in exports to the U.S., including the reexport of Brazilian ethanol, which was made possible under the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the U.S.; growth

was still less than expected, however. An increase in imports brought lower prices on many goods, but American corn-produced ethanol drove up grain prices in El Salvador. Moreover, the de-

EQUATORIAL GUINEA

Area: 28,051 sq km (10,831 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 507,000

Capital: Malabo Chief of state: President Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo Head of government: Prime Minister Ricardo Mangue Obama Nfubea Equatorial Guinea continued in 2007 to have one of the highest GDP growth rates in the world, estimated

at more

than 2096. The country was one of the members that participated in the 2006 inaugural meeting of the Gulf of Guinea Commission,

which

aimed

to ensure

that the energy resources of the region led to development and that Malabo's long-standing dispute with neighbouring Gabon over the status of the islands in Corsico Bay would at last be settled. In May it was announced that there would be a delay in the awarding of further offshore exploration blocks because the bids were not satisfactory, but in September seven new oil blocks were granted to companies from South Africa, India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and

Switzerland. Relations with Zimbabwe, which had

become close in 2004 when Zimbabwe intercepted mercenaries bound for Equatorial Guinea to stage a coup, remained warm. In August 2007 Pres.

cline of the dollar, El Salvador's official

Teodoro

currency, caused inflation.

made a state visit to Zimbabwe, where

(RALPH LEE WOODWARD,

JR.)

Members of the Mara 18 gang are held in detention in the police station of Ilopango, El Sal., on April 24.

Obiang

Nguema

Mbasogo

he opened the Harare Agricultural Show. Zimbabwean Pres. Robert Mugabe was keen to obtain oil from Equatorial Guinea, and Malabo wanted Zimbabwe to extradite Simon Mann, the leader of the mercenaries, who had

completed a jail term in Zimbabwe. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

ERITREA

Area: 121,144 sq km (46,774 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,907,000

Capital: Asmara Head of state and government: President Isaias Afwerki Jose Cabezas—AFP/Getty Images

396

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Ethiopia

Eritreas enmity with neighbouring Ethiopia continued to dominate the 2007 agenda of the country, sapping energy required for repairing broken relations with the West and resolving the dire

economic,

political,

and

social

needs facing its people. In January long-simmering tensions between itrea and Ethiopia exploded into a proxy war when both countries

held in Mombasa, Kenya, upsetting fivetime champion Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia.

(PATRICK L. THIMANGU)

apartheid regarding Estonia and even demanded a new Estonian government. Most striking, a wave of cyber attacks against

Estonian

government,

media,

and banking Web sites began in late April with the riots, and the Estonian embassy in Moscow was under siege for days by the pro-Kremlin group Nashi and other youth organizations.

ESTONIA

the Erhot lent

(TOIVO U. RAUN)

support to opposing sides in a new con-

flict in Somalia. The fighting, which had begun in December 2006, reached a climax when Somalia's Transitional

Area: 45,227 sq km (17,462 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,338,000

Federal Government

Capital: Tallinn

(TFG), backed by

ETHIOPIA

Ethiopian troops, routed the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a group supported by the government of Eritrean Pres. Isaias Afwerki and one that had ruled Somalia for six months. In September 2007 Eritrea hosted a conference at which the ICU leadership and other Somalian opposition figures discussed ways of dislodging Ethiopian soldiers and the ruling TFG. That move prompted the United States, which

fifth parliament since the restoration of independence in 1991; the voter turnout was 61%. Although polls had predicted that Edgar Savisaars Eston-

favoured the TFG, to threaten to declare

ian Centre

Eritrea a terrorist-friendly country. Although fighting in Somalia subsided after the fall of the ICU, the spectre of direct war between Eritrea and Ethiopia loomed large. During the year both countries continued to boost troop levels and armaments at their common border, further threatening the fragile seven-year-long UN-monitored ceasefire that had ended a bloody two-year

clear victory Prime Minister Andrus Ansips Estonian Reform Party (RE) emerged the winner, garnering 31 seats in the 101-member Riigikogu (parliament), compared with the EK's 29. The pro-business RE received credit for Estonia’s robust economic growth in recent years and benefited from Ansip’s personal popularity. In early April Ansip formed a new coalition government—consisting of the RE, the Pro Pa-

war that claimed some

70,000 lives.

Despite a pledge by the European Commission in July to provide Eritrea with the equivalent of $8.5 million in humanitarian aid, poverty and food shortages continued to haunt Eritrea. This situation was exacerbated by a bad economy, inadequate rainfall, border troubles with Ethiopia, intransigence of the Afwerki regime (which insisted that the country could feed itself), and a nearly $180 million shortfall in a $212.9 million international

food-assistance budget. As Eritrea’s relations

with

Western

countries

2007,

Asmara

worsened

in

Head of government: Prime Minister Andrus Ansip Area: 1,127,127 sq km (435,186 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 76,512,000 On March 4, 2007, Estonia elected its

Chong Quan to Asmara.

Despite troubles at home, an Eritrean athlete once again displayed his prowess in long-distance running. In March 25year-old Zersenay Tadesse won the world cross country championships,

Party (EK) would

which pledged to lower the flat income tax rate from 22% to 18% by 2011. The year’s most explosive issue was the controversy surrounding the government’s planned removal of a Sovietera World War II monument—the Bronze Soldier—from central Tallinn to a remote military cemetery in the city. In April two days of riots involving young Russians broke out at the origilocation,

resulting

in one

Capital: Addis Ababa Chief of state: President Girma Wolde-Giyorgis Head of government: Prime Minister Meles Zenawi

claim a

tria and Res Publica Union (IRL), and the Social Democratic Party (SDE)—

nal

looked east, strengthening its ties with China, which announced in January a cancellation of a chunk of Eritrea’s foreign debt. In July the two countries signed economic pacts following the visit of Chinese Assistant Minister of Commerce

Chief of state: President Toomas Hendrik Ilves

death,

scores of injuries, and the government's decision to relocate the monument immediately. Although the violence was a shock, the rioters were not representative of the Russian-speaking population of Estonia as a whole, and the episode encouraged both Estonians and Russians to face the challenge of integration in Estonia more realistically. The Bronze Soldier affair brought relations between Estonia and Russia to a new postcommunist low. Engaging in

rhetorical overkill, Russian representatives used terms such as fascism and

The release on July 20, 2007, of many of the country’s high-profile political detainees signaled the possible return to normal politics in Ethiopia. Following disputed parliamentary elections in May 2005, journalists and opposition leaders, mainly from the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), had been held in detention. Although most of the detainees were found guilty in June of having committed various crimes, Pres. Girma Wolde-Giyorgis pardoned 38 of them. The pardon restored the political rights of the CUD leaders to vote and stand for election. Two civil social activists, Netsanet Demissie (founder and

director of the Organization for Social Justice in Ethiopia) and Daniel Bekele of ActionAid, were the only two defendants to mount a defense. The two were convicted and given two-and-ahalf-year prison sentences in December; they had already served more than two years, however, and their supporters hoped that they would soon be released. Thousands of others were being detained elsewhere throughout the country. Meanwhile, the major urban centres of Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa remained headed by caretaker administrations while their elected officials spent most of the year in prison. Under the Julian calendar,

in use in

Ethiopia, September 12 marked the New Year and the start of the new millennium for the country. The longawaited national census was completed in most areas in May and June.

397

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Fiji

country short-lived opposition to the coup reflected both the military's efficiency and some public support for its determination to eliminate corruption in both Parliament and the Civil Service. Opposition from international aid partners

was

tained.

more

Fiji was

Commonwealth

donor

Worshippers at St. Ragouel Church in the Merkato neighbourhood of Addis Ababa, Eth., hold a ceremony on September 12—the date that, under the Julian

calendar, marked the start of the new millennium.

economy

grew

at a rate

of 6.3%

in

2007, up from 5.9% in 2006. Most exports came from the agricultural sector, notably coffee, tea, spices, cereals, pulses, oil seed, flowers, fruits, and

a humanitarian crisis unless more was done to provide local communities with food and medicine. The border dispute with Eritrea persisted with little change, and the UN Security Council extended the mandate of its peacekeeping mission until 2008. In addition, Ethiopia and Eritrea supported opposing sides in the war in Somalia, feeding speculation that a regional war was possible, even likely. (See Eritrea, above.)

and

sus-

suspended

from

the

of Nations,

and

aid

was withheld until the country established a program for a return to civilian government. Donors also imposed "smart sanctions," designed to limit the mobility of coup leaders (and their families) without imposing further hardship on Fiji’s poor. Some observers assumed that the collapse of the gold industry declining tourism, and the stagnation of the sugar industry would force the government to accede to

E

Inflation and ballooning consumer prices throughout 2007 put a strain on efforts to meet demands for economic development. Price increases on basic consumer products, including grains, cereals, and cooking oil, were nearly 100% in some cases. The Ethiopian

intense

(LAHRA SMITH)

demands.

Bainimarama,

how-

ever, seemed determined to resist pressure and to complete his reform program. He asserted that Fiji was not yet ready for civilian government and thus put at risk almost €300 million (about $400 million) of EU aid needed to re-

structure

the sugar industry.

In Sep-

tember 2007, when Qarase was allowed to return to Suva, Bainimarama

reim-

posed a state of emergency and declared that the previous government would not be allowed to contest new elections. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

FINLAND

vegetables. In addition, tourism was expanding rapidly. The World Bank continued to withhold direct budgetary support to the government and instead directed funds to the local level through its Protection of Basic

Services

program.

generally good harvests

Despite

Area: 338,417 sq km (130,664 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,286,000

and improve-

Capital: Helsinki Chief of state: President Tarja Halonen Head of government: Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen

ments in markets and infrastructure, at

least 7.3 million Ethiopians were considered in need of food assistance. Localized incidents of conflict and violence continued to occur periodically, as did reports of human rights violations, particularly in the Oromiya and Somali regions. In April armed members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front

(ONLF)

attacked

a Chinese-run

oil rig in eastern Ethiopia, killing 77 people (68 Ethiopians and 9 Chinese). The Ethiopian government reportedly blocked food aid to large parts of the Somali region and committed war crimes, which led a UN fact-finding mission in September to determine that the government and ONLF rebels were both responsible for human rights violations and that there was potential for 398

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Area: 18,272 sq km (7,055 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 839,000

Capital: Suva Chief of state: Presidents Voreque Bainimarama (acting) and, from January 4,

Ratu Josefa lloilo Head of government: Prime Ministers Jona Senilagakali and, from January 5, Voreque Bainimarama (interim)

The elections to the Finnish parliament in March 2007 resulted in three parties’ proclaiming themselves victorious: the Centre Party remained the largest party, with a 23.1% share (down from 24.7% in 2003); the National Coalition

At the beginning of 2007, Fiji military commander Voreque (“Frank”) Bainimarama, who in December 2006 had de-

Party (or Conservatives) emerged as the only one of the three big parties to increase its popularity, against all pre-

posed the eight-month-old government

election

of Prime

and the tiny True Finns gained the most proportionately, growing from 1.6% to 4.1% of the vote. The overall turnout dropped slightly to 67.9%.

Minister

Laisenia

Qarase,

stepped down as acting president and declared himself interim prime minister.

(See

BIOGRAPHIES.)

Within

the

polls, from

18.6%

to 22.3%;

World Affairs: France

The Social Democratic to 21.496

from

24.596)

Party (down was

excluded

from the coalition government formed after the elections. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of the Centre Party remained in office. His new cabinet featured 20 ministers drawn from the Centre Party, the Conservatives, the Greens, and the Swedish People's Party. Although the cabinet included 12 women, the important portfolios were in the hands of men, notably Minister for Foreign Affairs Ilkka Kanerva, Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen, and Minister of Trade and Industry Mauri Pekkarinen. À leading election theme of the opposition was the purportedly low wages of nurses and the substantial raise that the opposition parties promised them. In April the new government promoted the competitiveness of wages in women-dominated professions, and a budget of €150 million (about $200 milion) annually was earmarked for the purpose. In September the union of practical nurses accepted the collective agreement offered by municipal employers, but the qualified nurses' union Tehy turned it down. Tehy announced in October that it wanted a 2496 raise over two and a half years, and, to make

the point, 13,000 nurses gave their notice to leave their jobs en masse (effective November

19). In mid-November

the government pushed through a “patient safety" law that would allow the authorities to force nurses back to work. Agreement was reached on November

18, however, just a few hours

before the deadline. Nurses left the table with raises of 22-28% over four years and a 2007 year-end (Christmas) bonus of €270 (about $400).

The Finnish-Swedish forest products group

Stora Enso

announced

in Sep-

tember that it would sell its North American operations for €1.8 billion (about $2.5 billion), approximately the same amount that the group had spent on improvements to its subsidiary. (Stora Enso had acquired the American company Consolidated Papers in 2000 for €4.9

billion

[about

FRANCE

$4.5 billion].)

Stora Enso closed or sold a number of facilities in Finland and elsewhere. Finnish cellular phone giant Nokia agreed in October to buy the American company Navteq, a maker of digital maps for mobile systems, for €5.7 billion (about $8.1 billion). The move was

seen as the cell phone behemoth’s effort to evolve with the times by providing content (and advertising space). (SUSANNA BELL)

Area: 543,965 sq km (210,026 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 61,709,000

Capital: Paris Chief of state: Presidents Jacques Chirac and, from May 16, Nicolas Sarkozy Head of government: Prime Ministers Dominique de Villepin and, from May 17, Francois Fillon France turned to a new political generation in 2007. In the May 6 runoff of the presidential election, the voters chose 52-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement

Newly installed French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy poses with Justice Minister Rachida Dati in Paris after the first meeting of his cabinet on May 18.

(UMP) over the Socialist candidate, Sé-

goléne Royal, to succeed Pres. Jacques Chirac. (See Sidebar.) Sarkozy appointed François Fillon prime minister to head a new government, which went on to beat the Socialists in the parliamentary elections in June. Although he had formerly been a minister in Chiracappointed governments, Sarkozy campaigned on a slogan of a “rupture” with the previous order. He quickly carried out some labour market and tax-cutting reforms and started a review of constitutional changes, including term limits for future presidents. While maintaining Europe as the prime focus of his foreign policy, Sarkozy was relatively pro-American compared with his predecessors. He showed signs of being more accommodating to the U.S. (especially with his active interest in a positive outcome in

Iraq) and somewhat more trouble to some of his euro zone partners (with his criticism of restrictive European Central Bank monetary policy). Domestic Affairs. The year was dominated by the presidential and legislative elections and their consequences. It began with Royal, already the chosen Socialist candidate, ahead in the opinion polls, but this changed after Sarkozy got the uncontested endorsement of his UMP party in mid-January. Both candidates had very personal campaign styles and platforms. The photogenic Royal in her trademark white jacket held lengthy grassroots meetings across the country, while Sarkozy crammed stump speeches into a timetable that until March involved being interior minister as well as a presidential candidate. Royal mixed standard left-wing economic prescriptions with a call for

military-style boot-camp treatment of youthful delinquents. Sarkozy was ready to call himself a liberal, but neither his economic interventionism nor his hard-line immigration policy bore this out. Both candidates too had to cope with personal problems. Sarkozy's were well known because of the publicity surrounding an earlier temporary separation from his wife, Cécilia (which led to a very public divorce announcement in October). Royal’s domestic problems were confirmed only when, the day after parliamentary elections in June, she announced

that she

had separated from her partner and the father of her four children, Francois Hollande,

the

head

of the

Socialist

Party. This explained elements of tension that had appeared during the campaign, such as when Hollande called for certain tax cuts that Royal promptly rejected. The nature of the two main contenders—Sarkozy with his polarizing affect on the electorate and Royal, whose slipups in foreign affairs made her look like unpromising material for head of state—sent voters looking for an alternative, especially the centrist Frangois Bayrou. At one point he was

polling within a couple of percentage points of Sarkozy and Royal, but his bid eventually fizzled. Even the result of the first round—normally the occasion for protest votes for candidates with no chance of winning—confirmed the solidity of the traditional political cleavage. At the expense of fringe parties,

the

two

mainstream

candidates

got their highest combined percentage of the vote in more than 30 years. 399

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: France

The French Elections of 2007 The 2007 presidential election in France was never a foregone conclusion. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist contender, had the early advantage of being the first candidate to win a mainstream party nomination, in November 2006. Unlike Royal, however, Nicolas Sarkozy had

no rivals for his party ticket, and once he was endorsed by his conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party in January, he quickly drew level with and then ahead of Royal in the polls. Even faster was the poll-rating improvement of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) candidate, François Bayrou, who went

from less than 10% support in early February to more than 20% by early March. This third-party candidate never succeeded in making it into the two-person runoff, however, as the far-right Jean-Marie

Le Pen had done in 2002. Indeed, the 2002 result was probably one of the reasons why Bayrou never made it to the second round: many voters were wary of the dangers of tactical voting that could put an unwanted candidate through to the runoff. Another reason was the doubt about what sort of parliamentary majority Bayrou could count on to govern if he was elected president. Experience bore out the doubts. Bayrou came in third in the April 22 first-round vote with a very creditable 18.6%, pushing Le Pen (10.4%) into the

fourth-place position. In the campaign before the May 6 second round of the presidential election, both Sarkozy (who had scored 31.2% in the first round)

and Royal (25.9%) vied for the nearly seven million voters who had cast their ballot for Bayrou. He refused to endorse either candidate,

although Royal reportedly left several messages on his mobile phone and Sarkozy pledged that centrists would “have their place” in his government. The battle between Sarkozy and Royal was hard fought to the end, and an estimated 20 million people watched the last television debate between the two candidates, held four days

before the vote. Sarkozy's final margin of victory was decisive— 53.196 to Royal's 46.996. Bayrou's political fortunes collapsed in the June parliamentary elections. Most of his UDF deputies quit to join Sarkozy’s UMP rather than the new Democratic Movement that Bayrou formed. Bayrou saved his own seat only because Sarkozy had ordered the opposing UMP candidate to stand down. The UMP did not manage to capitalize on this or on Sarkozy's presidential success, however, as the party won fewer seats than in the previous general election (313 of the 577 National Assembly seats, compared with 355 in 2002). The Socialists won more than they had five years earlier (186

seats, up from 140). The main reason for the UMP's poor showing appeared to be a preelection leak that the government planned a five-point hike in the value-added tax. Nonetheless, the UMP conservatives retained power, the first time since 1978 that an incumbent party had won reelection. (DAVID BUCHAN)

The UMP did less well than expected in the parliamentary elections but still well enough to provide a comfortable majority for the new Fillon govern-

To some extent Sarkozy therefore created a coalition government, which influenced his decision not to scrap the famous law that placed a 35-hour max-

ment, with 313 of the 577 seats in the

imum on the standard workweek (a landmark Socialist law) but rather to

National Assembly. Former prime minister Alain Juppé was forced to resign from his post in the new, smaller cabinet when he lost reelection to his parliamentary seat. In the subsequent reshuffle, Christine Lagarde (see BIOGRAPHIES) was shifted from agriculture

minister

coming

the

to finance

first

minister,

woman

to

be-

hold

France's top economic post. Even more

surprising was the appointment as foreign minister of Bernard Kouchner, a maverick Socialist who, unlike everyone else in his party (and Sarkozy himself), had originally supported the U.S.led invasion of Iraq (on humanitarian grounds). Another striking nomination was that of Rachida Dati, the first full

cabinet member of North African origin. In addition to giving a ministerial job to Eric Besson, a Socialist MP who had quit the Royal campaign to join Sarkozy's, the new president subsequently appointed former Socialist cabinet minister Jack Lang to his constitutional-reform committee and supported another Socialist, Dominique StraussKahn, to be managing director of the International Monetary Fund. 400

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

use tax relief on overtime pay to moderate the law’s rigidity. He also endorsed payroll tax cuts, the easing of restrictions on the firing of workers, and other business-friendly policies. Carrying out a campaign pledge, he pushed for an end to the special pension privileges enjoyed by rail workers and other public-sector employees. Sarkozy faced down a nine-day national train strike in November and a brief stoppage in December, but it remained unclear whether he could achieve the negotiated solution to this issue that had eluded previous French leaders. Meanwhile, life out of power was somewhat harder for two men in the departing Chirac government. Dominique de Villepin, the former prime minister, had to answer police questioning on the so-called Clearstream scandal, which had involved an alleged attempt to smear Sarkozy. With the end of the presidential immunity that had shielded him for the past 12 years, Chirac faced magistrates’ questioning for allegedly having put party workers

on the city payroll during his 18-year stint as mayor of Paris. Chirac wrote in Le Monde newspaper that city funds had been used only to serve Parisians but that he had needed to hire more staff for his expanded responsibilities, which included being an MP, the head of a political party, and prime minister. In February former Chirac minister Michel Roussin had his conviction for corrupt party financing in the city upheld by a Paris court. Foreign Affairs. Sarkozy put new vigour into—and added a fresh slant to— French foreign policy. To the relief of many

European

Union

partners,

he

agreed to put forward a revamped EU treaty for ratification by the French parliament and not by referendum (as Chirac had tried and failed to do in 2005). Sarkozy agreed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to restructure the management of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and its Airbus subsidiary. A Ger-

man ICE high-speed train in May became the first German train since World War II to enter Paris, while in April a French TGV train using the same new Paris-Strasbourg rail line created a new world speed record for a wheeled train of 574.8 km/hr (357.2 mph).

Sarkozy also took a pragmatic approach to the issue of Turkey's applica-

World Affairs: Gambia AP

tion for EU membership, which he opposed. He gave a green light to negotiations compatible with Turkey’s be-

whelming majority in the parliament, having won 80 of the 120 seats in the

coming an associate, but not a member,

elections. Parties allied to the PDG won 13 seats, independents gained 4, and the fragmented opposition took only

of the EU. He changed the tenor of traditional French policy as he stressed EU complementarity to NATO, friendship with Israel, and a tough attitude to Iranian nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, he promoted the idea of a union of Mediterranean rim countries and went to Libya in July and Algeria in December. Visiting Beijing on the eve of a European Union-China summit, Sarkozy bluntly complained about China's surplus with the EU and the undervaluation of the Chinese currency, which was effectively pegged to the dollar. He also warned that the EU might penalize imports from carbonemitting countries such as China that did not do enough on climate change, though there was little support in Brussels for this idea. After going on holiday in August in New Hampshire—an unusual vacationing venue for a French president— Sarkozy returned to the U.S. in early November to make his first official visit as president. During his busy two-day stay, he held private meetings with President Bush, spoke with other American politicians and business leaders, and presented a warmly received address before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Sarkozy stressed that France would continue to support the fight against terrorism, including keeping French troops in Afghanistan, and endorsed a strong joint stand against Iran's nuclear program. It remained to be seen whether Sarkozys rapprochement with Washington would be as well accepted in France. (DAVID BUCHAN)

Dec.

17, 2006,

Gabonese

16; 7 seats remained

Vice

Premier and Minister of Social Affairs Louis-Gaston Mayila resigned from the PDG and the cabinet on July 16 and established his own party, the Union for a New Republic. On August 2, leaders of the main opposition parties reached an agreement with the government to prevent future electoral fraud; new voting cards would include a digital fingerprint of the cardholder. A press crackdown resulted in a threemonth publishing ban (from February 27) on the satiric newspaper Edzombolo for printing articles critical of public officials. In June journalist GuyChristian Mavioga, director of the independent newspaper L'Espoir, was arrested, and in August he was found guilty of defaming the head of state. Hospitalized while in prison, he was given a five-month suspended sentence According to an agreement signed on January 18, China would send 44 agricultural experts to assist small farmers in Gabon. The government promised on March 5 to supply free electricity and water to the country's poorest households to offset the impact of a 2596 increase in the price of foodstuffs and fuel. In an attempt to control surging inflation, price ceilings on basic commodities were put in place in September for a six-month period. Gabon Airlines, the privately owned successor to bankrupt Air Gabon, launched its inaugural flight from Libreville to Paris on April 10.

| (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

GAMBIA, THE

Area: 267,667 sq km (103,347 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,331,000

Area: 10,689 sq km (4,127 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,709,000

Capital: Libreville Chief of state: President Omar Bongo Ondimba Head of government: Prime Minister Jean Eyeghe Ndong

Capital: Banjul Head of state and government: President Col. Yahya Jammeh

announced

that on particular days of

the week,

he could

cure

HIV,

using

herbs and bananas and spiritual methods. Footage of Jammeh applying his treatment was broadcast on state-run television. Though Jammeh could do nothing about the criticisms that came from outside the country by AIDS activists who warned that his claim could influence people with HIV not to take antiretroviral medication, he did expel a senior UN official after she questioned his cure. Jammeh also claimed to be able to treat

asthma,

diabetes,

and hypertension, and in June the Organization of West African Traditional Practitioners made him its honorary president. Meanwhile, journalists who spoke out continued to be arrested for violating “state security,” and Banjul continued to be affected by the fighting in Senegal’s Casamance province; a leading rebel leader fled into The Gambia to escape capture. Jammeh resisted pressure from China to drop his country’s support for Taiwan, which had provided assistance in his campaign to reduce the countrys dependence on imported foods. While the government prided itself on the rollout of electricity, new roads, health clinics, and clean

Pres. Yahya Jammeh, who had easily won the presidential election in The Party over-

Gambian Pres. Yahya Jammeh (right) prays while administering his alleged herbal HIV cure to a patient.

and a $500 fine.

GABON

Pres. Omar Bongo’s Democratic (PDG) entered 2007 with an

v

legislative

undecided.

=

=

Gambia

in 2006, made

more

interna-

tional news in January 2007 when he

water, the tourists from Europe who flocked to the beaches could not entirely ignore the evidence of dire poverty. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS) 401

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Georgia

GEORGIA

opponent. Okruashvili was arrested on September 27 and charged with abuse of office and money laundering, but he was released on $6 million bail on Oc-

Area: 70,152 sq km (27,086 sq mi), of which

8,640 sq km (5,336 sq mi} in the breakaway Republic of Abkhazia and 3,900 sq km (1,506 sq mi) in the breakaway Republic of South Ossetia Population (2007 est.): 4,613,000, of which in

Abkhazia 177,000 and in South Ossetia 49,000

Capital: Tbilisi Head of state and government: Presidents Mikheil Saakashvili and, from November 25, Nino Burjanadze (acting), assisted by Prime Ministers Zurab Nogaideli and, from November 22, Lado Gurgenidze

tober 9 after retracting his allegations. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest Okruashvili’s arrest and demand the abolition of the presidency. Ten opposition parties aligned in late September in a national council and on November 2 convened a mass protest in Tbilisi that police forcibly dispersed on November 6. President Saakashvili imposed a nationwide state of emergency on November 7 but lifted it one week later under pressure from the international community. On November 8 Saakashvili scheduled a preterm presi-

the first six months

dential election for Jan. 5, 2008; he re-

Area: 357,046 sq km (137,856 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 82,249,000

signed on November 25, and parliament speaker Nino Burjanadze became acting president. On November 16 Nogaideli left office, and Lado Gurgenidze Antagonism between the Georgian became head of a new cabinet. leadership and the opposition worsOn May 23 former intelligence chief Irakli Batiashvili was sentenced to ened in 2007. In early September the opposition rejected as “a collection of seven years’ imprisonment for his imtoasts” the new government program puted support of the abortive July 2006 insurrection led by Emzar Kvitsiani. unveiled by Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli following a cabinet reshuffle. Twelve associates of fugitive former naOn September 25 former defense mintional security minister Igor Giorgadze were sentenced on August 24 to beister Irakli Okruashvili announced the creation of a new opposition movement tween three and nine years’ imprison(For a United Georgia), and in a telement on charges of plotting a coup. vised interview he accused Pres. Mikheil The Georgian parliament on May 8 Saakashvili of engaging in protectionvoted to endorse President Saakashvili's ism, condoning high-level corruption, proposal to create a temporary adminand proposing the murder of a political istration for the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Two days later, on May 10, Saakashvili named Dmitry Vano Shlamov—AFP/Getty Images Sanakoyev, | who was Supporters of the opposition in Georgia take part in elected alternative South a rally in front of the parliament building in Tbilisi Ossetian “president” in on November 3. November

2006,

to head

that administration. On March

12, unidenti-

fied combat helicopters fired rockets in the Kodori Gorge but caused no casualties. A UN investigation implicated Russia. Two unidentified aircraft en-

of 2007, but the

foreign-trade deficit widened. This was largely due to the ban imposed by Russia in March 2006 on selected Georgian imports.

(ELIZABETH FULLER)

GERMANY

Capital: Berlin; some ministries remain in Bonn

Chief of state: President Horst Kóhler Head of government: Chancellor Angela Merkel A 3% increase in the value-added tax (VAT) at the beginning of 2007 cast a dark shadow over Germans’ expectations; it was the largest tax increase imposed since World War II. By the end of the year, however, the public’s attitudes toward the government, the economy, and the future in general were more positive

than

in previous

years.

Ger-

many saw domestic debates on education, discussions

on antiterrorist meas-

ures and the rights of the citizen, and a repositioning of the parties on the leftright continuum. In the international arena, the German presidency of the EU and of the Group of Eight (G-8) went well, but the country was shocked by the abduction in February of a German woman and her 20-year-old son in Iraq. Domestic Affairs. A well-known television presenter divided Germany in the spring with a remark on the need for women to concentrate on family matters—for

their own,

the nation’s,

and,

most important, their children’s wellbeing. The economic activity rate of

air space

women in Germany, 48.9%, was among

on August 6 and dropped a missile that failed to explode. International experts tentatively concluded that the aircraft were Russian, but an investigation by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe declined to blame Moscow. Georgian special forces killed two

the lowest in Europe and was sometimes seen as a potential cause for economic stagnation and for the pension worries of recent years. Meanwhile, the debate on the reform of the education system centred on increased spending on day-care facilities. The education system and work conditions were often considered detrimental to having both parents working, but in 2007 some 8% of fathers made use of their more re-

tered

© 2008 Encyé

Russian military instructors in Abkhazia on September 20 and took seven Abkhaz border guards prisoner. Georgias GDP grew by 12.5% during

Georgian

World Affairs: Germany Sean Gallup/Getty Images

munerative right to parental leave and took over some of the child-care responsibilities while their partners returned to work. This new

initiative,

and the in-

creased government funding of day-care facilities, led to uncertainty within the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The CDU minister for

as the government debated the release or parole of the last four former Red Army Faction (also called the Baader-Meinhof Gang) terrorists still being held after more

than

20 years

in prison;

two of the four were released. Many blamed Bavarian Minister-Pres. Edmund Stoiber’s ultraconservative public outbursts— especially those directed toward former East Germany—for much of the public distrust of politi-

family matters had initiated these social programs, and some observers and CDU members cians. In January Stoiber anwere asking, "What are consernounced that in September he vative values today?" Minister for the Interior Wolfwould step down as premier and gang Schäuble of the CDU as the head of the CDU's partner German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign seemed to offer the answer to party, the Christian Social Union Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier attend a session this conservative “identity crisis” (CSU). Throughout the year of the Bundestag on April 26, during which the when he proposed domestic seStoibers stance resulted in a government's plan on reducing greenhouse-gas steady decline of support and curity measures through a finemissions was discussed. heavy criticism within the CSU, gerprint database that would contain all citizens’ information and he resigned as promised. In and would be made accessible to all SPD majority, although financial misOctober the Bavarian state parliament management and scandals had reduced elected Vice Minister-Pres. Günther governmental institutions. The suggestion was subsequently watered down. the party's lead in that region. Within Beckstein to replace Stoiber; Economics There also were proposed laws on the Bundestag (the lower house of parMinister Erwin Huber took over as CSU liament), which had last held elections shooting down terrorist-controlled party chief. General disillusionment planes and on the legalization of the in 2005, the SPD remained the second permeated public life, and many citizens searching of suspects computers largest party (behind the CDU), folsaw Stoiber as a symbol of the insincerlowed by the Free Democratic Party through the Internet. While all of these ity they criticized. Intriguingly, the role (FDP) and Die Linke, which therefore proposals were within the traditional that German politicians played in the inachieved the status of the fourth conservative realm of topics, they reternational arena in 2007 did much to strongest party in its first parliamensulted in warnings from the opposition alleviate this situation, and toward the tary elections. The success of the SPD and from Pres. Horst Kohler of the end of the year, Germans displayed the to regain voters from the left would be highest trust in public figures and polidanger to individual rights and caused tics that had been observed in years. judged in 2008, when several more unrest within the grand coalition and states were due to hold parliamentary the CDU itself. The minister of justice— Foreign Affairs. The international scene elections. The party’s future was further was dominated in 2007 by Germany's a member of the centre-left Social Dedisrupted in November when Vicepresidency of the European Union in mocratic Party (SPD), the junior partChancellor Franz Müntefering of the ner in the grand coalition—expressed the first half of the year and the G-8 summit held in Heiligendamm in early SPD unexpectedly resigned to care for displeasure at the conservative security proposals. his ailing wife. His replacement as viceJune. The agenda for the EU presidency The recent success of the new leftist chancellor, Foreign Minister Frankwas focused on climate change as well party Die Linke had caused the SPD to as the future of Europe and the EU afWalter Steinmeier, had often clashed consider the need for redefinition even with Chancellor Angela Merkel over ter the defeat of the constitutional before 2007. For many left-wing voters, foreign policy. treaty. Generally, Germany’s presidency, the SPD had become too conservative German distrust in public figures, inwhich ended in June, was considered a in its social security proposals. During side and outside politics, was widesuccess. At the end of the German presthe previous coalition government, spread in 2007. Cycling had always idency, surveys recorded the highest when the SPD held the majority, rebeen considered a clean sport, and Gerlevel of trust in years toward the EU, forms had been set in motion that man fans had revered their cyclists. The around 60%. Some problems remained would lead to a less-generous social sediscovery of an increasing number of concerning Polish disagreement in recurity network, and the electorate doping cases within the sport magnigard to voting rights and the general found the SPD representing ideas that fied public disenchantment. Thus, the anti-German sentiment perceived to be many voters felt to be contrary to the decision by public broadcasting organdisplayed in Poland, but the presidency labour tradition. Die Linke, a party izations to boycott the Tour de France closed with an agreement on a new refounded in 2005 by members of the had little impact, and the announceform treaty and on climate-change goals ment by many politicians that they Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) within the EU. The reform treaty difwould boycott the cycling road race and other disaffected leftists, was able fered from the constitutional treaty, to fill the vacuum thus generated and world championships, held in Stuttgart which had been defeated in 2005, in that in September, was considered hypocritto unite many former SPD votes under it presented a simplified and slimmedical, given the public’s mistrust of govits banner. Nevertheless, in the elecdown reform proposal for the EU. tions in Bremen, the only state balloternment officials. The country also The G-8 summit was also dominated ing held in 2007, there remained an faced a different kind of moral dilemma by the topic of climate change. In re403

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Ghana

spect to cutting carbon dioxide emissions, the summit did not produce clear goals for the post-Kyoto Protocol era, but it did achieve a tentative agreement on cutting carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050. This was not considered an unmitigated success domestically, and there was significant internal unrest due to a lack of definite targets. But the summit was considered a success in that the U.S. and some less-developed countries (LDCs) agreed to consider climate change a threat. The “Heiligendamm Process,” an institutionalization of the dialogue between the G-8 members and the five largest emerging economies, came out of the meeting by building a bridge between developed countries and LDCs through which the problem of climate change, and possibly other areas of conflict, could be addressed. Most notable was the close working relationship between Germany and the U.K. in regard to both the G-8 summit and the EU reform treaty, which was considered a possible blueprint for future interactions between the two countries. A domestic climate summit in Berlin,

which brought together politicians as well as industry leaders, was also not totally successful. Energy security in Germany was very much bound up with the topic of nuclear energy. The idea of potentially having to increase the use of nuclear energy, or even build a new nuclear energy reactor, seemed inconceivable to many Germans—even though this might be the only way to reach the ambitious emission goals (a reduction of 40% by 2020, relative to 1990). Nevertheless, renewable energy was the route that Germany was attempting to take, against the recommendations of industry. Chancellor Merkel was confident that the level of cuts in carbon dioxide emissions could also be achieved without increased or sustained use of nuclear energy. At the same time, there were voices in the parliament demanding less-stringent energy requirements for the building industry in order to ensure German competitiveness.

The Economy. The concentration on environmental concerns also influenced the economy, with the renewable-energy sector showing the largest upswing. For the first time in years, the overall economy posted a definite positive trend, despite the increase in the VAT at the beginning of the year. Unemployment decreased to some 3.5 million (with a slight cyclical increase of unemployment in the summer). Ger404

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

many not only met the predicted 2% growth rate but also exceeded it signif icantly. In the early part of 2007, growth stood at 3.196. It fell slightly to 2.4% midyear, partly because of the mortgage crisis in the U.S., but rose again thereafter, with a predicted average of 2.8% for the year. Unlike people in many other developed countries, most Germans traditionally used great caution in their financial dealings, and any form of insecurity could lead to low spending by individuals, often increasing economic weakness. Thus, the perceived upward economic trend in 2007 triggered a higher rate of spending, which in turn bolstered the positive trend. Though the 3% VAT increase had led economists to surmise that 2007 would be a year of low spending and halted economic growth, by year’s end, analysts predicted that strong growth would enable Germany to move its general government deficit into surplus in the near future. Despite this assessment, other analysts were worried that the economic uplift was not the result of the reforms implemented in the past few years but rather a cyclical improvement. The economic program passed by the parliament for the second half of 2007 stressed public spending rather than cutting public debt. The mortgage crisis in the U.S. influenced the German economy surprisingly little, aside from a stock market slowdown at the beginning of August, which was resolved within a few weeks. The threatened insolvency of two affected financial institutions was avoided through government intervention, however, which was potentially an example of the current political climate regarding intervention into markets if financial stability was threatened. The future outlook for industries connected with producing energy-saving technologies was especially good after the government decided on further subventions in these areas in August.

Demographically Germany was in trouble; the population growth rate in 2007 was estimated at —0.03396. As Germans had fewer children, the resulting decrease in the number of taxpayers— along with the increasing number of retirees—was likely to cause economic problems. Moreover owing to movement of the population from the less prosperous

areas

into

the more

pros-

perous ones and the low economic activity

among

German

women,

many

services provided by the state, such as local schools, were threatened.

(NICOLA CORKIN)

GHANA

Area: 238,533 sq km (92,098 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 22,931,000

Capital: Accra Head of state and government: President John Agyekum Kufuor Ghana's yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of independence from the U.K. culminated on March 6, 2007,

in the reenactment at midnight in Accra of the 1957 ceremonies. Thousands of revelers attended the early-morning events, which included such festivities

as a highlife and hiplife concert, traditional dancing, and a military parade. This momentous anniversary prompted general reassessment of Ghana'*s national achievements, its role on the continent, and, not least, the place in

history of turned the state after ence. There

Kwame Nkrumah, who country into a one-party fighting for its independwere a few who thought,

however, that the $20 million spent on

the festivities was an extravagant sum for a country that still suffered from widespread poverty, disturbing levels of corruption, and a persistent electricity crisis.

In June the British firm Tullow Oil announced the discovery of a major new oil field offshore from Ghana. Reserves were estimated at 600 million bbl. Company officials cautioned that it would take up to seven years before the oil field was operational. Nevertheless,

Pres.

John

Kufuor

enthused

that this find would transform the country into an “African tiger.” For those who feared that Ghana would mismanage its future oil wealth, Kufuor assured them that Accra’s economy would remain robust even without oil revenue. Shortly before the annual harvest season in September, unusually severe rains resulted in the worst flooding in 30 years along the White Volta in northern Ghana. Much of the region’s corn (maize) crop was destroyed, and thousands of people were displaced. Local officials accused neighbouring Burkina Faso of exacerbating the situation by opening the floodgates of a dam upstream from the border shared by the two countries. (LARAY DENZER)

World Affairs: Greece

GREECE

Following the elections, Karamanlis reshuffled his government extensively, reducing the number of ministries from 18 to 16. Of the 40 ministers and deputy

on suspicion of arson. Partly as a consequence of the inadequate response to the fires, Karamanlis merged the Public Order Ministry with the Interior Ministry. Despite calls from many quarters to break up the Ministry of Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works, the establishment of a separate Environment Ministry did not occur. In mid-March the government was rocked by a major scandal when it became known that pension fund managers appointed by the ruling party had bought state-issued structural bonds at inflated prices and that in the process banks and brokers had earned hundreds of millions of euros. On April 28 Karamanlis dismissed Employment and Social Protection Minister Savvas Tsitouridis in connection with the scandal. In December the new government's employment and social protection minister, Vasilis Magginas, resigned following press reports alleging that he had built a house illegally. He was replaced by former tourism minister Fani PalliPetralia. The Greek economy continued to perform well. The gross domestic product was expected to grow by about 3.796 in 2007, while the budget deficit was anticipated to remain below 396. Unemployment dropped to 7.796 in May 2007 (from 8.896 in the second quarter of

ministers in the new government, 17 were newcomers. Ministers in key portfolios retained their positions, however,

A forest fire nears the medieval Acrocorinth castle overlooking Corinth, Greece, on July 17.

c e [e Area: 131,957 sq km (50,949 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 11,190,000

Capital: Athens Chief of state: President Karolos Papoulias Head of government: Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis

Six months

ahead of schedule, Greeks

elected a new parliament on Sept. 16, 2007. Prime Minister Konstantinos (Kostas) Karamanlis and his New

Democracy (ND) party were returned to power with 41.8% of the vote, albeit with a reduced majority of 152 of the 300 seats in the parliament. The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) received 38.1% and 102 seats; the Com-

munist Party of Greece, 8.2% and 22 seats; the Coalition of the Radical Left,

5% and 14 seats; and the populist-right Popular Orthodox Rally, 3.8% and 10 seats.

including (Dora)

Foreign

Minister

Bakoyannis,

Interior

Theodora

2006), and inflation was expected to fall to 2.696. On August 8 the government approved the creation of a cohesion fund, with the aim of pulling some 500,000 people above the poverty line. The number of foreign tourists was thought likely to grow by about 1096. The education sector was affected by monthlong strikes and protest actions by teachers and students who objected to the government's reform plans for the sector. The demonstrators were particularly upset over planned constitutional changes that would allow for the establishment of private universities. No major developments or changes occurred in Greek foreign policy or in the country’s relations with its neighbours. The dispute with Macedonia over its name remained unresolved. Theodora Grosomanidou, Greece’s ambassador to Macedonia, was recalled af-

ter she said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper that “Greece has to face the new reality, as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has been recognised under its constitutional name by more than half the members of the United Nations.” On November

Nimetz both

1, UN

mediator

submitted

sides,

and

new

Matthew

proposals

in December

to

Greece

and Macedonia agreed to a new round of talks.

Minister

Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Defense Minister Evangelos (Vangelis) Meimarakis, and Finance

and Economy

Minister

Geor-

gios Alogoskoufis. PASOK’s defeat in the elections led to an immediate challenge of party leader Georgios Papandreou by former culture minister Evangelos Venizelos. PASOK’s Political Council set a leadership vote for November 11. In the balloting Papandreou was confirmed with 55.9% of the votes, against 38.2% for Venizelos and 5.7% for former party secretary Konstantinos (Kostas) Skandalidis. In the summer Greece was hit hard by the most devastating series of forest fires in decades, especially in the Peloponnese

and Euboea

(Evia). The fires

claimed 63 lives during the worst blazes on August 24-26 alone. Wildfires also threatened the site of ancient Olympia, destroying the surroundings. Around Athens, forests on Mounts Parnitha, Penteli, and Hymettos were

burned.

Several people were

arrested Vassilis Psomas—epa/Corbis

405

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Grenada

On January 12 a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the U.S. embassy in Athens, causing only minor material damage. The extremist Revolutionary Struggle group claimed responsibility for the attack. No suspects could be identified or arrested. On May 3 an appeals court upheld the sentences passed in 2003 against 13 members of the November 17 terrorist group but overturned the verdicts against two defendants and reduced the sentences of others. Two of the defendants were released on parole on July 10, having served three-fifths of their sentences. On March 29 one man was killed in a mass brawl outside Athens between supporters of rival sports clubs. In re-

the 158-member unicameral legislature, far short of a majority. Pérezs PP won just 30 seats, and the ruling govern-

sponse, and in an attempt to stamp out

ment's Grand National Alliance (GANA)

hooliganism, the government on April 4 outlawed some 300 association foot-

captured 37. Violence marked the long campaign; more than 50 candidates or campaign workers were assassinated. Guatemala's high crime and street violence became a major campaign issue, and General Pérez's law and order campaign accounted for his strong showing at the polls. The high rate of government

ball (soccer) fan clubs. (STEFAN KRAUSE)

GRENADA

won the presidency of Guatemala in a runoff election, defeating retired general Otto Pérez Molina of the right-wing Patriot Party (PP). Colom, who would take office in 2008, took 53% of the vote.

Fourteen candidates vied for the presidency in the first round on September 9, including indigenous leader Rigoberta

Menchü,

the

1992

Nobel

Peace

Prize laureate. Despite Guatemala’s majority indigenous population, Mencht, who ran a lacklustre campaign, garnered only 3% of the vote in the September election. In congressional elections, Colom’s UNE led with 48 seats in

Annie Bain (the widow of Norris Bain,

Grenada’s housing minister who was slain in a 1983 coup attempt that also claimed the life of then prime minister Maurice Bishop) protests the June release of imprisoned coup leaders.

corruption was another major issue. declared

that

Redhead,

Stroude,

and

Capital: Saint George's

Prime did not represent any “future risk to the society.” The other 10 ringleaders of the insurrection, including its instigator, Bishop’s deputy Bernard Coard, were given 40-year jail sen-

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

tences, much of which had been served.

sented by Governor-General Sir Daniel Williams Head of government: Prime Minister Keith Mitchell

In December 2006 the government released Cosmos Richardson, Andy Mitchell, and Vincent Joseph from prison for “good behaviour.” The Grenadan government was not entirely happy with the judge’s verdict in the

Area: 344 sq km (133 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 108,000

The Commission of Enquiry’s investigation into allegations of corruption against Grenadan Prime Minister Keith Mitchell ended its oral hearings in August 2007. The sole commissioner, Barbados lawyer Richard Cheltenham, reported that no evidence had been produced to incriminate Mitchell. In June the Grenada High Court ordered the immediate release of Lester

2007 resentencing, however, and in Au-

gust made an application to the court for permission to challenge his “suitability” to preside over the hearing. (DAVID RENWICK)

GUATEMALA

Redhead, Christopher Stroude, and Ce-

cil Prime—3 of the remaining 13 imprisoned leaders of the 1983 insurrection

against

then

prime

minister

Maurice Bishop, who, together with four cabinet ministers and six supporters, was murdered by a firing squad. The three were released following a resentencing trial ordered by Grenada’s highest court, the London-based Privy Council, on the grounds that the imposition in 1986 of the death penalty was “unconstitutional.” Judge Francis Belle 406

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Area: 109,117 sq km (42,130 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 12,728,000

Capital: Guatemala City Head of state and government: President Oscar Berger Perdomo

Alvaro Colom of the centre-left National Union for Hope (UNE) on Nov. 4, 2007,

The assassination in Guatemala in February of three Salvadoran deputies to the Central American Parliament focused international attention on the countrys lawlessness and on police corruption. These problems were especially highlighted after four Guatemalan policemen arrested for the crime were subsequently murdered in prison. An investigation eventually blamed the murders on drug traffickers, who had become powerful in Guatemala; the country continued to serve

as

a major

transit

route

for

Colombian cocaine to the U.S. The government took a number of steps to regulate more closely the adoption of Guatemalan babies. Guatemala had the world's highest per capita adoption rate and was second only to China in total U.S. adoptions of foreign infants. Amid growing charges of kidnapping and corruption, the U.S. Department of State recommended against adoptions there, and the Guatemalan Congress finally ratified the Hague Convention on Adoptions. There were also charges that Guatemalan child traffickers had taken children to Mexico and the U.S. for prostitution. U.S. Pres. George W. Bush visited Guatemala in March to promote trade under the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The heightened security for the visit disrupted commerce, prompting natives to complain that their

World Affairs: Guyana

Guatemalan presidential candidate Álvaro Colom delivers a speech during a campaign rally in the city of Salamá on November 2. country had been violated by Bush's "security invasion force." Bush encouraged Guatemala to increase its production of ethanol from sugarcane. The country would soon have five sugarcanebased ethanol plants in operation, and plans were afoot for three more. Under CAFTA-DR Guatemalan imports had increased much more than exports, and living standards had not improved as expected; 5196 of the population subsisted on less than $50 monthly, and 15% earned less than $21 per month. (RALPH LEE WOODWARD,

JR.)

GUINEA

uary 22 thousands of demonstrators battled with police throughout the capital, leaving at least 50 dead and hundreds injured. Union leaders were briefly detained, but upon their release negotiations with the government were reopened. On January 26 Conté, who had ruled Guinea since a 1984 coup, agreed to yield some powers to the prime minister. Two days later celebrations erupted with the announcement that the strikers and the government had reached a pact, which included an assurance that the new prime minister would be a consensus candidate. The jubilation soon gave way to further violent protests when Conté nominated his close associate Eugéne Camara for the office. Conté declared martial law on February 12, but his request to extend it beyond February 23 was voted down unanimously by the parliament. On February 26 unions suspended the general strike once again after Conté agreed to replace Camara with the more acceptable Lansana Kouyaté. A new crisis arose in late April when serious mutinies in the army erupted. On May 11 rioting soldiers moved through the capital's streets demanding higher pay, more promotions, and improved working conditions. The defense minister and the army chief were dismissed the next day, but Conté’s nonappearance at scheduled negotiations with the military kept tensions high. The president promised to raise army pay, to supply new uniforms, and to increase sharply the numbers of promo-

one

of the world’s

10

poorest countries, continued to suffer the effects in 2007 of a sharp price rise set by the government in 2006 for cashews, the country’s main export. The increase was so steep that traders would not buy them, and therefore exports suffered. Underscoring the instability in the country, a leader of the junta that ruled the country after the civil war of 1998-99

was

assassinated

on January

4. When former prime minister Carlos Gomes Júnior alleged that Pres. Joao Bernardo Vieira was involved in the assassination, the government issued an arrest

warrant,

and

Gomes

Junior

sought refuge in the UN building in Bissau. As Vieira’s supporters in the parliament began defecting to other parties, and street demonstrators called for a new government, the National People’s Assembly passed a vote of no confidence against Prime Minister Aristides Gomes, a Vieira ally. Vieira’s appointment in April of a new prime minister, Martinho Ndafa Kabi, restored a

measure of stability. Kabi, who promised to work for fiscal discipline, reduced the price of cashews and called for a “relentless” fight against drug traf ficking. The UN’s 2007 World Drug Report named Guinea-Bissau as a key staging post for cocaine moving from Latin America to Europe.

(CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

GUYANA

tions, but it was not clear how Guinea

would fund this program because most foreign aid was designated for water purification and rural development. On

August

10 the

government

an-

nounced the discovery of substantial uranium deposits. Many expected that Guinea would soon declare its intention to develop nuclear power plants. (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER) Area: 245,836 sq km (94,918 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,370,000

Guinea-Bissau,

GUINEA-BISSAU

Capital: Conakry Head of state and government: President Gen. Lansana Conté, assisted by Prime Ministers Eugéne Camara from February 9 and, from March 1, Lansana Kouyaté

Area: 214,999 sq km (83,012 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 738,000

Capital: Georgetown Chief of state: President Bharrat Jagdeo Head of government: Prime Minister Sam Hinds Despite strong opposition from religious groups, the parliament in January 2007 approved a bill to legalize casino gambling in Guyana's 10 administrative regions. The initiative was

On Jan. 10, 2007, unions called a strike, the third in 12 months, and demanded

the resignation of Guinean Pres. Lansana Conté. During the following week, 10 strikers were killed by security forces in various incidents. On Jan-

Area: 36,125 sq km (13,948 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,472,000

especially designed to help hotel and

Capital: Bissau Chief of state: President Jodo Bernardo Vieira Head of government: Prime Ministers Aristides Gomes and, from April 13, Martinho Ndafa Kabi

tional tourists. Chinese capital secured a major toehold in Guyana's industrial landscape in February when Bosai Minerals of Chongqing purchased Toronto-based

resort complexes

attract more

interna-

407

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Haiti

bad bua

IAMGold's 7096 interest in Omai Bauxite Mining Inc. The Guyanese

govern-

ISMAN

ment remained a minority shareholder, with a 30% stake. After being slapped with tax-evasion and illegal-wiretapping charges in the U.S., former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik decided in April not to continue serving his contract as security adviser to Pres. Bharrat Jagdeo. Kerik reportedly told Jagdeo that he did not want to "tarnish" Guyanas reputation internationally. The UN International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea's decision in September on the maritime boundary dispute between Guyana and neighbouring Suriname gave Georgetown the farlarger share of the Guyana-Suriname Basin in contention—more than 33,150 sq km (12,800 sq mi) compared with Surinames 17,870 sq km (6,900 sq mi). A new boundary was drawn by the tribunal to reflect the award, and Guyana was expected to vigorously resume offshore oil exploration. (DAVID RENWICK)

HAITI

A UN peacekeeper patrols a street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 22. tions between the executive branch and opposition leaders in the parliament deteriorating over an array of issues, including the indefinite postponement of elections for one-third of the Senate,

Area: 27,700 sq km (10,695 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,598,000

Capital: Port-au-Prince Chief of state and government: President René Préval, assisted by Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis A sense of optimism enveloped Haiti during 2007 as the country continued to creep away from its debilitating past of political conflict, insecurity, and economic decline. Optimism was tempered by concerns that gains were small in comparison with needs and expectations and vis-à-vis the political, social,

and economic polarization that had plagued the country throughout its history. Nevertheless, the overarching sense within Haiti and among its international partners was that 2007 was a year of significant progress toward rebuilding the country. Fueling optimism was the fact that the political détente fostered by the efforts of Pres. René Préval to include opposition groups within his coalition government remained largely in effect. Toward year’s end, however, with rela408

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

AP

the longevity of Prévals inclusive approach toward governance appeared to be in jeopardy. Also fueling optimism was the government's success, supported by the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUS-

TAH), in confronting and largely eliminating the gang violence and kidnapping that early in the year had paralyzed much of the country, particularly Port-au-Prince. In recognition of MINUSTAHS' essential presence, both the Haitian government and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sought and received a Security Council extension until Oct. 15, 2008, of the 9,150-mem-

ber stabilization force. Significantly, the renewed MINUSTAH mandate reconfigured the mission toward increasing its policing capacities and shifting its presence to unsecured border and coastal locations in an effort to target the arms and drug smuggling that plagued Haiti and its weak public institutions, including the country’s stillstruggling national police force. Economic developments in 2007 were both positive and disappointing. On the positive end, inflation fell from 40% to an estimated 10%, and GDP surged to a forecast growth of 4%, bucking the

trend of negative growth. Significant amounts of international aid pledged previously flowed into Haiti, with much of it allocated to short-term jobcreation programs. Increasingly, however, Haiti’s poor majority voiced frustration with the lack of tangible, sustained

economic

improvement

in

their lives as investment in longer-term job-creation initiatives remained low and the government’s envisaged antipoverty programs mostly failed to take off. Cash transfers from Haitians living overseas (an estimated $1.6 billion annually) continued to serve as a mechanism for bridging the gap between survival and growth. (ROBERT MAGUIRE)

HONDURAS

Area: 112,492 sq km (43,433 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 7,484,000

Capital: Tegucigalpa Head of state and government: President Manuel Zelaya A longtime boundary dispute was settled between Honduras and Nicaragua

World Affairs: Hungary

on Oct. 8, 2007, by the UN, which drew

HUNGARY

a maritime border that granted Honduras sovereignty over four Caribbean islands. The ruling eased tensions between the countries and eliminated seizures of fishing boats; the decision was binding, with no appeal. A protest march in February underscored concern about corruption, and Pres. Manuel Zelaya addressed the matter in April by launching the fourth anticrime initiative of his term. The measure focused on the drug trade, and he stated that by year’s end he would increase the number of police by

Area: 93,030 sq km (35,919 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,055,000

2,000.

During 2007 the popularity of Socialist

with European Union requirements

President Zelaya declared 2007 “the year of education,” and he named a commission to help improve the countrys education system. Under the Fast Track Initiative that was launched in 2002 with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development and donors in developed countries, Honduras by 2006 had improved the percentage (from 7096 to 8596) of children who completed primary school. Zelaya appointed himself director of the Honduran national electricity company in February in an effort to expand service and ease debt. On February 24 the Honduran government implemented "Operation Scissors," a plan that cut power to approximately 700 businesses and homes with outstanding energy bills. When efforts to rent oil-storage facilities to address high fuel costs were unsuccessful, the government took control of multinational storage facilities, but it soon backed down under pressure from the United States. The U.S. government in May extended for 18 months the Temporary Protected

Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany’s cen-

join the euro zone. Though efforts to reduce the budget deficit (which was the highest in relative terms within the EU) were successful, the austerity drive practically brought the economy to a standstill. In the wake of the global market turmoil in early autumn, the Hungarian stock exchange was the region's worst performer.

Capital: Budapest Chief of state: President Laszlo Solyom Head of government: Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany

tre-left coalition government plummeted in the wake of a strict austerity program that was designed to reduce the Hungarian governments soaring budget deficit. The most controversial element in the package was a radical overhaul of the health sector, overseen

by the SZDSZ-Hungarian Liberal Party, the junior coalition partner The plan proposed a major reorganization of the debt-ridden sector, including closures and mergers, a 1096 cut in hospital beds, and the introduction of a patient "visit fee." The package triggered chaos in the countrys massive health care sector. Political opposition to the plan came primarily from the centre-right Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Alliance (widely known

as Fidesz), the second

strongest political force in the Hungarian Assembly. Fidesz was critical of the

program at every juncture and pointed out the governments failure to hold public and political consultations on the matter. A particular bone of contention was the idea to open up the sector to profit-making health insurance funds and to privatize hospitals. In April the Liberal Party-nominated health minister resigned, but the reforms continued. The austerity program, which also included a partial reform of the public administration sector and cuts in energy subsidies to the public, was necessary to stabilize the economy and to bring macroeconomic indicators in line to

In an attempt to capitalize on grow-

ing public discontent with the government, Fidesz called for a national ref-

erendum to be held in 2008 on some of Gyurcsanys most unpopular policies, such as the privatization of hospitals, the status of overthe-counter drugs, and land ownership. The move, however, led to a quarrel between the National Electoral Commission and the Constitutional Court about whether the questions could be discussed in a referendum,

and the issue stirred heated

New members of the Hungarian Guard, a security force established by the farright group Jobbik, are sworn in on October 21 in Budapest.

Status (TPS) that allowed 78,000 Hon-

durans to work legally in the U.S. because of environmental disasters in Honduras.

TPS worker remittances, in

addition to remittances from undocumented workers, accounted for approximately 25% of the country’s GDP. Honduras named an ambassador to Cuba in February for the first time in 46 years. In May President Zelaya, who accused the media of only reporting problems, ordered major media channels to broadcast two hours a day of positive

government

propaganda,

though he lowered the requirement to one hour on Mondays and Fridays through the end of June when journalists objected. In 2007 the 1982 constitution became the longest-enduring constitution in the country’s history. (MICHELLE M. TAYLOR-ROBINSON)

409

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Iceland Kyodo/AP

debate about the potential of political manipulation through referenda. Prime Minister Gyurcsanys decision to support the expansion into Central and Eastern Europe of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, raised eyebrows among EU leaders, who planned to reduce the EU's energy dependence on

tional collaboration and discussion on clean energy." (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Iceland's currency, the króna, had gradually come under scrutiny for being too weak and subject to exchange

Russia. Gyurcsany agreed to invest in a

tracted large foreign króna-denominated bond issues and further destabilized the currency. This instability led to a debate on whether Iceland would not be better off adopting the euro. The stock of codfish in Icelandic waters had diminished over the years, despite stringent efforts to manage the catch. In 2006 the authorities concluded that the catch would have to be cut by 63,000 tons per year for the next two years, limiting the annual catch to

rate fluctuations.

land's from

project extending the Blue Stream gas pipeline from Russia, through Turkey, into Europe—which would run parallel to an EU-financed pipeline carrying gas from the Middle East. Following antigovernment riots in 2006 and the publics demand for an overhaul of the countrys justice and law-enforcement

sector

a

chain

of

sackings and resignations occurred in 2007.

In

the

2006

demonstrations,

hundreds of protesters were hurt, and the police had been criticized for overly violent conduct. In an effort to bolster the credibility of the police, who were also charged with corruption and involved in various scandals, Gyurcsany in June appointed a new minister of justice and law enforcement. Hungary made international headlines in August when a self-styled protection force was set up by the far-right group Jobbik, which claimed that the country was in danger and needed to defend itself from internal enemies. The creation of the Hungarian Guard caused a public outcry. The guard had only a handful of members at its founding, though more than 600 joined in October. Nonetheless, direct support for far-right groups remained low (under 3%) in Hungary. (ZSOFIA SZILAGYI)

ICELAND

ie HES Area: 102,928 sq km (39,741 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 310,000

Capital: Reykjavik Chief of state: President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson Head of government: Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde Elections to Iceland’s Althingi (parliament) were held in May 2007. The incumbent government coalition, made up of the Independence Party and the Progressive Party, barely survived with 410

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

basic 5.396

During 2005-06

interest to

1396,

rate

was

a move

130,000 tons. Since cod was

Ice-

hiked that

at-

the most

valuable species in the entire fish catch, the cut would have a serious effect on many fishing villages. On

The Imagine Peace Tower, a monument designed by John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, is unveiled near

Reykjavik, Ice., in October. a majority of one vote in the 63-member body. Because this majority was considered

October

9 Japanese

American

artist Yoko Ono inaugurated the Imagine Peace Tower on the island of Videy, near Reykjavík, in memory of her late husband, British singer John Lennon. The memorial was designed to shine a beacon of light into the sky every year from October 9 (Lennon's birth date) until December 8 (the date of his death in 1980). (BJÖRN MATTHÍASSON)

INDIA

too slim, the leader of the

Independence

Party,

Prime

Minister

Geir H. Haarde, decided to form a new coalition with the Social Democrats, giving his new government a majority

with 43 votes. Iceland’s economy began to slow down in the course of 2007, following the vigorous pace of growth of the previous several years. The Kárahnjükar 690-MW hydropower station in the northeastern part of the country was completed and began supplying power to the Alcoa aluminum plant at Reydarfjóróur. The construction of the power station provoked a bitter debate in the country on the use of natural resources, damage to the environment, and the future plans for additional power projects and aluminum plants. The proposal for a planned expansion of an Alcan plant near Hafnarfjóróur, a suburb of Reykjavík, was put to a municipal referendum and was narrowly defeated. In his New Year address on January 1, Pres. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson called on Iceland to "become a centre of interna-

|@ Area: 3,166,414 sq km (1,222,559 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,129,866,000

Capital: New Delhi Chief of state: Presidents A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and, from July 25, Pratibha Patil Head of government: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Domestic Politics. In India the most significant political event of 2007 was the surprise outcome of the provincial legislative elections in northern Uttar Pradesh state. Upsetting predictions that no party would come close to winning an absolute majority in the balloting held in April-May, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), led by 51-year-old Mayawati Kumari, claimed 208 of the 403 legislative seats. The BSP’s stunning victory brought into national focus the new political influence wielded by

World Affairs: India

the Dalits (“oppressed”), India’s lowest social caste and traditionally considered to be untouchable. Mayawati’s

December minister,

23.

The

Narendra

incumbent Modi,

secured

chief an-

BSP in 1984 to give greater political power to the Dalits. With the BSP’s electoral triumph, Mayawati, the first Dalit woman to head an Indian state government, regained the chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh, a post she had held— with support from other parties—three previous times. Her return to the chief ministers office was widely regarded as a first step to national leadership. Growing differences between the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA)

other term in office, boosting the morale and the prospects of the main national opposition party, the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi won with an unexpectedly large margin of victory. As a result it was unlikely that national elections would be called early. Apart from these developments in mainstream national politics, India continued to face the problem of terrorism inspired by Islamic extremists operating in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as by domestic ex-

and its partner, the Left Front, consti-

tremists.

tuted a second important development in Indian politics. Rejecting the UPA governments major foreign policy initiative—namely, the civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S.—the Left Front threatened to withdraw support unless the government was willing to renegotiate certain aspects of the agreement. In mid-November, though, the Left Front agreed to allow the government to seek the approval of the

ous cities continued

mentor, Kanshi Ram, had founded the

International

Atomic

Energy

Agency

necessary for the pact. Elections to the state legislature in the western state of Gujarat took place on

Newly installed Indian Pres. Pratibha Patil waves following her inauguration in New Delhi on July 25.

Major terror attacks in varito cause

concern,

though they had so far failed to ignite widespread communal conflict, which seemed to be the objective of such attacks on innocent citizens.

The Economy. Despite political uncertainty and social tensions, the Indian economy continued to perform robustly, establishing an unprecedented record of five continuous years of nearly 9% annual growth. The main worries for India’s macroeconomic managers were inflation and the strengthening of the Indian rupee visa-vis the U.S. dollar. Though the average inflation rate was close to 3%, far below the long-term average, the upward pressure on energy and commodity prices hurt middle-class and poor consumers and thereby contributed to political losses for the ruling alliance in provincial elections. The country’s booming real-estate market prompted fears of a speculative bubble, though many in the sector, including major property developers such as billionaire Kushal

Pal Singh

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

continued to see large opportunities. The global weakening of the U.S. dollar helped the rupee appreciate. While this benefited domestic consumers and industries dependent on imports, it hurt exporters, especially in the services sector. The Indian economy continued to be supply-constrained, with energy shortages and infrastructure bottlenecks being the main obstacles to better economic performance. Therefore, the focus of the government's policies was to step up public and private investment

in infrastructure,

in both

urban and rural areas. While the government had been able to boost investment, it had been slower in introduc-

ing reforms in the infrastructure sector. In a vital area such as energy, distribution reforms had not gone far enough. The inability of state governments and

public utilities to charge farmers and some other sectors of society for electricity, coupled with the high incidence of power theft and transmission losses, continued to impose a financial burden on power utilities and a fiscal strain on government. In sectors such as railways, ports, and civil aviation, publicprivate partnerships (PPPs) had proved beneficial. The PPP model was an important policy initiative of the UPA government, enabling private enterprise to build on public support. Foreign Policy. Negotiating the civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the U.S. and securing the support of all 45 member countries of the Nuclear Suppliers Group were the UPA government's main foreign policy concerns. While the U.S. Congress took an important step forward in passing the Hyde Act, which enabled the U.S. to negotiate the so-called 123 Agreement with India to resume cooperation in civil nuclear energy, various provisions of the act came under attack in both countries. Both governments,

however,

remained firmly committed to the agreement, notwithstanding internal political criticism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh participated in the G-8 Outreach Summit in Germany and in the East Asian Summit in Singapore during the year. The prime ministers visits to South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda inaugurated a new phase in Indian-African relations. India offered to host the first India-Africa Summit in New Delhi in early 2008. India remained concerned about internal tensions within most of its neighbouring countries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka continued to grapple with internal civil unrest

and

conflict.

Myanmar

(Burma)

joined this list when Buddhist monks took to the streets to protest against the military government there. The tensions at times spilled over into India. Several terrorist attacks in India during the year were traced to groups in Bangladesh. For its part, the government of Prime Minister Singh sought to engage each of the governments in South Asia. India successfully hosted the annual summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The New Delhi Summit saw

SAARC revitalized with a new developmental agenda and with the inclusion of Afghanistan as a new member. India's offer to cosponsor a South Asian University was unanimously accepted. (SANJAYA BARU)

Findlay Kember—AFP/Getty Images

411

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Indonesia AP

INDONESIA

Area: 1,860,360 sq km (718,289 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 231,627,000

Capital: Jakarta Head of state and government: President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Indonesia continued its democratic and economic

consolidation

in

2007,

though political tensions mounted as the 2009 parliamentary and presidential elections drew nearer. According to leading public opinion polls, the standing of the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) government remained high. One respected survey put the government's satisfaction rating at 5596, down from 6396 at the same time a year earlier; another survey showed support for the government at 49%. Nearly all polls rated SBY well ahead of prospective rival candidates for the presidency. A number of factors contributed to the governments, and the presidents, popularity First, Indonesia s economy continued to perform well, with 6.396 growth during the year, up from 5.596 the previous year. Investment also increased at a healthy 6.996 in the same period. Even the high poverty and unemployment levels, for which the government had been sharply criticized, fell modestly. Approximately 37 million people, or 16.6% of the population, were classed as living below the poverty line in 2007, compared with 39 million the previous year; during the same period, unemployment declined from 10.4% to 9.8%.

Second, most of the country remained peaceful and orderly, despite worsening drought in some areas, a succession of natural disasters, and continuing local direct elections for governors, mayors, and regents. Two of these elections—in Aceh and Jakarta—were of particular importance. The December 2006 Aceh election was the culmination of the peace agreement signed in 2005, bringing an end to decades of bloody conflict between pro-independence insurgents of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and

the Indonesian military. Though some observers

had warned

of violence, the

campaign was largely without incident. GAM candidates won a large minority of district and provincial executive positions. Foremost among them was the 412

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Anak Krakatau (“Child of Krakatoa”), a volcano located in Indonesia’s Sunda

Strait, emits a plume of ash and hot gas on October 30. Anak Krakatau stands in virtually the same spot as its predecessor, whose explosive eruption in 1883 was one of the most catastrophic in history. U.S.-trained GAM

veterinarian

commander

and

former

Irwandi Yusuf, who

was elected governor of Aceh. Like many GAM candidates, Irwandi emphasized the rebuilding and development of the tsunami-ravaged province and distanced himself from the Islamic law initiatives of the preceding administration. The inexperience of many of the new GAM public officials led to declining administrative efficiency in many districts, often combined with serious corruption.

Jakarta’s gubernatorial election, held in August 2007, was won by the incumbent deputy governor, Fauzi Bowo. Although Fauzi's victory was predictable, several aspects of the election were surprising. Despite Jakarta's immense political diversity and the controversial record of the outgoing administration, all but one major political party backed Fauzi, which virtually ensured his election. The sole challenger to Fauzi, a former deputy police chief nominated by the mildly Islamist Prosperous and Justice Party (PKS), gained a respectable 4296 of the vote. The pragmatism of the parties (and their desire to share in the spoils of power) had become a feature of many regional elections since 2005 and indicated a growing centrism in Indonesian politics. Third, the governments anticorruption campaign continued apace. Dozens

of high-profile figures at the national level and hundreds at the local level were investigated and prosecuted for malfeasance. One of the most revealing cases was that of former maritime and fisheries

minister

Rokhmin

Dahuri,

who not only dispensed millions of dollars in bribes and inducements but also kept detailed records of his disbursements. During the investigation and trial, details of payments across the political, business, and civil-society spectrum emerged, providing an elaborate picture of how high officials routinely used money to build influence. Rokhmin was eventually found guilty and jailed for seven years. Other highprofile cases included those of former president Suharto and his son Tommy, both of whom were under renewed investigation over graft allegations and facing demands to repay millions of dollars to the state. Despite these perceived successes, SBY continued to draw criticism for his presidential style from commentators and many in the political elite. He was widely attacked for delaying a long-anticipated cabinet reshuffle, despite several ministers having been implicated in corruption cases and a number of other ministers having drawn media ridicule for incompetence. Eventually, five ministers were reshuffled in May. Most glaring of all was the case of

World Affairs: Iran

Interior Minister Ma'aruf, who was in-

capacitated by a stroke in late March but not replaced until late August. Such events tended to confirm impressions of SBY as vacillating and self-doubting. SBY’s relations with Vice Pres. Jusuf Kalla deteriorated markedly during 2006-07.

Kalla, who was

also chair of

Golkar, the largest party, had publicly contradicted the president on a number of key issues, and in October 2007 he announced that he was likely to challenge SBY in the next presidential election. Although both men subsequently reassured the public that relations between them were harmonious and professional, the media reported extensively on the growing mistrust between them. Public opinion surveys indicated that Kalla, along with other declared presidential candidates—retired general Wiranto, former Jakarta governor Sutiyoso, and the sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengkubuwono X—trailed far behind SBY in popularity. The only candidate who appeared within striking distance of SBY was former president Megawati Sukarnoputri. The United Nations Climate Change Conference took place in Nusa Dua, Bali, December 3-14, with more than 10,000 participants from some 180

countries. A plan for a new international agreement was adopted. (GREG FEALY)

IRAN

Area: 1,648,200 sq km (636,374 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 71,243,000

year

2007

was

an

apparent

meetings with a U.S. group in Baghdad that started on May 28 were reportedly “frank and serious” but were mainly concerned with the security situation in Iraq and apparently did not serve as a platform for a new working linkage between the two states. Reformists in Tehran allied to Rafsanjani argued for diplomacy as a route to solving worsening foreign relations. In negotiations with the EU, it was widely believed that Iran prevaricated

against Iran. Despite growing

Iran. The EU countries worked toward imposing bilateral sanctions, and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner intimated that in the worst case, armed force might be used. Germany and the United Kingdom—the latter despite the incident in the Persian Gulf in April when Iran seized 15 British naval personnel and detained them for 13 days—were less eager for military confrontation. Economic growth for the year was approximately 6% in real terms, with per

resistance

from

a

number of important figures, such as former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad was able to achieve a number of changes. He abolished the Management and Planning Organization in July, replaced the incumbent minister of petroleum with his own nominee, and changed the minister of industries. His perceived objective was to strengthen government against the Majlis (parliament) for control over oil affairs and, particularly, oil revenues. Iran pursued a foreign policy that combined the established baseline of never risking the existence of the Islamic Republic with sustaining an independent pro-Muslim and anti-Western stance on global matters. Although Ahmadinejad continued to seize the initiative in overseas relations, his inopportune public speeches against Israel and the U.S. diminished Iran’s reputation. During his September 23-27 visit to New York City, he insisted that Iran would not manufacture nuclear weapons, but his reassurances

did little to

dispel the misgivings in the U.S. con-

Capital: Tehran Supreme political and religious authority: Rahbar (Spiritual Leader) Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei Head of state and government: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The

end he appeared to lose some of his appeal because of failures in the economy. The differences between the main political groupings within the Islamic regime sharpened as the economic costs of the confrontation with Western countries over the nuclear industry became apparent. The prospect of the imposition of UN-approved economic sanctions against Iran—supplemented with an aggressive commercial attack through deployment of U.S. influence in banking and industrial imports—was badly received. President Ahmadinejad was under great pressure from the Iranian hierarchy to reach a compromise with the EU on the nuclear issue and thereby preempt other moves

tri-

umph for Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He successfully maneuvered the development of Iran’s atomic energy program, against the wishes of the United States and the European Union, and sustained the country’s position as a leader in the Islamic world. He was popular at home for his robust resistance to the U.S., but near year’s

cerning Iranian aims.

U.S. intentions toward Iran and the military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan preoccupied foreign policy. The nuclear program attracted the ire of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush, and many Iranians were convinced that a U.S. invasion was imminent. The speed of Iranian nuclear development together with the statement by Ahmadinejad calling for the destruction of Israel and the belief that Iran was providing military support for terrorist organizations in Palestine all eroded U.S. patience with Iran. The EU was concerned that Iran already had the capacity to manufacture medium-range missiles. Continuing

to

win

time

to

secure

access

to

weapons-quality nuclear materials. The EU became more involved but, like the

U.S., was constrained by its inability to persuade Russia and China to permit more than minor UN sanctions against

capita income

standing at $2,240, de-

spite a rapid rise in total exports. Unemployment was running at more than 10%. Inflation was officially put at 11%, but in Tehran

the rate was

esti-

mated at twice that level. The oil-subsidy problem remained unsolved, and Iran was required to import $5 billion in products to avoid popular discontent. Fuel rationing was introduced midyear in an attempt to rein in losses. Although economic performance was good—oil export earnings totaled more than $33 billion during the Iranian year 2006-07—government

policies

were

criticized because there were fuel shortages at home. In an open letter signed by 57 Iranian economists and directed to Ahmadinejad on June 11, the president was berated for neglecting the domestic economy and for damaging foreign policy at a time when opportunities were ideal for using expanded oil income. The signatories urged investment in productive assets and the consolidation of Iran’s foreign markets. The privatization process was slow and became more complex and corrupt, while the Ahmadinejad policy of distributing shares in government firms to the poorer sections of the population moved forward at an increased pace. (KEITH S. MCLACHLAN)

413

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Iraq Fadhil Maliki/AP

IRAQ

Area: 434,128 sq km (167,618 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 28,993,000 (including

nearly 2,500,000 Iraqi refugees, of which about 1,400,000 are in Syria and about 750,000 are in Jordan)

Capital: Baghdad Head of state: President Jalal Talabani Head of government: Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki The Iraqi government, composed of different

ethnic

and

sectarian

factions,

proved to be too weak to achieve much progress in any direction in 2007. The main problem was the absence of a shared vision for the future of Iraq, even within the various sectarian groups themselves, and the absence of leaders capable of reaching beyond their own

narrow constituencies. Divi-

sions within the majority Shi'ite community became evident with armed confrontations between Shi‘ite militias in many parts of the country, including the oil-rich province of Basra in southern Iraq. The most significant intraShiite

confrontation,

however,

took

place on August 27 in Karbala between the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr (see BIOGRAPHIES)

and forces belong-

ing to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. In mid-September, Sadr withdrew his group from the United Iraqi Al liance, the main Shi‘ite bloc in the parliament. The action was the most dramatic sign of political transformation in Iraq, signaling the fraying of old alliances and the possibility of new groupings.

Among the Sunni, the situation was not much better. The main Sunni group in the government, the Iraqi Accord Front, announced in August that it was withdrawing its six ministers to protest, among other things, an alleged “genocide campaign” against Sunni. Meanwhile, key legislation remained hostage to protracted

negotiations

wieldy parliament muster

in an

that could

un-

barely

a quorum.

Acts of violence by Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda partisans, and Shi'ite militias against the U.S. and Iraqi government forces continued throughout the year. The most spectacular act of violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 occurred on August 14, when aseries of 414

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Standing atop a wall that separates a Shiite neighbourhood from a Sunni one in west Baghdad, demonstrators protest the establishment of such walls as well as the U.S. presence in Iraq. truck bombs struck two villages (inhabited by members of the ancient Yazidi sect) in northern Iraq. The incident left at least 500 persons dead and at

least

1,000

wounded.

Al-Qaeda

claimed responsibility for the attacks. Some success was achieved in reducing violence in Al-Anbar province, a Sunni Arab stronghold in western Iraq. In September 2006 Sunni Arab tribes there, with the backing of the U.S., had

formed a unified front called the Anbar Salvation

Council;

its aim was

to use

local tribesmen to fight al-Qaeda. In the following months the tribes were quite successful in this endeavour. In early September 2007, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush visited the province and met with members

of the council,

including its head, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. Ten days later the sheikh was killed by a roadside bomb aimed at his car. He was immediately replaced by his brother, Sheikh Ahmad Abu Risha.

As

Al-Anbar

calmed

down,

scores of young men from the province joined the national police force and the army. Success in Al-Anbar encouraged the U.S. to expand the model to other provinces, including the Shi'ite areas of central and southern Iraq, in an attempt to persuade tribes there to combat extremist Shi'ite militias and even to patrol the sensitive Iran-Iraq border. The U.S. also tried to bring about some reconciliation between Shi'ite and

Sunni tribes in the volatile eastern province of Diyala, urging them to cooperate in the fight against insurgents and al-Qaeda groups. Early in the year the U.S. decided, in cooperation with the Iraqi government, to increase the number of its troops in Iraq, in a "surge" designed to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. Some 30,000 additional U.S. forces were sent to Iraq. By midsummer, joint U.S.-Iraqi

operations had yielded some results. There was a decrease in the number of attacks and casualties in Baghdad and western Iraq. On September 10, however, Gen. David Petraeus (see BIOGRAPHIES), commander of the U.S. forces

in Iraq, told the U.S. Congress that he envisioned a gradual withdrawal of these 30,000 troops from Iraq starting in the spring of 2008. By November the violence had declined substantially in Baghdad, and Iraqi military commanders hinted that some restrictions imposed to reduce violence might soon be lifted in the city. Despite the surge, acts of violence and fighting continued between Shi'ite and Sunni militias. (See SPECIAL REPORT on page 178.) Beginning in 2006,

fighting between the two sects had intensified and affected the demographic structure of Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of Baghdadis were forced to leave their homes, either on their own

or because of threats from others. By

World Affairs: Ireland

the end of 2007, ethnic and sectarian

change in Baghdad had left eastern parts of the city with mainly Shi‘ite inhabitants (with pockets of Sunni areas mainly in the north and downtown Baghdad). The Sunni settled in western Baghdad, and there were some mixed Shi'ite-Sunni areas on both sides of the city. Massive internal migration also intensified;

it was

estimated

that some

two million Iraqis were dispersed internally. Iraqis (mostly Sunni) continued to flee to neighbouring countries, mainly Syria and Jordan; Iraqi refugees in Syria were said to number 1.4 million;

those in Jordan,

750,000.

In September Syria decided to impose visa requirements on lraqis (Jordan had already prescribed such requirements in 2005). Both countries justified their actions by citing economic, social, and other burdens

that had re-

sulted from Iraqi refugees; Damascus and Amman also asked for help from the UN. Both U.S. and Iraqi officials accused Iran of interfering in Iraq's internal affairs and attempting to destabilize the country by supplying arms and training to militias. Direct talks on these issues began in March in Baghdad between Iranian,

U.S.,

and

Iraqi

officials.

Though the talks were not very successful, the parties involved agreed to set up a committee to work on Iraq’s stabilization. Early in September the British government reduced its troop levels and began to withdraw those that remained from the city of Basra to bases outside the city. These moves were aimed at paving the way for a complete withdrawal in the future. Iraqi security forces took over positions previously held by the British. On August 17 Turkey and Iraq agreed to clear Turkish Kurdish rebels from northern Iraq. Turkey threatened to halt cross-border guerrilla attacks by these Kurdish rebels by force if necessary. Iraqi Kurds and the U.S. expressed opposition to any incursion of Turkish troops into Iraq. In an effort to stop the ethnic and sectarian strife that had risen steadily in Iraq since 2003, the U.S. Senate passed a nonbinding resolution in September aimed at partitioning Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines—Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi‘ite; these units, however, would

be kept inside Iraq in a loose federation. Though the Kurds welcomed the resolution, the U.S. plan was met with criticism by other Iraqis and by Arab countries.

(LOUAY BAHRY)

IRELAND

On election day, votes for Ahern’s Fianna Fail party remained solid, with a loss of just 3 of its 81 seats in the Dail (lower house of parliament), and Ahern

was returned as prime minister for a third straight term. The main opposition party, Fine Gael, gained 20 seats, but it was not enough to form a government

Area: 70,273 sq km (27,133 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,330,000

Capital: Dublin Chief of state: President Mary McAleese Head of government: Prime Minister Bertie Ahern The historic deal in 2007 between unionist and nationalist politicians to share power in a new government for Northern Ireland cemented the peace process that Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern had pursued since he was first elected in 1997. Unionist leader Ian Paisley

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

and

Sinn

Fein leader Gerry Adams reached agreement on March 26, the deadline that was set by the British and Irish governments.

Paisleys (DUP)

and

Democratic Sinn

Unionist

Fein were

Party

the clear

winners in the March 7 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, with 3096 and 26% of the vote, respectively. Paisley initially refused to say whether he would enter a powersharing agreement, and negotiations came down to the wire. On May 8 Paisley and Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein MP and afor-

mer leader of the illegal Irish Republican Army (IRA), were appointed first minister and deputy first minister, respectively, to lead an executive of 10 ministers at Stormont (the home of the

with Labour, which lost one seat. The Progressive Democrats (PD), Fianna

Fail’s junior coalition partner for the previous 10 years, had a disastrous election and retained only two of its eight seats. Among the seat losses was the PD leader, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McDowell, who resigned from politics immediately. The Green Party entered government for the first time after negotiating a coalition deal with Fianna Fail and the PD's two remaining MPs. Green Party leader Trevor Sargent, who had promised before the election not to lead his party into government with Fianna Fail, resigned and was replaced by John Gormley. Sargent accepted a junior ministry post in government,

how-

ever, alongside two Green colleagues who received senior ministry posts. The new government faced a less-certain economic future than that of previous years. After a decade of unprecedented growth in the property market, a significant slowdown saw a cut in the number of houses being built. Some 78,000 houses were expected to be completed in the year, compared with 93,500 in 2006, and this figure was predicted to drop to 65,000 in 2008. The fall in housing

construction

was

a major

factor in a reduction of GNP growth for the year, estimated at 4.4%, down from 6.5% in 2006, and forecast at 2.9% for

Assembly) in Belfast. The accord came after almost 40 years of conflict in the six northern counties of Ireland under British jurisdiction, a conflict that left more than 3,700 people dead. The formation of a power-sharing executive by two hitherto polarized political enemies was the culmination of a decade’s work by Ahern and British

job numbers, from 149,271 workers in

Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recogni-

2007 was 4.7%.

tion of his role in the peace process, Ahern was invited by Blair to become the first Irish prime minister to address the joint houses of the British Parliament. At the time of his speech on May 15, Ahern was in the midst of a difficult general-election campaign. Questions over financial donations that he had accepted in the 1990s continued to emerge in the media, but his appearance at a state tribunal investigating corruption in the planning process was postponed until after the May 24 election.

2008. The rate of growth in employment slowed to 2.5%, while unemployment rose slightly, to 4.8%. The construction sector recorded the highest increase in 2002 to 215,184 in 2006, but employment was lost in the more traditional pursuits of agriculture, fishing, and forestry. The annual inflation rate for The

impact

of immigration

on

the

labour market (and society as a whole)

was highlighted during the year in a succession of reports that broke down figures from the 2006 census. The labour force had grown by 17.1% in the previous four years, with nonnationals representing 49% of that increase. The census recorded 10% of the population as foreign-born, but it was believed that this figure could be nearer to 13%, or even 15%. The hotels and restaurants sector had the highest proportion 415

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Israel

(36.6%)

of workers

born

outside

Ire-

land, mainly from Eastern Europe, China, and West Africa. Asylum seekers made up a very small percentage of immigrants. The UN Commission on Hu-

man Rights reported in March that Ireland received 4,314 applications for asylum in 2006—fewer than 1.5% of all those who sought asylum in the industrialized world. Ahern appeared before the state tribunal in September and December to answer questions over financial transactions in 1993 and 1994, when he was

minister for finance. His recollections sometimes clashed with the evidence uncovered by the tribunal, but there was no definitive disproof of his version of events. Ahern survived a vote of no confidence following his appearance before the tribunal in September. He was due to appear again before the tribunal in 2008.

(KIERAN FAGAN)

ISRAEL

Area: 21,643 sq km (8,357 sq mi), including the Golan Heights and disputed East Jerusalem, excluding the Emerging Palestin-

After a stormy seven-year hiatus, 2007 saw a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The new U.S.-led drive for accommodation was made possible by a split in Palestinian ranks between the moderate, largely secular Fatah and the radical Islamist Hamas. In its peacemaking efforts, Israel dealt solely with the moderates

in the West Bank,

ignoring the radicals who had seized power in Gaza. Ostracized and excluded, Hamas, backed primarily by Iran, launched increasingly intensive rocket attacks designed to disrupt the peace effort. The moderate-radical divide among the Palestinians mirrored a growing regional rift between Western-leaning moderates,

such

as

Saudi

Arabia,

Egypt, and Jordan, and a radical Iranian-led axis that included Syria, the Lebanese

Hezbollah,

and Hamas.

The

renewed U.S. effort to promote IsraeliPalestinian peace was part of a wider strategy to strengthen the moderate camp. The seminal event for Israeli-Palestinian ties in 2007 was a bitter showdown in Gaza in June between Fatah-led moderates and Hamas-led radicals. During a week that saw often brutal fighting, poorly motivated and disorganized Fatah forces collapsed in the face of a well-coordinated Hamas onslaught. For Hamas,

however,

the vic-

tory proved a mixed blessing. Although Hamas had won a national election in January 2006 and was in sole control in Gaza, the radicals found themselves

out of government. In the wake of the fighting, Palestinian Pres. Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah invoked his constitutional authority to dismiss Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and form a new Fatah-led administration under Salam Fayad, a highly respected economist. Based in the West Bank town of Ramallah, the Fayad government was immediately recognized by most of the international community, including Israel. Ironically, Fatah’s defeat in Gaza made it possible for Israel to circumvent the radicals and deal directly with the moderates in control of the West Bank. All the key players were quick to recognize the peacemaking potential in the new situation. On June 25, just 10 days after the Hamas takeover in Gaza, moderate West Bank Palestinians and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Israel met at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Shaykh to launch a new Israeli-Palestinian initiative. On July 16 U.S. Pres. George W. Bush signaled his approval of the new peace moves by calling for a U.S.-sponsored regional conference in the fall. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made several trips to the region to

ian Autonomous Areas Population (2007 est.): 6,900,000, excluding

271,000 Jews in the West Bank Capital: Jerusalem is the proclaimed capital of Israel (since Jan. 23, 1950) and the actual

seat of govemment, but recognition has generally been withheld by the international community Chief of state: Presidents Moshe Katzav and, from July 15, Shimon Peres Head of government: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (left ), U.S. Pres. George W. Bush (centre),

and Palestinian Pres. Mahmoud Abbas shake hands during the peace conference held in Annapolis, Md., in November.

The Emerging Palestinian Autonomous Areas (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip)

Total area under disputed administration: West Bank 5,900 sq km (2,278 sq mi); Gaza

Strip 363 sq km (140 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): West Bank 2,794,000,

including 2,517,000 Arabs and 277,000 Jews; Gaza Strip 1,499,000. Projections, however, based on an independent demographic study in 2005, estimate the 2007 Arab West Bank population at 1,486,000 and that of the Gaza Strip at 1,177,000 Principal administrative centres: Ramallah and Gaza Head of government: President Mahmoud Abbas, assisted by Prime Ministers Ismail Haniya and, from June 15, Salam Fayad Saul Loeb—AFP/Getty Images

416

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Italy

help set the agenda and to ensure that key players, including the Saudis, participated. On each occasion she insisted that Israel and the Palestinians deal with core issues (notably borders, refugees, and Jerusalem) as part of a final peace deal. At the peace conference, held in Annapolis, Md., on November 27 and at-

tended by 16 Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, Israel and the Palestinians were able to agree on a joint statement only under heavy American pressure and by avoiding specific reference to any of the core issues. Moreover, the relatively large turnout of moderate Arab states seemed to have more to do with fear of Iran than peacemaking with Israel. Nevertheless, Israel and the Pales-

tinians undertook to launch an intensive negotiating process aimed at reaching a final peace deal by the end of 2008. With Hamas in control in Gaza, however it was not clear how far Abbas

would be able to advance in peacemaking efforts with Israel. In October rumours surfaced of secret feelers between Fatah moderates and Hamas radicals

over

a sulha,

or

“reconcilia-

tion,” along the lines of a power-sharing agreement reached by the two sides in Mecca,

Saudi

Arabia,

in February.

Throughout the year, however, Hamas persisted in its refusal to recognize Israel, and on September 19 Israel declared Gaza an “enemy entity” and threatened to cut off electricity and fuel supplies in retaliation for continued rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Relations between Israel and Syria were also strained. Along with repeated

gence, the Iranian aim was to surround Israel with a missile cordon from Tehran to Gaza, primarily to deter any Israeli preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program. Growing Iranian power and influence triggered a new arms race. In late July the U.S. administration announced plans for distributing huge weapons supplies to its moderate allies over the coming decade: $20 billion to Saudi Arabia,

$13 billion to Egypt,

and $30

billion to Israel. Following the muchcriticized showing of its ground forces in the 2006 Lebanon war, in July Israel allocated

an

additional

$11 billion in

military spending over 10 years, mainly to beef up the land army and enhance the air force’s long-range strike capacity. Israeli domestic politics also experienced dramatic developments during the year. On April 30 the Winograd Commission investigating the Lebanon war issued a scathing report on Prime Minister Ehud Olmerts wartime performance. Although his popularity plummeted, Olmert showed great political skill in hanging on to power. Olmert was not the only Israeli leader under pressure. On June 29, just two weeks before his term was due to end,

ITALY

Area: 301,336 sq km (116,346 sq mi) Population (2007 est): 59,051,000

Capital: Rome Chief of state: President Giorgio Napolitano Head of government: Prime Minister Romano Prodi Italy endured another year of political turmoil in 2007 as the fragile centre-left coalition government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi collapsed in February only to be replaced within days by a nearly identical government under Prodi’s leadership. “Prodi bis,” or Prodi Il, as

the

new

named, became ernment

executive

was

nick-

the 62nd Italian gov-

since 1945. As the year wore

on, the beleaguered head of the centreleft Olive Tree alliance faced increasingly sharp criticism from its ideologically divided membership as well as from conservative former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi,

whose

House

of

a significant arms buildup, procuring sophisticated AT-14 Kornet antitank and Pantsir-S1 antiaircraft missiles from Russia. After large-scale Israeli and Syrian ground exercises in May in the Golan Heights, there was talk on both sides of war in the summer. Tensions came to a head when, on September 6, Israeli planes crossed into Syria and bombed a building that Western media claimed contained a nuclear facility supplied by North Korea. Israel at first was careful not to acknowledge

prime minister Shimon Peres.

stock market, despite a major stumble in August, outperformed those of the

Freedoms centre-right coalition ran the country during 2001-06. In October Italys high court definitively cleared Berlusconi of corruption charges dating back to the 1980s. The alleged transgressions occurred before his involvement in national politics. The February crisis emerged from a rift within Prodis ruling Union coalition, which comprised both moderate parties and representatives of Italy's staunch far left, including the powerful nucleus of Italys communist party. The Senate unexpectedly voted down a nonbinding foreign policy resolution that pledged to maintain Italy's 2,000-strong Afghanistan troop contingent and uphold a Berlusconi-era promise allowing the United States to expand its military presence at a vital NATO base in the northern city of Vicenza. Support for the base expansion fell afoul of radical politicians opposed to U.S. policy in Iraq. Before the tally Foreign Minister

the strike, let alone the nature

rich Western nations.

Massimo

peace overtures from Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad, Damascus carried out

of the

target, and the Syrians did not retaliate. The Syrian arms purchases were reportedly bankrolled by Iran, which continued to strengthen its regional allies and proxies, resupplying the Lebanese Hezbollah with rockets similar to those lost in the previous summer’s war with Israel and training Hamas militia cadres. According to Israeli intelli-

Pres. Moshe Katzav was forced to resign over a sex scandal. He was accused of having sexually harassed 11 women who had worked with him at various stages of his career; the allegations included two cases of rape. In a plea bargain Katzav confessed to lesser charges in return for a six-month suspended sentence. He was succeeded as president on July 15 by 83-year-old former Despite the second Lebanon war and the increased defense spending, the Israeli economy showed great resilience. Growth remained robust at more than 5% for the fourth straight year; unemployment was down from 8.4% to 7.7%; and inflation was expected to meet the projected government figure of 2-396. Foreign investment was slated to grow by 896, to $15.3 billion, and the Tel Aviv

Per capita GDP

D'Alema,

confident

of suc-

in 2007, adjusted for purchasing power parity, was estimated at $31,767, putting Israel on a par with Germany and France. Israel was invited in May to open talks on joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a grouping of the world's most economically advanced democratic

cess, linked the government's future to

countries.

country’s

(LESLIE D. SUSSER)

the outcome of the vote. Four senators,

including two militant members of the Prodi coalition and two conservativeleaning senators for life, called D’Alema’s bluff by abstaining. The sudden setback underscored the Prodi government’s weakness

in the Senate, the

bellwether

upper

house, 417

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Italy Sandro Pace/AP

where the fragmented Union alliance maintained a majority of only two seats.

Though Pres. Giorgio Napolitano soon tapped Prodi to restore order, his endorsement was lukewarm. Napolitano cautioned both the prime minister and his rivals on the risks of failing to introduce electoral reform to limit the disruptive powers of Italys dozens of splinter parties, most of them on the left. Talks between the Union alliance and the House of Freedoms coalition (which included Berlusconis powerful Forza Italia party) produced no consensus. As the year ended, both sides were in flux. Berlusconi controversially prepared to launch a new centre-right party to intensify pressure on Prodi, a plan his traditional allies criticized as divisive. Meanwhile, the two leading centre-left parties fused into the Democratic Party (PD) and elected popular Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni its leader. Veltroni, 52, was immediately tapped as a logical successor to Prodi in the event of early national elections. Populist figures took advantage of the strife to make inroads. Comedian and television personality Beppe Grillo used the Internet, still a novelty in Italy, to generate resistance against what he labeled Rome’s “oligarchy of power.” Grillo’s popular blog, which according to Nielsen/NetRatings received more than a million hits a month,

issued a

“Clean Up Parliament” petition demanding 10-year term limits for lawmakers, direct elections for parliamentarians, and legislation barring anyone convicted of a crime from serving in public office. Grillo’s September V-Day campaign (“V” can mean victory or refer to an obscene phrase) produced some 300,000 signatures for the petition. Derided as a demagogue by some mainstream politicians, Grillo denied any personal political ambitions. Grillo’s grassroots criticisms were helped by the new book The Caste: How Italian Politicians Became Untouchable, in which journalists Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella alleged that 16 members of Italys 630-strong Parliament were convicted felons and cited myriad cases of conflict of interest. Released in May, The Caste had sold more than a million copies by November,

about 50 times the amount

required to be certified as a best seller. The weekly magazine L'Espresso added fuel to the fire when it charged Deputy

Prime

Minister

Francesco

Rutelli and Justice Minister Clemente Mastella with abusing taxpayer trust 418

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli appears on television with several of the looted artifacts to be returned to Italy by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles. by using government aircraft to attend nonessential functions. The local travel, reluctantly acknowledged by both men, played into long-standing Italian contempt for the country’s scandal-ridden power elite. Chastened by the bad publicity, Prodi tried winning back public favour by presenting a budget that avoided tax hikes. Italys dependency on imported natural gas and oil led to higher consumer prices, and by years end the growing strength of the euro was making Italian exports less attractive in dollar zones, slowing industrial production. A November study released by the Organisation

for Economic

Co-opera-

tion and Development warned that Italy needed to cut bureaucratic red tape to boost its economic fortunes. Despite these admonishments, Italy was still expected to meet EU standards in 2007.

On the diplomatic front, relations between Rome and Washington got a jolt in February when a Milan judge ruled that

26

Americans

and

7

Italians,

mostly current or former intelligence agents, should stand trial in connection with the 2003 kidnapping of the Milanbased Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan

Nasr

(known

as Abu

Omar).

Court papers alleged that Abu Omar was abducted from a Milan street by the CIA in conjunction with Italian secret services and flown to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years on

terrorism charges. A June trial date was postponed, in part because most of the Americans implicated in the case were no longer in Italy. More friction arose when the Prodi government confirmed that it had persuaded Afghan authorities to surrender five Taliban prisoners to obtain the release of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who was abducted and held for two weeks in March. U.S. and British officials condemned

the move,

but Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai confirmed that he had approved the “exceptional measure” because his country valued its ties to Italy. Meanwhile,

Calisto Tanzi, founder of

the Parma-based food giant Parmalat, was ordered to stand trial over his companys 2003 bankruptcy, which left some

50,000 shareholders with worth-

less stock. Tanzi and more than 50 other defendants (including his brother Giovanni) faced charges of fraud and stock-price manipulation. The Parmalat scandal, known as “Europe’s Enron,” revealed a shortfall of €14 billion (about $19 billion).

In a landmark case, the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles agreed to return 40 artifacts that the Italian Culture Ministry contended had been looted from archaeological digs in Sicily as part of a burgeoning traffic in illegally excavated artifacts. At the centre of the case was a statue of Aphrodite acquired in 1988 by the Getty for $18 million

World Affairs: Japan

from a private seller. A former curator of antiquities at the museum faced criminal charges as an alleged go-between in the sale. In a separate case, the University of Virginia Art Museum agreed to return two marble sculptures allegedly pilfered from Sicily. Successful appeals watered down some of the harsher verdicts meted out to association football (soccer) officials

and teams following a widespread match-rigging scandal that had dominated the news in 2006. Turin's Juventus, arguably the most popular team in the country, had its penalty significantly reduced and subsequently won the 2006-07 Serie B championship, which earned it a swift return to Serie A. Meanwhile, long-suffering Inter Milan fans had their dreams rewarded when their team captured the Serie A championship. AC Milan defeated England’s Liverpool for the Union des Associations Européennes de Football Champions League title in May. Fan violence during the year, however, prompted the suspension of some games and government pledges to rein in hooliganism. The country mourned the death in September of Luciano Pavarotti in his hometown of Modena. (See OBITUARIES.) Funeral services for the acclaimed tenor, televised live nationwide, were

held in the city’s cathedral and attended by dignitaries, while some 50,000 people paid homage to the performer from outside.

(CHRISTOPHER P. WINNER)

JAMAICA

sued the case as a murder inquiry for months until pathologists definitively confirmed

that Woolmer

had, in fact,

died from a sudden heart attack. It appeared very unlikely that Jamaica would have a land-based regasification terminal for the importation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the near future. Thus, the government in May turned to the option of ship-based regasification and opened a bidding process for such a facility. Nine firms had responded to the invitation by June. Where the LNG would come from,

however,

JAPAN

remained

an

Area: 377,915 sq km (145,914 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 127,770,000

Capital: Tokyo Symbol of state: Emperor Akihito Head of government: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and, from September 26, Yasuo Fukuda

open

question, since neither Trinidad and Tobago (the preferred supplier) nor Venezuela (which had offered gas supplies) were currently in a position to provide LNG, though they had different reasons.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), led

by economist Bruce Golding, succeeded in defeating the People’s National Party (PNP) in the September 3 general election, after the latter had enjoyed four straight terms (18 years) in office. The JLP won 33 of the 60 seats in the House of Representatives, with the PNP retaining the other 27. The PNPS failure to hold on to the reins of power came as a bitter blow to its first

Domestic

Affairs.

In a historic

defeat,

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost control of the upper house of the Diet

(parliament)

in elections

held in July 2007. Half of the upper house’s 242 seats were contested in the elections, with the LDP managing to win just 37 and its coalition partner, the New Komeito party, claiming another 9. That left the ruling coalition with a total of 106 seats in the upper house, a sharp reduction from the 132 that it had held before the elections. The main opposition Democratic Party

of Japan

(DPJ),

Ichiro Ozawa,

led by 65-year-old

claimed 60 seats in the

balloting to boost its total seat count to female leader, Portia Simpson Miller, 120. Support from splinter parties enwho had headed the party since Febsured Ozawa’s party of control of the ruary 2006. Golding was sworn in as upper house, which had to approve all prime minister on September 11. bills except the main budget and (DAVID RENWICK) treaties. The outcome of the elections represented one of the worst political defeats for the LDP in its history. For Bruce Golding celebrates his party's victory in the first time since the rulJamaica’s general election on September 3. ing party's establishment in 1955, the LDP was

placed as the largest party in the upper chamber. The LDP’ stunning loss was attributed to a variety of factors, including revelations that government bureaucrats had managed 50 million pension records so poorly that many retirees were at risk of losing

Area: 10,991 sq km (4,244 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,680,000

Capital: Kingston Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

sented by Governor-General Kenneth Hall Head of government: Prime Ministers Portia Simpson Miller and, from September 11, Bruce Golding

out on pension payments.

Voters also were angered over politicians’ abuses in the use of political funds financed by taxpayers and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s emphasis on revising the country’s postwar constitution while ignoring

The 2007 Cricket World Cup tournament, the biggest sporting event ever held in the Caribbean,

suffered

re-

a set-

back on the Jamaica leg in March when the coach of the Pakistan team, Englishman Bob Woolmer (see OBITUARIES), was found dead in his hotel room in Kingston. Local investigators pur-

growing

discrepancies

in

workers’ wages and a gap in prosperity between the Ramon Espinosa/AP

419

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Japan AP

urban and rural areas. A number of

government

ministers

For many Japanese, sports offered a welcome diversion during the year from the turbulent world of politics. Baseball fans were particularly excited to see several Japanese athletes play major roles in the World Series in October. Ace pitcher Daisuke

re-

signed before and after the elections. Amid calls for his resignation over his alleged involvement in a financial scandal, Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide in May. Fumio Kyuma, Abe's defense minister, was forced to resign in July after he said in a speech that the American use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unavoidable because it hastened the end of World War II—a

view

that ran

counter

Matsuzaka

and reliever Hideki Okajima helped the Boston Red Sox win the series in a 4-0 sweep of the Colorado

nouncement, Abe checked into a

(IMF)

ward,

Newly elected LDP president Yasuo Fukuda sits in the presidential chair at party headquarters in Tokyo on September 23. He assumed office as Japan’s prime minister three days later. cussions with the new prime minister only in public settings, such as in debates in the Diet, but in late October

he agreed to meet privately with Fukuda. Bunmei Ibuki, secretary-general of the LDP, warned Fukuda not to

ever, gave the ruling coalition power to override any bills rejected in the upper house by utilizing its two-thirds majority in the lower chamber. Never-

enter into a “grand coalition” with Ozawa's party. After the meeting Japanese media reported that the two leaders had discussed precisely that possibility. Ozawa denied that he had initiated the proposal for the DPJ to join the ruling coalition, while Fukuda refused to say who had come up with the idea. In any event, the DPJ executive committee unanimously rejected the proposal and criticized Ozawa for even thinking of a coalition. Ozawa announced his resignation as DPJ president on November 4, stating that he viewed the committee’s rejection “as a vote of non-confidence.” DPJ officials refused to accept his resignation, however, and a few days later he agreed to remain in his post. Ozawa also reiterated the opposition’s goal of winning

theless,

the

declared

that

how-

he

would try to avoid using that “veto power.” As leader of the DPJ, Ozawa had previously insisted that he would hold dis420

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

estimated

in July

to 2%

and

1.7%,

tion in Japan’s economic

over Taro Aso, a former foreign minister and a right-leaning ally of Abe. The LDPcontrolled lower house of the Diet then voted to install Fukuda as prime minister, and he formally took office on September 26. After Fukuda named a new cabinet, polls conducted by four national newspapers put his support among the public at 53-58%. This represented a huge jump from the meagre 27% rating that Abe had received in one poll on the eve of the July vote. The elections produced a legislative quagmire, with the DPJ in control of the upper house and the LDP and the New Komeito party holding 70% of the seats in the lower house. A rarely

Fukuda

start-

that

respec-

tively. The IMF cited a contrac-

(See BIOGRAPHIES.) Fukuda was chosen

of the constitution,

whose

Japan’s economy would grow by 2.6% in 2007 and by 2% in 2008, by October the IMF had revised those forecasts down-

Tokyo hospital for treatment of what was described as a gastrointestinal ailment. Following Abe’s resignation, the LDP selected 71-year-old Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate conservative, to lead the party.

used clause

Rockies,

ing lineup featured another wellknown Japanese player second baseman Kazuo Matsui. The Economy. Although the International Monetary Fund

to

the widespread belief in Japan that the bombing could not be justified. Abe initially rejected calls to step down in the wake of the election debacle. Instead he reshuffled his cabinet in August and visited a series of foreign countries, but he saw his popularity continue to plummet. On September 12 he called a snap press conference to announce that he was indeed stepping down. Immediately after his an-

(see BIOGRAPHIES)

next

lower

house

elections,

but

with the DPJ holding only 24% of the seats in the lower chamber,

most ana-

lysts saw the party's chance for victory as a longshot.

longest

output

during the second quarter, when growth appeared hampered by declining investment and weakness in domestic spending. The government viewed the secondquarter

performance

as

a tem-

porary drop in Japan's sixth year of continuing growth, the expansion

since

1945.

Many

Japanese analysts also worried over a possible economic slowdown in the U.S., one of Japan's largest export markets. In a speech given in early November, Economy Minister Hiroko Ota vowed to “carefully monitor” the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S., conceding that any resulting drop in U.S. consumer spending would “inevitably affect the Japanese economy.” Ota also expressed concern over negative impacts from high oil prices.

In February the Bank of Japan raised its leading interest rate to 0.5% from 0.25%, a move that had been widely anticipated following the news of strong growth during the fourth quarter of 2006. The move was an indicator that the central bank viewed the Japanese economy as likely to continue a moderate expansion. The central bank elected to leave interest rates unchanged during the remainder of the year but noted that it would “adjust the level of interest rates gradually, in accordance with improvements in the economic and price situation.” Japans unemployment rate stood at 3.6% in July, its lowest point in years,

World Affairs: Japan

though by October the jobless rate had seen an uptick to 496. In spite of a softening in export sales to the U.S., Japan's trade surplus expanded nearly 63% in September from the levels of a year earlier. Weaker American demand for Japanese goods was offset by growth in shipments to Europe and to other Asian countries, particularly China. It was reported in April that China (excluding Hong Kong) had replaced the U.S. as Japan’s largest trad-

intended to help nurture relations between the two Asian giants. Wen’s visit followed Abe’s fence-mending trip to Beijing in October 2006. Abe’s replacement by Fukuda promised to further closer Sino-Japanese relations. Fukuda, who was known for his moderate views

ing partner.

toward

In what represented the largest foreign acquisition of a Japanese brokerage house, Citigroup agreed to pay the equivalent of $8 billion in cash and a yet-to-be-determined amount in a stock swap to bring Nikko Cordial under its control after the securities company was caught inflating its books by $160 million. Citigroup utilized a new law allowing it to exchange its own shares for Nikko shares in a deal that would make the troubled brokerage a wholly owned subsidiary in January 2008, when the stock swap would be carried out. Corporate scandals also made headlines during the year. In March the Tokyo District Court found billionaire entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, who had attempted to take over Nippon Broadcasting System (NBS), guilty of padding profits in the balance sheet of his company, Livedoor, an Internet

had no plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine. No progress, however, occurred between Japan and North Korea in their attempts to establish diplomatic relations. Japan's effort to seek full information about Pyongyang's kidnappings of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and ‘80s remained stymied. Tensions over North Korea also crept into U.S.Japanese relations as the Japanese began to fear that the U.S. would remove North Korea from its list of countries that sponsored terrorism, even if North Korea refused to settle the kidnapping issue with Japan. Regarding

services provider. In a separate case in

July, the court convicted fund manager Yoshiaki Murakami on insider-trading charges related to Horie’s takeover bid. Prosecutors charged that Murakami had been told by Horie and other Livedoor executives in late 2004 about their plans to buy NBS shares. Murakami then bought 1.93 million NBS shares before Livedoor triggered a rise in the share price by announcing in February 2005 that it had acquired 35% of NBS. Murakami subsequently sold his holdings for a profit of ¥3 billion ($26.1 million). Horie was sentenced to two and

a half years in jail, while Murakami was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined ¥1.2 billion ($10 million). His fund, which had become defunct, was fined another ¥300 million ($2.6 million). The fines were by far the

largest ever for insider trading in Japan. Both Horie and Murakami appealed the rulings. Foreign Affairs. Before his resignation in September, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attempted to ease strains with China and other Asian countries by forgoing visits to the Yasukuni Shrine,

where both Japanese war dead and 14 Class A war criminals were enshrined. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabaos threeday visit to Japan in April—the first by a Chinese premier in seven years—was

the

China,

abductions,

also indicated

U.S.

Assistant

that he

Secre-

tary of State Christopher Hill indicated that he had "stressed to the North Koreans

we

want

to see progress

on this

issue." Japanese alarm about North Korea's explosion of a nuclear device in October 2006 faded from public view as the Six-Nation Talks, in which Japan was a participant, produced an agreement by which North Korea would "de-nuclearize" itself. Japanese officials, however, remained privately concerned that North Korea would wind up retaining weapons it had developed before dismantling its nuclear facilities. After leading the opposition to victory in the July upper house elections, DPJ president Ozawa condemned Japan's naval refueling mission in the Indian Ocean; the mission involved the use of

Japanese vessels to supply U.S. ships engaged in the war in Afghanistan with petroleum. Although Abe had promised U.S. Pres. George W. Bush that Japan would extend the refueling operation, Ozawa declared that the DPJ would oppose it as a violation of Japan's pacifist constitution. He also accused the government of allowing the U.S. to divert Japanese-supplied oil for use in the war in Iraq. The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Thomas

Schieffer, criticized Ozawa for

playing "political football" with the U.S.-Japan security treaty that bound the two countries as allies. In a speech

to the Japan National Press Club on October 24, Schieffer said that Japan’s failure to extend the refueling mission, which had begun in 2001, “would be sending a very bad message to the international community. . .that Japan is opting out of the war on terror.” At the insistence of its coalition partner, the New Komeito party, Fukuda’s government submitted a new bill to the lower house in October to continue the refueling but only for one year. The LDP had originally planned to extend the mission for two years.

In a meeting with President Bush in Washington on November 16, Fukuda pledged that Japan would renew the refueling operation, which was suspended on November 1. Both leaders described the operation as vital to the war against terrorism, and Fukuda's aides called it the most important issue for the survival of his cabinet. On December 14 Fukuda had the lower house extend the parliamentary session by 31 days—a period that would enable the ruling coalition to use its two-thirds majority in the lower house to override Ozawa's attempt to squelch the refueling bill. Earlier in the year, tensions had flared between the U.S. and Japan over the passage by the U.S. House of Representatives of a nonbinding resolution urging Japan to formally apologize for its militarys coercion of Asian women into sexual slavery during World War II. In taking the action in July, House leaders ignored a June 22 letter from Ryozo Kato, Japan's ambassador to Washington, warning that passage of the resolution would damage U.S.Japanese relations. Japan made headway on other diplomatic fronts during the year In August Prime Minister Abe visited India, where he met with his counterpart, Manmohan Singh, and addressed the Indian Parliament. A series of bilateral trade agreements between the two countries was signed. Also in August, Japan reached a preliminary free-trade agreement with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) intended to boost economic integration in East

Asia. Japan announced that it was canceling aid to Myanmar (Burma) in response to Yangon's (Rangoon's) violent suppression of monk-led prodemocracy demonstrations in September During those demonstrations a Japanese video journalist covering the protests was shot and killed as government troops opened fire on the participants. (SAM JAMESON) 421

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Jordan

JORDAN

because of what it called “manipulation” and “vote rigging” by the government. The boycott drew sharp criticism

_

from Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit,

Area: 88,778 sq km (34,277 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,924,000 (including

about 1,900,000 Palestinian refugees, most of whom hold Jordanian citizenship; excluding 800,000 Iraqi refugees) Capital: Amman Head of state and government: King Abdullah Il, assisted by Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit Jordan faced two challenging elections in 2007 that tested the resilience of its drive for democratization amid the rising popularity of the Islamic movement in Jordan and in neighbouring countries. In a surprise move on the eve of the municipal councils’ elections on

who told the Jordan Press Agency (Petra) that the move reflected “a conspiratorial and opportunistic mentality” that undermined the entire Islamic movement. The polling was held to fill nearly 1,000 seats of local councilmen and to elect 92 mayors, and the government allowed members of the armed

forces

to vote,

an

action

that

critics maintained would help ensure the election of the government’s candidates. In the event, pro-government and independent candidates captured most of the vote. The turnout in urban centres such as Amman was about 51%. The

municipal

elections,

however,

were only a dress rehearsal for the parliamentary elections that were held on November 20. Pro-government candidates swept the elections for the 110member legislative assembly, upsetting July 31, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), all expectations of the IAF, which won the political arm of the Muslim Brothfewer than 5% of the seats. The IAF erhood, withdrew all of its candidates charged that the elections were marred by irregularities and lacked integrity. Some 5596 of eligible voters parJordanians gather in the ancient city of Petra on ticipated in the balloting. July 8 to celebrate its selection in a global poll as The legislative contest one of the new Seven Wonders of the World. marked a watershed for both the electoral framework and the political power of the legislature in Jordan's public affairs. The results confirmed the electoral system of single nontransferable vote (one man, one vote) and the

distribution districts,

which

independent from

of electoral

rural

favoured

candidates areas

(where

clannish allegiance was superior to political platform)

over

urban-based

political parties that were supported by Jordanians of Palestinian origin. The Jordanian economy presented a combination of rising inflationary pressures and increased foreign

direct

investment.

Jordan's central bank reported that foreign currency reserves increased by 3.296 to $6.29 billion during the first five months of the year, a rise of 3.296 over the same period of the previous year. Mohammad abu Ghosh/AP

422

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

According to a study conducted by the Center for Strategic Studies of the University of Jordan, the rate of inflation rose to 6.25% for 2006, compared with 3.4% in 2004. The increase was attributed to the rise in oil prices, the weakness of the U.S. dollar, and the cost of

residential housing, as well as the cost of imports and public spending. Although the study put the rate of unemployment at 14%, it concluded that the approximately 800,000 Iraqi refugees who had fled to Jordan following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 had little to do with the rise in the cost of living. The loss of preferential oil prices, which Jordan received from Iraq under Saddam Hussein, was cited as a significant factor in the increased cost of living.

(AYMAN M. EL-AMIR)

KAZAKHSTAN

Area: 2,724,900 sq km (1,052,090 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 15,472,000

Capital: Astana Head of state and government: President Nursultan Nazarbayev, assisted by Prime Ministers Daniyal Akhmetov and, from January 10, Karim Masimov Throughout 2007 Kazakhstan continued its quest to receive recognition by the international community for its political and economic achievements. Though the country had developed one of the strongest economies in the Commonwealth of Independent States, thanks largely to its oil revenues, backsliding on democratization was increasingly evident. Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov resigned his post on January 8 and was replaced two days later by his deputy for economic development, Karim Masimov. Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev explained that the change was part of the planned reform of administrative methods in government and called on Masimov to make greater efforts to develop those regions that had been left behind the oil-producing areas with booming economies. Nazarbayev also reiterated his call for a greater diversification of the country’s economy, especially into high-technology industries, to reduce Kazakhstan’s dependence on its oil revenues.

World Affairs: Kenya Karel Prinsloo/AP

In 2007 Kazakhstan became the first state in Central Asia to become a donor to the economic development of its neighbours. In April, disturbed by continuing instability in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan promised $100 million to aid the Kyrgyz economy. In addition, a number of Kazakh firms an-

nounced plans during the year to invest in industries in Tajikistan as well as in the Tajik banking sector. In his annual televised report to the nation in February, Nazarbayev promised that although the country would retain a presidential form of governance, more powers would be given to the parliament, particularly in the formation of the government. One step in this direction was the presidents signing in May of constitutional amendments that reduced the presidential term in office from seven to five years. The limit was lifted on the number of presidential terms in office, however. In a parliamentary election held on August 19, Nazarbayevs Nur Otan party won 8896 of the vote and took all of the seats in the parliament. Although international observers noted that improvements had been made in electoral procedure, there was some criticism that vote counting was not transparent. The opposition

parties, of which the two largest received less than 1096 of the vote combined, as-

serted that the results had been falsified. Culture Minister Yermuhamet Yertysbayev commented that the opposition's failure resulted from its lack of unity. In February, Minister of Environmental Protection Nurlan Iskakov threatened that foreign oil firms working in Kazakhstan would face suspension of their activities for alleged failure to observe environmental regulations. The international oil consortium headed by Italys Eni-Agip and the U.S-Kazakh TengizChevroil consortium were particular targets, which led to speculation that Kazakh interests might be intending to push foreigners out. (BESS BROWN)

The violence that broke out in 2006 on Mt. Elgon on Kenya’s western border following the Kenyan government's allocation of land to squatters continued into 2007 and resulted in a massive displacement of the population. The shortage of land, due to the immense growth in Kenya's population, meant that the country could no longer rely on pastoralism and subsistence farming to provide a livelihood for the bulk of the population. While the country’s economy continued to grow steadily, the chief foreign currency earners—tourism with the attendant game parks and large-scale horticulture and vegetable production, both requiring considerable areas of land—could offer only limited employment opportunities. Even the government's generous financial assistance to farmers of other crops did not markedly improve the employment situation.

As

a result,

Capital: Nairobi Head of state and government: President Mwai Kibaki

unplanned

slums sprouted up around Nairobi, where, in the early part of the year, a sect calling itself Mungiki carried out acts of extreme violence. In June police launched a powerful crackdown on the dissidents, and by August 5,000 people had been arrested and more than 100 killed, but the fundamental problem remained unsolved. A bomb that exploded in a Nairobi hotel on June 11, killing two people and wounding several others, was, however, thought by many to have been the work of Islamist militants who had crossed the border from Somalia. Despite these problems, there were a number of promising developments. In May the U.S. agreed to provide $14 million for training and equipment to control terrorism,

and in June the World

Bank approved a credit of $80 million to

assist

in

the

campaign

against

HIV/AIDS. There was praise too from environmentalists for Kenya’s conservation efforts. Though a team led by history professor Henry Mwanzi found during their tour of the country that there was considerable support for a proposal to fasttrack a political federation between the members of the East African Community (comprising Uganda, Rwanda,

Area: 582,646 sq km (224,961 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 36,914,000

vast,

Kenya, Tanzania, and Burundi), the

Law Society of Kenya demurred. It felt that the federation was bound to fail because Kenyans did not fully understand the implications. The main preoccupation of politicians remained the presidential and parliamentary elections that were held in late December. The last session of the parliament, which opened in March, provided Pres. Mwai Kibaki with the op-

A policeman in Nairobi kicks a man to the ground during the governments crackdown on the Mungiki sect in June. portunity to emphasize the governments achievements in the field of primary education and in the allocation of funds to support regional projects. Opposition spokesmen concentrated most of their attention on the need for constitutional reform and the need to limit presidential powers. The elections were fiercely contested. Preelection polls had strongly favoured the opposition, led by presidential challenger Raila Odinga, and early voting returns appeared to show the opposition heading for a decisive victory. Amid widespread charges of vote rigging, the opposition's initial lead steadily diminished, however, and

in the final count Kibaki emerged the winner, claiming roughly 4796 of the official vote to Odinga’s 44%. Kibaki was immediately sworn in for a second term in office, while opposition leaders expressed outrage and deadly riots erupted, particularly in the shantytowns around Nairobi. The EU’s chief observer declared the elections “flawed” and cited evidence of irregularities, though at year’s end it was not clear whether the opposition would legally contest the outcome.

(KENNETH INGHAM)

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World Affairs: Kiribati

KIRIBATI

KOREA, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF

Area: 811 sq km (313 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 95,500

Area: 122,762 sq km (47,399 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 23,790,000

Capital: Government offices on three islets of South Tarawa Head of state and government: President

Capital: Pyongyang Head of state and government: Chairman

Anote Tong

of the National Defense Commission

Kim Jong Il Kiribati s August 2007 election saw 148 candidates (most of whom represented the parties Pillars of Truth or Protect the Maneaba) contest 44 parliamentary seats and pitted Pres. Anote Tong (of the Pillars of Truth) against his older brother and longtime rival, Harry Tong, the unofficial leader of the opposition. In the presidential election, which was held on October 17, the cur-

rent

president,

a London

Economics-trained

School

economist,

was

of re-

turned to power along with most of his cabinet. The

country

was

experiencing

in-

creasing pressure from annual population growth rates of 2.2596, particularly on South Tarawa, where about half of

the population resided. This growth generated a number of economic and environmental challenges. Kiribati had a well-managed Revenue Equalization Reserve

Fund,

which

invested

in the

global economy, but the fund faced declining returns as the impact of credit restrictions caused by loans in the American subprime mortgage market was felt. The government managed some 32 state-owned enterprises and generated some 77% of domestic employment but had recently underwritten a joint venture to build high-value fibreglass pleasure craft for the Australian market. This deal represented a departure from exports such as seaweed and copra. Growth also produced environmental problems in vulnerable coastal areas. Householders, despite government restrictions, collected annually some 70,000 cu m (about 2.47 million cu ft)

of aggregates (sand, gravel, small rocks, and shells) from beaches for private use and to sell to generate income. The government, with funds and technical support from the EU, planned to begin a dredging operation to provide aggregates from locations in the lagoon that were less environmentally vulnerable. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

424

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Amid

renewed

flooding,

chronic

hunger, and succession rumours, North

Korea showed signs in 2007 that it might be willing to give up its nuclear programs if the price was right. After six years of stalemate, Washington finally began an earnest dialogue with Pyongyang. The first breakthrough in nuclear talks came in February when North Korea agreed to shut down its decrepit light-water nuclear reactor in exchange for a modest package of economic assistance. A second breakthrough came in October when the North agreed to disable the reactor and submit a list of all remaining nuclear programs. As if to remind the world just how arduous denuclearization would be, North Korea failed to meet

the December 31 deadline. Many difficult months of nuclear negotiations remained. Even if Pyongyang declared all of its weapons-grade nuclear material, North Korean negotiators had already hinted that they might not reveal how many weapons the North had. Pyongyang had also refused to admit to having a uranium-enrichment program, and there was growing suspicion that the North may have secretly sent nuclear materials to Syria. North Korea might also insist on receiving less-proliferation-prone nuclear facilities as part of its economic-assistance

wish list—something that the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush had insisted would be a nonstarter. Meanwhile,

North Korea suffered its

second straight year of flooding. According to the Red Cross, 600 people were killed or were missing, and more than

170,000 were

left homeless

after

torrential rains in August. (See DISASTERS.) More than 10% of North Korea’s

already-meager arable land was believed to have been destroyed. Even under the best conditions, the country could grow only enough food to feed two-thirds of its people, and interna-

tional assistance made up only part of the shortfall. More than a million North Koreans were believed to be chronically hungry. Succession rumours swirled with the reappearance in June of Kim Jong I's eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, who paid his first visit to North Korea since his arrest in Japan in 2001, when he was caught using a fake Dominican passport while trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland; he was subsequently exiled to southern China. Most analysts, however, still believed that Kim Jong II's most-likely successor was his brotherin-law, 61-year-old Jang Song Thaek, who was placed in charge of internal security in November. (PETER M. BECK)

KOREA, REPUBLIC OF

Area: 99,678 sq km (38,486 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 48,456,000

Capital: Seoul Head of state and government: President Roh Moo Hyun, assisted by Prime Ministers Han Myung Sook, Kwon O Kyu (acting) from March 7, and, from April 2, Han Duck Soo South Korea was anything but the "Land of the Morning Calm" in 2007 as voters went to the polls in December to elect their first CEO president, 66-yearold Lee Myung-bak. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Despite Lee’s uninspiring policy platform and questions concerning his involvement in a financial scandal, Ko-

reans showed a preference for pragmatism over populism by overwhelmingly voting for the former Hyundai executive and mayor of Seoul. Unlike past elections, this one was not driven by anxieties over North Korea but instead focused on economic issues such as creating jobs and making home prices more affordable. Lee fell just short of securing an absolute majority but defeated his nearest rival, Chung Dongyoung, by a resounding margin of more than 22%—a first in South Korea’s usually razor-close elections. Lee had faced a much more bruising battle to win his party's nomination in August, when he narrowly defeated the daughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee. Just as the presidential election was kicking into high gear, Pres. Roh Moo

World Affairs: Kyrgyzstan Choi Won-Suk—AFP/Getty Images

Korean government pledged to withdraw its 200 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2007 and reportedly paid

Kuwaiti social and economic concerns were focused on revision of the educational system; improved health,

$20 million in ransom

to the Taliban

water, and electricity services; and im-

kidnappers. Despite their ordeal, the kidnapping victims became the object of public scorn for having ignored government warnings about travel to Afghanistan. South Korea experienced its worstever oil spill in December when a Samsung Heavy Industries barge collided with a Hong Kong oil tanker off the

plementation of long-term planning in the fields of housing and employment. The government, for its part, began a

west coast.

Some

66,000 bbl of crude

oil gushed into the ocean, fouling a 48km (30-mi) stretch of coast and dam-

aging an estimated

14,000 ha (34,600

ac) of fisheries and marine habitat. The

spill was the worst the world had seen in more than four years. The cleanup would likely take years and cost up to $1 billion. (PETER M. BECK)

Kuwaitis

to

work in the private sector. In 2006 foreign workers made up more than 80% of the total labour force in the private sector. Foreign workers in Kuwait often lived under poor conditions and received low wages. In February some Indian workers staged a strike to protest poor living conditions and a delay in payment of their wages. They claimed that there were sometimes 10 workers living in a small room, part of which was used as a kitchen. Early in the year Kuwaiti authorities announced plans for the construction of a new oil refinery, the largest of its East. The $13 bil-

lion project was expected to be completed by the end of 2011. (LOUAY BAHRY)

Area: 17,818 sq km (6,880 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,294,000

Hyun traveled to Pyongyang in early October to meet with his Northern counterpart, Chairman Kim Jong Il, a full seven years after the first NorthSouth summit. Aside from a vague pledge to replace the armistice agreement with a peace treaty to formally bring the Korean War (1950-53) to an end, the summit did little to reduce

military tensions, but the North was still able to secure billions of dollars in The summit

encourage

KYRGYZSTAN

Lee Myung-bak celebrates his victory in the South Korean presidential elections on December 19 in Seoul.

assistance.

to

kind in the Middle

KUWAIT

economic

campaign

un-

derscored the fact that North-South economic cooperation had skyrocketed in recent years. In the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea, just across the demilitarized zone, more than 20,000 North Koreans were work-

Capital: Kuwait Head of state and government: Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jabir al-Sabah, assisted by Prime Minister Sheikh Nassar Muhammad al-Ahmad al-Sabah The year 2007 in Kuwait was marked by continuous tensions between the parliament and the government. Having increased in importance and selfconfidence after playing a pivotal role in January 2006 in removing the ailing emir, Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah alSalim al-Sabah, and replacing him with Emir Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jabir alSabah, the parliament attempted to play a greater role in government and function as an elected body. There

Area: 198,500 sq km (76,641 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,317,000

Capital: Bishkek Head of state: President Kurmanbek Bakiyev Head of government (appointed by the president): Prime Ministers Feliks Kulov,

Azim Isabekov from January 29, Almazbek Atambayev from March 29, Iskenderbek Aidaraliyev (acting) from November 28, and

Igor Chudinov from December 24 The political situation continued

in Kyrgyzstan

to worsen in 2007, with the

government ministers between January

deterioration reminiscent of the last months of former president Askar Akayev's tenure, before his flight from the country precipitated the 2005 “Tulip Revolution.” By 2007 there was general agreement that the revolution had been a failure. The political opposition asserted that Pres. Kurmanbek Bakiyev was worse than Akayev had been, and frequent demonstrations called for the president’s resignation, usually on grounds of corruption and favouritism. Another reason for disenchantment throughout the country was continuing

and September.

economic stagnation.

ing for South Korean companies. In August the North-South railway line was reconnected for the first time since the division of the Korean peninsula in

were even calls, inside and outside the

1945.

Council

South Korea's zeal for sending Christian missionaries abroad received unwelcome attention in July when a group of 23 missionaries was kidnapped in Afghanistan. Over the course of 43 days, two missionaries, including the groups leader, were executed, but the rest were released after the South

Whereas “elected” or appointed councils were weaker than the government in the GCC, in Kuwait the legislature was active and questioned acts of the executive. Pressures from the parliament led to the resignation of several

parliament, for a constitutional monarchy. Of the six countries that constituted the Gulf Cooperation (GCC),

Kuwait

was

unique.

425

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Laos Elena Skochilo/AP

Parliamentary elections were held on December 16. Bakiyevs Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party scored a resounding

victory

in

the elections, capturing 71 of the 90 seats in the legislature. The opposition Social

Democratic

Party

of Kyrgyzstan won 11 seats, and the pro-government Communist Party of Kyrgyzstan claimed 8. Opposition groups,

accused Riot police prepare to disperse demonstrators during an opposition rally in Bishkek, Kyrgyz., on

April 19.

Increasing numbers of Kyrgyz citizens were forced to find work abroad. When Russia adopted stricter regula-

however,

the government

of ballot fraud, demanded a vote recount,

and staged a series of protests in Bishkek and elsewhere. On December 24 the new parliament convened for the first time and confirmed Igor Chudinov as the new prime minister. (BESS BROWN)

tions (effective in January) on the em-

ployment of foreigners, Bakiyev immediately appealed to Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin to raise Kyrgyzstan’s assigned quota of migrant workers to half a million. Labour migration was in-

LAOS

creasingly serving to relieve economic

and social pressures that could lead to another political collapse. At the end of May, Bakiyev told a forum of international financial institutions that Kyrgyzstan would need a growth rate of 8-996 in order to reduce the poverty level to 3096 of the population; he promised to encourage the development of small business and to seek foreign investment in energy-development projects.

His objective was

to prevent

foreign debt from increasing. In March, protests in Bishkek calling for Bakiyevs resignation turned violent, with beatings of police as well as demonstrators, destruction of property, and the arrest of several prominent activists. In later protests, demonstrators called for the release of the activists as well as the resignation of Bakiyev. On January 15 Bakiyev signed a series of constitutional amendments that expanded the powers of the president. In September the Constitutional Court declared the amendments unconstitutional on the grounds that they had not been confirmed by popular referendum. Official results in the October 21 referendum showed 8096 of votes cast approved the new constitution, but observers from the nongovernmental Fair Election Association and other NGOs reported seeing numerous cases of ballot-box stuffing.

Area: 236,800 sq km (91,429 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,859,000

Capital: Vientiane Chief of state: President Choummaly Sayasone Head of government: Prime Minister Bouasone Bouphavanh The economy of Laos continued to grow steadily in 2007, with a growth

rate that was expected to remain at about 796. This expansion was driven to a large extent by foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in the natural resource and industry sectors through the ongoing construction of a number of large hydropower dams (Nam Theun 2, Nam Ngum 2, and Se Kaman 3) and

the development of mining activities. (The largest mines in the country, Sepon Mine in the south and Phu Bia Mine in the north, were both operated by Australian companies.) The main foreign investors included Thailand, Vietnam, China, Australia, France, Japan, Malaysia, and South Korea, fol-

lowed by relatively recent newcomers such as Singapore, Taiwan, India, and

Russia. The impact of these projects was enormous. Without these large hydropower and mining projects, Laos's GDP growth rate would have averaged nearly 2 points lower between 2003 and 2006. The continued rapid growth of the mining industry was expected; in its five-year plan (2006-11), the Ministry of Trade and Handicrafts envisioned annual growth of nearly 11.596 in mineral production. The negative social and environmental impacts of these projects were of concern, however. The creation in July 2007 of a new governmental agency the Water Resources and Environment Agency may have signaled the government's renewed commitment to a more holistic approach to the country's development. FDI had also been crucial over the previous few years for the growth of the agricultural sector in Laos, mainly through the production of rubber, eucalyptus, and cash crops (such as sugarcane and coffee). China, Vietnam,

and

Construction of the Nam Theun 2 hydropower dam in Laos proceeded despite concerns raised over the project’s environmental impact.

m

Be.

=

Edvard Baardsen—Asian Development Bank/AP

426

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Lebanon

Thailand were lead investors in this sector. Vietnamese companies were largely present in the south (Champassak, Sekong, Saravane,

and Attopeu), while

Chinese investors were very active in the northern provinces, mainly Oudomxay, Luang Namtha, Luang Prabang, and Phongsaly. Thai companies were mainly located in the central (Vientiane, Bolikhamxay) and southern (Kham-

mouane, Savannakhet) regions. The development of export-driven commercial agriculture, through long-term land concessions

(up to 50 years,

in some

cases renewable) and based largely on foreign investments and loans from international lending agencies (e.g., the Asian Development Bank), constituted an important instrument in the govern-

ments ambitious plans to modernize the countryside. Whether the benefits of such a top-down strategy would outweigh the costs remained to be seen. The very rapid transformation of upland farming in Laos was already raising much concern; many farmers were still ill-prepared to cope with the transition from subsistence to market-based livelihoods.

(VATTHANA PHOLSENA)

LATVIA

sia. Though welcomed abroad, the treaty remained controversial in Latvia because it affirmed the borders imposed by the Soviet regime and accepted the seizure of Latvian border counties by the U.S.S.R.; this, in turn,

raised questions related to the constitution and adherence to the legal notions central to the reestablishment in 1991 of the independent and democratic Republic of Latvia. The Constitutional Court announced on November 29 that the treaty did not violate the constitution, but it added clarifying commentary that allegedly offended | some Russian officials. Nonetheless, on December 18 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and

his Latvian counterpart, Maris Riekstins, exchanged the ratification documents in Riga and thus completed the formalities. Domestically, Latvia experienced the ills of an overheated economy. Though gross domestic product grew by an estimated 1196, the growth was offset by equally high inflation. Pres. Vaira Vike-Freiberga stepped down in July because the law did not permit her to serve a third term. Parliamentary support for the governments policies was ensured by strict discipline within the ruling coalition, led by the People's Party, whose nominee, Valdis Zatlers (a surgeon with no political experience) was elected by the parliament as the new president of Latvia.

Area: 64,589 sq km (24,938 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,274,000

Capital: Riga Chief of state: Presidents Vaira Vike-Freiberga and, from July 8, Valdis Zatlers Head of government: Prime Ministers Aigars Kalvitis and, from December 20, Ivars Godmanis Latvia’s foreign relations in 2007 developed along the anticipated lines. The EU extended the Schengen passportfree travel zone to Latvia, and Canada

permitted Latvians visa-free travel. Given the unpopularity of the war in Iraq from the outset, the calls to withdraw Latvian peacekeepers swelled in January when two soldiers (killed in Iraq in December 2006) were laid to rest in Riga. In late June, having fulfilled its international mission, the Latvian unit returned home, but more Lat-

vian peacekeepers were later sent to Afghanistan. Agreement was finally reached on March 27 on a border treaty with Rus-

served in the cabinet of Kalvitis and who represented the same four political parties. The parliament endorsed Godmanis and his cabinet on December 20. (DZINTRA BUNGS)

In his second term as prime minister, Aigars Kalvitis concentrated on expanding the powers of his office and censured individuals and institutions (including the Anti-Corruption Bureau and its head, Aleksejs Loskutovs) that questioned his government's policies and the practices and finances of the People’s Party, which Kalvitis led. The gradually declining public confidence in the government, the parliament, and the country’s legal system was accelerated by revelations of crime among high-ranking elected officials. Consequently, public confidence in the government and the parliament plummeted,

and mass

demonstrations

took

place in October and November. On December 5 Kalvitis and his government resigned. President Zatlers asked Ivars Godmanis, an experienced politician from Latvia’s Way to form a new government representing the five centreright parties. Unable to persuade the opposition New

Era to join his team,

Godmanis formed a government from mostly the same ministers who had

LEBANON

Area: 10,400 sq km (4,016 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,099,000 (including

unnaturalized Palestinian refugees estimated to number fewer than 400,000)

Capital: Beirut Chief of state: President Gen. Émile Lahoud, and, from November 24, Fouad Siniora (acting)

Head of government: Prime Minister Fouad Siniora

The political problems associated with choosing a new president for Lebanon in 2007

were

very intense

and

time-

consuming. Bickering continued in late October between the parliamentary majority, which insisted on an independent president, and the minority, which was pushing for a pro-Syrian president. On November 24 Gen. Émile Lahoud’s nine-year extended term as president came to an end, but no one was elected to replace him. On December 12 a car bomb killed Gen. Francois al-Hajj, the operations chief of the Lebanese army. A parliamentary consensus was reached to elect as president the commander of the army, Gen. Michael Suleiman, but many attempts to carry out the election failed. In the thick of continuing political conflict, two parliamentary deputies of the government bloc were killed. On September 19 deputy Antoine Ghanem of the Christian Phalange Party was killed in a car bombing in Beirut; his death came just a few months after another car bomb had killed Walid Eido,

a deputy of the Sunni-dominated Future Movement. Both belonged to the pro-government majority bloc in the parliament and were against the imposition of Syrian policies in Lebanon. The assassination of Ghanem came less than a week before the start of the process of selecting a successor to proSyrian Pres. Émile Lahoud. Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir’s attempt to bring the Maronite parliamentary delegates to agreement on a 427

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Lesotho Nabil Mounzer—epa/Corbis

ing Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD), broke with the party and formed the All Basotho Convention (ABC),

Prime

Minister

Bethuel

Pakalitha Mosisili called a snap election in February. The LCD retained power but with a reduced majority. The ABC, which came

in second,

and

other opposition parties then protested the manner in which seats were allocated to parties on the basis of proportional representation. In June the homes of leading politicians, including two

government

ministers,

were

at-

tacked, and for a time the government imposed a curfew in Maseru. It was only when Mosisili agreed that the matter should be sent for arbitration to the Southern African Development Community that the political temperature began to cool. Meanwhile,

an estimated

one in five

people faced the prospect of food shortages in late 2007. Planting of crops had Lebanese army soldiers patrol the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon on September 28.

declined because of a lack of resources,

and the HIV/AIDS

pandemic

reduced

available labour, but the main cause of

consensus presidential candidate was unsuccessful. The political stalemate took a heavy toll on the Lebanese economy. One study reported that 4096 of Lebanese of working age (22-62 years) were employed outside the country. Remittances, however, reached nearly $6 billion, or about $1,500 per citizen, which

was considered a very high rate. This explained how—despite the acute political and administrative crises—the country was able to function economically. The real GDP growth forecast for Lebanon in 2007 was put at about 1.596; GDP growth in 2006 had been flat, owing to the war with Israel. The cost of

of the majority Future Movement in the quest to elect a new president of Lebanon. The World Bank and the EU jointly provided Lebanon with more than $200 million in soft loans and grants to help the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora implement reforms and rebuild areas that were devastated by the Israeli military in 2006. In October 2007 about 240 fires started in different stretches of forests in the country. One person was killed, dozens were injured, and more

On

October

4 U.S. Pres.

George

ac) of woodland were destroyed. Investigators were looking into the possibility of arson. (MAHMOUD HADDAD)

428

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

LESOTHO

Area: 30,355 sq km (11,720 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,008,000

Capital: Maseru Chief of state: King Letsie III Head of government: Prime Minister Bethuel Pakalitha Mosisili

W.

Bush received Lebanese MP Saad alHariri. The meeting was viewed as a sign of support by Bush for the leader

areas

west

of the

mountains,

where

most crops were grown.

(CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

LIBERIA

*

than 2,500 ha (6,200

that war was estimated at $7 billion.

The Lebanese army successfully seized full control of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp on Sept. 2, 2007, after 105 days of fighting the extremist organization Fatah al-Islam. According to official estimates, the army sustained 163 deaths and 500 injuries, and Fatah al-Islam lost 222 fighters in battle and had at least 202 of their soldiers captured. The battle was considered a great success for the army and a definite setback for Fatah al-Islam, whose leader, though initially thought to have died in the fighting, escaped to an unspecified location.

the food crisis was the drought (the countrys worst in 30 years), which early in the year ravaged the low-lying

Lesotho again experienced a period of political turmoil in 2007. When Tom Thabane, a leading member of the rul-

Area: 97,754 sq km (37,743 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,750,000

Capital: Monrovia Head of state and government: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Despite the confinement of former Liberian president Charles Taylor in the The Hague, his spectre overshadowed an uneasy political situation in Liberia throughout 2007. Some Liberians believed that he had been unfairly singled out for prosecution, and some of Taylors supporters, including Senators Jewel Howard-Taylor (his former wife) and Adolphus Dolo (former rebel

commander), occupied influential positions in the legislature. Taylors extradition remained a thorny issue for Liberian

Pres.

Ellen

Johnson-Sirleaf,

who in 1989 had briefly backed him. Many believed that the United States

World Affairs: Liechtenstein

had pressured her to demand his extradition rather than have her establish a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission. Taylors warcrimes trial for murder, rape, and enlistment of child soldiers began in June in The Netherlands. UN officials on the peacekeeping mission feared that outbreaks of violence would occur during the trial. It was expected that testimony would incriminate important members of the political class. Such fears seemed to be borne out in July when former Liberian army commander

Gen.

Charles

Julue

(who

in

1994 had led an abortive government coup) and four others were arrested on charges of treason. Despite fears about Liberia's potential for disrupting regional peace, in August the UN issued an encouraging report on the country's progress since the end of the civil war in 2003. Although the Security Council extended the mandate of its peacekeeping force for another year, it cut the mission's strength by 2096 and also reduced the size of its police force. Economic conditions improved. In April the UN Security Council lifted the ban on Liberian diamond exports, which was imposed in 2001 to reduce the export of illegal "blood diamonds" that had helped finance the civil war. The country mourned the death of one of its foremost diplomats and jurists, Angie Elisabeth Brooks-Randolph. (See

LIBYA

Area: 1,759,540 sq km (679,362 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,342,000

Capital: Tripoli (policy-making body intermittently meets in Surt) Chief of state: (de facto) Col. Muammar alQaddafi; (nominal) Secretary of the General

People’s Congress Zentani Muhammad al-Zentani

Head of government: Secretary of the General People’s Committee (Prime Minister)

Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi

After nearly eight years of political and legal squabbles, in 2007 the case was settled involving five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who had been sentenced to death by Libyan courts on charges of having infected 426 Libyan children with HIV/AIDS. On July 24 all six were released and flown to Sofia, Bulg., to a jubilant welcome led by Bulgarian Pres. Georgi Purvanov, who immediately issued them a general pardon. Libya’s Supreme Judicial Council had commuted their death sentences to life imprisonment, and though a legal agreement between Libya and Bulgaria called for the six to serve their OBITUARIES.) (LARAY DENZER) sentences in their home country, Purvanov said that Libya had ignored evidence pointing to their innocence. The In the Liberian capital of Monrovia, a boy passes in Palestinian doctor had front of a sign illustrating reasons for the creation been granted Bulgarian of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for citizenship while in Libyan Liberia. custody. The defendants said that they were tortured to give false

confessions,

were unfounded, and Saif ul-Islam al-Qaddafi, the

of

Libyan

Muammar

leader

al-Qaddafi,

later disclosed in a TV interview that the case was “contrived” and that the police

investigation

in-

volved “manipulation” that led to presentation of misinformation to the courts. (See Bulgaria, above.)

(AYMAN M. EL-AMIR)

LIECHTENSTEIN

Area: 160 sq km (62 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 35,300

Capital: Vaduz Chief of state: Prince Hans Adam II

Head of government: Otmar Hasler

and

their lawyers blamed the children’s infection on poor health standards. Independent experts maintained that the charges son

Egyptian Foreign Ministry official revealed that 640 Egyptian nationals were being held in Libyan jails, with about 33 of them on death row. Negotiations were reportedly under way with Libyan authorities to settle these cases. In October Libya was elected as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council for a period of two years. Needing to garner a two-thirds majority in balloting by the 192-member UN General Assembly, Libya collected 178 votes and would begin its term on the Council in January 2008. Also in October, Libya's conciliatory initiative to bring all of the parties involved in the Darfur crisis in The Sudan to the negotiating table faltered as key rebel figures refused to attend a conference held in Sirte. Shukri Ghanem, president of the Libyan Oil Co., announced that 12 concessions would be awarded to foreign companies for offshore gas prospecting in 41 areas, including Surt basin in the north and Gdamis and Marzak in the south. In May Libya signed a $900 million contract with British Petroleum to drill for oil and gas in a concession area—an indication that earlier Western sanctions were being phased out.

Meanwhile,

an

Liechtenstein enjoyed a high standard of living comparable to that of its larger neighbours in 2007. A large variety of small businesses contributed about 40% of GDP. The fast-growing services sector based on banking, financial services, and tourism

contributed

another

26%. Agriculture remained the smallest sector at about 5%, and agricultural products constituted the principality’s largest percentage of imports. Liechtenstein in August began work on modernizing its justice system. The country until recently had only one judge and still had only one prison, which housed detainees pending trial and inmates with very short sentences. (Long sentences were served in Austrian

Rebecca Blackwell/AP

429

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Lithuania

prisons.) There was particular concern about the placement of detainees waiting to be deported. In order to comply with international standards, Liechten-

stein had to tackle a total revision of the Enforcement

of Sentences

Act,

new

amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a revision of the Court Organization Act, and the development of a Judicial Services Act. All of these changes were necessary to bring Liechtenstein into compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Liechtenstein had moved into closer alignment with European standards—for example, it was no longer legal to open a bank account anonymously—the country remained on the Organisation

for Economic

Co-opera-

tion and Development blacklist of uncooperative tax havens. (ANNE ROBY)

LITHUANIA

in 2007 Vilnius encouraged closer energy collaboration in Europe. On February 23 the Baltic states and Poland agreed to build a new nuclear power station in Lithuania, replacing the plant in Ignalina. At the Vilnius energy summit

in October,

the Baltic

states

and Black Sea regions were encouraged to bypass Russia and secure a reliable supply route for Caspian Sea oil. The oil supply that had ceased in 2006 from Russia

main

to Mazeikiu

oil refinery,

stanched.

Also,

Nafta, Lithuania’s

continued

Russia

to be

dismissed

the

Lithuanian claim that Moscow should pay compensation of $34 billion for its 50-year occupation of Lithuania. On May 10 the parliament approved Pres. Valdas Adamkus’s firing of Arvydas Pocius, the director of Lithuania’s

Capital: Vilnius Chief of state: President Valdas Adamkus

Head of government: Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas

In an effort to reduce Lithuania's dependency on Russian energy resources,

electric power station. In economic news, the

stable

GDP

growth rate of 9% was largely due to the significant increase (of $5.4 billion over the previous year) in foreign direct investment (FDI) in Lithuania. By the

beginning of the second quarter, FDI had soared to $13 billion.

In September the Lithuanian basketball team won the bronze medal at the Eurobasket championship in Spain. Earlier in the year Lithuania was the guest of honour at the Turin (Italy) International Book Fair. (DARIUS FURMONAVICIUS)

LUXEMBOURG

State Security Department. The declassified hearings of the parliamentary Committee

on

National

Security

and Defense indicated that the aim of Dujotekana (the natural gas import company founded by Rimantas Stonys, Antanas Bosas, and Viktor Us-

Area: 65,300 sq km (25,212 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,375,000

Gediminas Kirkilas) who had helped Gazprom acquire the Kaunas thermo-

paskich with the help of Russian intelligence) was to increase Russian influence in Lithuania. It engineered the takeover of the energy enterprises and attempted to acquire the railway transit across Lithuania to and from Russias occupied Kaliningrad region. Pocius had failed to transfer to the Committee on National Security and Defense the existing classified reports, which provided the link between Dujotekana and Albinas Januska (an adviser

to

Lithuanian

Prime

Minister

Lithuanian Pres. Valdas Adamkus (left) looks on as Georgian Pres. Mikheil Saakashvili speaks during a news conference on the first day of the Vilnius energy summit in October.

Area: 2,586 sq km (999 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 467,000

Capital: Luxembourg Chief of state: Grand Duke Henri

Head of government: Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker

The global competitiveness of Luxembourg’s economy, which ranked in ninth place in 2006, rose to third in 2007. While more than 80% of goods produced in Luxembourg were exported to the EU, the country was working actively to diversify its trade internationally. Of particular interest was the Asia-Pacific region. Luxembourg (along with Belgium) reached out to Vietnam, urging local companies to invest more

in that country.

Prime

Minister Jean-Claude Juncker’s government also pledged to support Vietnam’s relations with the EU. Luxembourg continued to work to develop its infrastructure and housing stock. A new airport terminal was scheduled to open in 2008. A major real-estate development in the heart of the city, which would offer apartments, office space, shopping, and entertainment, was also due to be completed in 2008. In August Luxembourgers mourned the death of former prime minister Gaston

Thorn.

(See OBITUARIES.)

His

appointment in 1981 as chair of the Commission of the European Economic Community, forerunner of the EU, set the stage for future European integration. Mindaugas Kulbis/AP

430

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(ANNE ROBY)

World Affairs: Malawi

MACEDONIA

of his immunity volvement

for his alleged

in 2001

in an

arms

indeal,

which allegedly cost the state €3 million (about $2.6 million). On July 31 re-

tired chief of staff Gen. Metodi Stamboliski was arrested in connection with the case. The European

Union

on January 30

Area: 25,713 sq km (9,928 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,044,000

declined to set a date for the start of

Capital: Skopje

accession

Chief of state: President Branko Crvenkovski

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said on February 8 that the EU was disappointed at the slow pace of reform in the country. Pres. Branko

Head of government: Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski

talks

Crvenkovksi,

with

for

Macedonia,

his

part,

and

said

on

Continued friction between ethnic Albanian and ethnic Macedonian parties as well as within the ethnic Albanian political spectrum characterized Macedonian politics for much of 2007. On January 27 the Democratic Union for Integration (BDI) and its partner, the Party for Democratic Prosperity (PPD), announced a boycott of the parliament, which it claimed was undermining the 2001 Ohrid Agreement. The PPD returned to the parliament after agreeing on May 20 to join the government; the party was assigned the Ministry of Local Self-Government in June. The BDI ended its boycott on May 29, after winning concessions from the government, including a commitment that certain laws could be passed only if supported by a majority of ethnic Albanian MPs. The Democratic Party of Albanians

fresh round of talks. On November 1 UN mediator Matthew Nimetz submitted new proposals to both sides. Macedonia’s economy showed some signs of further improvement, with 4.7% year-on-year GDP growth in the second quarter of 2007. The government projected 2-396 inflation and a budget deficit of less than 196. Unemployment, however, continued to be one of the main problems plaguing Macedonia. On January 1 a flat-rate in-

(PDSH) threatened to leave the govern-

come

ment for not having been consulted on the talks but ultimately stayed on. On June 25 ailing PDSH leader Arben Xhaferi stepped down; he was replaced by his deputy Menduh Thaçi. On August 30 the government unveiled a plan to add 13 seats to the parliament to represent smaller national minorities and the diaspora. The plan was rejected by the BDI. A fistfight over the issue on September 25 between two MPs from the BDI and the PPD led to a blockade of the parliament by armed militants; a special police force unit was called in to break it up. Some 1,500 ethnic Albanians gathered in Skopje on September 28 to protest alleged “state terror” against the Albanian community. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on April 16 opened the trial of former interior minister Ljube Boskovski and a senior police officer. The two defendants were charged with the murder of seven ethnic Albanians in the village of Ljuboten

corporate tax rates were

in August 2001.

On August 20 the parliament stripped former prime minister Vlado Buckovski

March 24 that he expected talks to start in 2008. Macedonia was one of five Balkan countries that signed an agreement on September 18 with the EU on easing visa restrictions. The disagreement with Greece over Macedonia's name remained unresolved for yet another year, although diplomats of both countries agreed on May 16 to start a

tax of 1296 was introduced,

and

also reduced

to 1296.

On October 16 Macedonia's most popular pop star, Tose Proeski, died in a

ber of amendments to the Madagascar constitution in 2007. They included reducing the size of the National Assembly from 160 to 127 seats, ending the autonomy of Madagascar’s provinces, and giving the president increased powers, including authority to make laws directly if a state of emergency were declared. More than 70% of those who voted in a national referendum held in April supported the constitutional changes, though the parliamentary opposition, which said that the new laws gave too much power to the president, called for a boycott. One of the changes meant that English would be introduced as an official language, alongside French.

France,

the

former

colonial

power, was the leading foreign investor, followed by Mauritius and China, and the government hoped to attract more Anglophone investment. In May a violent protest erupted in Tulear in southwestern Madagascar owing to the lack of electricity. The incident revealed the deep resentment among coastal people for the “highlanders,” the Merina people who dominated the island's politics. In July President Ravalomanana dissolved the National Assembly, saying that its size did not reflect the results of the referendum,

and called

a new

parliamentary election for September. This meant that voters went to the polls for the third time in less than a year. In the balloting Ravalomanana’s I Love Madagascar (TIM) party secured 106 of the 127 seats (before the constitutional reforms, TIM held 108 of 160 seats). The turnout was low, however, esti-

car crash in Croatia. His death, at the

mated at fewer than 50% overall and only 20% in the capital, Antananarivo.

age of 26, precipitated a day of national

(CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

mourning. (See OBITUARIES.) (STEFAN KRAUSE)

MALAWI

MADAGASCAR

Area: 118,484 sq km (45,747 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 13,603,000 Area: 587,051 sq km (226,662 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 19,683,000

Capital: Antananarivo Chief of state and head of government: President Marc Ravalomanana

Capital: Lilongwe; judiciary meets in Blantyre Head of state and government: President Bingu wa Mutharika

À bumper corn (maize) harvest for the

After winning election (with 54.896 of the vote) to a second five-year term in office

in December

2006,

Pres.

Marc

Ravalomanana pushed through a num-

second year in succession helped Malawi's recovery in 2007 from long periods of drought and made it possible in May to supply Zimbabwe with $120 million of the cereal. In August an 431

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Malaysia Maxim Marmur—AFP/Getty Images

additional 10,000 tons were provided for drought-stricken Lesotho and Swaziland.

Small farmers

(who made

up a large proportion of the Malawi population) were not so fortunate, and the government encouraged them to form cooperatives. In April the granting of a mining license to a subsidiary of an Australian company to develop uranium deposits to the west of Lake Malawi was viewed as a positive economic development. The mining operation was expected to create employment and become an important export earner, but critics were

concerned about its impact on the environment and public health. A month later a new economic and technical cooperation agreement was reached with South Africa to encourage further investment in Malawi. A High Court judgment on June 15 authorized the speaker of the legislature to expel from that body any members who changed their party affiliation. The opposition, which had refused to approve the budget, had pressed for this action because of the large number of MPs who had defected to Pres. Bingu wa Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party. Following strong pressure from civil bodies and the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, the opposition approved the budget, but President Mutharika prorogued the legislature; this action created an uproar from the opposition, which claimed that he had reneged on a promise to attend to the membership issue as part of an agreement to accept

the budget.

(KENNETH INGHAM)

MALAYSIA

Area: 329,876 sq km (127,366 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 26,572,000

Capital: Kuala Lumpur; administrative centre, Putrajaya Chief of state: Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Paramount Ruler) Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin

ibni al-Marhum Sultan Mahmud Head of government: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi On Aug. 31, 2007, Malaysia celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence from the U.K. with military flyovers, visits from foreign dignitaries 432

© 2008 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

(including Britain’s Prince Andrew), and giant projections of historical photographs on skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur. In a speech marking the occasion, Prime

Minister

Ab-

dullah Badawi called on Malaysians to uphold national unity, a contentious

concept in this ethnically and religiously diverse country

as

conservative

Islam continued its encroachment on secular life. In February Terengganu state established a network of informants— who reported to Islamic morality police—to monitor public spaces for illicit contact between the sexes. Malaysia's Supreme Court struck a decisive blow in May when it declined to enforce the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religious

practice

in

a

XN

eu

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Malaysia first astronaut, waves during a training session near Moscow in September; he later flew to the International Space Station.

case involving a Christian convert who wished to change the religion specified on her official identity card from Islam to Christianity. The court ruled that only the Shari‘ah

cases. In January severe flooding in the southern state of Johor killed 17 people and forced more than 100,000 to seek emergency shelter. On April 26 Malaysia enthroned Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin of Terengganu as the 13th king. The country’s first astronaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, flew on a mission to the International Space Station in October. Corruption continued to plague Malaysia’s government, with allegations of graft even forcing the resignation in March of the head of the government's anticorruption agency. Despite public criticism of its handling of corruption

dropped by about 10%. In January the U.S.-based computer manufacturer Dell, already operating a factory in Penang, opened a global technical support centre in Cyberjaya near the capital. AirAsia X, the long-haul counterpart of the Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, announced in September that it would begin service to Australia and China. One year after its launch in September 2006, Malaysia’s biotechnology initiative had attracted about 40 companies and investments of 1 billion ringgit (about $300 million). In August U.S.-based Actis Biologics unveiled plans for a $250 million factory in Malacca. Free-trade negotiations with the United States broke down in January, and in March the U.S. announced that

and other matters, however, the ruling

it was

National Front coalition appeared in no danger of being voted out of power and consolidated its majority in by-elections throughout the country against a fragmented opposition. Malaysia’s economy remained robust in 2007, with growth in GDP forecast at 5.5% for the year. The country enjoyed a large trade surplus, but with plantations in Johor damaged by flooding, exports of palm oil (Malaysia’s most valuable agricultural export)

February Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei pledged to protect 200,000 sq

(Islamic law) courts could decide such

postponing

the

agreement.

In

km (124,000 sq mi) of rainforest on the

island of Borneo, where palm oil plantations and logging had destroyed vast tracts of rainforest. In June the U.S. added Malaysia to a list of countries that it said were not doing enough to stop human trafficking, a charge Malaysia's government denied as inaccurate and unfair. (JANET MOREDOCK)

World Affairs: Mali Charles Tossou—Reuters/Landov

MALDIVES

C Area: 298 sq km (115 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 305,000

Capital: Male Head of state and government: President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom The political reform process initiated in Maldives in 2005 continued at a snail's pace throughout 2007 owing to political differences between the government of Pres. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and the opposition. The August 18 referendum on the nature of the political system was a major political exercise in which an overwhelming number of vot-

An unprecedented tidal surge lasting for four days (May 15-18) caused heavy damage to crops and property on about half of the populated islands. Expressing his satisfaction with economic growth as a result of the remarkable performance of the tourism sector, Gayoom, in his annual opening address to the People’s Majlis (parliament), promised to evolve policies and mechanisms in pursuit of social progress, prosperity, stability, and peace. The development of fisheries in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner was given priority. (PONMONI SAHADEVAN)

MALI

ers (about 93,000 of 150,000) chose a

presidential system oom

favoured by Gay-

over a parliamentary-type

govern-

ment backed by the opposition. In the wake of the first-ever bomb explosion in Male (on September 29) targeting foreign tourists, the government remained seriously concerned over the growing threat of Islamic extremism. As a countermeasure,

Area: 1,248,574 sq km (482,077 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 11,995,000

Capital: Bamako Chief of state: President Amadou Toumani Touré Head of government: Prime Ministers Ousmane Issoufi Maiga and, from September 28, Modibo Sidibé

the government

began to crack down on religious groups advocating Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Among other steps, the government declared that bearded mullahs or clerics were barred from entering the country unless invited by the authorities.

Malian Pres. Amadou Toumani Touré won a second term in office in the April 29, 2007, presidential polls by taking more than 68% of the vote. Opposition candidates fared so poorly that most of their leaders failed to win in their own

Maldivian Pres. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom talks with school students during the opening ceremony of a summit on global climate change held in Male in November.

Malian Pres. Amadou Toumani Touré appears during his second-term inauguration ceremony in Bamako on June 9. constituencies.

Turnout

was

low; just

over 3696 of the electorate went to the polls. On May 4, claiming fraud and intimidation on the part of the government, opposition parties formally petitioned the Constitutional Court to invalidate the election. Taking into account the margin of Touré’s victory and the consensus of international observers that the election was well-organized and generally fair, the court approved the results. In the July legislative elections, turnout was again low. Touré's coalition, the Alliance for Democracy and Progress (ADEMA), won 128 of the 147

seats in the National Assembly. On September 3 ADEMA leader Dioncounda Traoré was elected to a five-year term as president of the National Assembly. In other news, following negotiations with the country's main union, the government announced on July 19 that all civil servants would receive a 1096 wage increase over the following two years. In late August members of a dissident Tuareg group, allied with the Niger Movement for Justice, launched two at-

tacks on military targets in northern Mali. The rebels had refused to accept the 2006 peace settlement. At least 35 soldiers were kidnapped, while 11 civilians were reported killed by land mines. On September 16, seven Tuaregs

and one soldier died in a skirmish near Tinzaouatène, in northeastern Mali. (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER) Sanka Vidanagama—AFP/Getty Images

433

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Malta

MALTA

*

a joint venture between Tecom Invest-

clear Claims Tribunal

ments and Sama Dubai. At the Gitex Technology Fair in Dubai in September,

lion compensation to Marshall Islanders exposed to fallout during the 1954 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The award brought an end to an action initiated 15 years earlier, but the plaintiffs were unlikely to receive compensation because the tribunal had virtually

Maltese

Prime

Minister

Lawrence

Chief of state: President Eddie Fenech Adami

Gonzi unveiled the master plan and model of the project, the biggest foreign investment Malta had ever seen. Tourism to Malta was the best since 2001, while GDP was expected to rise 4%, Malta’s request in February to join the euro zone was granted with effect

Head of government: Prime Minister

from Jan. 1, 2008, as the country had

Area: 316 sq km (122 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 409,000

Capital: Valletta

Lawrence Gonzi

In 2007 the EU finally responded to Malta's pleas for help to control the illegal immigrants reaching the island. During the summer, patrols run by the EU border agency Frontex turned back more than 700 African would-be immigrants.

Franco

Frattini,

the European

justice commissioner, praised Malta’s record in the fight against the flow of illegal immigrants and rejected criticisms by some members of the European Parliament. He denied charges that Maltese authorities had refused in May to accept 27 Africans who had survived by clinging to a tuna fishing pen, explaining that this happened within the search and rescue (SAR) region of Libya and not of Malta,

an

EU

member

state.

MAURITANIA

Area: 1,030,700 sq km (398,000 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,124,000

MARSHALL ISLANDS

Capital: Nouakchott Chief of state: Chairmen of the Military Council for Justice and Democracy Ely Ould Mohamed Vall and, from April 19, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi Head of government: Prime Ministers Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubakar and, from April 20, Zeine Ould Zeidane

* Area: 181 sq km (70 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 56,600

Capital: Majuro Head of state and government: President Kessai Note The economy of the Marshall Islands in 2007 remained heavily dependent on payments from the U.S., under the terms of the Compact of Free Association, and U.S. aid represented 60.296 of the Marshall Islands’ 2007 budget of $124.6 million. The economy continued to flounder, and at one point the government, which employed 64% of the borrowed

$500,000

from

compact funds (without appropriate authority from the U.S. Department of the Interior) to pay for fuel for the countrys main power utility. The Interior Department objected but was constrained by difficulties over land-rental agreements for the U.S. Army’s Kwajalein Atoll missile-testing range. The U.S. and Marshalls governments signed a deal in 2003 on the use of the site until 2086, but local landowners were reluctant to renew the current land lease,

due to expire in 2016, unless infrastructure was improved in areas where local workers resided. More tension arose over a subsidiary agreement of the original compact, which provided for settlement of all claims arising from the U.S. nuclear tests conducted between 1946 and 1958 at Bikini and Enewetak atolls. The Nu-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

(CLUNY MACPHERSON)

(ALBERT GANADO)

workforce,

A group of 27 Africans cling to a tuna fishing pen after their boat sank off the coast of Malta in late May.

$1 bil-

achieved a high degree of sustainable economic convergence with the EU member states that used the unified currency and had fulfilled the necessary conditions to adopt the euro.

Frattini

also rejected accusations that Malta had refused to accept 26 migrants rescued at sea by a Spanish tugboat. In February Malta signed a deal with Italy on a wide-ranging cultural collaboration to take place from 2007 to 2009. In April the final agreement to set up a Smart City in Malta was signed between the government and Smart City,

no funds.

awarded

Voters went to the polls on March 11, 2007, to elect a new president for Mauritania from among 19 candidates, but none of them were members of the military junta that had seized power in 2005 from Pres. Sidi Ahmed Ould Taya. On March 25 Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh

Abdallahi,

who

had served

in

Taya's cabinet, took 5396 of the vote in the second round, defeating opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah. The balloting marked Mauritania's first truly democratic presidential election since independence in 1960. The African Union indicated its approval by lifting Mauritania’s suspension (since the 2005 coup) from that body. On June 8 President Abdallahi announced that he and his cabinet would take a 2596 pay cut owing to lower-than-projected oil revenues. On May 21, after months of postponements, the trial began of some 20 members of militant Islamic groups. President Abdallahi stated that he would continue to enforce the junta's policy of cracking down on dissidents who allegedly were linked to al-Qaeda. The delayed rainy season began with a vengeance on August 7, two weeks after Abdallahi had asked the Mauritanians to pray for rain. Within days, devastating flash floods had wiped out thousands of homes in the southeastern community of Tintane. Heavy rains later that month inundated villages in the

World Affairs: Mexico Georges Gobet—AFP/Getty Images

progressive programs on health, education, and poverty when the Ibrahim Index for African Governance ranked Mauritius number one on its index of sub-Saharan countries. Paul Berenger, former prime minister and head of the

In mid-May the High Court in London rejected an appeal made by the U.K.’s Foreign Office to block the right

tensive use of the armed forces for this purpose because military operations of this kind had often produced serious human rights violations. Still other observers expressed fears about the longer-term consequences of expanding the militarys role in domestic affairs. On balance, though, public opinion polls indicated strong public support for Calderón's actions. The fact that Mexico experienced an unprecedented surge in drug-related killings, kidnappings, and gruesome violence (including beheadings) in early 2007 did sug-

of exiled Chagos islanders, or Ilois, to

gest, however, that any progress against

return to the Chagos Archipelago (British-controlled territory but claimed by Mauritius). During the early 1970s the British had removed about

drug cartels would be slow. Between March and September the Congress enacted legislation in three important areas. Most controversially, in March the Calderón administration pushed through a modification of the retirement pension system operated by the Social Security Institute for State

Mauritian Militant Movement

(MMM),

became leader of the opposition in the National Assembly in September when Nando Bodha stepped down from the post.

Mauritania’s first democratically elected president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, is sworn into office on April 19.

2,000 islanders from Diego Garcia, the

southern regions of Gorgol and Assaba. On August 9 the parliament voted to

largest of the islands, to allow the U.S. to build a military base there.

impose prison terms of up to 10 years on those practicing, praising, or pro-

(MARY EBELING)

moting slavery. Although such labour had

been

banned

since

1981,

slave

owners had not faced criminal penalties for continuing the practice. (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

Workers (ISSSTE). The measure raised

MEXICO

tirement

&

MAURITIUS Area: 1,964,375 sq km (758,450 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 106,535,000

Capital: Mexico City Head of state and government: President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa Area: 2,040 sq km (788 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,263,000

Capital: Port Louis Chief of state: President Sir Anerood Jugnauth Head of government: Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam Prompted by a downturn in two key industrial sectors, textiles and sugar production (following price cuts and the imposition of global trade quotas), Mauritius continued in 2007 to bolster its economy through strategic partnerships with several countries and forged trade agreements with China and Pakistan. Trade pacts had been signed in 2005 with India and in 2006 with the U.S. In February 2007 Mauritius was hit by four typhoons that left nine people dead and caused serious disruption to the sugar and textile industries, deepening the financial losses for both industries. The country was recognized for its strong record on human rights, its anticorruption legislation, and its

the retirement age for public-sector employees and phased in individual re-

Mexicos conflictive 2006 presidential election continued to cast a shadow over political events in Mexico during 2007. Over time, however, Pres. Felipe

Calderón proved capable of slowly building public support and moving his legislative agenda forward. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the presidential candidate of the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who

narrowly lost the hotly contested presidential race, retained significant public visibility. Yet his attempt to establish a "legitimate" parallel government came to naught, and some (though not all) PRD congressional representatives and state government officials were willing to conduct normal business with the Calderón administration. Calderón began his term with a highvisibility militarized offensive against drug-trafficking cartels. By early 2007 he had deployed 30,000 army troops and federal police in such operations in nine different states. Human rights advocates voiced concerns about the ex-

savings

accounts.

The

very

high commissions charged by private financial firms prevented a similar 1997 reform of the Mexican Social Security Institute

private-sector

pension

system from achieving its goals of significantly expanding pension coverage and raising the rate of saving. This was one reason why Calderón's initiative sparked intense opposition from public-sector unions, even though public employees currently working were not affected by the ISSSTE measure. In September the federal Chamber of Deputies finally approved a fiscal-reform package designed to increase tax revenues by 2.5-396 of GDP and thereby provide funds for substantially expanded public-sector infrastructure investment and social spending. A 16.5% levy on net business income (after deductions for long-term investments, physical inputs, salaries, and employee benefits) was

a central feature of the

legislation. The measure also increased incentives for state governments to raise their own revenues, and it reduced

somewhat the governments reliance on the state-owned Mexican Petroleum Co. (PEMEX)

as a source

of tax revenue,

which thereby freed up additional resources for PEMEX's exploration and development projects. Because former president Vicente Fox had twice failed to secure congressional approval of taxreform proposals, many observers applauded President Calderón's more effective negotiating tactics and the prospect that, even though Calderón's 435

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Micronesia

National Action Party (PAN) lacked a

majority of seats in either the federal Chamber of Deputies or the Senate, his administration might not be caught in executive-legislative gridlock. Federal legislators, reacting to both the very high cost of Mexican political campaigns and the controversies sparked by privately funded television advertisements during the 2006 presidential race, also approved a law that sharply limited private campaign spending and restricted parties’ television and radio spots to governmentprovided airtime closely regulated by

international attention in April when it legalized abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The action drew predictably harsh condemnation from Mexicos Roman Catholic hierarchy and the centre-right PAN, which had long counted Catholics among

its

core

supporters.

The

Although criticized by the media as an infringement on the freedom of expression, the measure received support from across the political spectrum. In exchange for its support for Calderón's fiscal-reform package, however, the PRD insisted that the electoral reform bill also include a provision providing for the early removal of some of the

Calderón administration insisted that abortions could not be performed in hospitals that the federal government operated in the Federal District, a position that set the stage for a Supreme Court review of the matter. In foreign affairs the Calderón administration worked hard to repair diplomatic relations with Cuba and Venezuela, which had been severely strained during the Fox years. Within North America the Mexican government pursued discussions with Canada and the United States concerning a "Security and Prosperity Partnership" designed to deepen cooperation between the three countries. Mexico demon-

IFE’s

strated its commitment

the Federal

Electoral

executive

Institute

counselors,

(IFE).

whose

terms would normally run until 2010. The PRD especially blamed the IFE's president, Luis Carlos Ugalde, for errors and omissions that allegedly deprived López Obrador of victory in his 2006 presidential bid. This provision raised widespread concern about the future institutional autonomy of the IFE, which was widely credited with ensuring Mexico's smooth transition to a competitive electoral democracy. The PRD-dominated Federal District legislative assembly drew national and

grants remained significant irritants in bilateral relations. Mexico’s GDP rose by 3.0% during 2007, compared with 4.8% in 2006. The annual

rate

of inflation

(consumer

prices) was 4.0%. In 2006, for the first time in many years, the formal sector had generated sufficient employment to meet the demand created by new entrants into the labour force. The gap between job supply and demand reemerged in 2007, however, as the U.S.

economy—Mexico’s principal export market and a source of employment for millions of Mexican emigrants— slowed. The U.S. economic

slowdown,

especially in industries such as home construction,

also affected the volume

of cash remittances that emigrants sent back to Mexico ($23 billion in 2006).

(KEVIN J. MIDDLEBROOR)

MICRONESIA, FEDERATED STATES OF

to cooperation

with the U.S. government in the battle against organized drug trafficking by extraditing several major traffickers to the United States. It also conducted extensive negotiations with the United States over greatly expanded U.S. financial and technical assistance (equipment and training) to combat drug-related organized crime. However, the U.S. government's failure to enact a progressive immigration-reform bill and continuing U.S. efforts to tighten border security to block Mexican mi-

a

*

d

y

Area: 701 sq km (271 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 111,000

Capital: Palikit, on Pohnpei Head of state and government: Presidents Joseph J. Urusemal and, from May 11, Emanuel Mori In May 2007 the newly elected congress of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)

In the city of Manzanillo in the Mexican state of Colima, soldiers march at an incineration site as some 23 tons of cocaine, discovered hidden in containers that had been shipped from Colombia, are destroyed.

voted

for

Emanuel

(Manny)

Mori of Chuuk state as president. Within weeks Mori appointed a new cabinet and introduced a bill to reorganize the executive branch. Some of the weaknesses of the FSM's loose federal structure became apparent

in 2007.

Some

$100

million

in

funds from the U.S. Compact of Free Association, along with an additional $36 million in grants, flowed annually through the FSM government to the governments of the four semiautonomous states, which were responsible for the funds’ administration. In 2007

two

states,

Chuuk

and

Kosrae,

found themselves in serious budgetary difficulties,

ee

e=

Alfredo Estrella—AFP/Getty Images

436

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

and Mori,

a former presi-

dent of the FSM Development Bank, attempted to resolve those problems. These economic issues would have been even more serious were it not for the fact that the FSM had a decline in population growth as a result of a high

World Affairs: Mongolia

emigration rate (about 21 persons per 1,000 population). The commitment of U.S. support at existing levels until the Compact of Free Association expired in 2023 also effectively reduced some of the pressure on the government to improve economic performance. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

MOLDOVA

a referendum was held on membership in the European Union, but only 29% of those polled were in favour of joining NATO. The Communists, therefore,

ascendant since their first major electoral victory in 2001, could no longer manage internal politics and information sources as confidently as before. By contrast, Igor Smirnov, the leader of breakaway Transdniestria, cracked down sharply on peaceful opposition after his parliament in January annulled a decision that had left open the prospect of a confederation between the pro-Russian breakaway territory and Moldova.

Area: 33,843 sq km (13,067 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,794,000 (excluding

(TOM GALLAGHER)

July

25,

2007,

Moldovan

Pres.

Vladimir Voronin ended months of speculation and confirmed that he had been negotiating with the Kremlin in an effort to secure an end to the secession of Transdniestria, where much

of the country’s industry was located. In recent years Voronin had engaged in a balancing game between the West and Russia, and this move suggested that he was tilting toward Russia. He had been especially shaken in 2006 by the imposition of an embargo on Moldovan wine by Russia, a major consumer. Voronin might also have feared that a Western orientation could erode his own power base, which rested on the Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova

The PCRM elections

oralships,

(PCRM).

suffered reverses in local

in June,

down

winning

from

368

328

may-

in 2003.

Dorin Chirtoaca, a member of the Lib-

eral Party, was elected mayor of Chisinau, the capital, with the support of 6296 of voters. In July Chairman of Parliament Marian Lupu spoke out in favour of the

Area: 1.97 sq km (0.76 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 34,000 Chief of state: Prince Albert II

Head of government: Minister of State

sign.

Jean-Paul Proust

Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2007 extended his efforts to fight catastrophic climate change. At the Clinton Global Initiative on September 27, he joined forces with UN Foundation Chairman Ted Turner to announce their support for the initiatives of the Global Leadership for Climate Action. The prince stated, ^I will personally devote time and energy to mobilize the resources and political will on a global scale to address the environmental challenges of the planet.” Planning continued on Monacos extension of its territory into the Mediterranean. Monaco’s director of planning joked that “we are pacifists and obviously can’t invade our neighbours to gain more space, so we have to find other ways.” The new district would be built on the surface of the water in order to avoid disturbing the marine life below. It would add about 10 ha (25 ac)

to Monaco’s current land surface of 197 ha

behind "unchanged common goals" of further integration with Europe, a

Building, expected to begin about 2010, would include yacht moorings, upscale shops, and more luxury housing. Monaco in 2007 surpassed London as the location with Europe’s most-expensive apartments, with rents as high as

resolution,

and

mod-

ernization of the state. A return to the Russian orbit would not go unchallenged, it appeared—even in Voronin's own party. À poll in May showed that 72.296 of Moldovans would vote "yes" if

The ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) suffered a serious blow to its prestige in June 2007 tional assembly) Chairman Tsendiyn Nyamdorj, who was accused of having altered the Minerals Law and the AntiCorruption Law after their texts were adopted in July 2006 by the Great Hural. Following months of MPRP infighting, the Constitutional Court ruled that his alterations were unconstitutional, and Nyamdorj was obliged to re-

continuation of transparty cooperation

Transdniestrian

Capital: Ulaanbaatar Chief of state: President Nambaryn Enhbayar Head of government: Prime Minister Miyeegombyn Enhbold

with the dismissal of Great Hural (na-

Transdniestria)

On

Area: 1,564,116 sq km (603,909 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,609,000

MONACO

nearly 300,000 Moldovans working abroad but including the 550,000 persons in Capital: Chisinau Chief of state: President Vladimir Voronin Head of government: Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev

MONGOLIA

(487

ac)—about

a 5%

increase.

£1,066 (about $2,140) per square foot. (ANNE ROBY)

Deputy

Chairman

Danzangiyn

Lundeejantsan was elected the Great Hural’s new speaker, and MPRP leader Doloonjingiin Idevhten was named as his deputy. The MPRP then chose Nyamdorj as its new leader. The erosion of Prime Minister Miyeegombyn Enhbold's "national solidarity" coalition government continued with the sacking of two non-MPRP ministers—Lamjavyn Gundalay (health, Party of the People) in January and Bazarsadiyn Jargalsayhan (industry and trade, Republican Party) in April. Amid growing pressure between factions supporting Pres. Nambaryn Enhbayar and former president Natsagiyn Bagabandi, both past chairmen of the party, MPRP members questioned whether Enhbold should remain both MPRP chairman and prime minister. In September

MPRP

Secretary

Yon-

dongiyn Otgonbayar lost the prestigious chairmanship of Ulaanbaatar's MPRP

Committee.

The MPRP’s policy-making Little Hural in August increased its membership from 250 to 288, earmarking new talent ahead of the partys 25th congress, which would make the final selection of MPRP candidates for the Great Hural elections set for June 2008. At the congress meeting in October, Secretary-General

Sanjiyn

Bayar

was

elected chairman of the MPRP, replacing Enhbold; Bayar was also expected to replace Enhbold as prime minister. 437

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Montenegro Jose Luis Roca—AFP/Getty Images

Otgonbayar became the new party secretary-general. À contract with Ivanhoe

Mines

(Rio

Tinto) for exploitation of Mongolia's prime gold and copper deposit at Oyuu Tolgoy was delayed for many months following public protests and government indecision. Several regions suffered problems that were caused by gangs of unlicensed miners, pollution, and environmental damage. Mongolia's poverty-reduction efforts were given a boost when President Enhbayar and U.S. Pres. George W. Bush in October signed a $285 million fiveyear

poverty-reduction-assistance

pro-

gram. The Asian Development Bank forecast Mongolia GDP growth of 896 for 2007 and 2008. (ALAN J.K. SANDERS)

MONTENEGRO

Area: 13,812 sq km (5,333 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 624,000

Capital: Cetinje; administrative centre, Podgorica Chief of state: President Filip Vujanovic Head of government: Prime Minister Zeljko Sturanovic

bolster ties with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Foreign Minister Milan Rocen underscored the country’s neutral stance regarding the final status of Kosovo,

saying

that Montenegro

was

not able to “contribute to the solution of the problem,” but stressed that it would foster close relations with Serbia. The World Bank praised Montenegro’s “amazing” economic progress. In 2006 the economy expanded 8.2%. For the first quarter of 2007, foreign direct investment (of €195.4 million [€1 = about $1.35]) was threefold higher than

the same period the previous year. The Montenegro budget showed a surplus; inflation

was

under

10%;

and

unem-

ployment continued its decline from about 19% in 2005 to 12% at the end of August. Monthly wages were estimated at €260. Montenegro’s parliament voted against the privatization of a stateowned coal mine and the Pljevlja power plant that generated one-third of Montenegro’s electricity. Investors from Russia, which in 2006 reportedly invested some €79 million in Montenegro, had shown interest in purchasing the facilities.

(MILAN ANDREJEVICH)

MOROCCO

Moroccans on November 5 protest the visit of King Juan Carlos of Spain to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, which had long been claimed by Morocco. river valley and the development of new tourist

facilities

in Marrakesh,

these

improvements did little to alleviate the high unemployment in Morocco. In early March a young man from the poverty-stricken district of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca blew himself up in an Internet café after an altercation with the owner. On April 10 three suicide bombers blew themselves up in Casablanca and a fourth was shot by police. Four days later the U.S. consulate and a privately run U.S. cultural centre came under attack when two suicide bombers (brothers) detonated their

In October 2007 Montenegros parliament adopted the country’s first constitution after gaining independence from Serbia in June 2006. The new constitution defined Montenegro as a state of citizens that is democratic and ecologically receptive and committed to social justice. The country marked several important steps toward EU membership by joining the Council of Europe and by signing the Stabilization and Association Agreement and other security arrangements with NATO, including a military agreement allowing EU Force transit through Montenegro. The governing coalition of the Democratic Party of Socialists and the Social Democratic Party (headed by Prime Minister Zeljko Sturanovic) unveiled a judiciary-reform program to combat corruption, pledged to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on any war crimes committed in Montenegro, pre-

pared draft laws on national security, and began the planned reduction of its armed forces. Montenegro agreed to 438

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Area: 710,850 sq km (274,461 sq mi), includ-

ing the 252,120-sq-km (97,344-sq-mi) area of the disputed Western Sahara annexation Population (2007 est.): 31,704,000, of which Western Sahara 480,000 (excluding 150,000

Saharawi refugees living near Tindouf, Alg., from 1975)

Capital: Rabat Head of state and government: King Muhammad VI, assisted by Prime Ministers Driss Jettou and, from September 19, Abbas al-Fassi Morocco had been relatively free from political violence following the suicide bombings in May 2003 in Casablanca, but by 2007 the potential for violence had flared once again. There was growing frustration with the government, which was unable to address the poor economic situation. Though a recent flood of foreign investment from the Persian Gulf states had promoted a number of prestige projects, such as the refurbishment of the Bou Regreg

explosives near the buildings. Police later apprehended three suspected accomplices and were able to connect all the perpetrators in the March-April bombings. A bomb that had been placed on a tourist bus in Meknes in August was disarmed before it exploded. In the legislative elections on Sept. 7, 2007, only 37% of voters went to the polls, the lowest turnout in the country’s history. Though the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) was expected to double its representation in the lower house of the parliament (and it had won the largest share of the vote), gerrymandering of electoral constituency boundaries denied the PJD the largest number of seats. The veteran nationalist Istiqlal party won 52 seats, followed by the PJD (46), the centrist Popular Movement (MP; 41), and the

conservative National Rally of Independents (RNI; 39). The former ruling party, the Union of Socialist Popular Forces (USFP), came in fifth with only 38 seats.

The king honoured an earlier pledge by asking Abbas al-Fassi, the leader of Istiqlal, to form a new government.

World Affairs: Myanmar (Burma) AFP/Getty Images

Relations with Spain became strained in November when King Juan Carlos of Spain visited Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves that had long been claimed by Morocco. Relations between the two countries had improved dramatically since Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero took office in 2004.

(GEORGE JOFFÉ)

MOZAMBIQUE

June the World Bank pledged that donors would give another $79 million to help implement the country’s education plans for 2008-09, and the U.S. Millennium Challenge Cooperation promised an additional $506.9 million over the next five years in recognition of the governments efforts to boost economic growth and to reduce poverty. After lengthy delays and in the face of considerable opposition, teams from the countrys National Elections Commission left for the provinces to prepare for the country’s first-ever elections to provincial councils. The fixing of a date for the elections was, however,

Area: 799,379 sq km (308,642 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 20,906,000

Capital: Maputo Head of state and government: President Armando Guebuza, assisted by Prime Minister Luisa Diogo

repeatedly postponed. In September there was unease when three mosques were burned in Niassa province. The country’s reputation for religious tolerance remained strong, and many thought that the crime had been committed by disaffected individuals venting their anger against society rather than as an indication of religious division.

The year 2007 began in Mozambique with a series of disasters. Floods in January and February left 120,000 people homeless

in Manica,

(KENNETH INGHAM)

Photos posted on the Internet show (top left) the body of a Japanese video journalist on the ground after being shot by Myanmar security forces and (bottom) the body being carried to a restricted area. The journalist, Kenji Nagai, had been covering the prodemocracy demonstrations in Myanmar.

MYANMAR (BURMA)

Sofala, Tete, and

Zambezia provinces, while late in February Cyclone Favia caused serious damage in parts of Inhambane, Man-

Sd chu

ica, and Sofala provinces. In contrast,

in the south severe drought and intense heat destroyed 197,000 ha (about 486,800 ac) of crops. Tourism was also affected by both the floods and the heat. As a result of all these problems, the cost of bread soared by 43% in May, while the price of fuel simultaneously rose by 6.1% and then increased by an additional 17.4% in June. There was serious concern of a more long-term nature about the threat to the country’s forests from the heavy overseas demand for hardwood. China,

in particular, was ignoring regulations that were introduced to control the export of timber and to encourage foreigners to help in developing local industry. In April reports of the serious extent of illegal logging induced environmental groups to redouble their ef forts to alert the population of the implications for Mozambique’s future. In spite of these setbacks, Mozambique’s reputation for stability and security, together with the government's efforts to wipe out corruption and to increase food production, continued to impress foreign donors. In May 19 donors and funding agencies announced their support for the 2008 budget by offering $385.8 million. In

Area: 676,577 sq km (261,228 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 47,374,000

Capital: Naypyidaw (site near Pyinmana) Head of state and government: Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council Gen. Than Shwe, assisted by Prime Ministers Lieut. Gen. Soe Win and, from April, Thein Sein (acting)

The year 2007 turned out to be a tumultuous one for Myanmar. On August 15 the ruling military junta drastically hiked the price of gasoline and diesel fuel as well as compressed natural gas, which thereby suddenly increased the cost of transport and other services. With inflation having hit an estimated

crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations began on September 26. Security forces raided monasteries and houses at night. Between 6,000 and 7,000 people were reportedly detained. The junta claimed that 10 people were killed when troops opened fire on demonstrators to disperse them, but diplomats and dissidents put the death toll much higher. In response,

U.S.

Pres.

George

W.

Bush announced new sanctions against Myanmar, which included tightening controls on U.S. exports to the country. On October 15 the EU tightened its economic sanctions by banning imports of timber, gemstones, and precious metals from Myanmar. The UN urged China, India, and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to use their

influence to press for dialogue between the regime and its political opposition. At the height of domestic unrest, For-

17.796 in 2005 and 21.496 in 2006, the

eign Minister Nyan Win visited Beijing

rise in fuel prices placed added pressure on Myanmar's already beleaguered economy. The move elicited a defiant public response that caught the authorities by surprise and soon snowballed into the largest show of public disenchantment with the government in two decades. Led by Buddhist monks, tens of thousands of angry protesters took to the streets for weeks in

to brief the Chinese leadership and to seek that country’s support at the UN. On October 11 the UN Security Council passed a nonbinding statement “strongly deploring” the regime’s use of violence against the monk-led protests. In late September UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari had been sent to Myanmar to meet with junta leader Gen. Than Shwe and detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose

August-September.

A

government

439

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Namibia

house arrest had been extended for another year on May 25. Myanmar denied the International Red Cross access to detainees, however. The government appointed Gen. Aung Kyi, Myanmar’s labour minister, as an intermediary to hold talks with Suu Kyi. Myanmar’s economy moved forward at an approximate growth rate of 2.9%. Huge commitments of foreign direct investment in the energy sector were made by China, Thailand, Russia, and

India. Two-way trade between China and Myanmar increased 39.4% in the first seven months of 2007 over the same period in 2006, reaching $1.11 billion. Among ASEAN member countries Myanmar had the lowest per capita

income.

On

September

26

Transparency International labeled Myanmar (along with Somalia) as the most corrupt state on its annual 180country Corruption Perceptions Index. Myanmar’ prime minister, Lieut. Gen. Soe Win, died on October 12 in Yangon. (See OBITUARIES.) Soe Win,

who was known for his involvement in two brutal suppressions of democracy advocates, had been replaced earlier in the year by Thein Sein, who was named acting prime minister in April. (MOHAN MALIK)

NAMIBIA

head of the country’s National for Human Rights for Nujoma brought before the International nal Court on charges relating atrocities committed by SWAPO

Society to be Crimito the during

the liberation war, a call Pohamba

dis-

missed as frivolous, might backfire and increase Nujoma’s popularity. There was even speculation that if Nujoma remained party president, he could run again for president of the country in 2009, on the grounds that the two-term limitation in the constitution meant two successive terms.

The main Caprivi high treason trial finally ended with lengthy sentences for the accused (10 men were sentenced to

a combined total of 314 years of imprisonment). Though Namibia's position on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index improved slightly, numerous cases of corruption came to light during the year. By September six senior police officers were facing charges or were under investigation for alleged corruption. Namibia's international standing also suffered owing to its continued support for the regime of Pres. Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and its invitation to Mugabe to make a state visit. The government was, however, able to persuade the De Beers diamond-mining company to sell it a larger share of its sea-floor mining and to agree to establish a Namibia Diamond

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer signed an agreement for Australia to provide an additional U.S.$15 million in aid to Nauru, though both countries denied that the money was a direct payment for detention facilities. In September, 72 of the Sri Lankans were granted refugee status, but they remained in detention on Nauru. Because Naurus traditional source of national income, its phosphate deposits, was all but depleted, the government welcomed Australia's decision to retain Nauru for offshore processing of asylum seekers. On August 25 Pres. Ludwig Scotty was reelected in a landslide vote. The only opposition member to get another term was former president Rene Harris. There were claims made that Scotty's victory was obtained by bribery with funds provided to the Nauruan government by Taiwan. Scotty

was ousted in a no-confidence vote on December 19, having failed to act on corruption charges leveled against Foreign Minister David Adeang. Marcus Stephen replaced Scotty. (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

NEPAL

Trading Company as a joint venture to

sell some of Namibia’s diamonds to local cutting and polishing companies. As a result of the increase in the price of uranium oxide, the Rossing uranium mine announced plans for large-scale expansion. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

Area: 824,116 sq km (318,193 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,074,000

Capital: Windhoek Chief of state and head of government: President Hifikepunye Pohamba, assisted by Prime Minister Nahas Angula There was intense speculation in Namibia for much of 2007 as to whether Sam Nujoma, the founding president of the ruling South West Africa People's Organization

(SWAPO),

would

stand

again as party president when SWAPO held its Congress (initially planned for August but postponed until November). One faction in SWAPO wanted Nujoma to cease being president of the party and to let Hifikepunye Pohamba serve as president both of the country and of the party. Nujoma, however, who was officially recognized as "father of the country^ had powerful backers. Some thought that the call by the maverick 440

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

NAURU

bs Area: 21.2 sq km (82 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,200

Capital: Government offices in Yaren district Head of state and government: Presidents Ludwig Scotty and, from December 19, Marcus Stephen

Area: 147,181 sq km (56,827 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 28,196,000

Capital: Kathmandu Head of state: King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and, from January 15, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala (interim head of state)

Head of government: Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala Despite the government’s postponement of elections for the Constituent Assembly that had been scheduled for Nov. 22, 2007, Nepal witnessed many historic political changes during the year. With the promulgation of an interim constitution on January 15, Nepal turned from a Hindu kingdom into a secular state, with the role of the monarchy suspended. Once elected and seated, the Constituent

In March 2007, 82 Sri Lankan boat people arrived in Nauru from Australia for detention as part of the Australian policy of preventing refugees from being processed for asylum on the Australian mainland. On a visit to Nauru in July,

Assembly would have the right to determine the future status of the monarchy. Property acquired by King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev while in power was nationalized, and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala (see BIOGRAPHIES)

was named interim head of state.

World Affairs: New Zealand

With the signing of a comprehensive peace accord between the government and Maoist rebels in November

2006,

Nepal’s 11-yearlong Maoist insurgency had come to an end. In January the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) was established. Its mandate was

to assist in the conduct of free and fair elections for the Constituent Assembly, to support the peace process, and to monitor both Maoist and Nepal Army soldiers and their weapons. UNMIN was originally established for 12 months, but the government later agreed to extend its tenure for another 6 months. Although the Maoists joined the interim coalition government upon its formation in April, they left in September after their demands for the monarchy to be immediately abolished were

refused.

In December,

however,

the legislature agreed to the demands and voted to end the monarchy, and the Maoists rejoined the government. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter

visited Nepal in June and November to urge political leaders to hold the elections.

Prime

Minister

Koirala

report-

edly told Carter that he was committed to holding elections by April 2008. (KESHAB POUDEL)

NETHERLANDS, THE

Capital: Amsterdam; seat of government, The Hague Chief of state: Queen Beatrix

Head of government: Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende The beginning of 2007 found The Netherlands still functioning with a caretaker government that had followed of November

Immigration

and

mained important Rita Verdonk, the immigration, made for the leadership for Freedom

and

and left the VVD later in the year. mali-born former anti-Islamist who

integration

re-

topics of discussion. previous minister of an unsuccessful bid of the People’s Party Democracy

2006,

but

lengthy and detailed policy negotiations finally yielded a new government in February. The Dutch, who had in recent decades become accustomed to unconventional coalition governments (such as the centre-left-centre-right “purple” cabinet) broke new ground with a coalition consisting of Christian Democrats, the left-of-centre Labour Party (PvdA),

and the ChristenUnie (a Christian Party whose policies did not consistently line up as either traditionally conservative

ative study by UNICEF, Dutch children were identified as the happiest in the world, a ranking based on self-reported measures of happiness and on other measures such as good health and health care and the quality of family relationships.

(JOLANDA VANDERWAL

TAYLOR)

NEW ZEALAND

(VVD)

to form her own party Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a SoMP and controversial had spent time at the

Area: 270,692 sq km (104,515 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,184,000

American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., returned to The Nether-

Capital: Wellington

lands in early October when the Dutch government ended funding for her security detail abroad. There were political discussions about the presumed loyalty of dual citizens, as well as lively debate in response to a speech by Argentine-born Dutch Crown Princess Maxima, champion of integration in

by Governor-General Anand Satyanand Head of government: Prime Minister Helen Clark

The

Netherlands,

in which

she

de-

scribed Dutch identity as not “static” but rather multidimensional and fluid. Toward year’s end, the prognosis for the Dutch economy looked rosy. The government, which anticipated a budget surplus in 2008, announced plans to reemploy many of the longterm unemployed. It also reported its goal of giving priority to improvements in energy, water quality and water control, health care for citizens, and education. In an effort to continue to attract

Area: 41,543 sq km (16,040 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 16,371,000

the elections

or progressive). The new coalition appeared to be stable, and Jan-Peter Balkenende was once again sworn in as prime minister. Wouter Bos of the PvdA and Minister of Finance André Rouvoet of the ChristenUnie became vice-prime ministers, with Rouvoet also heading the Ministry of Youth and Families.

international business and innovative research, the government formulated plans to improve access to the country in order to admit talented foreigners to work in The Netherlands and to study at Dutch universities. The government stipulated that it intended to continue playing an active role in Europe, though Balkenende rejected calls for a referendum on the new EU reform treaty. It was reported in November that the government also would extend the mandate beyond 2008 for some 1,600 Dutch soldiers stationed in southern Afghanistan. Recent

attempts

to encourage

those

older than 55 to remain employed appeared to be successful. A government study showed that women’s salaries still trailed those of men. Because many women reduced their work participation for the sake of family care, the government proposed improved access to child care as a remedy for the wage disparity. Meanwhile, in an international compar-

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, represented

Policies by the Labour-led government to make New Zealand the world's first "truly sustainable" country underpinned strategies announced in 2007 by Prime Minister Helen Clark. In her formal statement to the House of Representatives on February 13, Clark declared plans for a carbon-neutral public service from 2012, a single government procurement policy for sustainably produced goods and services, a low-emission state vehicle fleet, improved waste management, and a CarbonZero program that would enable businesses to label themselves as carbon neutral. Government officials also made progress during the year on a free-trade agreement with China, began talks for a similar agreement with South Korea, discussed

an Asia-Pacific

free-trade

area,

and pursued closer economic relations and free trade with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The leader of the opposition, John Key, announced that if his National Party was elected in 2008, he would abolish separate Maori representation in the House of Representatives (currently 7 of the 121 seats) from 2014. Prime Minister Clark abandoned the idea of introducing state funding of political parties, but she promoted legislation that would impose constraints on election campaign spending. Finance Minister Michael Cullen's May 17 budget projected an operating surplus of $NZ 6,327,000,000 ($NZ 1 = about U.S.$0.74) for 2007-08, reduced company tax from 33% to 30% in 2008,

and

introduced

a KiwiSaver

savings 441

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Nicaragua

scheme (supported by compulsory contributions from employers) to provide retirement funds for modest-income earners. The budget's $NZ 67,853,000,000 in allocations included $NZ 20,142,000,000 for social security and welfare, $NZ 10,658,000,000 for health services, $NZ 10,204,000,000 for education, and $NZ 4,994,000,000 for eco-

nomic and industrial services. À guaranteed minimum wage for disabled workers was enacted on March 21, along with sick pay and leave entitlements. Free preschool education of up to 20 hours a week for three- and four-year-olds was introduced on July 1, in addition

to subsidized

medical

consultations and prescription medicines for those aged 25-44. A contentious law that allowed parents and caregivers to use "reasonable force" to correct a child’s misbehaviour was repealed. A radical overhaul of conduct and disciplinary processes involving the police was announced after an independent inquiry found serious cases of misconduct in the past by officers, including sexual assault. Permits authorizing oil and gas exploration in the Great South Basin of the Southern Ocean over the next five years were granted in July to two international

consortia:

one

comprising

U.S.-based ExxonMobil and Todd Exploration of New Zealand; the other a joint venture of Austrias OMV New Zealand,

PTTEP

Offshore

The Royal New Zealand Navy in July commissioned

the

9,000-metric-ton,

131-m (1 m = 3.28 ft) multipurpose vessel HMNZS Canterbury, to be supplemented by two new 85-m offshore patrol vessels and four 55-m inshore patrol craft. The first Victoria Cross for gallantry to be awarded to a New Zealand soldier since 1946 was bestowed on Special Air Services Corp. Willy Apiata for valour in Afghanistan. Apiata, age 35, had carried a seriously wounded comrade over 70 m of rocky gravel under enemy fire and in the face of return fire from his own side. Originally a British honour instituted in 1860, the Victoria Cross was adopted by New Zealand in 1999 as its own supreme military award for valour. (NEALE MCMILLAN)

NICARAGUA

Area: 130,373 sq km (50,337 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,602,000

Capital: Managua Head of state and government: Presidents Enrique Bolaños Geyer and, from January 10, Daniel Ortega Saavedra Nicaragua's

A Maori demonstrator in Wellington, N.Z., leads a protest march against antiterrorism laws that many Maori believe have allowed authorities to unfairly target their community.

year, which led to several confrontations between the executive, legislature, judiciary, and civil society. The Zero Hunger program was launched in May, providing assistance packages to the rural poor, who made up about 3096 of the population. In July Ortega offered to destroy half of Nicaragua's remaining arsenal of SAM-7 missiles in exchange for U.S. medical donations. Nicaragua's nearly $1 billion debt with the Inter-American Development Bank was canceled. Nicaragua’s government signed cooperation agreements with Venezuela, Brazil, and Iran.

Venezuela agreed to fund social programs, provide low-cost fuel, and build

former

president

Daniel

oil refinery.

Sweden,

however,

an-

tional Assembly, while the Sandinista

nounced that it would soon withdraw all development assistance. Nicaraguan police seized ExxonMobil storage tanks by court order in August, citing unpaid customs duties. Although a settlement was later reached that allowed temporary usage of the tanks to store

Renewal Movement (MRS) won 3 seats.

Venezuelan

Nicaragua' liberal parties—the Consti-

tion caused prices to rise. Nicaragua's projected economic growth rate was 3.9% with a 10% inflation rate. Daily blackouts began in July owing to the government's dispute with the transnational electric utility. On September 4 Hurricane Felix struck north of Puerto Cabezas as a Category 5 storm, killing more than100 people and leaving about 150 missing.

Ortega (1984-90) took office on Jan. 10,

2007, after having been elected president in November 2006. Ortega’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)

Marty Melville/Getty Images

Esteban Felix/AP

an

Investment

Co. of Thailand, and Mitsui Exploration of Japan. Bottom trawling and dredging was banned over 30% of the seabed in New Zealand’s 200-nauticalmile exclusive economic zone.

Need» children in Matagalpa, Nic., wait to receive meals provided by the Spanish nongovernmental organization Childhood Without Borders in May.

garnered

41 seats in the Na-

tutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) and the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN)—

which signed a pact in September, held the majority. Former president Arnoldo Alemán's sentence for corruption was modified in March to allow him unlimited travel throughout the country. In July, however, a Panamanian judge ordered Alemán and Byron Jerez, Alemán's former

revenue

minister,

to

appear

in

court for money-laundering charges, and an arrest warrant was issued. In August the ALN introduced an amnesty bill to benefit the two previous administrations.

The legality and constitutionality of the Citizen Power Councils introduced by Ortega were at issue throughout the

fuel, barriers

(See DISASTERS.)

Also

to distribu-

in September,

Nicaragua's National Assembly banned therapeutic abortions, despite national and international opposition from medical associations and women’s and human rights groups. These abortions were previously allowed if three doctors certified that the pregnancy put a womans health at risk. (NADINE JUBB)

World Affairs: Nigeria

NIGER

Tandja named Seyni Oumarou, Amadou’s replacement.

57, as

(NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

NIGERIA Area: 1,189,546 sq km (459,286 sq mi) Population (2007 est): 14,226,000

Capital: Niamey Head of state and government: President Mamadou Tandja, assisted by Prime Ministers Hama Amadou and, from June 7, Seyni Oumarou The government's control over northern Niger appeared to be threatened as Tuaregs, belonging to the Movement of Nigerians

for Justice

(MNJ),

about

1,000 km (600 mi) north

of Niamey, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two others. A uranium mine was hit in April, and on June 22 the MNJ struck a Saharan garrison post, killing 15 and taking 72 hostages. Although the MNJ released 30 injured soldiers to the International Red Cross a week later, it continued its campaign on August 10 by launching a series of attacks on power stations and a fuel depot near Agadez. The MNJ claimed to have killed 17 soldiers on August 22 when it attacked a convoy near Gougaram. International aid agencies in the north suspended most of their humanitarian efforts when rebels launched a wave of violent carjackings and planted antipersonnel land mines in the area. A state of emergency was declared on August 24, and dozens of civilian critics of the regime, including journalists reporting on the Tuareg unrest, were

arrested.

On July 27 Dominque Pin, the operations director of the French uranium mining company Areva, was expelled from Niger without explanation. Thousands of demonstrators marched through Niamey on September 6 demanding the total expulsion of Areva, claiming that it was supporting the MNJ. Niger remained the world’s third leading producer of uranium. Prime Minister Hama Amadou and his government resigned on June 1 after losing a vote of confidence in the National Assembly, which arose out of allegations that it was heavily involved in the disappearance in 2005 of the $9 million donated by the European Union for education. On June 7 Pres. Mamadou

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Capital: Abuja Head of state and government: Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and, from May 29, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua

rule of law, restructured the civil service,

and made a determined drive against corruption. Within his first 100 days of

in 2007

launched a series of deadly raids throughout the region. On February 8, rebels attacked an army base near Iferouane

Area: 923,768 sq km (356,669 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 144,077,000

malpractice, but the Economic Community of West African States representatives pronounced the elections as “fairly acceptable,” and other observers identified positive trends in the countrys democratization process. Before inauguration day YarAdua sought reconciliation with the opposition parties (which had challenged the election in court) and Niger Delta groups (which had stepped up militant action in the oil-producing region). Yar'Adua inherited from Obasanjo a strong political economy that had achieved important successes in paying off the bulk of the country’s international debt, extended democracy and the

was

office, however, the new president broke

reached in Nigeria’s history when outgoing Pres. Olusegun Obasanjo handed over power to Umaru Musa Yar'Adua

ranks with his predecessor. He suspended or reversed some of Obasanjo’s policies and last-minute decisions concerning privatization, redecriminalization of the currency, a raise in the fuel price, the dismissal of top civil servants, and taxation. Yar'Adua also announced an extensive review of legislation and

On

May

29,

2007,

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

a milestone

marking

the first

time that a civilian head of state had been succeeded by another civilian. The presidential election took place on April 21, a week after the gubernatorial and state assembly elections. The Independent National Electoral Commission

appointed a new economic team.

(INEC) declared Yar’Adua, flag bearer

In the Niger Delta, the source of 90% of Nigeria’s wealth, the security situa-

of the ruling People’s Democratic Party

tion deteriorated.

(PDP), the victorious candidate, with a

backed

Local armed militia,

by local inhabitants,

seemed

landslide 24.6 million votes. Former military head of state Muhammadu Buhari won 6.6 million votes, and Vice

Pres. Atiku Abubakar took 2.6 million. The PDP won control of 28 of the 36 states, but Lagos, the largest city, remained under the domination of the opposition Alliance for Democracy (AD). Unfortunately, these elections fell far below the standards of democratic practice. Shortly before the state elections, the federal army killed at least 25 suspected Islamic militants in Kano. A few hours before voting began on April 21, there was an alleged attempt in Bayelsa state to assassinate Gov. Goodluck Jonathan, the PDP vice presidential candidate, as well as an unsuccessful at-

tempt to bomb INEC’s Abuja headquarters. On election day, fraud and thuggery occurred on a massive scale: some polling stations never opened; many opened late; there was a shortage of ballots; voters were often intimidated; and

in some precincts the total vote exceeded the number of registered voters. A low voter turnout reflected popular skepticism of the political process. Observers from multiple international and national watchdog organizations lamented the widespread violence and

Near the oil-rich city of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, two locals drive past smoke from a Royal Dutch Shell pipeline that had been burning for a week following an attack by militants in July.

World Affairs: Norway

dangerously close to turning into an insurgency. In February the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a coalition of militant groups, released a proclamation threatening war. Kidnappings of foreign oil workers accelerated,

with a new

dimension

of

random abductions in the centre of Port Harcourt. After the elections militants in various places, claiming that victorious politicians had reneged on promised payments for their services as party thugs, seized 11 Ondo state officials and a number of relatives of politicians, including children and the elderly mothers of two governors. Meanwhile, their truce with the government fell apart in August when fighting broke out among rival gangs

in Port

Harcourt.

Many

were killed or wounded. To restore order the government mobilized the Joint Task Force into the region to round up the militants and destroy their strongholds; this was followed in October by a federal army operation in the Port Harcourt

waterfront.

Residents,

how-

ever, were skeptical of a military solution and urged the development of effective economic reforms and poverty alleviation. (LARAY DENZER)

NORWAY

A Mw j|

tinued to increase, unlike housing in some other northern countries.

tively. The royal couple had an active year, with official visits to Finland (in

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund (the former Petroleum Fund) reached 1.94 trillion kroner (about

June) and Germany (in October). (HILDE SANDVIK)

$357 billion), even though the fund operated within the government's strict ethical framework for the investments in a global economy. Despite the fund's high returns, plans for a new pension system from 2010 were approved by the parliament in the spring. The reforms would encourage more people to work full time until age 67. Both the shortage of workers and the need to cut costs were

strong arguments

for a new

scheme. Unions, however, were worried

that the reforms would make it difficult for people in demanding or hazardous jobs to be eligible for early retirement. After a warm summer in northern Norway, disturbing news from the Arctic area arrived: the ice around Svalbard and Greenland was melting faster than the UN's climate panel had predicted. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s government promised to make Norway carbon neutral by 2050, partly by buying carbon quotas from less-developed countries and partly through domestic efforts, including investment in new offshore technology that could pump carbon gas back into former reservoirs of oil and gas. Environmentalist organizations urged more immediate actions. Compared with the national election

ing the overseas Arctic territories of Svalbard

Area: 309,500 sq km (119,500 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,595,000

Capital: Muscat Head of state and government: Sultan and Prime Minister Qaboos bin Said (Qabus ibn Sa‘id)

Record high oil prices continued to fuel Oman’s robust economic growth in 2007. Highlights were the advancement of the country’s hydrocarbons industry, including the addition of a third train of liquefied natural gas exports and the use of new technology to enhance recovery of oil from existing fields, and accelerated development of Oman’s newest port and aluminum facility at Sohar,

located

outside

the

Hormuz

autumn showed that support for most political parties tended to remain stable. The Labour Party was still the

Strait, the world’s most vital waterway. In addition, the expansion of transportation and tourism facilities and services further diversified the economy and increased employment opportunities for the country’s burgeoning population. Two other developments had signifi-

strongest, with 29.6%

cant impacts on Oman’s

in 2005, the local elections held in the

Area: 385,199 sq km (148,726 sq mi), includ-

OMAN

of the vote, fol-

economic sit-

(61,020 sq km [23,560 sq mi]) and Jan Mayen (377 sq km [145 sq mi]) Population (2007 est.): 4,702,000

lowed by the Conservative Party (19.3%) and the liberal Progress Party

uation. In June Cyclone Gonu hit the eastern part of the country, resulting in

(17.5%). The Socialist Left Party, which

Capital: Oslo Chief of state: King Harald V Head of government: Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

since 2005 Stoltenberg with Labour from 12.6% cal elections tion turnout

78 casualties, estimates of more than $3 billion in damages, and the cancel-

Norways economy continued to be strong in 2007. Only 2.796 of the workforce was unemployed, and since many firms were looking to expand their employment rolls, several sectors reported labour shortages. Workers from Eastern European countries were generally welcomed, and Polish immigrants especially were settling in Norway. Exports of oil, natural gas, fish, and in-

dustrial products—combined with the importation of cheap industrial products from China and other low-cost countries—gave

Norway

a

positive

trade balance. House prices also con444

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

had been part of the government in a coalition and the Centre Party, fell of the vote in the 2003 loto 6.2% in 2007. The elecwas only 60%, which was

low but not abnormal in local elections;

in the national election the turnout was usually higher. The balloting produced no significant changes in local government in Norway’s five major towns. In the northern towns of Trondheim and Tromsø, red-green coalitions survived, and in the three southern cities (Oslo,

Bergen, and Stavanger), coalitions between the Conservative and Progress parties remained in power with minor changes. King Harald V and Queen Sonja both celebrated their 70th birthdays in 2007—in February and July, respec-

lation of Oman's plans to host the 28th annual Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

ministerial

and

heads

of state

summit scheduled for the fall. Oman also opted out of the GCC countries' planned monetary union with a single currency, set to take effect by 2010, declaring that it would continue to peg its Omani riyal currency to the U.S. dollar and voicing its opposition to the stipulation that the member countries' ratio of debt to GDP could not exceed 6096. While Oman carried very little debt, the need to finance numerous massive infrastructure-development projects under consideration would likely require indeterminate levels of indebtedness in order to bring them to fruition. The sultanate explained that its decision need not prevent the other members from

World Affairs: Pakistan

adopting a unified currency, noting that of the 27 European Union countries, only 13 used the euro. (JOHN DUKE ANTHONY)

prime

PAKISTAN

ing the 85,793-sq-km (33,125-sq-mi) Pakistaniadministered portion of Jammu and Kashmir Population (2007 est): 159,060,000 (exclud-

ing nearly 4,623,000 residents of Pakistaniadministered Jammu and Kashmir as well as 2,400,000 Afghan refugees) Capital: Islamabad Head of state and government: President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, assisted by Prime Ministers Shaukat Aziz and, from November 16, Mohammadmian

Soomro (interim)

The assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto (see OBITUARIES)

on Dec. 27, 2007, only 13 days after the lifting of the state of emergency imposed by Pres. Pervez Musharraf in early November, plunged Pakistan into its deepest domestic crisis since the 1971 civil war. Musharraf placed Pakistan on red alert and ordered all military, paramilitary, border constabulary, and police to quell the riots that paralyzed many sectors of society, notably railroads and air terminals. Bhutto's death and its aftermath placed the national and provincial elections scheduled for Jan. 8, 2008, in question. She

allegedly was shot leaving a rally in Rawalpindi. The shots were followed by a suicide bomber, who blew himself up near her vehicle, killing more than 20. Controversy raged around the speof Bhutto's

tragic passing

framed

death, but her

the events

of

2007.

The state of emergency established a form of martial law (it suspended the constitution but did not dissolve the legislature, which completed its term November

15).

It came

as

the

Supreme Court was poised to rule on the legitimacy of the October 6 election that gave Musharraf another five-year term as the countrys president. With anti-Musharraf Supreme Court justices dismissed

The

new

ministers

Musharraf issued Constitution (Amend-

Area: 796,096 sq km (307,374 sq mi), exclud-

on

minister.

pledged to continue the policies of the previous government, and Soomro declared that a continuity of policy was essential for the holding of free and transparent elections. Subsequently,

C

cific cause

ropolitan venues, and the martial law authority arrested thousands. On November 16 Musharraf swore in an interim caretaker government and named Mohammadmian Soomro

from

office, the declaration

set off a firestorm of anti-Musharraf criticism. Demonstrations led by Pakistani lawyers affected the major met-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ment) Order 2007 to provide “constitutional cover” for all actions taken during the period of emergency. A reconstituted Supreme Court dismissed all six legal challenges to Musharraf's

In January a spate of suicide bombings caused casualties in several areas of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Mosques, hotels, and police constabularies were all targets of extremists. In February the female Punjabi minister for social welfare was assassinated by a self-declared "religious fanatic." A suicide bomber took the lives of a judge and six lawyers in a Balochistan courtroom. In May the Global Peace Index listed Pakistan among the seven most dangerous countries in the world. Meanwhile,

the war

the

in Waziristan intensified, and in September and October hundreds were killed as helicopter gunships and heavy artillery were brought to bear on Taliban and tribal militants. In December Pakistan's first reported woman suicide bomber blew herself up at a military checkpoint in Peshawar, while another suicide bomber detonated a device in a nearby mosque, killing more than 50. Earlier, in an audio recording, Osama bin Laden called rebellion against Musharraf an act of faith. In March there was fierce fighting in South Waziristan between tribal Pashtuns and Uzbek militants. In April and again in November, scores of people

modified constitution. These events followed a year of mounting turmoil.

died in Parachinar, North-West Frontier Province, when rival Sunni and Shi‘ite

reelection.

He was

sworn

in as presi-

dent for another five-year term on November 29 after having retired from the army the previous day. Former InterServices Intelligence (ISI) director Gen.

Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani was made the new chief of army staff. On December 15 Musharraf lifted the state of emergency, but not before he had amended the constitution (through executive order) and thereby insulated himself against future legal challenges. This accomplished, Musharraf revoked the emergencys Provisional Constitution

Order

(PCO)

and

reinstated

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is greeted by well-wishers as she tours Lahore on November 12. She was assassinated on December 27 while campaigning in Rawalpindi.

World Affairs: Palau

communities clashed. A suicide bomber killed 32 people at a public meeting northeast of Peshawar. In May, 22 people were killed when another bomber attacked a crowded restaurant in the NWFP capital. In September and October militants took almost 300 soldiers prisoner in North Waziristan. Negotia-

tions with tribal leaders in November led to the release of an estimated 200. In Swat state the military launched a campaign to capture or kill Maulana Fazlullah and suppress his Islamic state breakaway movement. This clash was traced to the November suicide attack on a bus transporting ISI employees in Islamabad that killed 18 intelligence operatives.

Musharraf contributed to his own weakness when in March he dismissed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. The media’s handling of the firing also led to a government crackdown on the press, but efforts to silence government critics only intensified the confrontation. The New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists cited Pakistan among the 10 worst countries for press freedom. Moreover,

after months

of street

demonstrations, Chaudhry was reinstated. Musharraf accepted the court order, but his popularity waned, and opposition to his rule spread. Bolstering his support within the army, Musharraf promoted six officers to lieutenant general and made Lieut. Gen. Nadeem Taj director general of the ISI. Although U.S. criticism of Musharraf increased throughout the year, it reached crescendo proportions after the November declaration of the “state of emergency.” Pakistan, however, had become the largest recipient of U.S. funds for the latter's “war on terrorism," a figure estimated at $9 billion-$11

billion

since 2001. Symbolic of this assistance was the delivery in July of F-16 aircraft that the U.S. Congress had delayed for more than a decade. In the spring public attention focused on the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad. Religious militants seized control and ordered students from nearby religious schools to attack public and commercial outlets. The government hesitated to respond, even after the kidnapping of policemen and the seizure of public property. In July, however, efforts to mediate

a solution failed, and

Musharraf ordered Special Forces to take control of the complex. More than 100 died in the assault. The action prompted suicide bombings in different parts of the country. 446

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

In July Musharraf met secretly with Bhutto

in

Abu

Dhabi,

U.A.E.,

for

“power-sharing” discussions, and in October she was granted amnesty and allowed to return to Pakistan. Her homecoming began tragically, however, when her procession from the airport was bombed, killing at least 145 and wounding 450. In September former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was prevented from returning to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia. In November, however, after Bhutto’s return and

Musharraf's hasty visit to Saudi Arabia. Sharif was allowed to reenter Pakistan. Pakistan’s budget for 2007-08 was judged largely irrelevant for the countrys average citizen. À record trade deficit and double-digit food-price inflation compelled the government to levy special surcharges on most imports. Without massive investments

in

water, energy, and human resources, crop yields fell, while population growth continued its upward spiral. The UN 2007 Human Development index ranked Pakistan 136th in the world. Floods caused by a huge cyclone and heavy summer rains inundated Sind and Balochistan. More than one million people were driven from their homes,

and

hundreds

died.

Palau remained of concern to the trade union movement. After the World Banks publication Doing Business ranked Palau in the top 10 in “Employing Workers,” the International Trade Union Confederation declared in September that the World Bank’s decision to award Palau (with other deregulated economies) a high ranking was to promote a dangerous model of labour reform. The World Health Organization rated Palau as having the seventh fattest people in the world. Poor diet, Westernstyle junk food, and a lack of exercise had put Palauns at risk of premature death from weight-related illnesses. The country also faced painful confirmation of the threat of HIV/AIDS in the region, and in April Palau consulted with other Pacific governments at a meeting during which experts proposed some steps for dealing with the growing number of people affected by the illness.

(A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

PANAMA

Survivors

were threatened by cholera and other diseases. (LAWRENCE ZIRING) Area: 75,040 sq km (28,973 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,343,000

PALAU

Capital: Panama City Head of state and government: President Martin Torrijos In June 2007 Panama’s free-trade agreement with the U.S. was signed by

Area: 488 sq km (188 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 20,200 Capital: Melekeok (on Babelthuap)

Head of state and government: President Tommy Remengesau, Jr.

Palau continued to national profile in vowed to join the Russia in the fight

build up its inter2007. The country United States and against nuclear ter-

rorism. After a meeting in Ankara, Tur.,

in February, Palau approved the statutory documents of the Global Initiative, which U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin had instigated. Palau maintained its close association with Taipei and was invited by Taiwanese Pres. Chen Shui-bian to attend the second Taiwan-Pacific Allies

government

representatives

at

the

Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States. The Panamanian National Assembly quickly ratified the treaty by a vote of 58-3, with one abstention (only 62 of the 78 members were present). On September 3 Pres. Martin Torrijos

presided over the official opening of the $5.25 billion expansion of the Panama Canal. The project was to be completed by 2014 and was expected to increase the canal’s capacity significantly and extend its role in global maritime trade well into the 21st century. The fate of former Panamanian strongman

Manuel

Antonio

Noriega—

Summit, held in the Marshall Islands in

who was scheduled to be released from a Florida jail after having served some 17 years in prison for cocaine trafficking, racketeering, and money launder-

October.

ing—occupied Panamanian government

World Affairs: Paraguay Torsten Blackwood—AFP/Getty Images

officials and the country’s media for the second half of the year. Though Noriega completed his sentence on September 9, he remained in prison as he appealed

crises.

in 1999 he had been tried in absentia and convicted of money laundering and other crimes. On August 28 a U.S. judge approved the U.S. Justice Department’s motion to have Noriega extradited to France, but the Panamanian government said that it would continue to seek his return to relations

were

Pres.

Members of the Andai tribe study a candidate sheet before voting in remote East Sepik province during Papua New Guinea’s general election.

1997. The U.S. Senate, which had not

yet ratified the U.S.-Panama free-trade agreement, declared that it considered González's election “a serious obstacle” (ORLANDO J. PEREZ)

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Area: 462,840 sq km (178,704 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,331,000

Capital: Port Moresby

had Moti

investigated from

the flight of Julian

Papua

New

Guinea

to

Solomon Islands in defiance of Canberra’s request to have Moti extradited to Australia to face criminal charges. Australia continued to provide the lion’s share of international development aid money to Papua New Guinea,

but Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer observed that his government was “pretty unhappy” with Papua New Guinea over the Moti case.

A ceremony was held in August in East New Britain to atone for the killing and eating of four missionaries during the 19th century. Gov-Gen. Sir Paulias Matane addressed the thousands who attended, praising the early missionaries for having made Papua New Guinea Christian. He also called on the country to follow Christian principles. (A.R.G. GRIFFITHS)

PARAGUAY

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth II,

represented by Governor-General Sir Paulias Matane Head of government: Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare Sir Michael

Somare

was

Fer-

tained power in Paraguay since 1947.

soured following the selection on September 1 of Pedro Miguel Gonzalez to preside over Panama’'s congress. Gonzalez, a member of the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party, was accused by the U.S. government of having murdered a U.S. soldier in advance of the visit to Panama in 1992 of then U.S. president George H.W. Bush. Gonzalez claimed in his inauguration speech that he was acquitted by a Panamanian court in

to the deal.

2006

nando Lugo, the popular Roman Catholic bishop of San Pedro, resigned to run for the presidency. Paraguay’s constitution prohibited members of the clergy from holding office. Lugo, a fierce critic of the government, was seen as posing a serious challenge to the corruption-riddled Colorado Party, which had re-

his extradition to France, where

Panama. U.S.-Panama

In December

reelected in

August 2007 to a second successive term as prime minister of Papua New Guinea. Somare won a large majority

but governed in a prudent coalition with a strategy designed to create national political stability, guard the country’s sovereignty, and encourage economic development. Somare ignored pressure from Australia to release a report by a Papua New Guinea Defence Force board of inquiry, which

cation

health

and

minister,

Blanca

Ovelar,

as his successor. She and other Colorado candidates trailed far behind Lugo in public-opinion polls, however. Although Duarte took office on an anticorruption platform, allegations of bribery, embezzlement, and other corrupt practices by various highlevel government figures dogged his administration—including a case involving Education Ministry officials (serving under

Ovelar), who

were

ac-

cused of having embezzled nearly $6 million in 2002-06 from a school meals program. In July 2007 the six leading opposition parties announced that they had forged an

alliance

(the Concertación)

behind Lugo to wrest power from the Colorados. The presidential race fractured

in

September,

however,

when

Paraguays Supreme Court freed from prison former general Lino Oviedo after he had served less than 4 years of his 10-year sentence for an attempted coup in 1996. Oviedo, whose supporters also had mounted a fizzled coup attempt in 2000, immediately launched legal actions to overturn barriers that as a convicted

felon, from

parties, both allied with Oviedo, with-

Capital: Asunción Head of state and government: President Nicanor Duarte Frutos

and

Frutos,

running for the presidency. The former commander of the army retained a strong power base in the countryside, especially in eastern Paraguay. The second and third largest opposition

Area: 406,752 sq km (157,048 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,127,000

dents,

Duarte

after unsuccessfully seeking a constitutional amendment permitting him to run for a second term, began grooming his edu-

kept him,

Political maneuvering in advance April 2008 presidential elections nated Paraguay’s attention during even as the country was hit by a of corruption scandals, violent

Nicanor

of the domi2007, series inci-

environmental

drew from the Concertación after he was freed. In April, in one of a rash of kidnappings, an armed group took hostage a Japanese businessman, his secretary, and two Paraguayans who came upon the kidnapping in progress. The secretary was released nine days later; Hirokazu Ota (the business manager of South Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon's church in Paraguay) and two other 447

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Peru

hostages were freed on April 20 after payment of a reported ransom of $140,000. Police shot dead six of the al-

leged kidnappers in a raid in rural eastern Paraguay in early May.

Also in May, an appeals court overturned the 2006 conviction of former president Luis González Macchi for concealing a $1 million Swiss bank account. He was freed after having served five months of his eight-year sentence. (ROBERT ORTEGA)

PERU

& Area: 1,285,198 sq km (496,218 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 27,903,000

Capital: Lima Head of state and government: President Alan García Peruvian Pres. Alan the first year of his fice in 2007, but his ued to slide during 35%)

as

citizens

García completed second term in ofpopularity continthe year (to about

continued

to voice

concerns about the difficulty of finding good jobs, about personal security, and about persistent scandals involving questionable government purchasing

practices. García's interior minister re-

signed after he was charged with corruption for having overpaid for police cars and other official vehicles. Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who fled the country in 2001, was formally extradited to Lima in September 2007 to stand trial on several corruption and human rights abuse charges. Fujimori had been under house arrest in Santiago for some 22 months while the case made its way through the Chilean legal system, but because he maintained a sizable core of supporters in Peru and his party often sided with President Garcías American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in the Congress, the hearings represented a highly sensitive political issue. In December Fujimori was convicted of having authorized an illegal search in 2000 and was sentenced by Peru's Supreme

Court to six years in prison.

A separate trial on charges of murder and human rights abuse continued at year’s end. Meanwhile, a long series of trials continued for Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimoris former spy chief. Montesinos already had been found guilty on a number of charges involving his abuse of power while serving (1990—2000) in government.

Probably the most notable event in Peru during the year was the magnitude 8.0 earthquake that on August 15 struck the southern Peruvian coast. The epicentre was near the city of Ica, and the surrounding towns were hard hit. Lima, some 240 km (150 mi) north

Residents of the Peruvian city of Pisco carry a coffin through the streets on August 18, three days after a massive earthquake struck the country's southern coast.

of Ica, emerged

basically unscathed.

The

toll was

final

death

about

600,

with another 300 missing. Macroeconomic

indicators

were

strong and positive throughout the year; economic growth surpassed 7% and helped to generate substantial government revenues, significant trade surpluses, and large foreign reserves. Inflation

stayed low

(at about

2.5%).

Nonetheless, extreme disparities remained between Peru’s wealthy and its poor. One of Peru’s economic mainstays— mining—showed signs of trouble. Numerous

mining communities

protested

against low wages and such environmental ills as water pollution and mercury spills. Leakage from the Camisea natural gas pipeline also caused problems. The city of La Oroya, a mining town with a refinery in the central Andean highlands, was reportedly one of the 10 worst polluted places in the world; more than 90% of children in the area had high levels of lead in their blood.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

In foreign affairs Pres. Alan Garcia demonstrated support for a free-trade agreement with the U.S. The Peru Trade

Promotion

Agreement

was

ap-

proved in November by the U.S. House of Representatives and in December by the U.S. Senate. The ratification of this bill represented a major coup for Peru and García. (HENRY A. DIETZ)

PHILIPPINES

Area: 300,000 sq km (115,831 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 87,960,000

Capital: Quezon City (designated national government centre and the location of the lower house of the legislature and some ministries); many government offices are in Manila or other suburbs Head of state and government: President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo Opponents of Philippine Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo asked voters to treat the national elections held on May 14, 2007, as a referendum on her adminis-

tration. Some 30 million people voted in the elections, which were marred by violence that claimed at least 126 lives. Arroyo's supporters won more than 200 of the 219 seats that were contested in the House of Representatives to maintain their control there for another three years. Her opponents, however, claimed 7 of the 12 Senate seats contested, enough to give them control of the 24-seat upper chamber. Once in office, opposition senators quickly reopened an investigation into charges that Arroyo had improperly influenced vote counting in her narrow presidential election victory in 2004. Although the investigation failed to overturn her election

to

a six-year

term,

it con-

tributed to a highly partisan situation that slowed or obstructed legislation recommended by Arroyo. Her critics in the Senate also charged her administration with corruption. Arroyo’s support in the lower house, however, protected her from impeachment. Domestic and international criticism mounted during the year over extrajudicial killings and the disappearances of political activists and religious leaders. A Filipino human rights group said that nearly 1,000 people had been killed or went missing between 2001

World Affairs: Poland Dennis M. Sabangan—epa/Corbis —

in a ruling coalition with two smaller parties—the Self-Defense and the League of Polish Families—stressed the need for nourishing a traditional community free from corruption, crime, and communist

residua. In March, for

example, it passed a law to purge public officials suspected of collaborating with the former communist secret services; parts of the law were subsequently declared unconstitutional. In its drive to defend national interests and be treated as an equal partner, the government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski clashed with the EU over privatization, environmental issues, the

Filipinos in Manila protest extrajudicial killings in their country during a Supreme Court-led summit on such killings in July. and 2006. Many of the victims belonged to organizations that were legal but that Filipino security forces accused of being communist fronts. Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno declared that the executive and legislative branches of government had failed to safeguard civil liberties in the country In July Arroyo called for harsher penalties for what she termed "rogue elements" in the military and police force who were involved in political assassinations. She also asked for special courts to try cases of political killings. Many cases remained unresolved. After a six-year trial, a special court on September 12 convicted former president Joseph Estrada of having taken some

$85 million in bribes and

kickbacks on government transactions

talks between the separatists and the government stalled. The Philippine economy saw a 7.5% expansion during the second quarter of the year—its fastest rate of growth in nearly two decades. Economists attributed this to increased government spending on public works and social services. The spending was partly funded by 2006 tax increases that temporarily reduced the budget deficit, but weak tax collections caused the deficit to rise again in the first half of 2007. The economy also benefited from remittances

estimated at more

than $13

billion a year from some eight million Filipinos working abroad. (HENRY S. BRADSHER)

POLAND

during his time in office (1998-2001).

The 70-year-old Estrada was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison, but Arroyo

pardoned him on October 25. In the southern Philippines, the heaviest fighting in three years disrupted a government cease-fire with Islamic extremists seeking a separate Muslim state. The terrorist groups Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front,

both of which U.S. officials said were linked to al-Qaeda, on July 10 killed 14 marines in jungle fighting on Basilan island. On nearby Jolo island in August, 26 soldiers were killed. The armed forces launched a widespread counterattack that forced some 24,000 people from their homes. In December the two groups reached a tentative accord, but

Area: 312,685 sq km (120,728 sq mi) Population (2007 est): 38,110,000

Capital: Warsaw Chief of state: President Lech Kaczynski Head of government: Prime Ministers Jaroslaw Kaczynski and, from November 16, Donald Tusk In the first three quarters of 2007, Poland continued a difficult transition under a particularly difficult government. The Law and Justice party (PiS),

EU draft treaty, and its demands for reweighting the EU voting system. The government had some success in pushing its agenda in the EU, but its combative way of pursuing its goals annoyed Poland's European partners. At home the Kaczynski administration was hurt by intergovernmental squabbling over power in key ministries, a series of corruption and sex scandals, and accusations that the government had misused the intelligence services. After months of recurring internal conflicts, the prime minister fired the coalition ministers and, lacking a parliamentary majority, in Sep-

tember announced October 21, with turnout

(53.9%)

new elections. On the highest voter

since

1989,

PiS was

swept aside by the centre-right probusiness and pro-European Civic Platform (PO), which captured 41.4% of the vote. PiS, with 32.2%, finished sec-

ond in the balloting to become the strongest opposition party. The Left and Democrats alliance tallied only 13.1%.

The chairman of the PO, 50-year-old Donald Tusk, took office as prime minister on November 16 and soon secured a parliamentary majority by forming a coalition with the left-leaning Polish Peasants Party, whose leader, Waldemar Pawlak, was appointed as his deputy and minister of economy. Tusk pledged to restore trust and openness at home. He also vowed that Poland would be a more cooperative member of the EU and try to repair ties with Germany and defuse tensions with Russia. He wanted Polish troops to be pulled out of Iraq in 2008, the Polish military contribution in Afghanistan to be strengthened, and 350 troops to be sent in an EU mission to Chad. Under a new, Oxford-educated foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, tougher negotiations were expected to be made with the U.S. over the potential deployment 449

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Portugal

of U.S. antimissile interceptors in Poland. In late December Russian and Polish authorities signed a memorandum to end a two-year ban on exports of Polish meat to Russia. On the internal policy front, the new government planned to revive efforts to adopt the euro in 2012, reform public finances,

and speed the sale of government stakes in industry. The PO also promised to fight corruption, rebuild the credibility of state institutions, and put an end to the interference of intelligence services in politics. Competence, better execution, and a better

style of governance were to be Portuguese Prime Minister José Sécrates delivers the guidelines of the new adaddress on the country’s national referendum on ministration. The support of abortion in February. mainly young, urban, and proEuropean Poles voting for the national referendum on abortion. PorPO provided a good chance for change. tugals abortion laws, among the most The pending "cohabitation" with Pres. Lech Kaczynski, the twin brother of the restrictive in the EU, had been upheld at the polls in 1998. The 2007 vote was former prime minister, posed a major again marred by broad absenteeism; challenge for the new government, just 4496 of the 8.8 million eligible vothowever. ers turned out, but this time the proIn spite of the political turmoil, Poland's economic growth was vibrant. liberalization crowd won, with nearly a GDP was expected to hit 6.896 at the 60% margin. Despite the vote’s being technically invalid because a referenend of 2007. The unemployment rate dropped significantly, from 15.296 in dum required at least a 5096 turnout, 2006 to 12.496, and inflation was held Sócrates asserted that the people had spoken, and he forced through the legin check at 3.596. These figures, along with a budget deficit of 396 and a low islation. Pres. Aníbal Cavaco Silva later debt-to-GDP ratio of 4496, provided the ratified the law, which allowed abortions up until the 10th week of pregnew government with a comfortable economic starting point. nancy and provided terminations via (ANDRZEJ JAROSZYNSKI) the national health service. In this mainly Roman Catholic country, how-

PORTUGAL

Sg Area: 92,090 sq km (35,556 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,629,000

Capital: Lisbon Chief of state: President Aníbal Cavaco Silva

Head of government: Prime Minister José Sócrates

Portugal enjoyed a fairly quiet year on the political front in 2007 as the Socialist Partys dominance in the parliament allowed it to have a free hand in forming legislation. Prime Minister José Sócrates used this leverage in February to fulfill à campaign pledge on a 450

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ever, the issue remained

controversial,

with some doctors refusing to carry out abortions. In July Portugal took over the sixmonth EU presidency and highlighted employment, education, and further integration of the EU as its main priorities. Portugal had a specific mandate to agree on a new text for the Reform Treaty intended to replace the EU constitution, which was rejected by voters in a handful of key countries in 2006. The renamed Treaty of Lisbon was signed at the summit of EU leaders in December. Portugal also organized an EU-Africa summit in Lisbon in midDecember. Portugal saw modest economic growth, and efforts were continued to rein in spending and reduce the swollen budget deficit. GDP was growing at a 1.896 rate by the third quarter, held back a bit by rising interest rates

an

and market turmoil in the U.S. and in some other EU countries. Inflation was relatively cool at 2.596, though unemployment had crept up to a multiyear high of about 896. The government continued with its privatization process, selling off a stake in electricity grid operator REN at a highly popular initial public offering and sketching out plans to sell stakes in electricity company Energias de Portugal and natural gas company Gas de Portugal. Socrates’ administration also focused on alternative- and renewable-energy projects, with the aim to put Portugal at the forefront of the EU in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. In March the world's largest photovoltaic generating

site, with a capacity

of some 11 MW, opened near Serpa in the sunny Alentejo region. Plans were afoot to build more solar facilities, expand the countrys wind farms, and launch a prototype wavepower facility off the Atlantic coast. Meanwhile, the two big takeover bids that had marked 2006 faded away in 2007, with Portugal Telecom fending off a hostile approach from the muchsmaller

SonaeCom,

while

Millennium

BCP, the countrys largest private financial services company, failed to acquire Banco BPI.

The major international event of the year concerned Madeleine McCann, a British child who disappeared from her room at a luxury resort in the Algarve region on May 3, just days before her fourth birthday. Initial reports indicated that she had been kidnapped, possibly by a pedophile ring, and an international alert went out to find her. Despite a high-profile media campaign and numerous false leads, there was no

sign of the toddler, and the Portuguese police started investigating the possibility that Madeleine’s parents had been involved in the girl’s disappearance. The McCanns were formally named as suspects under the Portuguese legal system, even though police were unable to provide hard evidence of any crime. While protesting their innocence—and against the background of a steadily increasing spat between the Portuguese media and the British tabloid newspapers—the McCanns returned to the U.K. The deputy national director of police was put in charge of the investigation in October, but at year’s end the case was still unsolved. (ERIK T. BURNS)

World Affairs: Romania

QATAR

producers and exporters of liquefied natural gas and gas-to-liquids fuels, combined with record-high oil revenues, underscored the country’s expanded role as a major centre of regional and international modernization, project financing, and, increasingly, greater intra-GCC industrialization,

Area: 10,836 sq km (4,184 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 841,000

Capital: Doha Head of state and government: Emir Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifah al-Thani, assisted by Prime Ministers Sheikh Abdullah ibn Khalifah al-Thani and, from April 3, Sheikh Hamad ibn Jasim ibn Jabr al-Thani

The

year

2007

was

an

active

one

transportation,

tourism,

and economic

integration.

(JOHN DUKE ANTHONY)

ROMANIA

in

Qatar. Prime Minister Abdullah ibn Khalifah al-Thani resigned in April and was replaced by Foreign Minister

Area: 238,391 sq km (92,043 sq mi) Population (2007 est): 21,549,000

Hamad

Capital: Bucharest

ibn Jasim

ibn Jabr

al-Thani,

who retained the foreign ministry portfolio; the country’s third municipal elections were held in the spring; and Her Highness Shaikha Mozah, the wife of the head of state, Emir Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifah al-Thani, announced the

opening of the Arab world’s first centre for democracy at the conclusion in April of the seventh annual Doha Forum on Democracy, Development, and Free Trade. In international relations, Doha

in December hosted the annual Gulf Cooperation

Council

(GCC)

ministerial

and heads of state summit. Earlier in the year, Qatar had sought to mediate between

hostile Lebanese,

Palestinian,

and Sudanese factions and succeeded in persuading Riyadh to return its ambassador

to Doha,

from

whence

he had

been withdrawn in 2002 in reaction to treatment of Saudi Arabia by Qatar's government-financed Al-Jazeera satellite television network. Economic diversification highlights included the ongoing success of stateowned Qatar Airways, which garnered still more international awards for superior services and added numerous new routes, bringing to 77 its number of destinations worldwide. Meanwhile, Qatari per capita income soared to $44,200, the highest in the Gulf region

and one of the highest in the world. Qatar National Bank again received the country's highest possible credit rating from the world's leading rating institutions, and the Qatari Financial Cen-

tre, along with its Kuwaiti Dhabi

associates,

strengthen

and Abu

continued

capital institutions

to

in the

U.S., the U.K., Lebanon, and Malaysia.

Qatar’s continued meteoric expansion as one of the world’s most important

Chief of state: Presidents Traian Basescu, Nicolae Vacaroiu (acting from April 20), and,

from May 23, Basescu Head of government: Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu

Romanian

Pres.

Traian

Basescu

was

in-

creasingly outspoken about the need to bring corruption under effective control and to create a justice system that would serve all citizens and not provide immunity from control for avaricious group

interests.

Basescu

also

month EU Commissioner

tini declared

Franco Frat-

that he was

extremely

worried about the fate of Daniel Morar,

head of the prosecuting unit investigating high-level corruption in Romania; these concerns were reiterated in May by U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Taubman. On May 16, five EU ambassadors took the unprecedented step of attending a meeting of the managerial body of the Romanian judiciary in anticipation of the removal of a prosecutor investigating top figures in the coalition. Tariceanu then complained about diplomatic interference from countries that had previously been the main backers of Romania’s return to the Western fold after decades of communist rule, and in statements he sought to identify Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a counterweight to what was viewed by his supporters as EU meddling. A minority

suspended from office on April 19, 2007, following the formation of a transparty alliance comprising nearly all the parties in the parliament (including the National Liberal Party, headed by Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu) that accused Basescu of having authoritarian tendencies and refusing to use his office to promote consensus. Following his 2004 election, Basescu became

doleezza Rice canceled a scheduled meeting in April with Adrian Cioroianu, the new foreign minister. That same

government

comprising

close personal supporters of Tariceanu and members of the Hungarian minority clung to office during a summer beset by the worst drought seen in Romania since 1946. Other parties shrank from voting the poor-functioning body out of office and precipitating early elections for fear that they would then suffer massive losses to Basescu’s allies. During his campaign for reinstatement, Basescu named powerful figures,

Daniel Ciobotea speaks to the media on September 12 in Bucharest after being elected the new head (patriarch) of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

con-

demned the defunct communist dictatorship as illegitimate and criminal. His closest ally, crusading Justice Minister Monica Macovei, was forced from office

by hostile parliamentary forces in April, just months after Romania joined the EU on January 1. Her successor, Tudor

Chiuariu—known as the personal lawyer of the top economic mogul in the poverty-stricken northeast of the country—had no experience in the area of judicial reform, but within a fortnight of taking office, he announced that the time had passed when he would be required to heed the advice of the EU in these matters. Chiuariu’s attitude led to mounting alarm in Brussels and other Western capitals. U.S. Secretary of State ConVadim Ghirda/AP

451

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Russia Musa SadulayewAP

mainly in business, who he claimed controlled the transparty alliance that had formed against him. He argued that its hold over the political system could be loosened by a series of reforms. On May 19, 7496 of voters overturned Basescu’s suspension from office. The 44% voter turnout was mainly young, urban, and middle-class voters who swung massively behind Basescu while his opponents found it hard to mobilize their mainly rural supporters. Meanwhile, the steady flow of emigration continued, and fears surfaced that

within the next five years as much as half the active labour force might be working outside the country. On September 30 Daniel Ciobotea became the new head (patriarch) of the Romanian

Orthodox Church, following the death on July 30 of his predecessor, Patriarch Teoctist. (See OBITUARIES.) (TOM GALLAGHER)

RUSSIA

In the Chechen capital of Grozny, a young man waves a flag with the proKremlin United Russia party logo during a rally in support of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin and Chechen Pres. Ramzan Kadyrov, depicted on the poster in the background. or fair. The elections were seen as paving the way for the presidential elec-

not only during Yeltsin’s leadership but also under that of the last Soviet pres-

tion scheduled

ident, Mikhail Gorbachev. In August Prosecutor General

Putin

would

for March

stand

down

2008, when

after two

terms in office. Putin was constitution-

Area: 17,075,400 sq km (6,592,800 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 141,378,000

Capital: Moscow Chief of state: President Vladimir Putin Head of government: Prime Ministers Mikhail Fradkov and, from September 14, Viktor Zubkov Domestic Politics. Elections to the State Duma (the lower house of the parliament) were

held in Russia

on Dec 2,

2007. With Pres. Vladimir Putin heading the electoral list of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party (UR), the elections turned into a referendum on Putin’s leadership. Thanks to Putin’s popularity, UR won an overwhelming 64.3% of the vote, ensuring that it would have well over the 300 seats needed to pass any legislation, including constitutional amendments. The Communist Party, with 11.6%, was the only opposition party to make it into the Duma. The ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia, both loyal to the Kremlin,

won

8.1%

and

7.7%

re-

spectively. No other party overcame the 7% threshold required to enter the parliament. Turnout was 63.8%—a record for the post-Soviet period. International observers expressed concern about the elections, which they said were not free 452

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ally debarred from running for a third consecutive presidential term, but he remained extremely popular, and there were calls for the constitution to be amended to allow him to remain in office. Putin repeatedly ruled out that possibility, saying that it was essential that the constitution be observed. Following the elections, UR announced that it would nominate First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a close Putin associate, to run for president in the election scheduled for March 2008. Medvedev declared that were he elected president, he would ask Putin to take the post of prime minister. In December Putin announced his willingness to accept the post. Russia’s first elected president, Boris Yeltsin

(see OBITUARIES),

received

a

Yury

Chaika announced that a number of people had been arrested in connection with several high-profile criminal cases, including the 2006 murders of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Russian Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrey Kozlov and the 2004 killing of Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. Chaika said that the operation to kill Politkovskaya had been headed by a leader of a Moscow criminal gang from Russias southern breakaway republic of Chechnya, assisted by former and acting members of Russia’s Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service. In addition, he stated that the (as-yetunidentified) person who ordered Politkovskaya’s murder was living abroad. The level of violence in Chechnya con-

state funeral when he died in April. As

tinued

the successor

substantial weakening of the rebel forces. In April Ramzan Kadyrov was sworn in as the republic’s president. Kadyrov's appointment marked the culmination of the policy of “Checheniza-

to Yeltsin,

Putin

made

strengthening the state his overriding objective. He was aided by soaring oil and gas revenues that filled the state’s coffers. Many Russians came to see the political stability and relative economic prosperity that Putin achieved in stark contrast to the economic turmoil and political uncertainty of the Yeltsin years.

Other

Russians,

meanwhile,

lamented what they saw as the increasingly authoritarian tone of Putin’s leadership, and they contrasted it with the greater political freedom permitted

to decline,

tion,” launched

which

in 2002,

indicated

whereby

a

the

federal centre had distanced itself from the conflict in the republic by devolving responsibility for the everyday running of affairs to a pro-Moscow Chechen elite. Kadyrov continued his efforts to rebuild Chechnya’s war-ravaged infrastructure and economy. Meanwhile, violence and instability in-

World Affairs: Russia

creased in other parts of the North Caucasus—most notably in the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria.

In May the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad ended their 80-year schism and were reunited—a reconciliation that Putin personally worked hard during his leadership to achieve. This rapprochement ended nearly a century of religious hostility that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Economy. Russia in 2007 recorded its ninth year of strong economic growth, with the economy projected to grow by 7.2-7.4%, compared with 6.9% recorded in 2006. The macroeconomic

situation

remained strong, with large budget surpluses accompanied by high and rising foreign-exchange reserves. Nonstate foreign borrowing rose fast—a significant amount of it entered into by statecontrolled companies such as gas-giant Gazprom and oil-company Rosneft— but even so Russia's overall (state and

nonstate) foreign debt remained modest. While high world oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble played key roles in this economic resurgence, investment

and consumer-driven demand were increasingly important factors. Domestic consumption, underpinned by high commodity prices, was the main driver of growth. Living standards improved, and wages rose, which made many people feel better off and more secure financially. Both unemployment and the proportion of the population living below the official poverty line fell. AIthough Putin stated in February that the raising of living standards was the government' top priority, a general sense of increasing prosperity was one of the main achievements of his presidency and, in all probability, the chief source of his popularity. Though the rate of inflation in 2006 was down to single digits, the government predicted that the figure for 2007 would rise to 1296. The growth of total fixed investment, which was already rapid, accelerated in 2007. This reflected a surge of investment by state-controlled companies. While the development was a positive

Kremlin to be of strategic importance for national security, had since 2003 been characterized, if not by state ownership, then at least by tight state intervention and control. This included the

natural-resource

sector,

aerospace,

and other defense-related production, while the status of banking and some metals remained unclear In these "strategic" sectors, the state authorities either set up state-controlled companies and sectorwide state-controlled holding companies—such as the United Aircraft Co. and similar holding companies in shipbuilding, atomic power, and nanotechnology—or left much of the sector in private hands but intervened to ensure that Kremlin-friendly private owners were in place. The tax service and prosecutors office were, for example, mobilized in 2007 to force Mikhail Gutseriyev to quit Russneft, the mediumsized oil company that he had founded and controlled. His offense appeared to be that he had tried to acquire assets of the bankrupt Yukos oil company that the Kremlin wanted to control. When the Kremlin insisted on having a controlling stake—as in Russneft, the fading car giant AvtoVAZ, or the world's largest titanium producer, VSMPOAvisma—it typically sought alliances or minority investments from private, often foreign, partners; in this respect the Kremlin's "statist" policies contained a strong dash of pragmatism. Concern continued to be expressed internationally over Russia's reliability as

segments, in which an OPEC-style cartel could achieve very little. Others qualified this argument, noting that over the longer term an alliance of gas exporters might be able to coordinate the development of pipelines and liquefied-naturalgas terminals in such a way as to carve up the market between them. Russia remained someway short of achieving World Trade Organization membership, even though Moscow had overcome a major hurdle by signing a bilateral agreement with the U.S. on the terms

of its accession.

Lesser, but

still tricky, bilateral negotiations remained to be concluded, including with Georgia, a country whose relations with Russia remained tense. In addition, the concluding multilateral negotiations encountered a host of problems,

often

to

do

with

details

of

Russian legislation or its implementation. The likely date of accession remained unclear. Russia’s Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with the EU was due to expire at the end of 2007. Relations between Brussels and Moscow had become rather frosty, and it was not clear what sort of agreement would replace the PCA, or when. Nevertheless,

the

EU

remained

Russia's

largest trading partner, and business could continue very much as usual without a PCA. Foreign and Security Policy. Russia in 2007

was

player

on

Moscow

an

increasingly

the

was

assertive

international

also, in some

stage.

respects,

a

an energy supplier. In January Russia

revisionist

briefly suspended crude oil deliveries to Belarus following a dispute over energy prices. The dispute began after Gazprom forced Belarus to accept a large increase in the price of Russian gas. Belarus retaliated by halting oil supplies to Poland, Germany, and Ukraine. Though the dispute was quickly resolved, it had damaged Russia's relations with Belarus. In October Gazprom threatened to cut gas supplies to Ukraine in what some interpreted as a political move following the

some of the commitments that it had forged under Yeltsin's leadership in the

power—eager

to

amend

1990s, when Russia had felt itself to be

ferred during the year to the possibility

in a weaker position. Confident of their countrys newfound stability and prosperity, Russian leaders in 2007 reacted angrily to Western criticisms that democratic freedoms had been curtailed during Putin's leadership. Moscow accused the West of double standards and expressed strong irritation with what it saw as attempts to lecture Russia about its internal affairs. Accusing the Western powers of conspiring to damage Russian interests and of preventing Moscow from assuming its rightful place in

about the

that Russia, which held one-third of the

world

quality of this investment. Commentators described Russia as having a dual economy, in which two sectors worked according to different rules. One sector consisted of industries in which the state appeared to take no vital interest and in which activity by foreign investors was not restricted. Another sector, consisting of areas deemed by the

world’s natural gas reserves, might take up Iran’s proposal to form a gas cartel (a “gas OPEC”) with other major gasproducing countries, such as Algeria. In

that the international community treat Russia with the respect it was due. While some excited media speculated about

the existing arrangement, gas was sup-

sober commentators pointed out that modern Russia was neither advancing an anticapitalist ideology to challenge the Western way of life nor leading an anti-NATO military bloc.

one, some

doubts remained

return to power in Kiev of a Western-

leaning administration. Russian

leaders,

Putin

included,

re-

plied across national borders through pipelines and on long-term contracts. Analysts therefore argued that the gas market was divided into noncompeting

affairs,

the Kremlin

demanded

the advent of “a new Cold War,” more

453

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Rwanda RTR Russian Channel/AP

Relations between Russia and the U.S. grew increasingly prickly as the year wore on. Russia strongly objected to U.S. plans to install antimissile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Washington argued that the proposed installations were needed to protect Europe against ballistic missiles from potential rogue states. Moscow countered, however, that the installations would

upset the balance of power in the region and, by providing the U.S. with information on Russia's

der

Litvinenko,

who

had

re-

ceived political asylum in the U.K. Litvinenko died in London after having been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Putin responded to Britains demand by accusing the U.K. of giving shelter to thieves and terrorists— a reference to the political asylum granted by the British government to Russian tycoon Boris

Berezovsky and to Akhmed Zakayev, representative of the Chechen secessionist movement. In December Lugovoy won a seat

in the Duma. In July the Black Sea resort of Sochi won the international conAddressing an international seThe operator of a Russian minisubmarine plants curity conference in Munich in test to host the 2014 Olympic the Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole on February, Putin railed against Winter Games. The effort made August 3. by Putin personally was credited U.S. “unipolarity,” accusing with having persuaded the Washington of provoking a new sues and mutually supported each nuclear arms race by undermining injudges to award the honour to Russia. others position. Meanwhile, Russia At years end Time magazine named ternational institutions, dividing EuPutin its Person of the Year. continued to strengthen its cooperation rope, and destabilizing the Middle East with China and, to a lesser extent, with through its clumsy handling of the Iraq A Russian minisubmarine in August India. In October Putin made an official planted the Russian national flag on War. The U.S., Putin complained, had visit to Iran, the first in more than 60 the seabed at the North Pole. Russian “overstepped its boundaries in every years by a head of the Russian state. way” and was pushing Russia to the scientists claimed to have found new During his visit Putin reiterated Russia's evidence that Siberia was linked to the brink of a direct confrontation. If the support for Iran's right to a peaceful nuArctic by the undersea Lomonosov U.S. went ahead with its plans to erect clear program. In December Russia bea missile-defense shield in Eastern Eumountain ridge. If substantiated, this gan to supply enriched nuclear fuel for would support Russia’s claim to ownrope, he threatened, Russia would aim its nuclear missiles against targets in Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. ership of the Arctic’s vast untapped gas Central and Eastern Europe. Moscow Russia's relations with neighbouring and oil reserves. Meanwhile, Canada, also threatened to pull out of a number Estonia deteriorated sharply, following Denmark, Norway, and the U.S. were of arms-control agreements, including Estonia’s decision to relocate a Soviet also hoping to find evidence that would the revised Conventional Forces in Euwar memorial from the centre of the allow them to claim jurisdiction. (See rope Treaty (CFE) and the Intermediate Estonian capital, Tallinn. The statue of MAP on page 362.) (ELIZABETH TEAGUE) Nuclear Forces Treaty. In July Putin said a Soviet soldier, erected in 1947, was that Russia had to build up its military seen by Estonia's large ethnic Russian and step up its espionage activity population as a memorial to Estonia's against the West in the face of the new RWANDA liberation from Nazi occupation, but security threats. The following month many Estonians viewed it as a symbol Russian strategic bombers resumed of the subsequent Soviet occupation of long-range patrols for the first time their country. Moscow denounced the since the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991, move as a desecration of the Soviet war and in September Russia announced dead and as a move toward fascism. that it had tested what it described as The dispute quickly turned violent. One the world’s most powerful nonnuclear Area: 26,379 sq km (10,185 sq mi) Russian was killed in fighting in bomb. As threatened, Russia in DecemPopulation (2007 est.): 9,725,000 Tallinn, while members of pro-Kremlin ber suspended its participation in the youth groups besieged the Estonian Capital: Kigali CFE Treaty. Head of state and government: President embassy in Moscow and blockaded Russian opposition forced the U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame, assisted by Prime frontier posts. Estonian banks and govand the EU to abandon efforts to adopt ernment departments complained of Minister Bernard Makuza a UN Security Council resolution electronic attacks that temporarily dispreparing Kosovo for independence abled their computer networks. Rusfrom Serbia. Russia also continued to Genocide and its aftermath continued sia's relations with neighbouring Georoppose Western calls for sanctions to dominate Rwandan domestic and gia remained equally tense. against Iran, insisting that the standoff Relations with the United Kingdom foreign policy in 2007. In February about 8,000 prisoners accused of war over Iran's nuclear program needed to also deteriorated after Moscow refused be resolved diplomatically, despite London’s request to extradite Russian crimes, many of them sick or elderly, Western fears that Tehran was seeking citizen and former KGB officer Andrey were released because of prison congestion. The government called for to produce nuclear weapons. Russia Lugovoy to stand trial for the murder and China saw eye to eye on these isin 2006 of former KGB officer Alexangreater efforts toward reconciliation. satellites and missiles, undermine Russian national security.

454

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Saint Lucia Andrew Parsons—PA Photos/Landov

David Cameron (right), leader of the British Conservative Party, meets staff at a textile factory in Kigali, Rwanda, during his visit to the country in July. In April Pres. Paul Kagame pardoned former president Pasteur Bizimungu

Many felt that his conciliatory statement was crafted to restore good rela-

(1994—2000), who had served just under

tions with Rwanda. On a different note,

3 years of his 15-year prison sentence for setting up a militia, inciting ethnic violence, and committing financial fraud. After his resignation in 2000, Bizimungu had become a vocal critic of the Rwandan Patriotic Front-led government. In June the parliament abolished the death penalty (effective from the end of July), an important step in the countrys efforts to extradite genocide suspects from European countries that had hitherto refused such requests because they objected to capital punishment. European diplomacy with Rwanda took distinctly different forms. In September the foreign ministers of France and Rwanda initiated steps to restore relations that had been broken off by Rwanda in 2006 after a French judge accused President Kagame of complicity in the 1994 assassination of Pres. Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu—the incident that had sparked the genocide.

also in July, the leader of the British

Rwandan

Conservative Party, David Cameron, visited Rwanda, where he launched his

partys global poverty report, pledging its commitment to international development and poverty alleviation as well as to rebuilding Rwanda’s economy. In April local filmmakers staged a traveling film festival, nicknamed “Hillywood,” in Nyagatare, a small town in eastern Rwanda. Young filmmakers, who had gained experience working with the various international movie crews that produced films such as

Hotel

went

on

to

minister,

Dwyer

Astaphan,

against

whom a legal motion was filed in August. Astaphan, who also held Canadian citizenship, would be required to resign if he was found to be in breach of the constitution. Saint Kitts and Nevis announced in September that it was assessing various options for developing its renewableenergy sector. (DAVID RENWICK)

SAINT LUCIA

make

their own movies. The film Hey Mr. DJ!, about a young mans discovery that he is HIV-positive, reflected general community concerns. (LARAY DENZER)

Area: 617 sq km (238 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 168,000

Capital: Castries Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS

efforts, however, to persuade

French authorities to arrest and extradite Habyarimana’s widow on charges of genocide conspiracy had been rebuffed. Many Rwandans believed that the French had helped to train and to arm those who carried out the genocide. By contrast, in July, after a Belgian court sentenced former Rwandan army major Bernard Ntuyahaga to 20 years in prison for having murdered 10 Belgian peacekeepers at the beginning of the 1994 genocide, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt acknowledged that these murders had led to the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping mission, which then provided the opportunity for genocide to commence.

Rwanda,

save about $1 million following the introduction of energy-saving light bulbs from Cuba as part of the latter's program to provide assistance to Englishspeaking Caribbean territories. The close relations between the two countries were reinforced in early March when Saint Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas led a five-day official visit to Havana. Foreign citizenship held by members of the Saint Kitts and Nevis parliament became an issue in August when it was alleged that those who fell into that category were in violation of the constitution. At least four members of the National Assembly were identified as having dual citizenship. The matter was brought to the attention of Gov.Gen. Sir Cuthbert Sebastian by a small opposition party. One of those alleged to be culpable was the national security

j^

sented by Governor-General Louisy Head of government: Prime Sir John Compton and, from to September 7), Stephenson

j^

Dame Pearlette Ministers May 1 (acting King

Capital: Basseterre

In September 2007, only nine months after his triumphant return to office as prime minister of Saint Lucia following

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

his

sented by Governor-General Sir Cuthbert Montraville Sebastian Head of government: Prime Minister Denzil Douglas

shocking

Area: 269 sq km (104 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 50,400

A Saint

Kitts

and

Nevis

government

spokesman said in February 2007 that the twin-island state was expected to

United

Labour

Workers

defeat

Partys

of the

Saint

(UWP)

Lucia

Party (SLP) in the December

2006 general election, Sir John Compton died at age 82. (See OBITUARIES.)

Earlier in the year he had suffered a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed, and he had received treatment in the U.S. and Martinique. Stephenson King, who acted for Comp455

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Emmanuel Dunand—AFP/Getty Images

Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves in January 2007 launched what he described as a plan to develop a “postcolonial” economy in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Calling it Vision 20/20, he said that the plan would be a “road map” for growth, with improvements in education and health given top priority.

In June Gonsalves rejected opposition claims that the current foreign policy of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was not in the best interest of the country. He stoutly defended the growing assistance provided by Cuba and Venezuela and accused the opposition of being afraid that his government’s choice of countries for closer cooperation might “upset” the U.S. The prime minister stressed that Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was also pursuing closer relations with Taiwan, Turkey, and Brazil and insisted that a small state had to take advantage of all opportunities for links with larger

Saint Lucia s new prime minister, Stephenson King, addresses the UN General Assembly on September 28.

ton following his incapacitation,

took

over as prime minister.

The UWP government in April made the controversial decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with Taiwan, much to the annoyance of China. The former SLP government had switched diplomatic recognition to China in the mid-1990s, after a postindependence period during which Taiwan was the preferred choice. The UWP insisted that it could recognize both Beijing and Taiwan, but a Chinese spokesman rejected this option. Acting

Prime

Minister

King

Chief of state: O /e Ao o le Malo (Head of State) Malietoa Tanumafili Il, Tuimaleali'ifano Va'aletoa Sualauvi Il (acting) from May 11, and, from June 20 (acting from May 11),

Tuiatua Tupua Tamasese Ffi Head of government: Prime Minister Tuila'epa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi

The death in May 2007 of Malietoa Tanumafili II, who had held the position of O le Ao o le Malo (head of state)

since independence in 1962, occasioned a period of national mourning. (See OBITUARIES.)

That same month both Prime Minister Gonsalves and opposition leader Arnhim Eustace declared their support for the retention of the death penalty in the country, arguing that it acted as a deterrent to criminality. Gonsalves pointed out, however, that judgments of the London-based Privy Council, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines’ final court of appeal, had been making it “very difficult” to hang those convicted

Deputies,

of murder.

(DAVID RENWICK)

Ralph Gonsalves (left), prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, embraces Hugo Chdvez upon the Venezuelan president's arrival to the island state on February 16.

SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

members former

In June one

of

of the

the

Council

of

prime

minister

Tu-

iatua Tupua Tamasese Efi, was elected unanimously by the Legislative Assembly to the office for a five-year term. The Samoan government continued its economic and institutional restructuring programs and was rewarded with low inflation; stable external debt; con-

tinued economic growth of about 6% from increased returns for fishing, agriculture,

tourism,

and

manufacturing;

and promotion by the UN Economic and Social Council from least-developed-country status. The government remained

dependent,

mittances from some

however,

on

re-

200,000 Samoans

living abroad. In August Samoa hosted the 13th South Pacific Games. Prime Minister Tuila'epa Sa'ilele Malielegaoi took a silver medal in archery, becoming the first head of government to have won a medal. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

SAN MARINO

Area: 389 sq km (150 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 106,000

Area: 61.2 sq km (23.6 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 30,500

Capital: Kingstown

Capital: San Marino Heads of state and government: The republic is governed by two capitani reggenti, or coregents, appointed every six months by a popularly elected Great and General Council.

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il, repre-

sented by Governor-General Sir Frederick Ballantyne Head of government: Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves Miraflores Press Office/AP

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Capital: Apia

two

(DAVID RENWICK)

456

Area: 2,831 sq km (1,093 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 180,000

countries.

an-

nounced in July that a change of constitutional status for Saint Lucia—with a nonexecutive president to replace the queen of England as titular head of state—was to be examined as part of a general governance review.

SAMOA

World Affairs: Saudi Arabia Anwar Hussein—WireImage/Getty Images

In 2007 the Republic of San Marino once again captured the attention of the regional press owing to claims that the country's financial institutions were being used to launder funds involving criminal activities in surrounding Italy. The allegation was serious enough that the Italian high commissioner for corruption in public administration met with San Marinos chief foreign affairs officer to review the matter. In late October the Great and General Council resigned, but the parliamentary crisis was

averted,

and

on

November

28

a

new cabinet was installed. The economy was strong overall; the IMF reported in April that GDP growth in 2006 was about 596, with unemployment hovering at about 296. San Marino assembled a team of experts to discuss prospects for future growth. The surprising findings showed that the country's strongest sector was not finance but rather industry, which accounted for about half of the country's wealth

and involved

more

than 3,000

firms. Finance followed, strengthened by new legislation to ensure transparency and security for investors. The third sector of economic relevance was tourism, which, however, would require new investment in order to remain competitive. Some economic experts

suggested that San Marino an attractive location for fices of multinational which could be enticed through tax incentives and nancial services.

would make the head ofenterprises, to relocate improved fi-

(GREGORY O. SMITH)

SÁO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE

Area: 1,001 sq km (386 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 158,000

Capital: São Tomé Chief of state: President Fradique de Menezes Head of government: Prime Minister Tomé Vera Cruz While São Tomé and Príncipe waited for the bonanza promised by the discovery of oil in its offshore waters, it was rewarded for its good governance and stable economy by the IMF, which offered debt relief in March 2007 under its Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative. Though no oil had yet been pumped from the countrys waters, an

estimated $80 million had been earned

for prospecting rights, but most of that money had been invested (on international advice) in interest-bearing securities.

The country continued to enjoy close relations with other members of the community of Portuguese-speaking countries, especially Angola, and in February the Angolan airline opened a service from Luanda via São Tomé to Lisbon. In 2006 São Tomé was one of the eight founder members of the Gulf of Guinea Commission, made up of countries bordering the oil-rich gulf. São Tomé's common maritime boundary with Nigeria meant that its future was bound up with the giant West African country, and in 2007 Sao Tomé officials appealed to Nigerians to invest in their country. In September news that the head of Sao Tomé’s Association of Traditional Medicine had produced what he claimed to be an anti-AIDS herbal remedy was carried on radio and television and spread widely. Critics feared that the announcement might hamper the use of antiretroviral medication. (CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS)

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia accompanies Queen Elizabeth II and

Prince Philip to a state banquet at Buckingham Palace in London on October 30.

SAUDI ARABIA

DNY

Prince al-Walid ibn Talal, announced in

ao

Area: 2,149,690 sq km (830,000 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 24,209,000

Capital: Riyadh Head of state and government: King Abdullah

later retracted his statements, however.

The most important political development in 2007 in Saudi Arabia was the issuance by 84-year-old King Abdullah in October of a set of rules to guide the conduct of the "allegiance" council, a body that was set up in 2006 to regulate political succession. Since most of the sons of former king Ibn Sa'ud were either dead or aged, the stage was set for the grandsons to start looking for power at the very highest levels. In Saudi Arabia succession did not pass automatically from the father to his eldest son. The new guidelines would not take effect, however,

lah’s heir, 83-year-old

until Abdul-

Crown

September that he planned to establish a political party and that he would invite jailed reformists to join it. He criticized the monopoly on Saudi power by one faction within the royal family. He

Prince

Sultan, had acceded to the throne.

A key Saudi royal, Prince Talal ibn ‘Abd al-Aziz, half brother of King Abdullah and the father of billionaire

Saudi liberals welcomed a royal decree in October overhauling the kingdom’s judicial system and allocating $2 billion for the building of new courthouses and the training of judges. The reforms would preserve the centrality of the Shari‘ah (Islamic law) but would

take away many powers exercised by the Supreme Judicial Council, which was controlled by conservative clerics. In late September Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh ‘Abd al-Aziz alSheikh, issued a fatwa (religious edict)

prohibiting Saudi youth from traveling abroad under the pretext of jihad. Although he did not mention Iraq by name, it was understood that the fatwa

was aimed at discouraging young Saudis from going to Iraq to fight U.S. and other foreign forces in that country. The Saudi Arabian economy continued to perform well, especially since the price of crude oil remained robust and, 457

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Senegal

at one point, soared to nearly $100 per barrel. Though the budget surplus in

sorts of Cap Skirring resulted, however,

2006 was $77.5 billion, that figure was

In the February 25 presidential election, Abdoulaye Wade won his second term in office, trouncing 14 other candidates and taking 56% of the vote; his nearest rival, former prime minister Idrissa Seck, captured 15%. The voter

expected to shrink to $5.3 billion in 2007 owing to an ambitious government

spending and investment program. Riyadh had a huge fallout with Damascus in August after Syrian Vice Pres.

Faruq al-Shara’ criticized the Saudi policy in the Middle East, saying it was virtually paralyzed. In an unusual and swift move,

Saudi Arabian officials at-

tacked the Syrian foreign policy that “disregarded the unity of Arab ranks and worked for spreading chaos and turbulence in the region”; a scheduled visit by the Syrian foreign minister was canceled by Riyadh. Saudi Arabia would be the largest purchaser in a $20 billion arms deal that was reached between the U.S and the Arab Gulf states. The agreement was made after Israel was promised aid of $30 billion for arms over a 10-year period. In September Saudi Arabia signed an $8.8 billion deal with the U.K. to buy and service 72 Eurofighter aircraft; this was part of a larger $40 billion arms deal that had yet to be signed. In October-November, King Abdullah visited the U.K., Switzerland,

Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Egypt, and he met with Pope Benedict XVI, the first-ever meeting in the Vatican between a Saudi monarch and a pontiff. (MAHMOUD

HADDAD)

SENEGAL

in a modest increase in tourism.

turnout was

70%. Despite protests by

opposition parties, the Constitutional Council certified the vote on March 11. In the June 3 legislative elections, the leading opposition parties boycotted the vote, which gave President Wade's coalition an easy victory; it took 131 of the 150 seats in the National Assembly. As a result of the boycott, only 3596 of the electorate voted. On June 19 President Wade named Cheikh Hadjibou Soumaré prime minister; he replaced Macky Sall, who resigned to become president of the National Assembly. The government threatened to withdraw its 500 men from the African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur after 5 of them were killed in April. On August

10, however,

after a series

of

meetings with AU and UN authorities, the government committed Senegal to tripling the size of its contingent. Over

the

weekend

of

June

9-10,

renowned Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembéne died at the age of 84. He was a cofounder of the Pan-African film and television festival that was held biennially in Burkina Faso. (See OBITUARIES.) (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

SERBIA

Area: 197,021 sq km (77,071 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,961,000

Capital: Dakar Chief of state: President Abdoulaye Wade, assisted by Prime Ministers Macky Sall and, from June 19, Cheikh Hadjibou Soumaré One of the major stories in Senegal in 2007 was the death in January of 78year-old Augustin Diamacoune Senghor, the leader of the separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance

Area: 88,383 sq km (34,125 sq mi), including 10,887 sq km (4,203 sq mi) in the UN

interim-administrated region of Kosovo Population (2007 est.): 9,516,000, including

2,114,000 in Kosovo Capital: Belgrade Chief of state: President Boris Tadic Head of government: Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica

(MFDC). Although most members of the

The

MFDC had accepted the 2004 peace accord signed by Senghor, some dissident factions remained active in the southern region, causing a new wave of refugees to flee into neighbouring Guinea-Bissau. Improved security around the beach re-

Kosovo Albanians

458

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

deadlock

between

Serbs

liamentary elections were held in Kosovo in November. The province's Serb minority boycotted the balloting, and most Serb candidates withdrew. European media reported of a U.S. plan that would put a 12-year hold on a final decision over the political future of Kosovo and in the interim would provide billions of euros for economic development. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica suggested Hong Kong's "two systems, one state" arrangement with China as a model for relations between Serbia and Kosovo. UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari, who earlier in the year had drafted a plan that envisioned a period of internationally supervised independence for Kosovo, repeatedly warned against attempts to alter the plan. The UN plan was backed by the U.S. and most EU member states but was rejected by Serbia, Russia, and China. The EU was considering recognition of Kosovo’s independence in mid2008. In December the UN mediator’s report concluded that both sides were far from agreement. Following the report, Serbia’s parliament passed a resolution condemning any attempt by Kosovar leaders to declare independence while rejecting any role the EU planned to take in Kosovo if the EU recognized the province's independence. The resolution would also put on hold any future steps that Serbia was required to take toward EU membership. Serbian elections were held in January. A four-party coalition government was finally established in May after the Serbian Radical Party—the single largest party in the 250-seat parliament—could not find a coalition partner. The shaky coalition lost one of its smaller partners, and amid escalating political tensions and the uncertain status of Kosovo, the government scheduled the next presidential election for early 2008, with local elections to be held later in the year. Serbia's economic picture was mixed. Economic growth was projected at 7.596, while inflation stood at 8.596. Ser-

and

(Kosovars) over the

future status of Serbia's restive province of Kosovo continued in 2007 amid growing tensions between the two camps and disagreement among members of the international community. Local and par-

bia secured more than €2.6 billion in foreign investments, down from the previous year's €6 billion. Serbia sought to expand its partnership with the Russian energy giant Gazprom after having signed a nonbinding agreement in 2006 that called for Gazprom to build part of its South Stream natural-gas pipeline through Serbia. The pipeline would connect Serbia with Croatia and Bulgaria and eventually with markets in Italy, Austria, and France. Negotiations also took place with Gazpromneft, a

World Affairs: Singapore

subsidiary of Gazprom, over a privatization plan calling for a 2596 stake in Serbia's oil industry. Russia also agreed to settle its Soviet-era debt to Serbia by modernizing the Djerdap hydroelectric plant, Serbia’s largest energy producer, and writing off Serbia's €260 million bill for natural-gas imports. Kosovo's economic and social situation continued to deteriorate. According to the World Bank, 15% of Kosovo’s population lived in extreme poverty, and 37% were considered poor. A UN report showed that 57% of those living in extreme poverty were under the age of 25, and unemployment for those under 25 was 40%. In foreign affairs Pres. Boris Tadic became the first high-ranking official from Serbia to apologize to Croatia for war crimes committed by Serbs during the 1991-95 war. His remarks were followed by improved relations with the EU and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

party, the Seychelles People’s Progressive Front (which had ruled the coun-

try for three decades), won an absolute majority, gaining 23 of the 34 parliamentary seats.

Seychelles continued efforts to recover from a five-year downturn and to strengthen its economy (one of the strongest in Africa) by forging foreign trade agreements. In February, Chinese Pres. Hu Jintao concluded his eightcountry African tour in Victoria, where he met with President Michel, signed a number of cooperation agreements, canceled a debt, and pledged $12 million in aid. Seychelles was readmitted into the Southern African Development Community during the year. The country had left the 15-member organization in 2004 after experiencing an eco-

nomic decline following the Sept. 11, 2001,

terrorist

attacks

in

the

U.S.,

which had caused a slump in tourism and fishing, two of Seychelles’ vital industries. (MARY EBELING)

Christiana Thorpe, who dealt firmly with election malpractice and disqualified 8.9% of the votes. President Koroma faced a difficult task. Almost six years after the end of a decadelong civil war, an increasingly disillusioned people yearned for the implementation of an effective policy to end poverty in their mineral-rich country, which ranked 176 out of 177 in the United Nations Development Programme index of poor countries. Major priorities for the new regime were to defuse ethnic tensions, stem unemployment, restore electricity, and continue the crackdown on the “blood diamonds” trade that had disrupted international trade and investment. Meanwhile, the country made significant strides toward reconciliation with its violent past. In June former Liberian president Charles Taylor went on trial in The Hague for having instigated war

crimes

in Sierra

Leone.

In June

the

and August the special war crimes court in Freetown handed down guilty

EU initialed the Stabilization and As-

verdicts to a number of militia leaders,

(ICTY). sociation

In November

Serbia

Agreement—an

and

important

SIERRA LEONE

including Moinina Fofana and Allieu Kondewa. These latter convictions were controversial, because many civilians viewed these men as heroes for having led the Civil Defense Force against brutal rebel groups such as the Revolutionary United Front during the civil war that ended in 2002. Former defense minister Samuel Hinga Norman,

step toward Serbia’s eventual EU membership. The agreement, however, had to be ratified by the EU's 27 member states; in addition,

a precondition

for

membership called for the capture of the four remaining war criminals indicted by the ICTY, including Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Area: 71,740 sq km (27,699 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,866,000

SEYCHELLES

Capital: Freetown Head of state and government: Presidents Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and, from September 17, Ernest Bai Koroma

(MILAN ANDREJEVICH)

who

had

Ernest

Bai Koroma was inaugurated as Sierra

Area: 455 sq km (176 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 84,300

Capital: Victoria Head of state and government: President James Michel In response to a five-month boycott of the National Assembly by 11 members of the opposition Seychelles National Party, Seychelles Pres. James Michel dissolved the legislature in March 2007, and the electoral commission called for new elections to be held in May, well ahead of the scheduled October balloting. The opposition protest was aimed at a proposal to ban political parties or religious groups from owning radio stations. In the election Michel’s ruling

Leone's president. The flag bearer of the All People’s Congress, he pledged to run the country on sound business principles and to curtail corruption. His election was preceded by widespread violence, especially in Freetown and the southeastern towns of Bo and Kenema, but prompt police action and a two-week postponement of the polls until August 11 defused tension. Seven candidates ran for the presidency in the first electoral round, but only three qualified to stand in the September 8 runoff election. With the least percentage of votes, Charles Margai, leader of the People’s Movement for Democratic Change, decided to step down in support of Koroma, who won 54.6% of the vote

against

incumbent

Vice

Pres.

Solomon Berewa. A hopeful sign was the tough management of the poll by

indicted,

died

in

February in Dakar, Senegal, before going to trial. Founded by British abolitionists in 1787,

On Sept. 17, 2007, businessman

also been

Freetown

celebrated

the bicen-

tennial of the abolition of the British slave trade by renaming its main streets after key black abolitionists: Thomas Peters, Olaudah Equiano, Sengeh Pieh,

and John Ezzidio. The city also began preparations to receive the Amistad (a replica of the slave ship involved in the famed 1839 slave rebellion), which had

set sail in June to retrace the original route.

(LARAY DENZER)

SINGAPORE

C: tei

Area: 704 sq km (272 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,564,000 Head of state: President S.R. Nathan

Head of government: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong 459

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Slovakia Wong Maye-E/AP

Slovakia's political scene was relatively quiet in 2007 as the three ruling parties that took office in mid-2006 consolidated their power and maintained remarkably high public support, partly thanks to a booming economy. Backing for the largest ruling party, Direction-Social

Democracy

(Smer-SD),

stood at approximately 4096 throughout the year, higher than the support for the three centre-right opposition parties combined. In 2007 Prime

Singapores financial district provides the backdrop to a construction site where a new casino resort is being built.

Minister Robert Fico

continued his efforts to undo many of the business-friendly reforms that had been implemented during the 2002-06 term of his predecessor. Fico launched rhetorical attacks against the foreign owners of Slovakia's energy monopolies, called for major changes to the 2003 labour code, and tried to decrease

For Singaporeans 2007 would be remembered as the year in which the property market finally awoke—with a vengeance—from a five-year slumber. Property fever even found its way into the courtroom when some owners of a high-end residential condominium complex sued another set of owners for not getting a better price for the "en bloc," or collective, sale of their build-

ing to a redeveloper. In particular, the Horizon Towers case, with its star-stud-

ded cast of top property firms and top Singaporean lawyers, gripped the country for much of the year and remained unresolved at year's end. Lured by the prospect of becoming millionaires overnight, many other property owners

put their buildings on the market for collective sale. Proceeds from these collective sales were estimated to hit S$6 billion (about U.S.$4.1 billion) in 2008.

Even as the property market surged in 2007 (23% in the first nine months

alone, compared with 10% for the entire year in 2006), so too did inflation,

to 4.2% in November. While low by international

standards,

the

rate

still

marked a 25-year high for Singapore and was projected to rise further—to as much

as 5% in 2008,

on the back of

higher oil and food prices. Fears about the economy overheating prompted the government to delay S$2 billion (about U.S.$1.4 billion) of public building projects and to allow the Singapore dollar to appreciate a little to curb imported inflation. Curbs on the hiring of foreign workers were eased to alleviate business costs. The thriving economy came at a cost—a widening income gap that the opposition

parties wasted

460

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

no

time

in

exploiting. The government responded by strengthening Workfare, a scheme introduced in 2006 to boost the incomes of low-wage workers. To ensure that poorer Singaporeans would have sufficient funds for retirement, the government planned to introduce a compulsory annuity as part of the government-mandated savings scheme, the Central Provident Fund. On the legal front, revisions to the Penal Code, Singapore’ colonial-era criminal law, prompted a rare and vehement public debate on homosexuality. While a number of other archaic prohibitions were removed, “acts of gross indecency” between males remained an offense. The government explained its stance as one of a balance between maintaining a stable society with traditional heterosexual family values and making space for homosexuals but said that it would not enforce the law. The conservative majority applauded the retention, but liberals scoffed: What was the point of a law that was never enforced? (CHUA LEE LOONG)

SLOVAKIA

Area: 49,035 sq km (18,933 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,396,000

Capital: Bratislava Chief of state: President Ivan Gasparovic Head of government: Prime Minister Robert Fico

the influence of private pension funds, which formed the backbone of the three-pillar system that had been introduced in 2005. In an effort to further raise his popular support domestically, in early February Fico pulled Slovakia's demining team out of Iraq. The parliament approved controversial amendments to the labour code and pension system that business leaders viewed as indicators of a worsening business environment.

Still, those laws

did not go as far as Fico had hoped, as the initial proposals were often toned down by Smer-SD's two junior coalition partners—the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (LS-HZDS) and the Slo-

vak National Party (SNS), particularly the former. One study indicated that Fico’s government had kept fewer than half of its key promises during its first year in office. For its part, the political opposition was ineffective in blocking government legislation. The only major leadership shift in the six parliamentary parties during 2007 occurred in early April. Bela Bugar, the longtime chairman of the opposition Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK), was defeated by Pal Csaky. Bugar’s replacement sparked fears that the SMK’s orientation would shift toward a more nationalist approach, contributing to tense relations between Slovaks and Hungarians. In September relations worsened further after the Slovak parliament approved a resolution on the inviolability of the postWorld War II Benes decrees, which had

stripped ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia of their civic and property rights. The SMK was the only party to vote against the resolution. The ruling parties experienced

World Affairs: Solomon Islands Kerstin Joensson/AP

their biggest crisis to date in November, after Fico fired Agriculture Minister Miroslav Jurena (of the LS-HZDS) fol-

lowing reports of his involvement in illegal land transfers. The Slovak economy surged at a record

pace

in 2007

(about

9%)

as

strong foreign demand contributed to a sharp narrowing of external deficits. Moreover, productivity gains continued to outpace real wage growth, keeping concerns about economic overheating to a minimum. By the standards of Eurostat’s Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, Slovakia’s inflation fell to about 2%, well within the Maastricht

Treaty limit for entry to the euro zone. Thus, Slovakia appeared to be on track to adopt the euro in January 2009. On the downside, Eurostat figures indicated that Slovakia recorded the highest unemployment rates (over 11%) in the EU during 2007, falling behind Poland.

(SHARON FISHER)

Two couples in traditional dress—one from Slovenia (right) and one from Austria (left)—greet each other at the Karawanken tunnel on the SlovenianAustrian border after the border controls between the two countries were abolished on December 21.

SLOVENIA Janez Drnovsek chose not to seek reelection to another five-year term. Seven candidates competed, but because none gained a majority of the votes cast, a runoff election was

held

the 10 states that joined the EU in 2004 to adopt the euro, was also the first of that group to accede to the EU rotating presidency. A third major step as an EU

on November 11 between the two candidates with the most votes. The victor was former UN ambassador Danilo Turk, who captured 68% of the vote. He defeated Lojze Peterle, Slovenia’s prime minister at the time of independence in 1991. Turk was supported by the centre-left, while Peterle was the candidate of the centre-right, including the parties constituting Slovenia’s coalition government under Prime Minister Janez Jansa. Turk took office on December 22. Slovenia’s government remained stable during the year, although there were several ministerial changes. The strong leftist showing in the presidential election underscored the vulnerability of the Jansa coalition leading up to the parliamentary elections due in the fall of 2008. The collapse of the once-dominant Liberal Democrat party was coupled with the appearance of a new centre-left party known as Zares

member

(For Real),

Area: 20,273 sq km (7,827 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 2,011,000

Capital: Ljubljana Chief of state: Presidents Janez Drnovsek and, from December 22, Danilo Turk

Head of government: Prime Minister Janez Jansa

Slovenia began 2007 by becoming the 13th country in the 27-member European Union to adopt the euro as its currency. The transition from the tolar to the euro was prepared carefully and implemented smoothly. The government and the parliament used 2007 to prepare for the presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2008. Thus, Slovenia, the first of

came

on December

21, when

extension of the Schengen Agreement abolished Slovenia’s border controls with fellow members Italy, Austria, and Hungary. This step also made Slovenia’s border with non-EU member Croatia the external border of the EU. On October 21 Slovenia held a presidential election. Incumbent Pres.

whose

leaders

emanated

primarily from the Liberal Democrats. Its popularity remained unclear, however, and the strongest leader on the left continued to be Borut Pahor, head of the Social Democrats, who declined

an anticipated presidential run in order to prepare for the 2008 parliamentary vote.

(RUDOLPH M. SUSEL)

SOLOMON ISLANDS

aR kk Area: 28,370 sq km (10,954 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 496,000

Capital: Honiara Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il,

represented by Governor-General Sir Nathaniel Waena Head of government: Prime Ministers Manasseh Sogavare and, from December 20, Derek Sikua

In 2007

there was

continuing

tension

between Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), which had been invited

to the Solomons in 2003 to restore order and to rebuild government institutions. Sogavare was keen to negotiate a

withdrawal date for RAMSI, but a September 2007 survey found that more than 80% of Solomon Islanders wanted to retain RAMSI and believed that the political and economic conditions would deteriorate if the multinational security force left. Sogavare further annoyed Australia when he appointed as attorney general a longtime friend and Fijian national, Julian Moti, whose ex-

tradition Australia was seeking, and when he replaced the country’s Aus461

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Somalia

tralian police chief with another Fijian national, Jahir Khan, who promptly submitted a plan for rearming the Solomon Islands police whom RAMSI had disarmed in 2003. In December Sogavare lost a no-confidence vote and was replaced by Derek Sikua. The new government dismissed Moti, who was extradited to Australia and held on child sex charges. Despite the political tension, the economy was growing very fast. It was heavily dependent, however, on unsustainable levels of logging, which had been growing at 6-1296 annually. Natural forests were likely to be depleted in six years, and the IMF had urged reductions in logging. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

SOMALIA

bf Area: 637,000 sq km (246,000 sq mi), includ-

ing the 176,000-sq-km (68,000-sq-mi) area unrecognized Republic of Somaliland Population (2007 est.): 8,699,000 (including

roughly 3,700,000 in Somaliland); at the beginning of the year, more than 450,000 refugees were in neighbouring countries, Europe, or the United States Capital: Mogadishu; Hargeysa is the capital of Somaliland Head of state and government: Somalia's goverment under President Abdiqassim Salad Hassan was barely functioning in 2007; a new transitional government comprised President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, assisted by Prime Ministers Ali Muhammad

an

internationally recognized but ineffectual ruling body created in 2004, found itself on the verge of collapse. The Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamic fundamentalist movement, had seized

control of much of the country, including the capital city of Mogadishu, and was closing in on the TFG’s last strongthe

city

of Baidoa,

near

the

Ethiopian border. Commanding only a 462

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

as

fleeing

Is-

lamist fighters became sandwiched between Ethiopian forces, the Kenyan border

and the Somali coastline, U.S.

gunships mounted a pair of air raids that were aimed at cadres of foreign fighters, militiamen, and—reportedly— three high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives aligned with the ICU. Though the ICU’s militia was defeated, Ethiopian troops remained in Mogadishu, where they were soon joined by a contingent of some 1,500 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda. These foreign forces effected little order, and in the deeply xenophobic capital they quickly became targets of the city’s entrenched clan-based militias. In March, violence there reached its worst levels in more than a decade,

with scarce

Somalia began the year 2007 embroiled in a war that would produce the worst violence since the fall in 1991 of the country’s last stable government. In the final days of 2006, Somalia’s Transi-

hold,

cluding many Islamist insurgents and the powerful Hawiye clan—boycotted it; they held their own conference in September in Asmara, Eritrea. There the groups formed the Alliance for the

In January,

July. Yet major opposition groups—in-

Re-Liberation

of Somalia

(ARS),

an

umbrella group that vowed that it would not negotiate until a full withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia occurred.

(EBEN KAPLAN)

SOUTH AFRICA >

|

Area: 1,219,912 sq km (471,011 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 47,851,000 Capitals (de facto): Pretoria (executive);

Bloemfontein (judicial); Cape Town (legislative)

Head of state and government: President Thabo Mbeki

320,000

civilians poured out of Mogadishu. Many sought refuge in Kenya but were turned back at the border and were left stranded. Though the total number of internally displaced people in Somalia was impossible to ascertain, UN estimates approached one million. These refugees lived in precarious conditions,

October 29, and, from November 24, Nur Hassan Hussein

(TFG),

incursion.

To escape the violence, some

Ghedi, Salim Aliyow Ibrow (acting) from

Government

U.S. warship fired missiles into a mountainous area of Puntland where a band of suspected foreign militants had recently arrived by boat. Prospects for peace remained bleak. After repeated delays, a reconciliation conference convened in Mogadishu in

with battles so intense that bodies were left lying in the streets for days. In response to calls for a UN peacekeeping force, UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon said that such an operation would be too dangerous.

of the unilaterally declared (in 1991) and

tional Federal

meager militia, the TFG would have met its end in Baidoa in late 2006 had Ethiopian forces not intervened, routing ICU fighters and recapturing Mogadishu in a matter of days. The United States, fearing the ICU would turn Somalia into a terrorist haven, tacitly supported the Ethiopian

access to food, water, and

shelter. Spiraling inflation and rising food prices due to insecurity burdened those Somalis who had not fled their homes. Because of security concerns, few humanitarian organizations were willing to provide assistance in Somalia. Somalia’s relatively stable northern regions could not remain above the fray. The Republic of Somaliland (which had been virtually independent for 16 years) and the adjacent semiautonomous region of Puntland became entangled in a border dispute fueled by rival subclans, which raised fears of a

localized war. All-out regional war also remained a threat, with Ethiopian troops still in Somalia and Eritrea continuing to support the lingering Islamist insurgents. The destabilizing presence of refugees and transient militants exacerbated this risk. In June a

The succession crisis in the African National Congress

(ANC), which

loomed

large during 2007 in South Africa, was resolved in December when ANC Deputy

Pres.

Jacob

Zuma

was

over-

whelmingly elected ANC president; he won 2,329 votes, compared with 1,505

for outgoing president Thabo Mbeki. Zuma’s slate for the next five senior positions in the ANC also triumphed over Mbeki’s ticket. On December

28, how-

ever, Zuma was recharged with fraud and corruption, and new charges of money laundering, racketeering, and tax evasion were also added. These developments put into question his succession to the presidency of the country in the 2009 elections. The succession crisis sparked a number of related developments. The year was punctuated by a series of court skirmishes between the National Prosecuting Authority and Zuma’s lawyers involving documents required for the successful refiling of charges against Zuma for fraud and corruption. Former National Intelligence Agency director general Billie Masetlha—fired by President Mbeki in 2006 for having allegedly

World Affairs: South Africa Jerome Delay/AP

masterminded a series of hoax emails implicating senior ANC politicians in a plot to undermine

Zuma—lost

an attempt in

court to prove his dismissal was unlawful and unfair; he appealed the ruling. Masetlha was also on trial for having refused to answer questions put to him by the inspector general of intelligence. In September President Mbeki dismissed

Vusi

Pikoli,

head

of

police

chief

Johann

van

Merwe

were

sentenced

der to

10

years’ imprisonment (the sentence was suspended for five years in a plea-bargain agreement) for the attempted murder in 1989 of then leading antiapartheid activist Frank Chikane, presently the director-general of the Presidency. A one-month public-service strike in June involving up to one million workers and 17 unions was settled with a 7.5% pay increase. That strike and numerous others by midyear had accounted for more than 11 million lost working days, the highest ever recorded. Economy. Economic growth in

the National Prosecuting Authority, and set up a commission to determine his fitness for public office. There was widespread speculation that Pikoli had, without Mbeki’s knowledge, secured a warrant for the arrest of Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi and that this was the motive 2006 was recorded at 5%, the behind Pikoli’s firing, not the fastest in more than 20 years. In breakdown of Pikoli’s working the first quarter of 2007, growth was 4.7%, but it slowed to 4.5% relationship with his superior, Newly elected African National Congress president in the second quarter. A series of the minister of justice. Earlier in Jacob Zuma addresses delegates during the closing the year, the press had exposed interest-rate increases by the Resession of the ANC conference in Polokwane, S.Af,, serve Bank (SARB) had raised links between Selebi and Glenn on December 20. rates by 4% since June 2006. InAgliotti, who was on trial for drug smuggling and had been flation remained below the 6% target set by the SARB until April 2007, charged with the 2005 murder of conthat beginning in 2010 a new mandabut by September it had reached 6.7%. tory earnings-related national social setroversial financier Brett Kebble. curity system would be instituted. Agliotti claimed that the death of KebGrowth boosted the current-account deficit in 2006 to 6.4% of GDP; the Controversial Health Minister Manto ble was an “assisted suicide.” deficit for 2007 was estimated at 7.1%. Tensions in the tripartite alliance of Tshabalala-Msimang had a liver transthe ANC, the Congress of South African plant early in the year, and soon after In the 2006-07 financial year, there Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South her return to the job, a furor erupted was an unprecedented budget surplus African Communist Party (SACP) intenover Mbeki’s dismissal in August of of 5 billion rand (about $700 million). sified, with several heated exchanges beDeputy Health Minister Nozizwe MadSocial services constituted 56% of tween President Mbeki and Zwelinzima lala-Routledge. Critics argued that her spending for the 2007-08 budget, with Vavi (general secretary of COSATU) and dismissal had more to do with her difthe housing budget projected to inbetween Mbeki and the leadership of the ferences with Mbeki and Tshabalalacrease from 4.6 billion rand (about $650 SACP. COSATU issued an unpreceMsimang on AIDS policy than with her million) in 2003-04 to 12.5 billion rand dented endorsement of a slate of leaders inability to work as a “team player.” (about $1.8 billion) by 2009-10. Fundfor the ANC’s December conference; the That same month The Sunday Times ing was announced for crime prevenlist included Zuma and excluded Mbeki. (London) newspaper accused Tshabaltion and for the provision of more eduIn another development, pro-Zuma ala-Msimang of having been convicted cators and health workers. At the same SACP General Secretary Blade Nziof theft in Botswana in the 1970s and time, tax cuts of 12.4 billion rand (about mande was accused by the pro-Mbeki of having an addiction to alcohol. $1.8 billion) were announced. Total COSATU Pres. Willie Madisha of having There were calls for her resignation, spending for the year was projected at received a donation (not properly acbut she was defended by the president 534 billion rand (about $77 billion), and counted for) of 500,000 rand (about and the cabinet. a surplus of 0.6% of GDP was forecast $70,000). Nzimande denied the charge. In May, Cape Town Mayor Helen Zille for the 2007-08 financial year. In President Mbeki’s state of the nareplaced Tony Leon as leader of the Foreign Affairs. South Africa gave astion address in February, he chronicled main opposition party, the Democratic sistance to flood victims in Mozama string of his administration’s sucAlliance. In January Zille's coalition bique in February. As chair of the UN cesses, but he admitted that his govgovernment in Cape Town had been in Security Council during the year, the ernment could do better in terms of job danger of collapsing when one of its South African government was criticreation, crime fighting, black ecomembers threatened to defect, but Pacized for refusing to allow the council nomic empowerment, and the provision tricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats to debate issues pertaining to Zimof housing. Crimes against women and joined the coalition and stabilized it. In babwe and Myanmar (Burma). South September Zille was arrested while children, in particular, remained “at an Africa continued to assist in peace efunacceptable level.” Mbeki spoke of the leading an antidrug protest march in forts in Cóte d'Ivoire and The Sudan need for a determined drive to increase Cape Town. and to aide in the consolidation of the country’s capacity to produce capiIn August former apartheid law and democracy in the Comoros. tal goods. An announcement was made order minister Adrian Vlok and former (MARTIN LEGASSICK) 463

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Spain AFP/Getty Images

SPAIN

Area: 504,645 sq km (194,845 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 45,321,000

Capital: Madrid Chief of state: King Juan Carlos I Head of government: Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

In economic terms Spain continued to

outperform Union

most

partners

of

its

European

in 2007, with impres-

sive job creation and an estimated growth of 3.896 in GDP. In the second half of the year, however, the slowdown

in the all-important construction industry was accompanied by evidence of reduced consumer spending and export growth as well as a worrying rise in inflation, which was running in November at 4.1% annually. In December the Organisation

for Economic

Co-opera-

tion and Development cut its prediction for 2008 growth to 2.5%. The most worrying development for the Socialist government of Prime Minister

José

Luis

Rodriguez

Zapatero

came on June 5, when the Basque separatist organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna

(ETA)

broke

off its

14-month

cease-fire, dashing hopes of an end to the organization's 40-year armed struggle. Intensified police and judicial activity aborted a number of bombings and resulted in dozens of arrests of suspected terrorists on both sides of the French border and in the roundup in October of more than 20 leaders of ETAS banned political wing, Batasuna. These measures failed to prevent a surge in street violence in the Basque Country or the deaths on December 1 of two Civil Guard officers who, while conducting surveillance duty in southern France, were shot and killed after a chance encounter with three ETA members. A joint statement condemning this attack was signed by all the mainstream political parties and thus constituted a rare display of political unity between the ruling Socialist Workers’ Party and the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP), which fiercely opposed talks with ETA. Earlier in the year, hundreds of thousands of PP flag-waving demonstrators protested the early release, on humanitarian grounds, of an ETA hunger striker who was allowed to serve out his sentence under house arrest. 464

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

At the 17th Ibero-American Summit, King Juan Carlos of Spain (right, foreground) tells Hugo Chávez to “shut up” after the Venezuelan president interrupted Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (left, foreground). The PP’s belligerent mobilization around terrorism and the regional question was echoed on other emotive issues. Even after the October conviction of 18 Islamic fundamentalists of mainly North African origin and three Spanish accomplices for the March 2004 train bombings, leading members of the PP continued to suggest the possibility of a politically motivated cover up of ETA involvement in the attack (which killed 191 people and injured

pointed out that they won more town council seats. An opinion poll taken in October indicated that the gap between the two parties was narrowing; the Socialists led the PP by an estimated 2.3%. With general elections scheduled

more

in government.

than 1,500). The PP stood alone

for March

2008,

the

Socialists

could

take some consolation from the fact that respondents were even less enthusiastic about PP leader Mariano Rajoy and his opposition strategy than they were about the Socialists’ performance The usually discrete monarchy became the object of controversy. In July the seizure of a satiric magazine containing a sexually explicit cartoon featuring Crown Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia sparked antimonarchical protests in Catalonia. In November Morocco recalled its ambassador in response to a royal visit to the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and

too in its frontal opposition to the Law of Historical Memory (approved by the parliament in November 2007), which condemned Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) and provided for the rehabilitation of its political opponents, the removal of surviving public symbols of the Francoist regime, and public support for the excavation of unmarked Civil War graves. The PP denounced the bill as divisive and charged the Socialists with reopening the wounds of the war and breaking the consensus “pact of silence” over the past that had facilitated the transition to democracy in the 1970s. For the Socialists this was further evidence of the PP’s alarmist and opportunistic strategy of total op-

Carlos told Hugo Chávez to “shut up” after the Venezuelan president called former Spanish president José María Aznar a “fascist” and “worse than a

position to the government.

snake,” denounced

The voters’ response to the political tension was inconclusive. Regional and local elections held on May 27 left the political map largely unchanged. The PP was encouraged by sweeping triumphs in Madrid and its larger share of the national vote in the municipal elections (35.6%, compared with the

of Spanish companies in his country, and interrupted Zapatero when he spoke out in their defense. In the international arena, meetings in Madrid and in Washington between Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice improved bilateral relations, but the two countries continued to differ

Socialists’ 34.9%), while the Socialists

Melilla.

(See Morocco,

above.) In No-

vember Spain became embroiled in a dispute with Venezuela at the 17th Ibero-American

Summit.

King

Juan

the neocolonialism

World Affairs: Sudan, The

over policies concerning Iraq, Cuba (with which Spain reestablished full cooperation in April) and Afghanistan. Zapatero refused the U.S. request to increase the 700-strong Spanish military presence in Afghanistan. (JUSTIN BYRNE)

SRI LANKA

Area: 65,610 sq km (25,332 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 20,102,000 Capitals: Colombo (executive and judicial); Sri

Jayawardenepura Kotte (legislative) Head of state and government: President Mahinda Rajapakse, assisted by Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake In 2007 the civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that

had continued at varying levels of intensity since 1983 flared up again. While neither side explicitly abrogated the 2002 cease-fire, it died in practice as the fighting, suicide bombings, as-

government seemed to be gaining the upper hand. With the aid of the dissident Karuna faction of Tamil fighters, it cleared the LTTE from the eastern region of the country. In November the government kiled S.P. Thamilselvan, the leader of the LTTE' political wing. Politically, Pres. Mahinda Rajapakse faced little challenge in early 2007. Urged on by militant Buddhist monks and other Sinhalese nationalists and buoyed by military successes, he felt little incentive to negotiate with the rebels over a possible compromise solution to their demand for independence. Continuing international pressure, including a partial aid freeze, did not avail. The opposition United National Party was in disarray and suffered defections to the ruling People’s Alliance. Later, however, a new opposition alliance (the National Congress) was formed, and the Ceylon Workers Congress, which represented legal migrants from India, deserted the ruling coalition (though its lawmakers rejoined late in the year). The social costs of ongoing war and unrest were high. Reportedly, 350,000 people had been displaced and 5,000 had died in the latest fighting, bringing cumulative deaths since 1983 to more

sassinations, and abductions increased

than 67,000. In addition, more than 1,000 individuals had been abducted in 2007. Press freedom was curtailed, and

during the year. Both sides launched attacks, including daring and unprecedented LTTE air raids on government air bases at Katunayake and Anuradhapura. Later in the year, however, the

for the first time, the government of Sri Lanka faced concerted international criticism for its human rights record. Economic growth, which had held up remarkably well over the course of the

A Sri Lankan magistrate inspects the bodies of victims of a roadside bomb blast that claimed the lives of at least 16 bus passengers near the town of Kebithigollewa; the bombing was believed to have been the work of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

war, slowed to approximately 6% in 2007. Adverse weather hampered agricultural production, and the prevailing insecurity hurt tourism. The garment sector continued to thrive, and worker

remittances provided valuable foreign exchange. Inflation resulted from large government deficits, spiraling defense expenditure, and expansion of the armed forces. Private and public investment remained very low. The government followed a generally marketoriented economic policy, but further economic reform was stalled by its reliance in the parliament on the People’s Liberation Front, its Marxist partner. (DONALD SNODGRASS)

SUDAN, THE

Area: 2,505,800 sq km (967,499 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 39,379,000, including

nearly 250,000 refugees in Chad Capital: Khartoum Head of state and government: President and Prime Minister Lieut. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir

Benefiting from the high prices paid for oil, The Sudan in 2007 recorded one of

Africa's fastest-growing economies, estimated at nearly 1096. Foreign investment, spurred by China and some of the emirates

in the Persian

Gulf, had

quadrupled over the past decade. On the political front, The Sudan's relations with Eritrea improved following an agreement early in the year between the presidents of the two countries to develop areas along the common border and to encourage cooperation in matters pertaining to health, education, and road construction. In the middle of the year, however,

the worst floods in

living memory affected 400,000 people in 19 of The Sudans districts. Relations between northern and southern Sudan were less friendly. On October 11 the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the ruling party in southern Sudan, suspended its participation in the Government of National Unity (GNU), claiming that its partner in the GNU

(the Northern Sudan's Na-

tional Congress Party) was failing to fulfill the terms of the internationally supervised Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005. Little progress had Sanka Vidanagama—AFP/Getty Images

465

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Suriname

been made toward defining the boundary between north and south, and this led to delays in the compilation of a census,

SURINAME

general elections, and the dis-

tribution of oil revenues from the disputed border region. Meanwhile, the rebellion in the west-

ern province of Darfur remained the focus of international attention. Early in January, Pres. Omar al-Bashir agreed to a 60-day cease-fire, but the disunited rebel groups showed little inclination to cooperate. President — Bashir's unswerving resistance to the deployment of UN troops in Darfur exasperated Western governments, but he insisted that while he welcomed help in Darfur

he did not want

it at the ex-

pense of his country’s sovereignty. On February 27 the International Criminal Court (ICC) accused Ahmed Haroun (The Sudan’s minister of humanitarian affairs) and Ali Kushayb (a

Area: 163,820 sq km (63,251 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 510,000

Capital: Paramaribo Head of state and government: President Ronald Venetiaan, assisted by Prime Minister Ram Sardjoe Suriname received the verdict in September 2007 of the UN Law of the Sea tribunal with widespread dismay, including calls from opposition leaders for Pres. Ronald Venetiaan’s resignation. The tribunal awarded neighbouring Guyana most of the legal points at issue and 65% of the contested maritime area containing potentially valuable oil and natural gas deposits. The judgment arose from the expulsion of a Canadian rig from the disputed waters by Surinamese gunboats seven years earlier. Otherwise, Suriname enjoyed comfortable, if unspectacular, progress on many fronts, with improvements in its

former commander of the Janjawid Arab militia) of crimes against humanity. The government, however, rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction, stating that the Sudanese judiciary was fully competent to deal with any crimes committed in Darfur. A UN Security Council delegation on June 27 claimed that it had secured an unconditional agreement with the Sudanese government to deploy a joint African Union-UN peacekeeping force

plus. Aid flows continued from donors generally satisfied with President Venetiaan’s stewardship. Revenue from oil,

for Darfur,

bananas,

which

would

consist

of

nearly 20,000 troops and more than 6,000 police. Almost immediately the chief of the AU commission, echoing President Bashir’s own opinion and reflecting the concerns of other African countries,

stated

that

non-African

troops would not be necessary because African countries had offered adequate reinforcements. An appeal by the Security Council to UN members to supply troops was met with a tardy response. Early in August eight rebel groups met in Tanzania and agreed to present a united approach to the Sudanese government. The following month UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited The Sudan to try once again to make arrangements

credit rating, tax revenue, and trade sur-

and

alumina

was

up, while

on its corruption index.

The endemic challenges related to money laundering and narcotics linked to organized crime remained, however. Tensions rose in Paramaribo at year’s end with the approach of the longawaited murder trial of former dictator and opposition leader Dési Bouterse. (JOHN W. GRAHAM)

SWAZILAND

Area: 17,364 sq km (6,704 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,141,000 Capitals: Mbabane (administrative and judicial); Lozitha and Ludzidzini (royal); Lobamba (legislative)

Chief of state: King Mswati IIl, with much power shared by his mother, Queen Mother Head of government: Prime Minister

Former Surinamese dictator Dési Bouterse speaks during a meeting of his National Democratic Party in Paramaribo on November 26, just days before the start of his trial for the murder of 15 political rivals in 1982.

On September 6 he announced that an agreement had been reached to hold peace talks in Libya (starting on October 27). The meeting appeared threatened, however, by the absence of representatives of several resistance movements, but the UN and AU envoys

Absalom Themba Dlamini

The constitutional and economic uncertainty that had dominated Swaziland during the previous year largely remained in 2007. The validity of the countrys recently adopted constitution was legally challenged by pro-democracy groups at the beginning of 2007, but the High Court ruled in November that they had not convincingly proved their claim. In other judicial news, in June Richard Banda was sworn in as the chief justice of the High Court, and he promised that the independence of the judiciary and rule of law would be upheld. Leading labour unions and some political parties jointly organized protest marches on July 24 (in Manzini)

and July 25 (in

Mbabane) to register their discontent over the constitution, the banning of political parties, and worker-unfriendly policies. Violent student protests against the implementation of “semesterisation” led to the closure of the

to Darfur (who had initiated the talks)

insisted that this was only the first phase of an ongoing process. (KENNETH INGHAM) Ed Oudenaarden—AFP/Getty Images

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

180 countries

Ntombi Latfwala

to create a lasting peace.

466

profits from rice were down, along with other agricultural production adversely affected by serious flooding in April. President Venetiaan continued to successfully finesse the seven fractious parties that constituted his Nieuw Front coalition. The countrys GDP increase was just above 5%, slightly higher than the average for Latin America. Transparency International promoted Suriname to 72nd position from 90th out of

World Affairs: Switzerland

main campus of the University of Swaziland on December 10. Swaziland’s budget showed a 2.8% surplus, and GDP stood at $2.3 billion.

Corruption continued to be a problem in both government and the private sector, and in February the Prevention of Corruption Act was promulgated. The number of those living below the poverty line rose to 70%, from 69% in 2006. The prevalence of HIV/AIDS dropped sharply from 39.2% to 26% among those sexually active and to 19% overall.

(NHLANHLA DLAMINI)

SWEDEN

ture from power, there was a rapid drop in the percentage of unemployed (from 4.9% in September 2006 to 4.2% a year later) and a sizable increase in the

active

workforce

(which

added

131,000 more jobs, compared with 93,000 jobs in Persson’s last year), although there was also a drop in productivity growth. Combined with generous wage agreements in the private sector, however, this situation was ex-

pected to have inflationary effects in the years to come. Lower unemployment rates had been credited in part to reductions in security benefits, such as health insurance. As a result of higher state-enforced fees to union-administered unemployment funds, these funds lost a total of 320,000 members

course

in the

of the first eight months

of

2007.

Although the four-party alliance won a clear mandate Area: 450,295 sq km (173,860 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,142,000

Capital: Stockholm Chief of state: King Carl XVI Gustaf Head of government: Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt The political climate in Swedish public life changed considerably in 2007 following the seizure of a majority in the Riksdag (parliament) by the four-party centre-right coalition in the September 2006 general election. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt gave his cabinet ministers more visible responsibilities than had

while

his predecessor,

at the same

strongest

Finance

Göran

time

Persson,

creating

Ministry

since

the the

legendary era of former finance minister Gunnar Strang, who presided over the expansion of the Swedish welfare state for more than two decades

(1955-76).

From the beginning, one aim of the Reinfeldt government was to reform the social service network provided by the state without dismantling it entirely. The main objective was to put more people to work, by reducing both taxes and unemployment benefits. This was something that the government was able to accomplish; in fact, by year’s end this action was its main political achievement. The Swedish economy during Reinfeldt's first year in office continued to grow at roughly the same level as the previous year—at or slightly less than 496. Economic development under Persson’s Social Democrats was labeled “Jobless growth,” but after their depar-

in the 2006 elections,

its poll ratings immediately deteriorated, settling at least 10 percentage points behind those of the parliamentary opposition. This reinforced a general assumption that voters in 2006 were wanting to get rid of an arrogant leadership rather than favouring the alliances proposed cuts to welfare programs. Two ministerial departures immediately after the government was formed—and an embarrassing financial affair that forced the departure of Reinfeldt’s own state secretary in October—gave the impression of an administration lacking in political experience and the ability to govern effectively. The Reinfeldt government was especially embarrassed by the resignation in September of Defense Minister Mikael Odenberg, who had long supported the conservatives as a leading parliamentarian. He left office over the severe cuts in the long-term budget, which would affect Sweden’s self-defense capability. Plans to sell state-owned stakes in large public companies to private parties, which were not popular among the voters, were delayed owing to mismanagement

at Carnegie, one of

the investment banks commissioned to handle the sales. The Carnegie scandal was caused by proprietary traders’ alleged attempts to overvalue various derivative instruments in their portfolio by manipulating prices, which triggered an extraordinary fine of 50 million kronor (about $7.7 million) against

the bank by the Financial Supervisory Authority. On average, Swedish households were better off than before, although income differentials widened both within and

between groups and professions. The Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations

(SACO), the chief organi-

zation for well-educated professionals, enlarged its constituent memberships, in sharp contrast to groups that represented blue- and white-collar workers. SACO also showed a female majority for the first time. The total value of companies listed on Sweden’s OMX stock exchange diminished somewhat during 2007, a correction after four consecutive years of increasing stock prices. Property prices also showed signs of weakening.

(ANDERS BJORNSSON)

SWITZERLAND

J-

Area: 41,284 sq km (15,940 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 7,607,000

Capital: Bern Head of state and government: President Micheline Calmy-Rey Switzerland’s normally predictable political landscape was shaken to the foundations by the fallout from the Oct. 21, 2007, general elections which

gave the nationalist Swiss People's Party (SVP) the highest vote ever recorded for a single Swiss party The SVP received 2996 of the vote (up from 26.796

in the

2003

election)

and

in-

creased its representation by 7 seats to give it the largest number of seats (62) in the 200-seat National Council. The left-of-centre Social Democrats fell to 19.596 (down from 23.396) and finished

in second place with 43 seats, partly owing to a strong showing from the Green Party which improved from 7.496 (13 seats) in 2003 to 9.696 (20 seats) in 2007. The centrist Free De-

mocratic Party got 15.696 of the vote (down from

17.396), and the Christian

Peoples

Party

14.6%.

Turnout

stayed was

steady a poor

with 48.9%,

which reflected widespread apathy in a country known for holding frequent referenda on a diverse range of issues. The SVP campaigned under the slogan “My Home, Our Switzerland,” and with a poster of three white sheep kicking out one black sheep—symbolizing the party’s proposals to expel entire immigrant families if one member broke the law, which

was

in tune

with the

467

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Syria Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images

A Zürich court in June acquitted all 19 of the top executives implicated in the collapse of the former flag carrier Swissair and awarded them compensation of more than 3 million Swiss francs (about $2.5 million); the award

Sicherheit schaffen —————" — gp—Ó Ó!—— ——

A controversial election poster of the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) emphasizes the SVP’ proposals for strict measures against immigrants.

prompted an outcry among the thousands of employees who lost their jobs and pensions when Swissair was grounded abruptly in October 2001 after being unable to pay for fuel and landing fees. Swiss

economic

was forecast at a betterthan-expected 2.6%. A government

partys belief that foreigners were to blame for much of the country’s crime. About 1.6 million of Switzerland’s 7.6 million inhabitants were foreign—although the high total partly reflected tougher citizenship criteria than in many

growth

expert

panel,

however, warned that prospects 2008 were highly uncertain.

for

(CLARE KAPP)

SYRIA

other countries.

The SVP was outmaneuvered when its leading light, billionaire businessmen and virulent EU opponent Christoph Blocher, failed to gain reelection as justice minister (at a joint sitting of the two chambers of the Federal Assembly on December 12). In the biggest upset since the formation of the four-party coalition in 1959, the Federal Assembly instead elected Eveline WidmerSchlumpf, from the SVP’s moderate wing, to the seven-member federal executive. Blocher disowned WidmerSchlumpf and said that the SVP would in future behave as an opposition party and try to thwart government plans through referenda. Blochers sudden exit from the cabinet looked set to ease relations with the EU after antagonism over Switzerland's refusal to amend its corporate taxation policy.

Switzerland showed no sign of wanting to join the EU, but its role as a transport hub at the heart of Europe was cemented with the opening in June of the transalpine Lótschberg Base Tunnel. The world’s longest overland tunnel—a 34.6-km (21.5-mi) rail link—

took eight years to build, and when full rail service began in December, it slashed the train journey between Germany and Italy from 3% hours to less than 2 hours. An even more ambitious project—the 57-km (35-mi) Gotthard Base Tunnel—was scheduled for completion by 2017 in a bid to move heavy trucks off the road and onto the rails.

Area: 185,180 sq km (71,498 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 19,048,000 (excluding

1,400,000 Iraqi refugees) Capital: Damascus Head of state and government: President Bashar al-Assad, assisted by Prime Minister Muhammad Naji al-Otari

revenue and stabilize banking. This announcement followed a substantial tax cut for private companies. President Assad issued a decree in October that awarded all state employees and military personnel a 50% salary bonus. On September 28 a prominent figure in Syria’s Islamist movement, Sheikh Mahmoud Qul Aghasi, known as Abu al-Qa’qa, was assassinated. He had urged his followers, who called themselves the Strange Ones of Syria, to fight against U.S. intervention in the Muslim world. Rumours immediately circulated that he had been killed on orders from the U.S. CIA, although some pointed to radical Islamists incensed by his calls for collaboration with existing Arab governments and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi‘ites. Syria’s relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia steadily deteriorated. In February an elite Israeli unit carried out exercises in the Golan Heights for the first time in five years. Three months later Syrian officials told Egyptian journalists that “Syria wants the Golan back, whether peacefully or through a war.” Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reportedly pledged $1 billion to purchase upgraded weaponry, including fighter-bombers, tanks, and military helicopters during a July visit to Damascus. On September 6, Israeli warplanes bombed a remote site outside Dair al-Zur. Some observers claimed that the strike was designed to test

Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad greets supporters in Damascus on May 27

Parliamentary elections held in Syria in April 2007 sparked violent protests in Al-Raqqa, Al-Hasakah, and Homs after local officials attempted to rig the balloting in favour of pro-regime candidates. Nine Kurdish parties boycotted the proceedings and charged that the

after casting his ballot in a referendum on whether to approve his second term in office.

authorities were encouraging voters to

support lists of nominally independent Kurdish candidates in an effort to undercut the opposition. In the end the 10 parties of the ruling National Progressive Front won

172 of the 250 seats, 3

more than in the 2003 elections. The People’s Assembly then nominated Pres. Bashar al-Assad for a second seven-year term. In a May referendum nearly 98% of voters approved the nomination. Electoral stasis accompanied gradual change in the domestic economy. The Ministry of Finance announced in January that publicly traded treasury bonds would be introduced to augment Bassem Tellawi/AP

468

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Taiwan Wally Santana/AP

Syria's air-defense system; others suggested that it was a warning to Iran; and still others argued that it destroyed a secret facility for the production or storage of chemical agents or nuclear material. The commander of the UN Disengagement Observer Force warned in late September that Israel was engaged in a dangerous troop buildup along the Golan front. Tensions between Syria and Saudi Arabia appeared to be diminishing in March when President Assad conferred with Saudi King Abdullah at an Arab summit in Riyadh. Saudi officials hinted

a month

later,

however,

that

Damascus had supported a militant Islamist cell that was planning to attack oil installations and military bases across the kingdom. In August Saudi Arabia refused to attend a Syrian-sponsored conference on Iraqi security. Ef forts by Qatar to mediate bore little fruit and precipitated a rupture in QatariSaudi relations. (FRED H. LAWSON)

won his party's presidential nomination in May. Contrary to expectations

he would take a moderate line with respect to relations with China, Hsieh came out strongly in favour of a DPPproposed referendum to join the UN under the name Taiwan. He also worked out a compromise resolution on Taiwan' future, known as the “res-

olution on making Taiwan a normal country." Among other things, the resolution called for a new constitution and name for the country, although it did not specifically designate that name as Taiwan. While Hsieh supported amending Taiwan’s constitution to change the country’s official name from the Republic of China to Taiwan, this change would break an explicit promise made by President Chen to the U.S. not to do so. Hsieh’s KMT opponent in the presidential race, Ma Ying-jeou, initially attempted to focus his campaign on the state of Taiwan’s economy. Ma promised that if elected,

he would

a restriction

Area: 36,188 sq km (13,972 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 22,902,000

Capital: Taipei Chief of state: President Chen Shui-bian

Head of government: Presidents of the Executive Yuan (Premiers) Su Tseng-chang and,

from May 21, Chang Chun-hsiung In 2007 Taiwan's politics became focused on the presidential elections scheduled for March 2008 as the (KMT),

or

Nationalist

Party, and its allies, which controlled Taiwan' legislature, realized that Pres. Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would serve out his second and last term. The two parties were locked in an ideological struggle over the status of Taiwan that had paralyzed and polarized politics for seven years. While the DPP regarded Taiwan as an already independent country, the KMT leadership wanted to see Taiwan more closely integrated with China economically over the short term and ultimately united over the long term. The DPP’s Frank Hsieh, who near the

end of 2006 lost the mayoral election in Taipei by a less-than-expected margin,

on Taiwanese

companies

that capped their Chinese investments at 40% of their net assets. Ma's campaign received a major boost when the Taipei District Court acquitted him on charges of having misused public funds while serving as mayor of Taipei. Strong support for the DPP’s UN referendum, however, led Ma to propose a parallel referendum whereby Taiwan would rejoin the UN under its official name of the Republic of China. This proposal angered China, which opposed all referenda in Taiwan because it feared that the ethnic Taiwanese majority might use a referendum to reject unification with China or to declare de jure Taiwanese independence. In 2007 less than 10% of the Taiwanese population supported unification with China. In December the DPP government amended the legal status of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial

Police in Taipei stand guard in front of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hail on December 5; the Taiwanese

government's plan to remove the inscription on the memorial arch bearing the former dictators name sparked a series of protests.

restore

the rapid economic growth of the 1980s and ‘90s by opening direct air and shipping links with China and by dropping

TAIWAN

Kuomintang

that

Hall, a vast down-

town monument and park dedicated to the memory of the former dictator. AF ter a series of sporadic protests, the inscription on the memorial arch bearing Chiang’s name was replaced, and the entire complex was renamed the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. Ma Ying-jeou promised to restore the old name if elected. The DPP’s proposed UN referendum increasingly strained relations with the U.S., which saw it as a step toward for-

mal independence. The DPP’s refusal to drop its proposal led senior U.S. diplomat Thomas Christensen to abandon the U.S.’s policy of strategic ambiguity on the status of Taiwan by saying that the U.S. does “not recognize Taiwan as an independent state.” Although Taiwanese investment in China reached $150 billion in 2007, for-

mal relations with China remained icy. Negotiations to allow Chinese tourists to visit

Taiwan

in greater

numbers

failed to produce results, and after a disagreement over nomenclature, Taiwan refused to allow the Olympic torch to pass through on its way to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. The year saw three acquisitions of Taiwanese banks by foreign banks. Citigroup acquired the Bank of Overseas Chinese;

ABN

AMRO

took

over

the

troubled Taitung Business Bank; and HSBC agreed to take over the troubled Chinese Bank. Taiwan’s main stock exchange,

the

TAIEX,

hit a series

of

seven-year highs during mid-2007, which—combined with export growth of 8.8%—had Taiwan’s economy on track for overall growth of 4.58%. Unemployment, meanwhile, hovered at around 4%. The relatively high jobless rate, combined with sluggish growth in salaries and rising prices caused by higher international oil prices, contributed to widespread discontent about the state of the economy despite rosy economic indicators. (MICHAEL R. FAHEY)

469

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Tajikistan

TAJIKISTAN

Area: 143,100 sq km (55,300 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,736,000

Capital: Dushanbe Chief of state: President Imomali Rakhmonov (from April Imomalii Rakhmon)

Head of government: Prime Minister Akil Akilov

The drift toward authoritarianism in Tajikistan continued in 2007 as Pres. Imomalii Rakhmon’s extended family and personal clique increasingly dominated political and economic life in Tajikistan; most of the appointees to high government posts were natives of Rakhmon's home village of Dangara. He announced in March that he was dropping the Russian suffix (-ov) from his surname and invited his countrymen to return to the traditional forms of their names; during 2007 the “Tajikization” of surnames was most noticeable at the highest levels of government. The year began with Tajikistan in the midst of a severe power shortage, intensified by an exceptionally cold winter. The lack of power was caused by extremely low water levels in the reservoirs behind the country’s power dams, particularly at Nurek, Tajikistan’s single-most-important source of hydroelectric power. Uzbekistan failed to fulfill its commitment to supply Tajikistan with power in winter, asserting that its domestic demands were higher owing to the cold winter. Most of Tajikistan received electricity two hours a day at most, if at all. Erratic supplies of natural gas from Uzbekistan forced most city dwellers to heat with electricity; the absence of both light and heat intensified popular dissatisfaction, and by March the media were warning of rising social tensions.

In May Rakhmon sharply criticized the spending of huge sums on family events such as weddings, circumci-

increasingly rapid rate of inflation. Attempts to establish price ceilings for meat and flour caused affordable foodstuffs to disappear from the markets. The disastrous winter intensified the Tajik government's efforts to find foreign investors to develop the country's hydroelectric potential. Angered by the long dispute with Rusal—the Russian aluminium giant, which in 2004 had agreed to complete the construction of a major power dam at Roghun above Nurek on the Vakhsh River—the Tajik government withdrew from the deal at the end of August; it had already begun a search for other investors. Uzbekistan, however, intensified its objections to the construction project, argu-

ing that the new dam would reduce the amount of irrigation water available to Tashkent. Similar Uzbek objections to a power plant on the Zeravshan River in northern Tajikistan caused a Chinese consortium to drop that project. (BESS BROWN)

TANZANIA

Area: 945,090 sq km (364,901 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 39,384,000

and Burundi.

In May the Nile Basin Initiative, a nongovernmental organization, launched a project to construct a $200 million hydroelectric plant on the Kagera River on Tanzania's northwestern border with Uganda. Meanwhile, FBME Bank Ltd. (formerly the Federal Bank of the Middle East), based in Dar es Salaam, invested a more-modest $1 million in a

gold refinery near Mwanza, where small-scale gold miners were working. There was criticism, however, from dis-

appointed competitors over the awarding of a $2.6 billion contract to build an oil refinery to an international consortium in which a company owned by the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party had a share, although the company had made no secret of its participation in the project. Donors of aid remained well disposed toward Tanzania; in March,

use.

De facto capital: Dar es Salaam; only the legislature meets in Dodoma, the longtime planned capital Chief of state and head of government: President Jakaya Kikwete, assisted by Prime Minister Edward Lowassa

14 donors

Critics

of her

plans,

however,

thought them insufficiently bold. Although the country's balance of trade with China was unfavourable, there was

optimism that this state of affairs could be rectified. One long-standing drain on the country’s resources seemed likely to come to anend. On a visit to Burundi in June, President Kikwete announced that

In March 2007 Tanzanian Pres. Jakaya Kikwete announced a number of measures that were aimed at encouraging both foreign and local investors. Speaking at a dinner of the Tanzania Bankers Association on April 3, he said that his policy was meant to encourage wider economic relationships wherever possible. Already playing an important role in his policy was the Tanzania Investment

Centre

(TIC), which

was

recog-

nized in March when the World Asso-

lature quickly adopted a law that restricted the amounts that could be spent and the number of guests who could be invited to such occasions. The restrictions caused controversy but were generally accepted. Government efforts to force the population to redirect its saving and spending practices were undercut later in the year by an

ciation

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

out of Uganda, Rwanda,

promised aid totaling $650 million to support the general budget for 2007-08. Nevertheless, while stressing the governments good record in providing social services, Finance Minister Zakia Meghji emphasized in her budget speech on June 14 that there was still a need to make more provision for road construction and for providing electricity for both industry and household

sions, and funerals; the national legis-

470

at Tanga to provide an alternative port to handle heavy goods moving into and

of

Investment

Promotion

Agencies conferred its annual award on the TIC (together with a group in South Korea and one in Portugal); 260 investment agencies took part in the competition.

The government’s plans for the future included an agreement in March with Kuwait to create a deep-water harbour

with peace restored in Burundi, the refugee camps in the northwest would be closed by year’s end. As chairman of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Kikwete played a prominent role in the SADC’s efforts to find a solution to the serious problems in Zimbabwe. He had a private meeting with Pres. Robert Mugabe in March, and in spite of intense pressure from a number of Western powers demanding strong action, Kikwete insisted that his aim was to reach an amicable settlement between the Zimbabwean government and the opposition. To that end, a summit meeting of the SADC later in March agreed to invite South African Pres. Thabo Mbeki to begin negotiations between the Zimbabwean government and its opponents. (KENNETH INGHAM)

World Affairs: Togo Saeed Khan—AFP/Getty Images

—

THAILAND

-— o — r

Oo

-—

— —— e—a ——

== Area: 513,120 sq km (198,117 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 63,884,000

Capital: Bangkok Chief of state: King Bhumibol Adulyadej Head of government: Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont

—

"2 u.

The year 2007 was another eventful one for Thailand. The military junta—in

. a

power since ousting then prime minis2006

coup—attempted

to

restore

democracy in ways that would serve its interests. In May a junta-appointed tri-

bunal dissolved Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party on the grounds of having committed electoral fraud in the snap election of April 2006. Thaksin and more than 100 top-ranking TRT members were barred from politics for five years. Other TRT members formed or joined new parties, including the People Power Party (PPP), which was led by former Bangkok governor Samak Sundaravej. On August 19 a referendum was held on a new constitution drafted by the junta’s appointees. Approved by nearly 58% of referendum voters, the charter

eliminated clauses in the previous constitution

that had

favoured

the TRT,

while the “self-sufficient economy” doctrine, advanced by King Bhumibol Adulyadej after the financial crisis of

~~

"ono "oos Tuer ramm m t^? ware rts A n mmm 102,78 gam a3 ae

—e — — c

—e

E _ — -— -

ter Thaksin Shinawatra in a September

—— — ae — sar oe o= —

on —

REB a — —

—

— — -— es a t — -— — e— aims w—— — — siii -= e mS: qum = 2 ——À wed os — -~

-——L—

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cua

visui

ima anu ai var

ee -——

i

15 TE

mue = -—

where

he

purchased

League

association

the

Premier

football

(soccer)

club Manchester City against opposition from human rights activists. The Thai Supreme Court attempted to have him extradited but to no avail. The Muslim insurgency in the south persisted in 2007, causing more civilian casualties and defying the junta’s effort to contain it. In February the insurgents burned down the largest rubber warehouse in Yala province—a severe blow to the south’s rubber-based economy. In foreign relations, Myanmar’s (Burma’s)

crackdown

on _ pro-democ-

nomic

Most

=

$iwee Svpra

— —

= -

—

& —

frt A

rm z

—

A Thai man reads general election results posted on a board outside Bangkok’s city hall on December 24.

usurpation

in 2006.

P.

2 -

—

There was much concern over several undemocratic clauses that allowed the government to appoint half of the members of the Senate and to pardon the junta for its unconstitutional of power

`

meaa

n —_ —

racy protesters in late September highlighted Thailand’s perennially delicate relationship with its neighbour. Buddhist monks, as well as a defiant highranking military officer, defected to Thailand, a longtime sanctuary for Myanmar dissidents. With its vast eco-

1997, was inserted into the document.

— — —

interests

in Myanmar,

(YOSHINORI NISHIZAKI)

TOGO

bf Area: 56,785 sq km (21,925 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 6,585,000

Capital: Lomé Chief of state: President Faure Gnassingbé Head of government: Prime Ministers Yawovi Agboyibo and, from December 6, Komlan Mally

however,

Thais voted less for the referendum per se than for the holding of an election, which the junta threatened to postpone if the referendum was rejected. In some parts of rural Thailand, where Thaksin remained popular for his policies to help the poor, the referendum was actually defeated. Held on December 23, the general election saw the pro-Thaksin PPP gain more parliamentary seats than the anti-Thaksin Democrat Party, the oldest existing party in Thailand. Rumours circulated about Thaksin's polit-

Thailand was constrained from taking effective independent action; it could do little more than act as a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in jointly disapproving the use of violence. Despite the 2006 coup, the economy grew at a healthy pace, though more slowly than in previous years. A tragedy occurred on September 16 when a budget airliner crashed in Phuket, a popular resort island in southern Thailand; 89 people, including foreign

ical comeback. Thaksin, meanwhile, remained in exile in Great Britain,

The crash did not negatively affect the tourist industry, a major source of for-

tourists, were

eign currency for Thailand. One major concern, however, was the growing strength of the baht, which reduced the competitiveness of Thai exports.

killed. (See DISASTERS.)

In May 2007 sioner

for

the UN Refugees

High Commis(UNHCR)

an-

nounced that it would close the camps that had been established in neighbouring countries to care for the estimated 25,000 refugees who in 2005 had fled violence in Togo in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election. The UNHCR advised the refugees to return home, but the extent to which they were doing so was unclear. Sports Minister Richard Attipoe and journalist Olive Amouzou were among 19 killed in a helicopter crash in Sierra Leone on June 3. They were on their way to Freetown Airport following 471

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Tonga Emile Kouton—AFP/Getty Images

government indicated that parliamentary reform would not occur before the next election,

threats

of civil disorder

were renewed. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

v.v.

EP FERA

Area: 5,128 sq km (1,980 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 1,303,000

Capital: Port of Spain Chief of state: President George Maxwell Richards Head of government: Prime Minister Patrick Manning Opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio campaigns in Kara, Togo, on October 9.

In parliamentary elections held on Nov. 5, 2007, in Trinidad and Tobago, Prime

Togo's victory over Sierra Leone in an

association football (soccer) qualifying match for the African Cup. In August the severe floods that hit much of West Africa left more than

In 2007 Tonga still suffered from the aftermath of the November 2006 rioting that had caused some

$200 million in

and Burkina Faso. The October 14 legislative elections gave the ruling party of Pres. Faure Gnassingbé a clear majority (50 of the

damages and destroyed about 80% of the capital’s central business district. By December 2006 Tongan police, bolstered by officers from New Zealand and Australia, had charged some 790 people for riot-related offenses. At the closing of the parliament that same month, King Siaosi (George) Tupou V made conciliatory remarks about the need for dialogue with the pro-democracy movement and his belief that differences with them could be resolved. When he later undertook to sell his

81 contested seats) in the National As-

considerable

sembly; the main opposition party, led by Gilchrist Olympio, won 27 seats.

other source of popular discontent, progress looked certain. The parliament reconvened in May 2007, but little progress was made on political reform, and popular discontent was rising. A report released in May found that more than 40% of those facing charges had been subjected to violence by Defence Force and Police personnel. Although international aid donors, including Australia

20,000 homeless

in Togo. As a result,

the opening of the school year was postponed for several weeks because many of the classrooms were requisitioned as shelters. The European Union pledged €2 million (about $2.7 million) to assist flood victims in Togo, Ghana,

More

than 2,000 candidates

stood for

election in a poll that was postponed twice by disputes over the distribution of voting cards. The turnout (at 9596)

was one of the highest in Togo’s history. (NANCY ELLEN LAWLER)

TONGA

business

interests,

an-

Minister Patrick Manning’s ruling People’s National Movement took 26 of the 41 seats in the parliament, while the United National Congress Alliance (UNC) party won the remainder. The Congress of the People party, which had broken off from the UNC, failed to garner representation.

Pres. George Maxwell Richards appointed a three-man tribunal in May to investigate whether Chief Justice Satnarine Sharma should be removed from office. Sharma allegedly had at-

On November 3, two days before Trinidad and Tobago's parliamentary elections, supporters cheer at a rally for the ruling People’s National Movement party, led by Prime Minister Patrick Manning.

and New Zealand, contributed to the reconstruction in Nuku'alofa, civil ser-

Area: 750 sq km (290 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 101,000

Capital: Nuku'alofa Head of state and government: King Siaosi (George) Tupou V, assisted by Prime Minister of Privy Council Feleti Sevele

vants were told by the government that anticipated salary increases could not be afforded. Meanwhile, five popular Tongan legislators who had supported the pro-democracy movement faced charges of sedition; a pro-democracy television station and newspaper had been banned, and the manager and the editor, respectively, faced sedition charges;

and

late in 2007,

when

the Brennan Linsley/AP

472

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Turkey

tempted to influence the magistrate’s verdict in the trial of former prime minister Basdeo Panday, who had failed to declare all of his assets to the

whose husband,

Integrity Commission.

whom went on a hunger strike in 2007 to protest their confinement. At the end of July, however, 22 of those prisoners

The Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries confirmed in May that cross-border natural gas in reservoirs straddling blocks located in Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela could amount to about 283 billion cu m (10 trillion cu ft), 27% of which was on

the Trinidad and Tobago side. U.S. consultants Ryder Scott reported in August that Trinidad and Tobago’s proven natural gas reserves had fallen by 49 billion cu m (1.72 trillion cu ft) to 483 billion cu m (17.05 trillion cu ft.) This announcement was worrisome

because the commercialization of natural gas had been the basis of the country’s rapid industrial development in the past decade. (DAVID RENWICK)

TUNISIA

G Area: 163,610 sq km (63,170 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 10,226,000

Capital: Tunis Chief of state: President Gen. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

a journalist, had been

imprisoned on questionable charges. There were more than 100 people in detention since their 1991-92

were

released,

most

trials, 4 of

of them

Renais-

sance Party members or sympathizers. They included Daniel Zarrouk and Mohammed Abbou, a lawyer who had been sentenced in April 2005 to three and a half years’ imprisonment. Meanwhile, Abdullah al-Hajji Ben Amor and Lotfi Lagha, whom the U.S. had released in mid-June from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp, were both immediately arrested upon their arrival in Tunis and faced trial on terrorist offenses. Hajji Ben Amor had been convicted in absentia in 1995 of having membership in a Tunisian

terrorist

organization

abroad—the Tunisian Islamic Front— solely on the basis of a statement that was made by another person who was also accused. In January 2007 about two dozen Islamic extremists who had apparently intended to attack U.S. consular facilities in Tunis were intercepted by security forces in Grombalia, south of the capital. At least 12 people were killed, and 15 others were arrested. In late September, 30 persons were charged with belonging to a terrorist organization and were said to be planning a military coup in Tunisia. (GEORGE JOFFE)

Head of government: Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi

The Tunisian cereal harvest in 2007 reached two million tons, and despite both budget and current-account deficits, GDP was expected to reach 6%. The country was still coping with

wife,

Hayrunnisa,

insisted

on

wearing the Muslim head scarf, which was banned in all official functions in Turkey. On April 27, on the eve of a second mass rally in Istanbul, 357 of the 550 members of the parliament voted in favour of Gul. The opposition, represented by the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), boycotted the session. A few hours later the general staff posted on its Web site a statement that the armed forces would not remain indifferent if the secular regime was endangered, while the CHP petitioned the Constitutional Court to annul the election. On May 1 the court allowed the petition on the novel grounds that the vote to elect the president required a quorum of two-thirds of the members of the parliament. Erdogan responded by securing parliamentary approval of a constitutional amendment that provided for the election of the president by popular vote and by calling general elections on July 22, some three months early. An opposition petition to disallow the constitutional amendment was rejected by the Constitutional Court on July 5, and on October 21 voters approved a referendum that endorsed several constitutional changes, including the holding of presidential elections by popular vote.

increased its vote to 4796 (1296 more than in the 2002 elections) and won 341 seats (22 fewer than in 2002). The CHP came in second (with 2196 and

TURKEY

Cx

112 seats), and the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) took third place (with 14% and 70 seats). Mem-

Area: 783,562 sq km (302,535 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 73,884,000

parency International’s annual Corrup-

Capital: Ankara Chief of state: Presidents Ahmet Necdet Sezer and, from August 28, Abdullah Gul Head of government: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The regime continued its repressive policies and targeted persons whom the government suspected of having sympathies for political Islam as well as others, particularly journalists and human rights organizations that sought to create awareness of human rights abuses. Often the journalists, such as Sihem Bensedrine and Omar Mestiri (publisher of Kalima, an online newspaper), were connected with cyberjournalism. The government continued to campaign against those who persistently opposed it, notably Radia Nasraoui, a lawyer

Gul’s

In the elections on July 22, the AKP

corruption, however, and was ranked 61st out of 179 countries in Trans-

tion Perceptions Index.

criticized at a series of mass meetings. Beginning in April, doubts were expressed about the AKP’s professed attachment to the secular republic when

In 2007 Prime

Minister Recep Tayyip

Erdogan, leader of the centre-right Justice and Development Party (AKP), won a second mandate and succeeded in having his candidate elected to the presidency. Erdogan’s decision to back the candidacy of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul (see

BIOGRAPHIES)

was

vehemently

bers of the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP), which could not hope to cross the 10% threshold, stood as independents. Twenty of the 26 independents who were elected subsequently rejoined the DTP and thereby gained the right to form a parliamentary group. This meant that for the first time, Kurdish nationalists were represented by their own party in the parliament. In the predominantly Kurdishspeaking southeastern region, however, the AKP won 53% of the vote, and DTP

independents took 24%. Strengthened by its success in the polls, the AKP put forward Gul for a second time as its candidate for the presidency, and he was elected president on August 28. Military command473

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Turkmenistan Murad Sezer/AP

DURIVIAK YOK YOLA DEVAM

who had died in December 2006. His interim replacement, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, promised that the election would be fair. Six candidates were nominated, including Berdymukhammedov, but it was quickly apparent that he would have an overwhelming advantage because his activities

as

acting

president

were

given coverage in the state media. In the

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and his wife, Hayrunnisa, celebrate their party’s election victories in July. Gul was elected president in August. ers broke with precedent by not attending the swearing-in ceremony. Throughout the year, militants of the radical nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which had its chief operational base in northern Iraq, mounted hit-and-run raids on Turkish security forces, while

other PKK

terrorists

set

off bombs in metropolitan areas. PKK attacks during the year cost the lives of some 150 people, including civilians and members of the security forces. A convention on the prevention of terrorism signed with Iraq on September 27 had little effect. The U.S. and Turkish retired generals who had been appointed to coordinate measures against the PKK gave up their efforts. Erdogan thereupon asked the parliament to authorize the deployment of Turkish forces outside the country’s boundaries. The attempts by the U.S. administration to dissuade Turkey from an incursion

into

northern

Iraq

proved, however, after Erdogan visited Pres. George W. Bush in Washington on November 5. Following an agreement to share intelligence on the PKK, the U.S. opened Iraqi airspace prior to a series of Turkish raids on PKK camps in December. Meanwhile, EU membership negotiations made no progress. Economic growth slowed, but at 4% (in the first nine months of the year) it

was still well above the EU average. Despite record exports, the foreign-trade deficit rose to $51 billion by the end of October owing to the steep rise in imports, while the deficit in external payments stood at about $30 billion. (ANDREW MANGO)

TURKMENISTAN

were

House

(see OBITUARIES), the editor of Agos, a

bilingual Turkish-Armenian-language weekly in Istanbul, was shot dead by a Turkish adolescent in the service of a group of nationalist fanatics, some of whom had links with the security forces. U.S.-Turkish relations im474

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

February

11, he re-

Internet

access

available

to all,

and Internet cafés reportedly began to open in February, but restrictions remained on access to sites outside the

of Representatives to recognize

the massacres that attended the deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman empire in 1915 as an act of genocide. Turkish-Armenian relations had been dealt a blow earlier when Hrant Dink

on

ceived 8996 of the vote. Following his election, Berdymukhammedov carried out a reform of the educational system, restoring the 10th year of basic education and the 5th year of university; he also restored the old-age pensions that Niyazov had canceled. Reports indicated that the new leader's reforms were very limited, however. His predecessors Ruhnama (“Book of the Spirit”), a rambling volume on the history and traditions of the Turkmen people, remained a staple part of the educational system. Educational exchanges with foreign countries were encouraged officially, but restrictions on travel outside the country were not fully removed, and the strict isolation Niyazov imposed on Turkmenistan only partially weakened. In June the Turkmen government granted permission to the American oil firm Chevron and to BP to open offices in Ashgabat. The projected gas pipeline supplying Turkmen natural gas to Pakistan via Afghanistan came closer to realization in August when the American firm International Oil announced its decision to undertake the construction. In early October, Indian Ambassador Mohammad Afzal informed Berdymukhammedov that India also wanted to take part in the trans-Afghan pipeline project. In return, Berdymukhammedov raised the possibility of cooperation with Indias information-technology sector At the beginning of the year, he had promised to make

hampered by a vote in October by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S.

election,

Area: 488,100 sq km (188,500 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 5,097,000

country.

Capital: Ashgabat Head of state and government: President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov (acting to

menistan Nasrullah ibn Ibadullah (who

In August the former mufti of Turk-

February 14)

A presidential election campaign was launched

in Turkmenistan

on

Jan. 2,

2007, to choose a successor to longtime dictator Saparmurad Niyazov,

had been sentenced during the Niyazov era to 22 years

in prison

on charges

that were never made public) was pardoned and released. The list of prisoners covered by the annual Independence Day amnesty in October did not, however, include any known political prisoners, nor was any indication given

that the new regime intended to review

World Affairs: Ukraine

the convictions of persons jailed on political or religious grounds. In November Berdymukhammedov replaced several cabinet ministers and dismissed three of the five provincial governors.

UGANDA

U.S. government by sending troops to Somalia in March as the vanguard of an African Union peacekeeping force, another venture, although long contemplated and launched with the support of a World Bank loan of $360 million, proved more contentious. This scheme envisaged the construction of a

(BESS BROWN) Area: 241,551 sq km (93,263 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 30,263,000

TUVALU

third dam on the Nile River, 10 km (6

Capital: Kampala Head of state and government: President Yoweri Museveni, assisted by Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi

Area: 25.6 sq km (9.9 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 9,700

The government’s deadline for the people displaced by the Lords Resistance

Capital: Government offices in Vaiaku, Fongafale islet, of Funafuti Atoll

Armys

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth Il,

represented by Governor-General Filoimea Telito Head of government: Prime Minister Apisai lelemia

els, which created additional economic

problems. At the same time, Tuvalu became a partner in a trial scheme to provide migrant labour for seasonal horticultural work in New Zealand. This plan could offset some of the loss of income,

but it would

increase

Tuvalu's

rebellion

to return

to

their homes by the end of 2006 was not met, and by the middle of 2007 more than one million were still living in refugee camps. A precarious cease-fire prevailed, and intermittent negotiations took place between the government and the LRA under rebel leader Joseph Kony

Tuvalu's well-managed Tuvalu Trust Fund, which invested in major economies and funded a significant part of the government budget, started 2007 in good shape, but the fund was likely to suffer from global credit problems that emerged late in the year. Income from the lease of the country’s " tv" Internet domain name to Verisign had again fallen below anticipated lev-

(LRAS)

(see BIOGRAPHIES).

The

talks

were mediated by Riek Machar, the vice president of the government of Southern Sudan, who was actively assisted by UN envoy Joaquim Chissano (the former president of Mozambique). Although from time to time there were encouraging

signs of progress, in May

the LRA suddenly announced that it would resume its military campaign regardless of any agreement signed if the International Criminal Court persisted with the charges of war crimes against Kony and other LRA leaders. The Ugandan government remained conciliatory, however, and the talks continued all year. In Karamoja district, in the northeast,

dependence on remittances from migrant labour for revenues. Aid continued to play a significant role in providing infrastructure for a growing population; in February Japan commissioned a $7.5 million upgrade of Funafuti Atoll’s electric-power-supply

there was an acute shortage of food throughout the year, and cattle rustling remained endemic. In April the army was accused of using excessive force in a controversial attempt to disarm the pastoralists while, simultaneously, the

system.

jong women and children who had been found begging in Kampala to their own district. In the less-turbulent central region, and particularly in Teso district, nature took a hand. Starting in July, continuous heavy rains led to serious flooding, which displaced many thousands of people. Along the western border, news of oil reserves remained good, but in August there was a dispute with the Democratic Republic of the Congo over a joint border. Even the more prosperous south had its problems. While the government won the approval of the

Tuvalu faced other, and more potentially serious, environmental problems: sea levels around it were rising at a rate of 2.3 cm (almost 1 in) annually, caus-

ing accelerated coastal degradation; underground water supplies were deteriorating; and the destruction of its barrier reefs by Crown of Thorns starfish was increasing. The prospect that Tuvalu’s nine atolls might be submerged by as early as 2040 had already raised questions concerning where the population might be relocated. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

government

tried

to

return

mi) north of the two existing dams located where the river leaves Lake Victoria. The aim was to remedy Uganda’s chronic need for more electricity, but critics pointed out that the dangerously low water level in Lake Victoria was already due as much to the excessive demands of the existing generators as to the persistent drought. Shadows,

too,

were

cast

over

the

Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (held in Kampala in November) by two disturbances in the capital earlier in the year. On March 5 the judiciary suspended business for four days, after which lawyers went on strike, because security forces had violently rearrested—on the High Court's premises—suspected members of the Peoples Redemption Army, to whom the court had just granted bail. The Uganda Law Society also suspended the attorney general and four other high-ranking officials. This serious contretemps was followed in April by rioting in Kampala over the allocation of forest land to an Indian-owned sugar company.

Pres. Yoweri

Museveni

has-

tened to reassure Commonwealth members that he would ensure their security at the meeting. Apart from a demonstration in Kampala that was dispersed by baton-wielding police, the event went off smoothly. (KENNETH INGHAM)

UKRAINE

Karamo-

Area: 603,628 sq km (233,062 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 46,457,000

Capital: Kiev Chief of state: President Viktor Yushchenko Head of government: Prime Ministers Viktor Yanukovych and, from December 18, Yuliya Tymoshenko In Ukraine the year 2007 was dominated by early parliamentary elections, which were held on September 30. 475

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: United Arab Emirates Sergei Chuzavkov/AP

(30.71%), while the Our Ukraine—People’s Self-Defense (NUNS) alliance

placed third with 3.3 million votes (14.15%). Only two other parties crossed the 3% threshold needed for seats in the assembly: the Communist Party

(5.39%)

and

the

(Volodymyr)

Lytvyn Bloc (924,538, 3.96%). The Socialist Party, led by Parliament Speaker Oleksandr Moroz, who had parted ways with his former Orange coalition allies in 2006, narrowly failed to make it into the new assembly. The BYT and NUNS formed a majority coalition in October. On December 18 Tymoshenko returned to the prime ministership after having gained the 226 votes needed for approval in the 450-member assembly. An initial vote taken a week earlier had shown Tymoshenko

one

than $1.3 billion through the return of $1.2 billion in gas owned by RosUkrEnergo to Gazprom Eksport and cash payments by UkrGazEnergo and Naftohaz Ukrainy. On September 14 the EU and Ukraine confirmed a closer partnership after a series of fruitful meetings. Though the EU did not accept Ukraine’s request for full membership, it had earlier promised $647 million in aid to the country over the next four years. It also lifted visa restrictions, allowing free travel from Ukraine to the EU for those Ukrainians under the age of 18 or of retirement age. (DAVID R. MARPLES)

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

vote short of 226, but

President Yushchenko—who had fired her as his prime minister in 2005—resubmitted

Ukrainian opposition leader Yuliva Tymoshenko waves to supporters during a preelection rally in Kiev on September 28. She was approved as prime minister on December 18. They followed a prolonged dispute between Pres. Viktor Yushchenko and Party of Regions (PR) leader and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, with the former accusing the latter of having violated the constitution by persuading individual deputies to switch factions and thereby build a new coalition to usurp power. On April 2 Yushchenko announced that the parliament had been dissolved. In response, the president’s opponents maintained that he had no legal grounds to dissolve the assembly. By late March some 15,000 PR supporters had gathered in Kiev to protest. On May 26 the president ordered troops from the Ministry of Internal Affairs into Kiev, only to find the way blocked by troops loyal to Yanukovych. After negotiations between the president and the prime minister, however, both sides accepted the

September 30 date and began to prepare for new elections. The election was notable for the sweeping gains made by the Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc (BYT), the opposition party led by former prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, though the PR maintained its standing as the largest and most popular bloc. Overall the PR won just over 8 million votes, or 34.37% of the total. The BYT finished in second place with 7.16 million votes 476

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

her

name,

this

time

with

success by a single vote. In the parliamentary elections, the BYT was the only party to secure significant votes in almost all the regions of Ukraine. It won in 16 of Ukraine's 25 regions and in two of its cities, Kiev and Sevastopol. By contrast, the PR was successful in only 10 oblasts, most notably in Luhansk (73.53%) and Donetsk (72.05%), the residence of its main financial backer, Rinat Akhmetov.

Area: 83,600 sq km (32,280 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 4,444,000, of whom fewer than 900,000 are citizens

Capital: Abu Dhabi Chief of state: President Sheikh Khalifah ibn

Zayid Al Nahyan Head of government: Prime Minister Sheikh Muhammad ibn Rashid al-Maktum

The PR finished last in Ternopil, with

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) un-

only 20,000 votes (3% of the total), and

veiled its National Development Strategy in 2007, recognizing the need to develop an infrastructure that was not based on oil revenues. In September Dubai became the largest shareholder in the London Stock Exchange, with 28% ownership, and acquired a 20% stake in the Nasdaq stock market index. Dubai also announced an initial public offering (PO) of its port-operating company DP World, which at $4.96 billion was the largest IPO in the Middle East. Abu Dhabi struck a deal with Boeing to become a major supplier of high-tech aerospace components. De-

fared very poorly in all areas of western Ukraine. NUNS, backed by Yushchenko and former internal affairs minister Yury Lutsenko, also had a very disappointing campaign. It won in just

one region, Transcarpathia, and even there it held only a narrow lead over

the BYT (31.1% to 28.8%).

According to government figures, GDP in the first 10 months of 2007 rose by 7.3% compared with 2006. Industrial output (January-October) increased by 10.7%, but that of agriculture fell by 5.1%. Consumer price growth rose 11.7% over the same period. In June Ukraine and Russia signed a new protocol on regulations for gas whereby Russia agreed to raise the volume of gas transported through Ukraine by 5 billion cu m in 2008-13 and by 25 billion cu m in 2014-30. In 2007 Ukraine paid $130 per 1,000 cu m of Russian gas, compared with $95 in 2006. On October 9 Ukraines energy minister, Yury Boyko, signed an agreement with the head of the Russian energy company Gazprom, Aleksey Miller, to clear an outstanding debt of more

spite rising inflation, construction con-

tinued to boom, symbolized by the Burj Dubai skyscraper, which in September became the world’s largest free-standing building. (See Sidebar.) Prime Minister Muhammad ibn Rashid al-Maktum founded the Muhammad ibn Rashid al-Maktum Foundation for the purpose of education investment and knowledge development in the Arab world. He endowed the institute with a $10 billion grant,

one of the largest charitable donations (continued on page 478)

World Affairs: United Arab Emirates

The Gulf States’ Construction Boom In the early 21st century, virtually all six Gulf Cooperation Council

On the tourism front, the region abounded with five-star hotels

(GCC) countries—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.)—showcased levels of economic

associated with the world’s leading hoteliers. In addition to the dozens of luxury hotels planned for the new islands, hotels containing more than 7,000 rooms and suites opened in 2007, with plans

development and infrastructure expansion not seen since the 1970s oil boom. Indeed, metaphorically speaking, the Gulf states, especial-

to double the hotel “bed stock” in Dubai alone to at least 80,000

ly the U.A.E.'s largest emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, had welcomed

within a decade. Dubai already boasted the Burj Al Arab, a billion-

the return of an earlier era's most omnipresent bird: the building

dollar, 321-m (1,052-ft) sail-shaped "seven-star" hotel, and the

crane. In 2007 the mixed-use Burj (“Tower”) Dubai, the final height of which was expected to exceed 800 m (2,640 ft), was officially des-

$500 million Hydropolis, the region's first underwater hotel. Not to

ignated the world's tallest structure, despite the fact that it was still under construction. Numerous factors and forces drove the boom: the vast public- and private-sector capital accumulation made possible by record-high oil and natural-gas revenues, the extension of what was already a sustained busiAP ness-friendly environment, and the

GCC region's stability and peace. One result of this vast wealth and political stability was a quantum jump in the number of foreign

be outdone, Abu Dhabi welcomed guests to its $3 billion Emirates

Palace Hotel. An additional consequence, of special importance to Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, was the proliferation of more-diverse

employment opportunities. These were generated by the associated local and foreign demands for travel guides, spas and swimming pools, ice-skating rinks, golf courses, and world-class entertainment,

firms in the region; for example,

as well as expanded facilities for camel and horse racing. One of the most remarkable proj-

according to the U.S. Department

ects was

of Commerce, over 750 American

complex of entertainment and tourist amenities that included the

companies (250 more than a decade earlier) had established or

expanded acquired

preexisting new

business

offices, licenses,

Mall

indoor

Dubailand,

of Emirates

shopping

a massive

(the

mall

largest

outside

North America) and a 2.25-sq-km (about 1-sq-mi), 25-story-high indoor ski resort. Ski Dubai, which opened in late 2005, was a winter wonderland in the desert, with "real" man-made snow, ski slopes

and/or entered into joint commercial ventures with local partners. The still-unfinished Burj Dubai looms above the skyline as a traditional camel caravan approaches The Texas-based oil services firm the U.A.E. city. Halliburton triggered widespread criticism when it announced in of varying difficulty, and a snowboard quarterpipe. The arts were not March 2007 that it was moving its international headquarters to ignored, especially in Abu Dhabi, which announced that Saadiyat Dubai. Accompanying these trends was an increase in the profusion Island would include a performing arts centre by architect Zaha of world-class banking institutions, together with a great concenHadid, a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum, and Louvre tration of Arab investment capital and liquidity. On Sept. 26, 2005, Abu Dhabi, the Paris icon's first international outpost. trading began on the Dubai International Financial Exchange, the Foreigners eager to benefit from the region's business opportunifirst international stock exchange in the Middle East. ties had no choice but to establish themselves permanently on the Infrastructure projects were being financed on a scale not hitherto ground. Meanwhile, vast numbers of foreign labourers were experienced. Many of these endeavours were associated with islands employed in the infrastructure projects. As a result, all the Gulf formed by land reclaimed from the sea. Nakheel (“The Palms”), a countries were hard pressed to accommodate the demand for Dubai property-development company with government ties, was increased housing and office space. In response, residential and adding thousands of kilometres of waterfront on reclaimed land. commercial construction was also booming; Saadiyat Island was Nakheel claimed to have some $30 billion in megaprojects under expected to house 150,000 full-time residents, while the three way in 2007, most notably a trilogy of palm-shaped man-made archi"Palms" would include residences for more than 250,000 people. pelagoes—Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah, and Palm Deira—and the Despite the frenzied pace of development throughout much of the World, which comprised some 300 small man-made islands arranged to look from the air like a map of the world. Saadiyat Island, just off region, the implications of the boom for the interests and policies of the coast of Abu Dhabi, was at the centre of a reclaiming megaproindividual Gulf countries and their foreign economic partners ject that would expand a natural island half the size of Bermuda into remained largely unnoticed by much of the outside world. What was a much larger complex of hotels, golf courses and other tourist long viewed as a subregion of vital significance to global economic amenities, three marinas, and private residences, as well as a 270-ha growth mainly because of its energy sources had emerged as a cen(670-ac) cultural district. Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar had similar tre of abundant investment capital and almost unimaginably vast islands under construction or in the planning stages. construction projects. (JOHN DUKE ANTHONY) 477

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: United Kingdom Cathal McNaughton/AP

(continued from page 476)

in history, with the first initiative being the construction of a think tank named the Knowledge Complex. May marked the first visit by an Iranian head of state to the U.A.E. since its founding in 1971. The countries had been at odds over three islands near the Strait of Hormuz,

which were claimed

simultaneously by Iran and two U.A.E. skeikhdoms. Though future talks were agreed to, none materialized in 2007. The U.A.E. worked extensively with the UN in 2007 to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals and to produce an annual report gauging the state of education and knowledge in the Arab world.

(RUMEE AHMED)

Newly installed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrives at 10 Downing Street in London with his wife, Sarah, after his meeting with Queen Elizabeth II on June 27.

UNITED KINGDOM

Capital: London

A series of floods that had started earlier in June became more intense during the days immediately after Brown was sworn in. It was estimated that a total of one million people were directly affected by the floods, many of them having to leave their homes temporarily. Brown subsequently announced that local councils would receive £46 million

Chief of state: Queen Elizabeth II

(midyear

Head of government: Prime Ministers Tony

help them meet the costs of dealing with the floods. He also said that government spending on flood defenses would be increased by £500 million annually. Browns third crisis was the outbreak on August 2 of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey, south of London. Six years earlier an outbreak in East Anglia had spread quickly to many parts of the

Na "ZA Area: 242,495 sq km (93,628 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 60,863,000

Blair and, from June 27, Gordon Brown

Domestic Affairs. After 10 years as prime minister, Tony Blair stepped down on June 27. (See Special Report on page 198.) He was succeeded by Gordon

2007,

£1

= about

$2.00) to

more power to ratify international treaties and decide the date of elections and to relinquish the executive’s power to appoint judges and bishops. Immediately following Brown’s promotion to prime minister, the Labour Party went into the lead in the opinion polls. Labour's lead looked sufficiently well established by September to tempt Brown to consider calling an early general election in order to secure his own mandate from the electorate. Speculation intensified after Labour took a double-digit polling lead following Browns speech on September 24 at the partys annual conference. The following week saw an equally dramatic shift back to the Conservatives, however, fol-

appeared to have been learned; strict controls were immediately imposed on

lowing their party conference. Brown announced on October 6 that there would be no general election before 2009. By December the Conservatives had taken a clear lead in the opinion polls, ahead of Labour by up to 13%— the biggest lead for the Conservatives

Alistair Darling to

the movement of livestock, and the out-

since 1989.

replace himself as chancellor, and Jacqui Smith as the U.K.'s first woman home secretary. Brown was quickly thrust into a series of crises, each of which the public regarded him as handling calmly and efficiently. The first crisis erupted barely 48 hours after he became prime minister. Two car bombs were placed in

break was contained. The government

One issue that had caused Blair anxiety in his final months as prime minister was the continuing police inquiry into allegations that some people had been promised peerages in return for donations to the Labour Party. This inquiry had led to Blair’s being the first prime minister to be formally interviewed as part of a criminal investigation. On April 20 the police sent their files on the case to the Crown Prose-

Brown

(see BIOGRAPHIES),

who

had

served as chancellor of the Exchequer under Blair and had been elected leader of the Labour Party unopposed three days earlier. Brown made radical changes to his new cabinet, appointing David Miliband as foreign secretary (see BIOGRAPHIES),

central London, and a third vehicle was

driven into Glasgow (Scot.) Airport, where it caught fire, killing the driver, Kafeel Ahmed. The two car bombs were

defused, however, before any ex-

plosions actually occurred. Ahmed’s brother and two other individuals were charged with conspiring to cause the explosions. 478

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

country,

causing

a

catastrophe

in

British agriculture and forcing the postponement of national elections. This time, however, the lessons of 2001

faced embarrassment, however, when it

transpired that the initial outbreak had occurred because some strains of the disease had escaped from a nearby government laboratory that had been set up to develop vaccines for the disease. These crises helped Brown to enhance his reputation but overshadowed his attempts to present himself as a man with fresh ideas for the future. In his first major policy announcement, on July 3, he outlined plans for reforming the U.K.’s constitution. These included surrendering the royal prerogative to declare war on the advice of the prime minister, transferring that power to Parliament. He also promised to give Parliament

cution

Service,

which

announced

on

July 20 that the case was to be dropped and no one would be prosecuted. A separate dispute erupted in November when it emerged that David Abrahams, a property developer, had donated money to the Labour Party indirectly,

World Affairs: United Kingdom

via staff and friends. Receiving money this way was illegal; police launched a new

inquiry

On

November

26 Peter

Watt resigned as the Labour Party’s general secretary, admitting that he knew of the arrangement. The most dramatic changes in the U.K.’s power structure occurred not in London but rather in Northern Ireland (see below), Scotland, and Wales. In Ed-

inburgh the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition that had ruled Scotland since its devolved Parliament was established in 1999, lost power in elections held on May 3. The Scottish National Party (SNP) narrowly emerged as the largest party, with 47 seats (an increase of 20 since the previous elections in 2003), compared with Labour's 46 (a loss of 4 seats), the Conservatives’ 17 (down 1), and the Liberal Democrats’ 16 (down

1). Smaller parties emerged with just 3 seats, 14 fewer than four years earlier. Although the SNP fell 18 seats short of an outright majority, party leader Alex Salmond was elected first minister at the head of a minority government, replacing Labour’s Jack McConnell. During the election campaign the SNP promised to hold a referendum on full Scottish independence. It did not win enough votes to secure a majority in the new Parliament for this plan (which

lobby the British Parliament to grant the Welsh Assembly more powers, in order to bring it into line with the Scottish Parliament. The Liberal Democrats struggled the most

in 2007.

By September,

opinion

polls were showing that the party had lost up to half of the 23% support that it achieved in the 2005 general election. Party leader Sir Menzies Campbell, though widely respected at Westminster, especially on foreign affairs, was not highly rated by the electorate. Part of his problem was his age (he turned 66 on May 22) and elderly appearance. On October 15, shortly after Brown had made it clear that there would not be an early election, Campbell resigned as party leader. In a BBC interview the following day, he blamed the media, saying that over the previous week there had been “seven consecutive sets of reports about my age and about leadership.” The subsequent leadership con-

nounced that the consumer price index had risen by 3.1% over the previous 12 months. As this was more than one point above the 2% target set for the Bank of England (BOE), the bank’s governor, Mervyn King, was required by the rules to write a formal letter to the chancellor of the Exchequer (then still Brown) to explain what had gone wrong. It was the first such letter in the 10 years since the BOE was granted powers to set interest rates in order to

control inflation. King asserted that the problem was increased volatility in inflation, partly caused by fluctuations in energy prices, and that he expected the inflation rate to subside in the months ahead. This indeed was what happened: by August the rate had fallen to 1.8%. Nevertheless, to prevent higher inflation from becoming routine, the BOE raised the benchmark repo interest rate

in

three

quarter-point

stages,

from 5% at the start of the year to 5.75% by July. Among other things, test, the result of which was announced this had the effect of cooling the on December 18, was won by Nick Clegg, the partys spokesman on Home housing market. According to figures released by the Halifax bank (the Office matters. Clegg defeated Chris U.K.’s largest mortgage lender), house Huhne, the party's spokesman on the environment, by barely 1% in a ballot prices that had been rising at an annual rate of more than 11% during of party members. the first half of 2007 peaked in August Economic Affairs. The U.K.’s economy grew by 3% in 2007, continuing the and fell in every month after that for the rest of the year. Amid fears that steady progress that had begun in the Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats all opposed), but during these falls would be accompanied by early 1990s. Inflation remained subdued, although in April it was anits first few months in office, the SNP slower economic growth in 2008, the BOE reduced interest rates to unveiled a number of popular policies, including scrapping toll 5.5% in December. fees on some of Scotland's In his first annual prebudget The first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan (left), report in October, Darling anbusiest road bridges, reducing meets with the new first minister of Scotland, Alex the fees paid by graduate stunounced two major reforms to Salmond, in Edinburgh on December 7. dents, and eventually ending prethe tax system. First, he simpliscription charges for medicines fied the capital gains tax, so that supplied by the National Health instead of a variety of rates rangService. ing from 10% to 40%, there Labour lost ground in the would be a single rate of 18% Welsh elections, also held on from April 2008. Second, he douMay 3, but remained the largest bled the inheritance tax (IHT) party, with 26 seats in the 60-seat threshold for married couples to Assembly (down 4 from the 2003 £600,000. This announcement balloting), while the Welsh nawas made a few days after the tionalist party Plaid Cymru won Conservatives had announced 15 seats (a gain of 3), the Conthat they would increase the IHT servatives took 12 (up 1), and the threshold for individuals to £1 Liberal Democrats remained unmillion—a move that was popuchanged with 6 seats. (There was lar with the public, according to also one independent.) After opinion polls. Darling was acweeks of negotiation, Labour cused of "stealing" Conservative and Plaid Cymru finally agreed policies. on June

Labours

27 to govern

Rhodri

Two

together.

Morgan

re-

major British

companies

were afflicted by crises in 2007. The country’s largest company, oil giant BP, was shaken in May

mained first minister, with Plaid

Cymru’s leader, Teuan Wyn Jones, as his deputy. Among their agreed priorities was to

when

Lord

suddenly

Browne,

resigned

its

CEO,

after admit-

Andrew Milligan—PA/AP

479

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: United Kingdom British Ministry of Defence—AFP/Getty Images

ting that he had lied to a court about a four-year homosexual relationship that he had sought to keep private. BP's image was tarnished further in October when it agreed to pay a fine of $50 million over lax health and safety systems that had contributed to an explosion in which 15 people were killed in March 2005 at its Texas oil refinery. The second company to face a crisis was the bank Northern Rock, which had aggressively grown its mortgage-lending business, largely by borrowing money on the wholesale markets. (See United

States: Sidebar, below.) As the year ended, the government was seeking a buyer for Northern Rock amid widespread speculation that the bank might have to be taken temporarily into public ownership to secure its future. Foreign Affairs. In June, at his last European Union summit as prime minister, Blair committed the U.K. to the

new EU reform treaty. Blair’s critics argued that this was very similar to the former proposals for a constitution, on which Blair had promised a referendum in the U.K. Following the constitution's rejection by French and Dutch

A convoy of British armoured vehicles withdraws from Basra Palace in southern Iraq on September 3.

voters, it was abandoned. Blair insisted

that no referendum was needed to ratify the new treaty, as it contained "red line" clauses that protected the U.K.'s ability to decide its own criminal and labour laws, foreign policy, and domestic law on such issues as taxes and benefits. Brown continued Blair’s policy of supporting the new treaty while rejecting a referendum. On October 22, after attending the EU summit in Lisbon, at which the 27 member countries agreed on the detailed wording of the treaty, Brown reported to Parliament that “the protections we have negotiated defend the British national interest.” Conservative Party leader David Cameron responded that Brown had “absolutely no democratic mandate to sign this without a referendum.” One month after becoming prime minister, Brown

flew to the U.S. for talks

with Pres. George W. Bush. Although both men publicly appeared to be in agreement,

the

encounter

was

more

strained than previous visits from Blair had been. Brown insisted that decisions about British troops in Iraq would be taken on the advice of the U.K.’s military leaders, not according to Washington’s wishes. This was evident on September 3 when British troops withdrew from central Basra to Basra Airport, handing over day-to-day control of the city to Iraqi forces. This ended the U.K.’s role in patrolling the streets of southern 480

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Iraq. On October 8 Brown announced that half of the remaining British force would be withdrawn from Iraq by the spring of 2008, leaving 2,500 troops in the country. This compared with 45,000 troops at the time of the initial 2003 U.S.-led invasion. In early December Brown triggered controversy when he boycotted a summit of African and EU leaders in Lisbon. When he announced his intention to boycott the meeting if Zimbabwean Pres. Robert Mugabe attended, Brown said that Zimbabwe faced “a tragedy that requires the whole of the world to speak up and also to act.” Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland’s Assembly was reconvened on May 8, following almost five years during which it had been suspended because of the inability of the two main parties to reach agreement on how it should function. The last major hurdle to the Assembly’s resumption had been removed on January 28 when Sinn Fein, the Roman Catholic nationalist party that had historically been associated with the militant Irish Republican Army, voted to end its long-standing policy of noncooperation with the province’s police service. Two days after Sinn Fein’s vote, Blair announced that elections to the 108member Assembly would be held on March 7. The balloting confirmed the

dominance of the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which won 36 seats, and Sinn Fein (28 seats) in their respective communities. The more

moderate Party

Protestant

(18

seats)

Ulster and

the

Unionist Roman

Catholic Social and Democratic Labour Party (16) saw further declines in their support.

On March 26 Ian Paisley (see BIOGRAPHIES) and Gerry Adams, respectively leaders of the DUP and Sinn Fein, announced that the two parties would end their historic enmity and lead a power-sharing executive in the Assembly. Paisley, who had been afierce critic of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which underpinned the peace process, said that the DUP was now committed to full participation in the new Northern

Ireland

Executive,

while

Adams

said that “a new era” had opened in the life of the province. On May 8 the transfer of powers from London to Belfast, N.Ire., was marked with a ceremony in front of dignitaries from around the world. Paisley was sworn in as first minister,

with

Sinn

Fein's

Martin

McGuinness as deputy first minister. The new government quickly turned away from old hostilities and started grappling with such practical issues as the regulation of taxis, the administration of libraries, and the control of animal diseases. (PETER KELLNER)

World Affairs: United States

UNITED STATES

Area: 9,366,006 sq km (3,616,235 sq mi),

including 204,083 sq km of inland water but excluding the 156,049 sq km of the Great Lakes that lie within U.S. boundaries Population (2007 est.): 302,633,000

Capital: Washington, D.C. Head of state and government: President George W. Bush For four years the United States economy had expanded robustly and virtually without incident, shrugging off concerns

about potential overextension

in a costly and deteriorating military expedition in Iraq, but 2007 brought abrupt change. A long-shot plan to temporarily increase the U.S. military presence seemed to work, reestablishing hope for a stable Iraq and easing pressure on an unpopular president—even as a fast-appearing disaster in the U.S. housing and financial sectors disrupted world markets and threatened to plunge the U.S. economy into recession. (See Sidebar.) War on Terrorism. As 2007 began, the

U.S.-led international coalition in Iraq was fraying noticeably, American casualties were rising, and the newly elected Democratic congressional majority was

won his last-minute gamble, at least temporarily, and bought more time for his policies. Bush vowed in January to augment the 132,000 Iraq-based U.S. forces with 30,000 reinforcements. Fresh troops began arriving within weeks, taking on both Sunni and Shi‘ite militias for control of Baghdad neighbourhoods and creating alliances with tribal chiefs to combat suspected al-Qaeda fighters in outlying provinces. The military also provided financial support to Awakening Councils, formed by Sunni sheikhs designed to turn Iraqi neighbourhoods against foreign terrorist fighters by appealing to the residents’ nationalist sentiment. The efforts were particularly successful in the unruly western Al-Anbar province, where previously hostile tribes began turning against alQaeda. By fall, as the U.S. surge reached its peak, some

160,000

U.S. troops were

on Iraqi deployment, and congressional opposition to the plan grew ferocious. The new U.S. military commander, Army Gen. David Petraeus (see BIOGRAPHIES), was summoned

to Wash-

ington in September to answer skeptics and defend his cautious claims of progress.

One

prominent

antiwar

group, Moveon.org, ran a controversial full-page newspaper ad questioning General Petraeus’s credibility and patriotism. Throughout the year Congress held more than 80 votes designed to reduce funding or force U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, but President Bush was able

demanding a prompt U.S. exit. Facing a humiliating forced withdrawal and likely defeat in his quest to establish a stable Middle East A former Sunni insurgent now working with U.S. democracy Pres. George W. forces sits next to a U.S. soldier in an armoured Bush decided instead to replace vehicle in Baghdad on July 12. his military leadership and escalate the U.S. military presence in the conflict. The bold plan attracted comparisons to the disastrous U.S. experience in Vietnam and ran counter to majority

opinion—from Congress, the Iraq Study Group, and even U.S. public opinion polls. The conflict also led to the bloodiest year yet for U.S. troops fighting the war

with

in

three emergency spending bills that were eventually approved without strings attached. By October it had become obvious that the insurgency—bombings, attacks, and both civilian and military deaths—was losing momentum rapidly. At year’s end violent incidents were down by two-thirds, Iraqis had taken over security in many areas, and officials were able to announce initial U.S. troop withdrawals. Even so, U.S. military deaths in Iraq reached 899 for the year, the highest number since the 2003 U.S.-led incursion. The U.S. monthly death toll peaked in May at 126, but it dropped to 37 in November and 23 in December. Although fighting between Islamic factions was also reduced during the year, critics pointed out that the Iraqi government had failed to make substantial progress in achieving national reconciliation. In Afghanistan Islamic radicals continued their resurgence following the 2001 NATO coalition invasion that toppled the Taliban from power. Sheltered in sanctuaries in lawless tribal areas of western Pakistan and financed in part by opium production, Taliban fighters escalated armed clashes in remote areas, at times retaking effective control of up to half the country. For the first time U.S. troop deaths topped 100, and the overall 232 coalition deaths for the year were almost evenly divided between U.S. and other NATO forces. For much of the year, the U.S. encouraged its allies to substantially increase their

troop

commitments

in

Afghanistan but with little success, and some observers suggested that the U.S. would soon be compelled to increase its own presence in Afghanistan even as it drew forces down in Iraq. Domestic Policy. Democrats took control of Congress from scandal-plagued Republicans in Jan-

policy, and the war in Iraq. However, President Bush and the Re-

publican minority, utilizing veto threats and procedural rules, managed to alter many Democratic initiatives and halt others altogether. The tone was set early in the year when the House of Representatives quickly approved virtually all of the Democrats’ “Six in '06" campaign promises—in-

After a spike in violence at midyear, reinforced coalition forces in Iraq were able to forge pacts

$200 billion for the war

uary, promising major changes in national priorities, ethics, entitlements, health care, fiscal

on terrorism.

cooperation

to obtain

numer-

ous factions and root out terrorists in Baghdad and elsewhere. Security began improving dramatically across Iraq. As 2007 ended, Bush appeared to have Chris Hondros/Getty Images

481

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: United States Charles Dharapak/AP

cluding stepped-up stem-cell research, a minimum-wage increase, reducedcost student loans, and mandatory negotiation on Medicare drug prices. AII of the initiatives bogged down in the

expanding congressional earmarks— projects inserted in appropriations bills by individual lawmakers—and President Bush complained that a massive spending bill at year's end contained

Senate, where

a 60-vote supermajority

more than 9,800 such additions, with an

was often necessary to move legislation. By May none of the Democratic legislation had reached Bush's desk.

estimated cost of $10 billion. Congress also provided a one-year fix for the Al-

In the spring, antiwar Democrats attached an amendment to a $90 billion

law originally written to ensure that the wealthy paid at least minimal taxes. For

supplemental Iraq War appropriation requested by President Bush, setting a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. forces. Bush rejected the measure—only his second veto in more than six years in office. Amid GOP warnings that U.S. troops needed resupply, Democrats were forced to pass the supplemental without timeline amendments. Relations between Congress and the administration were contentious. The new congressional majority launched numerous investigations of past admin-

2007,

istration actions;

one

inquiry into the

firing of eight U.S. attorneys in 2006 led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was replaced in November by Michael Mukasey. (See BIOGRAPHIES.)

Bush was

also weakened

by the conviction in March of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby on charges of having lied to a special counsel about his involvement in the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity. Bush commuted Libby’s two-and-a-half-year prison sentence on the eve of Libby’s incarceration. The pace of congressional legislation was glacial. Immigration reform, frustrated by the U.S. House in 2006, appeared headed for passage early in the year when the Bush administration started negotiations with Republican and Democratic Senate leaders on a compromise bill. Initially, in a test vote, 69 Senators signaled willingness to consider the measure, but the bill rapidly lost support on the Senate floor. The measure allowed most illegal aliens to stay in the U.S. and earn permanent status by paying taxes, learning English, and avoiding criminal activity, but it was quickly denounced by opponents as an amnesty that would encourage future disrespect for border laws. After three weeks of contentious debate, supporters agreed to add a “touchback” provision requiring undocumented aliens to return to their home countries at least briefly before receiving legal status. In the critical procedural test, however, only 46 Senators (of 60 required) voted to pursue the legislation, and comprehensive reform died again. 482

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ternative Minimum

owing

to

Tax (AMT), a 1978

inflation,

the

AMT

threatened some 23 million taxpayers. After extended negotiations, the $50 bil-

lion AMT expansion was suspended, and the lost government revenue was to be added to the federal deficit. As oil prices moved close to $100 per barrel during the year, Congress passed new energy legislation to expand alternative energy sources, increase vehicle

Retired federal judge Michael Mukasey became the new U.S. attorney general on November 9. President Bush vetoed five additional bills during the year and threatened rejection of some 50 more while seeking to force legislative changes. Bush vetoed expansion of federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research and thus killed the measure again. Republicans stymied the plan to force pharmaceutical companies to negotiate with the government over Medicare drug prices. An ambitious bipartisan bill to double expenditures on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program was vetoed twice; at years end Congress extended the existing bill for 18 months, removing the issue from the 2008 election cycle. Congress was able to override only one

Bush

veto—an

appropriations

measure containing numerous local infrastructure projects, including funding for rebuilding the hurricane-devastated Gulf coast. The new Congress was ultimately successful at midyear in raising the minimum wage for the first time in a decade; the law increased the rate from

$5.15 to $7.25 per hour by 2009. A Democrat-led effort to provide additional assistance to students by expanding Pell Grants and reducing interest rates on student loans also became law. Congress provided a record funding increase for veterans' health care programs and significantly tightened Washington lobbying and ethics rules. Critics noted that the new rules did not directly address concerns over rapidly

mileage standards by 40% (to an average of 35 mi per gal by 2020), and phase out incandescent light bulbs in favour of fluorescent lighting. Yet another threatened veto forced removal of provisions rolling back tax breaks to oil and gas companies, and Bush thus had successfully stopped any major tax increase during the year. The Economy. Excesses in the domestic housing sector finally caught up with the U.S. economy during 2007, causing major disruption among financial firms and marring an otherwise solid sixth consecutive year of economic growth. The turmoil had worldwide ramifications.

In most

recent

years

the U.S.

economic engine had pulled the global economy

forward.

In 2007,

however,

with the U.S. overextended and struggling, less-developed economies in India, China, Russia, and elsewhere shared the mantle of world economic

leadership. Spurred by near 596 growth in the third quarter, the U.S. economy expanded by almost 396 for the year, close to its long-range potential. Employment increased every month, setting a national record of 52 consecutive months of net job growth. Some 1.5 million new payroll jobs were created, and although the unemployment rate moved upward from 4.496 to 5.096 during the year, employers continued to report worker shortages in many areas. The

positive

statistics,

however,

masked the tumult caused by an urban housing bubble earlier in the decade. Brokers had helped fuel a boom in home construction and resales by offering adjustable-rate mortgages at low initial interest rates. The easy cash drove home prices up markedly,

World Affairs: United States

producing an overheated real-estate market that peaked in 2005. The new mortgages were typically packaged together and resold as securities to banks and other investors in the U.S. and worldwide.

By mid-2007,

however,

it

had become clear that a substantial minority of homeowners could not make their payments when their interest rates were adjusted upward. That led to rising delinquency rates and foreclosures, and an estimated $500 billion worth of

"subprime" mortgage securities were devalued, which reduced the lending capacity of financial institutions. With equity markets in turmoil, federal officials in August changed signals and began easing short-term interest rates, which had remained largely unchanged for a year. In an effort to avoid an economic slowdown, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board (Fed) lowered the

key federal funds rate by one-half percentage point in August and followed with two additional quarter-point reductions in the fall. The administration also sought voluntary private-sector cooperation to ease the crisis, including a controversial plan to freeze interest rates temporarily. The action came too late, however,

to forestall multibillion-

dollar losses reported in the fall by holders of subprime paper. The chairmen of Citibank and Merrill Lynch resigned under pressure, and several major financial institutions were forced to seek infusions of foreign funds to bolster their books. Other economic news was mixed. With energy prices again rising, the threat of inflation reappeared, and the consumer price index topped 396 for the year, well above the Fed's guide-

lines. National workplace productivity, a key measure of economic efficiency, resumed substantial growth after a brief slowdown. As expanding economic activity bolstered revenues, the federal budget deficit declined again in 2007, to $163 billion by the end of the

fiscal year on September 30. As the U.S. trade deficit continued at a historic peak, the U.S. dollar suffered, los-

ing 10% of its value to the euro during the year. Overall, despite turmoil among financial firms, Wall Street ended a turbulent

year with solid, if unspectacular, gains. Equity markets rallied following the August interest-rate cut but gave back most of the year’s gains later in the year. The broad Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index finished up by 3.9% for the year, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 6.4%. At years end, however, consumer and investor confidence was dropping, and economists were divided on whether the national economic expansion would continue into 2008. Foreign Policy. With its attention and resources concentrated on Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. was unable to focus sustained diplomatic attention on overseas issues and recorded little real progress during 2007. One apparent ex-

ception involved North Korea, which President Bush in 2002 had named as one of three “axis of evil" countries because of weapons exports and support for terrorism. For four years Japan, Russia, China, the U.S., and South Ko-

rea had negotiated with North Korea to dismantle its fledgling nuclear weapons capacity. On September 3, however, diplomatic negotiators announced that North Korea had agreed to catalog and dismantle its nuclear testing sites and would in turn receive a $300 milReal estate signs along a roadside in Montpelier, Vt., lion aid package. At year’s reflect the turmoil in the U.S. housing market. end North Korea failed to honour yet another disclosure deadline, but diplomats

remained

optimistic

that a breakthrough had been achieved. Efforts to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capability were largely unavailing. After Iran denied UN

inspectors

suspected

access

weapons

to

sites,

the Security Council approved a unanimous resolution tightening international economic sanctions

in March—again, with few ascertainable results. In

early December U.S. intelligence agencies released a surprise consensus National Intelligence Estimate

(NIE) de-

claring with “high confidence” that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons capacity in 2003—reversing a

2005 “high confidence” estimate by the same agencies that Iran was rapidly developing that weaponry. The new NIE undermined the international consensus seeking to stop the Iranian nuclear development, and critics charged that U.S. intelligence officials were effectively overturning Bush administration policy. Russia maintained substantial trade with Iran, including its first delivery of uranium

fuel, and U.S. relations with

Russia continued to slowly deteriorate during the year. At midyear President Bush invited Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin to Kennebunkport,

Maine, in an

unsuccessful attempt to warm up bilateral relations. U.S. officials were openly critical of Putin’s centralization of control over the Russian government, suggesting democracy was being undermined. After the U.S. pushed toward installing missile defense shields in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation

in the

1990

Conven-

tional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, the arms-control agreement. U.S. policy toward Asia was dominated by the growing influence of China, a current trading partner viewed as a future economic or even military rival. The U.S. filed three World Trade Organization complaints during the year against China, which nonetheless continued to enjoy a huge export advantage in the bilateral trade balance. In the spring China was forced into massive recalls of substandard products shipped to the U.S.,

including

defective

tires,

tainted pet food, and toys with lead paint. (See Special Report on page 180.) The U.S. concentrated on tightening relations with India and an increasingly unstable Pakistan in an effort to counter China's growing influence. The U.S. signed a controversial agreement with India to facilitate production of domestic nuclear power, even though the deal arguably infringed on international nuclear nonproliferation agreements. Relations with India’s rival, Pakistan, were

rockier. The U.S. pushed the Pakistani military regime for democratic reform even while seeking from Pakistan additional military action against the Taliban fighters attempting to destabilize Afghanistan. The U.S. openly criticized Pakistani Pres. Pervez Musharraf's {continued on page 485)

Toby Talbot/AP

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World Affairs: United States

Subprime Mortgages: A Catalyst for Global Chaos One version of chaos theory opines that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing could produce a change in atmospheric pressure that in turn could cause a tornado in Texas. This "butterfly effect" graphically demonstrates the theory whereby a small change in one area can cause a chain of events that leads to a major effect somewhere else. So it was in 2007 when losses in the subprime-mortgage sector in the U.S. led to downturns in many housing markets around the world, followed by a widespread tightening of credit and turmoil in international financial markets. Farly in the year there was growing concern about the rise in mortgage defaults in the U.S. housing market and fears of a U.S. recession, which resulted in a global sell-off in equities in February. Over the

(124%), Denmark (115%), and New Zealand (105%). The supply of

houses in 2005—06 had accelerated sharply compared with 10 years earlier; again it increased fastest in Ireland (up 21096), Spain (115%), Sweden (113%), and Denmark (76%). In the U.K. the num-

ber of mortgages approved for home buyers fell for the third straight month, and at just over 44,000 in October 2007, it reached

a record low. The increased cost of mortgages—combined with the rejection of one in three mortgage applicants—contributed to a decline in the number of buyers for 11 straight months. The rate of repossessions in the U.K. was accelerating, with nearly 30,000 repossession orders in the third quarter of 2007. In the financial sector, Countrywide Financial, the largest mort-

past decade, strong economic growth, moderate inflation, and low

gage lender in the U.S., reported a third-quarter loss of $1.2 billion,

interest rates had encouraged home ownership in the U.S. and other developed countries, while the strong rise in house values made property an attractive investment to more people, including those with poor credit records and low incomes, who could not qualify for prime-rate loans from mainstream lenders. This led to an increase in the competitiveness and proliferation of subprime-mortgage lenders and brokers. Confidence among lenders was boosted by low funding costs and the widespread belief that if borrowers could not maintain loan repayments, the properties could be repossessed and resold at much higher prices. Credit standards were lowered, and many loans were made to high-risk borrowers, including those in low-income minority areas, who might otherwise have been excluded from the

its first loss in 25 years. In the U.K., Northern Rock had to be bailed

market. It was estimated that $450 billion, or 3096, of outstanding

subprime loans were adjustable-rate mortgages in which the repayment rate had been set for two years before being reset at higher interest rates (plus a margin) in 2007 and 2008. The rapid increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve (Fed) from 196 in mid-2004 to

5.25% in mid-2006 meant that by midyear 2007 a rising number of the estimated six million subprime borrowers were defaulting on their mortgage payments, and their homes were being repossessed. Combined with an absence of new buyers (deterred by the higher interest rates), this led to a slump in the housing market. In August, sales of new homes were down 21% over the year, and the decline

was deepening. As the year progressed, it became increasingly clear that the U.S. problem had global implications and could not be contained. This was because much of the mortgage debt had been rolled into bonds, called mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and then rebundled (together with lower-risk assets) by investment bankers in

order to gain a higher credit-risk rating. The apparently less-risky bonds were then sold to other investors on the wholesale money market as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). The market for

CDOs was extremely buoyant, and banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and other investors all over the world bought them. Crucially,

the complex structure of the market made it difficult to know who was holding the debt and where it was in the world financial system. By midyear 2007, housing markets in many countries were beginning to falter and house prices to fall. House prices in many other Western industrial countries had risen faster than in the U.S. (up 103%) over the previous decade, led by Ireland (up 25396), the U.K. (194%), Spain (173%), France (137%), Australia (135%), Sweden

484

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

out by the Bank of England in September and was the focus of continuing attention. Northern Rock was the U.K.'s eighth largest bank and fifth biggest mortgage lender, accounting for one in five U.K. mortgages. The bank had pioneered the securitization of mortgages in the U.K., and although other lenders were more restrained, by the

beginning of 2007 about been sold off in this way. would happen to Northern around £25 billion (nearly

half of all outstanding mortgages had By late November it was unclear what Rock, which was being propped up by $52 billion) in taxpayer money, with an

additional £18 billion (about $37 billion) in deposits being under-

written by the government. In June the U.S. investment bank Bear Stearns announced that two of its hedge funds, which invested in subprime-related debt, had

registered large losses. Other funds, located as far away as Australia, also announced losses and froze redemptions. Securities

backed by subprime mortgages were also being used as collateral for more borrowing and were putting additional pressure on financial markets. In July there were increasing worries about the exposure of several state-owned German banks to subprime debt, and in

early August the French bank BNP Paribas announced that it was suspending funds invested in U.S. subprime-related mortgages because of the difficulty of valuing the underlying assets. Markets were stunned on August 9 when the Furopean Central Bank intervened with an unprecedented offer of unlimited short-term loans to the banking system. It injected €130 billion (about $179 billion) in order to avert a potential liquidity crisis when overnight interest rates rose to 4.7%, exceeding the 4% cap. The Fed made a more modest intervention of $24 billion. Further injections of funds continued, and in mid-December central banks gave a record $530 bil-

lion to boost liquidity in credit markets. Toward the end of the year, sharp declines in the value of the dollar against all major currencies raised concerns of inflation in the U.S., where the rate of consumer price increases was already accelerating. This limited the Fed's scope to raise interest rates for fear of the inflationary consequences. In December the Fed detailed plans that, if implemented, would give it more control over the U.S. mortgage market and prevent another subprime crisis. In the U.K. politicians and financial regulators were planning banking system reforms to reduce liquidity risk in the future.

(JANET H. CLARK)

World Affairs: United States Jason Reed—Reuters/Landov

(continued from page 483)

islative balloting,

declaration of a short-lived state of emergency in November but was less outspoken when Presi-

over the state Senates in Virginia

dent Musharraf's chief rival, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in late December. (See OBITUARIES.)

having

taken

and Mississippi and adding seats elsewhere. In 2008 Democrats would have control of both legislative

chambers

in 23

states,

and the GOP would dominate in 14, with 12 split or tied. (NeThe U.S. was able to claim braska has a nonpartisan, unicloser ties with one of its tradicameral legislature.) tional major allies following the Structures, Powers. Several states presidential elections in France. took action to safeguard ballot procedures. Montana and South The warming was especially noteworthy because for years Dakota moved to curb abuses in France had been openly critical citizen initiatives by prohibiting signature gatherers from being of U.S. policies in Europe and the Middle East. paid by the signature. After enWith the U.S. Senate bogged acting a model election-reform law in 2001 in response to the down in partisan gridlock, international treaties received scant presidential election debacle the attention. Over opposition from previous year, Florida was forced to revisit the subject; this time trade unions, the Senate finally Accompanied by Guatemalan Pres. Oscar Berger the state required a paper trail in approved a free-trade agreement (right), U.S. Pres. George W. Bush greets with Peru, but similar proposed all electronic voting machines. schoolchildren at a municipal library during his Iowa, Maryland, and Virginia appacts with Colombia, Panama, visit to the rural Guatemalan town of Santa Cruz proved similar mandates; as a reand South Korea languished at Balanya on March 12. years end. A Senate committee sult, 27 states required a paper voted 17-4 in late October to ratrecord for auditing purposes. ify the decades-old Law of the Sea warming held in Bali, Indon., in DeGovernment Relations. A rare revolt over treaty, which had previously been cember. Criticized for its failure to sign mandates in a federal law broke into the the 1996 Kyoto Protocol and largely signed by virtually every other country, open during 2007 when several state but conservatives argued that the treaty abandoned in public sessions by other legislatures—including New Hampwould grant the UN powers that rightmajor industrialized countries, the U.S. shire, Montana, Oklahoma, and Washfully belonged under exclusive U.S. sovdelegation reversed itself in mid-conferington—refused to comply with the ence and agreed to a new process that Real ID Act. Many others also took preereignty. The full Senate did not take up promised involvement of less-developed liminary steps in the same direction. the treaty by year's end. President Bush attempted to counter countries, speedier antipollution techThe federal law required states to verify a distinct regional movement toward nology transfers to Third World counthe identity of all 245 million licensed socialism and the growing influence of tries, and development of a worldwide drivers and to impose other security feaVenezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez by visplan to combat global warming by the tures, at an estimated cost of $14 billion. iting five Latin American countries in end of 2009. (DAVID C. BECKWITH) Real ID had been under fire since its the spring. Chávez, the most visible passage as an antiterrorism measure in manifestation of a discernible leftward 2005. States objected to its cost; civil DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STATES shift in Latin American politics, libertarians raised privacy concerns; stepped up his anti-American rhetoric Reacting to perceived failures by the and immigrant rights groups objected federal government, U.S. states moved during the year and established a close to provisions impairing states’ ability to relationship with U.S. adversaries such forward in 2007 on several lawmaking grant driver’s licenses to noncitizens. as Iran. U.S. influence was bolstered fronts, including health care, immigraUnder the act, licenses that did not tion, security, climate change, and other when Chavez appeared to overreach comply could not be used as identifiand narrowly lost a December referenareas heretofore considered national iscation for entering airports or federal dum that would have allowed him to sues. The tension with Washington, buildings. Tennessee followed North rule the oil-rich country indefinitely. D.C., enlivened an active year for state Carolina in denying driver’s licenses to U.S. policy was severely tested in two governments and resulted in a marked illegal immigrants during 2007, and a international conferences at year’s end. deterioration of fiscal balances by year’s proposal by New York’s governor to isResponding to complaints about the end. All 50 states staged legislative sessue licenses to illegal residents was lack of leadership toward Middle East sions during the year, and 22 states held abandoned after widespread criticism. peace, U.S. Secretary of State Conone or more special sessions. Tension over funding and control of doleezza Rice convened a 40-country Party Strengths. Democrats recorded state National Guard troops continued summit in Annapolis, Md., in late fall. gains in limited state elections during to simmer. After Louisiana’s governor The conference, which included the Isthe year. In governorships Republicans turned down a federal National Guard raeli and Palestinian heads of state, took over a Democratic seat in takeover in the wake of Hurricane Kaended amiably with mutual vows to Louisiana but were ousted in Kentucky, trina in 2005, Congress permitted its draft another framework for peace in thereby maintaining the Democratic federalization in future disasters, which 2008. The U.S. found itself isolated at a advantage at 28-22. Democrats also prompted objections from numerous UN-sponsored conference on global added to their majority control in legstate governors. Kansas Gov. Kathleen 485

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: United States

Sebelius implied that Iraq deployment had reduced the ability of the National Guard in her state to assist in May when tornadoes devastated Greensburg. Under pressure from the White House, however, Sebelius said that her

real worry was preparedness for possible future needs. Finances. After two years of bustling revenue and spending growth, states tightened their belts in 2007 as national economic growth slowed at year's end. Tightening mortgage standards helped depress the housing market in many areas, and sales and real-estate tax col-

lections slowed markedly. Arizona, California,

Florida,

Illinois,

Maryland,

Michigan, Virginia, and Wisconsin were among the states facing major budget deficits. (See Sidebar.) With its

auto industry slumping, Michigan continued in what became known as a “one state recession.” State general fund expenditures rose by 9%, paced by increases in Medicaid and pension spending. For the first time, owing to rising health care costs, state spending on Medicaid programs for low-income individuals in 2007 surpassed state expenditures on K-12 education. Numerous states adjusted tax rates, but overall changes in revenue collections were minor by historical standards. Twenty-four states reduced and 4 raised personal income taxes, saving taxpayers $1 billion, while 22 states lowered and two increased sales taxes. Nine states, led by Michigan and New York, increased corporate income taxes. The biggest revenue increases were assessed against tobacco products, with eight states raising cigarette taxes by $761 million. No state adjusted alcohol taxes during the year. Two states raised motor fuel taxes, and

13

boosted motor vehicle and other user fees. As the real-estate slump deepened late in the year, states began tapping their “rainy day” funds, carryover balances, and other reserves to combat looming budget deficits. More than a dozen states raised alarms over pending budget deficits, increasing the prospect of further belt tightening or tax increases in 2008.

Law and Justice. Opposition to capital punishment gained significant ground during 2007, fed by concerns over wrongful convictions and the humaneness of executions. In late September the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would review whether the lethalinjection method used in virtually all executions constituted “cruel and un486

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

A school lies in rubble in the town of Greensburg, Kan., where a massive tornado—part of a violent storm system that swept through the region—wreaked havoc in May. Orlin Wagner/AP

usual punishment.” States immediately suspended imposition of the death penalty for the year. Only 42 inmates were executed during 2007, the fewest number since 1994. At year’s end New Jersey became the first state in 42 years to abolish capital punishment; death penalty statutes remained on the books Though Congress failed to enact immigration reform, 46 states ratified immigration-related legislation. Several moved to increase employer responsibility for ensuring that their workers were in the U.S. legally. Arizona,

New Mexico and Louisiana became the last two states to ban cockfighting, although the Louisiana law would not take effect until August 2008. Gambling. States continued to expand legalized gaming during the year. Seeking a greater share of profits, Kansas became the first to authorize large-scale casino resorts owned and operated by the state. Indiana joined 11 other states that allowed slot machines at horse tracks, and legislation was pending in Maryland and Michigan; West Virginia added table games at casino racetracks. Maine voters rejected a harness-racing

Nevada,

in 36 states.

West

Oklahoma,

Virginia

joined

Tennessee,

and

track with slot machines,

Colorado

and

and California were among the states that allowed expanded gaming in Na-

Georgia in restricting immigrant services or increasing enforcement penal-

ties against illegal aliens. The Arizona law suspended the license of any business convicted of having hired illegal aliens; a second offense was grounds for permanent revocation. Arizona’s governor also deployed National Guard forces to assist in border enforcement. Oklahoma prohibited the hiring or the transporting of illegal workers and banned undocumented aliens from receiving public benefits. A dozen other states approved a variety of measures that cracked down on identity fraud or required proof of legal status to receive public benefits. California specifically extended public benefits to migrant workers,

and Illinois became

the first

state to prohibit officials from checking identities by using a federal database. After National Football League star Michael Vick was arrested on federal dogfighting charges, several states moved to bolster animal cruelty laws.

but Florida

tive American casinos.

Health

and Welfare.

Health

care

is-

sues—including access, cost, and deliv-

ery—dominated legislative agendas during 2007. The debate came as the federal government moved slowly to expand and reform its State Children’s Health

Insurance

Program

(SCHIP),

which some states had used to cover parents, single adults, and middle-class families. New York and New Jersey helped to fuel the controversy by seeking federal matching SCHIP funds for families earning up to 400% of the poverty income level. Illinois became the first state to guarantee health insurance to all children. Florida and Indiana initiated closely watched experiments in Medicaid reform, expanding coverage while trying to hold down costs through insurer competition and requiring recipients to

contribute accounts.

to personal health savings

World Affairs: United States

More states moved toward universal health insurance coverage. California's governor proposed a $12 billion plan to cover all state residents—learning from universal coverage experiments under way in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont,

and Hawaii—but the initiative bogged down in the state legislature. Eight additional states—lIllinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, and

Tennessee—banned smoking in public areas and places of employment, including restaurants and bars. By 2008 a total of 31 states would mandate smoke-free environments. Bucking a national trend, Oregon voters turned down a proposal that would raise tobacco taxes to finance increased health insurance for children. State stem-cell research had a mixed year; voters in New Jersey rejected a major bond issue related to such research, but

New York budgeted $600 million over 10 years. Texas voters approved $3 billion in bonds for cancer research. Texas and Florida joined New Jersey in testing high-school athletes for steroid use. Nearly half the states considered requiring schoolgirls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV),

which

causes

cervical

cancer,

but only one—Virginia—enacted a statewide program. Education. Programs that would allow for choice in K-12 education made minimal progress during 2007; in the past, such programs had been on the rise. Utah became the first state to en-

act a universal voucher law that allowed any child to receive public funds to attend private school, but Utah voters repealed the measure in November. Three states expanded voucher programs but only for students with disabilities. Rights. Washington joined California in requiring employers to grant paid leave of up to $250 per week for parents with newborn children. Illinois became the 12th state to require a mandatory daily moment of silence in public schools. Maryland became the first to enact a “living wage” law that required state contractors to pay their employees up to $11.30 per hour. Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and

Virginia legislatures expressed remorse for their states’ past support of slavery. Advocates of equal rights for homosexuals made progress during the year. New Hampshire became the fourth state

to

approve

civil unions,

giving

same-sex couples all rights granted under traditional marriage laws. Oregon and Washington joined California, Maine, and Hawaii in enacting domestic-partnership laws, with many of the same benefits. Rhode Island’s attorney general declared that his state would recognize marriages performed in Massachusetts, the only state that recognized same-sex marriages. Iowa and Colorado banned discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation, and Colorado specified that homosexuals could adopt children. Oregon voters rolled back a controversial 2004 initiative that required that the government compensate property owners for

U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy participates in a rally in Washington, D.C., on October 1 against Pres. George W. Bush’s threat to veto the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

= "7-4

Wu

Don’t VETO att.

Kid

—

land-use

restrictions;

the

measure had produced demands

for $19 billion in

little more than two years. Florida and Maryland restored voting rights for convicted felons who had served their time. Environment. Globalwarming fears, augmented by a perception that the federal government was foot-dragging on

environmental

protec-

tion, spurred significant state legislation during the year. Hawaii, New

Jersey,

Minnesota, and Washington endorsed a 2006 California law that limited smokestack emissions from power plants and industrial sources. After President Bush signed a

law boosting automobile fuel economy standards over 12 years, the administration formally rejected a tougher 2002 California law requiring an even faster reduction in auto carbon-dioxide emissions. The state initiative had been endorsed by a dozen additional states, including Maryland in 2007, and at years end California announced new plans to sue the federal government. States continued to boost goals for producing electricity from renewable sources,

with

Minnesota,

New

Hamp-

shire, and Oregon officially aiming at a goal of 25% clean production by 2025. A total of 23 states had renewable energy standards. Consumer Protection. State laws requir-

ing that cigarettes be self-extinguishing gained rapidly in popularity. A total of 15 states approved new “fire-safe” measures, bringing the number to 21 states that required that manufacturers add bands of paper that snuffed the flame quickly if a cigarette was not being smoked. Following the collapse of a Minnesota I-35W highway bridge on August 1, states nationwide moved to reinspect similar structures and propose infrastructure-repair plans. Even though studies showed that more than onequarter of the country’s bridges were rated either structurally deficient or obsolete, minimal additional funding was allocated during the year. A battle continued in state legislatures between telephone and cable companies over regulation and taxation of multichannel television; more

than a dozen

states moved from local to statewide control. Telephone firms wanted to bypass complicated local requirements as they attempted to compete with cable on Internet access as well as telephone and television delivery. With $40 billion in insurance from

Hurricane

Katrina,

claims insurers

moved to raise rates or reduce coverage, creating a serious backlash in several states, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Louisiana and South Carolina offered tax breaks to insurers, and in a controversial move, Florida dramati-

cally expanded its state-run “insurer of last resort” to cover more than one million residents. Critics warned that the state was taking on excessive risk. Nevada,

New

Mexico,

and Oregon in-

creased regulation of short-term-interest “payday” lenders. Washington state voters approved a measure that allowed triple-damage lawsuits against insurers who wrongfully rejected claims. (DAVID C. BECKWITH)

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

487

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Uruguay

URUGUAY

UZBEKISTAN

posed after the Uzbek government refused to permit an independent investigation of the violent events in Andijan in 2005. The international human rights community lobbied hard against relaxation of the sanctions, which were

Area: 177,879 sq km (68,679 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 3,340,000

Area: 447,400 sq km (172,700 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 27,372,000

Capital: Montevideo Head of state and government: President Tabaré Ramón Vázquez Rosas

Capital: Tashkent Chief of state and head of government: President Islam Karimov, assisted by Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyayev

The year 2007 was another one of steady economic growth for Uruguay, but the political climate heated up for a number

of reasons,

not the least of

which was the decision by Pres. Tabaré Vázquez not to seek reelection. GDP grew a very solid 5.696; unemployment hovered around 9.596; but inflation, which was

running at 8.596,

was considerably above the central bank target range of 4.5-6.5%. The tax-reform program that was passed in January to help alleviate poverty and address inequality created an income tax that affected many professional and business people. The program was implemented on July 1 amid much grumbling, even among government supporters.

Public displeasure resulted in a more accommodating stance on public spending by Minister of Finance Danilo Astori. Nevertheless, the government faced increased pressure from publicsector unions demanding higher wages and from students and teachers opposed to the governments educationalreform project. All this was encouraging to the two traditional parties, the Blancos

and

the

Colorados,

but

the

leadership vacuum in these parties remained apparent, as did the lack of a clear successor to Vázquez for the governing coalition. The bitter conflict with Argentina over the pulp paper plant constructed by the Finnish company Botnia on the Uruguayan side of the Rio Uruguay did not end, even as the plant was given permission by the Uruguayan government to begin production in November. (See photograph on page 236.) The Uruguayans were hopeful that Argentina's recently inaugurated president,

Cristina

Fernández

de Kirchner

(see BIOGRAPHIES), would finally put the issue to rest. The year ended with hints that President Vázquez might reconsider his decision not to seek immediate reelection. (MARTIN WEINSTEIN) 488

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

The main political question of 2007 in Uzbekistan was whether or when there would be a presidential election. Pres. Islam Karimov had exceeded his constitutionally allotted term in office, and there was considerable speculation inside and outside the country on whether he would have his tenure extended indefinitely (as had Pres. Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan) or content himself with manipulating the choice of a successor. By September an election date of December 23 had been set, and

in November delegates at a Liberal Democratic Party congress selected Karimov as their presidential candidate. He went on to win the election with 88% of the vote and thereby secured a third term in office. Karimov faced only token opposition, and many Western observers questioned the legitimacy of the vote. Throughout 2007 the Uzbek leadership sought to reverse the country’s worsening economy. In February Presi-

dent Karimov told his cabinet that Uzbekistan urgently needed to expand its output of oil and natural gas and to improve the tax-collection rate by fighting the “shadow” economy. The population had been driven to rely on the shadow economy by Karimov' earlier restrictions on the import of consumer goods, which the country could not produce for itself. The import restrictions, however,

remained.

Throughout

the year various officials called for increased domestic and foreign investment in the Uzbek economy. In March, Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov asserted that the economy was stable and growing and that foreign investment was increasing. In August the Uzbek authorities liquidated the Uzbek-U.S. Zeravshan-Newmont gold-extraction venture and gave its assets to a local firm; this action did not send an encouraging signal to potential foreign investors. Uzbekistan was only partially successful in its efforts to persuade the European

Union

to relax

sanctions

im-

extended in May. The country's record on the observation of human rights remained poor: human rights activists were regularly harassed by the police, arrested,

and

imprisoned,

and

there

was little evidence that an effort was being made to end the torture of suspects by law-enforcement officials. The world's attention was drawn to Uzbekistan on October 24 by the murder of independent Uzbek journalist Alisher Saipov. Saipov had published a political weekly highly critical of Karimov in the Kyrgyz town of Osh, near the Uzbek border. Kyrgyz Ombudsman Tursunbai Bakir-uulu expressed the view of many journalists and others when he said on October 29 that he believed Uzbek special services were behind the killing, but Kyrgyz law-enforcement officials said that they could find no evidence to support that conclusion. (BESS BROWN)

VANUATU

Area: 12,190 sq km (4,707 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 226,000

Capital: Port Vila Chief of state: President Kalkot Mataskelekele

Head of government: Prime Minister Ham Lini

As Prime Minister Ham

Lini managed

to keep a large, fractious political coalition together in 2007, Vanuatu enjoyed continued political stability and a steady 396 rate of economic growth. Primary commodities (coconut oil, kava,

copra,

and

beef),

which

con-

tributed about 2096 to total exports, increased with the resumption of kava exports, and growing demand for copra was expected to generate higher incomes for the 6596 of the population that depended on agriculture. The commodities sector was expected to grow as a result of the governments successful use of coconut oil-based biofuel for power generation and the planned use of biofuel in the government's vehicle fleet. This had already resulted in

World Affairs: Venezuela Gerald Herbert/AP

a 5% saving on Vanuatu’s fuel-import bill. Resultant foreign-exchange savings had increased foreign reserves, and the countrys growth and stability gener-

On Nov. 2, 2007, Venezuela’s

ated new investment in Vanuatu, which

was reflected in increased sales of land to investors and developers. Overseas investment was being promoted more systematically by the Vanuatu Investment Promotion Authority, which brought together the directorates of key ministries and established a “one-stop shop" for potential investors. Vanuatu's tourism was growing rapidly as a consequence of investment in hotels, increased airline services from major markets, and political uncertainty in nearby visitor destinations, such as Fiji and the Solomon Islands. (CLUNY MACPHERSON)

U.S. Pres. George W. Bush exchanges gifts with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on June 9.

VATICAN CITY STATE Korea,

China,

and other countries,

to

ratify the nuclear test ban treaty. Vatican officials sought to strengthen relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, Area: 44 ha (109 ac) Population (2007 est.): 930; about 3,000 workers live outside the Vatican

Chief of state: (sovereign pontiff) Pope Benedict XVI

Head of administration: Secretary of State Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone

with a view toward

an even-

tual exchange of formal visits. The plight of Roman Catholics in China was

also a focus of Vatican

attention,

with calls for Beijing to restrain action against priests not affiliated with the state-recognized Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. Finally, stronger diplomatic ties were pursued with Muslim countries. To this end, the Vatican

state established Fears

that

a German

head

of state,

Pope Benedict XVI, might upset the traditional national bias within the Vatican were allayed in 2007 by reports that, if anything, the composition of the Holy See had become more Italian in some offices than in the past. This was evident

in the

Secretariat

of State,

where the top seven officials were all Italian. While consolidating the Italian hold on these key positions, however, the pope had internationalized the leadership of the nine congregations, which were headed by cardinals of as many nationalities. Domestic action was matched by an intense calendar of foreign initiatives, which included formal visits from U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as separate visits by the presidents of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In his quest for world peace, Pope Benedict spoke out about the war in Iraq, where he claimed the conditions of Christians had actually deteriorated, and urged the U.S., along with North

full diplomatic

tions with the United

rela-

Arab Emirates,

National

Assembly approved modifications to the 1999 constitution that would increase the power of the national executive and central government. One measure created new rules for declaring states of emergency and permitted security forces to disregard legal protections and round up citizens. The revised constitution also would allow for the indefinite reelection of the president and end the central bank’s autonomy. These changes conformed with suggestions to the National Assembly by the Commission for Constitutional Reform, which Pres. Hugo Chavez appointed shortly after being sworn in on January 10 to a third term as president. Allies of President Chávez controlled all 167 seats in the National Assembly, which overwhelmingly approved the reforms (160 lawmakers supported the changes, and 7 of them abstained). These changes were submitted to a national referendum on December 2, and

though public opinion polls forecast that a majority of voters would vote to approve the reforms, the referendum was defeated by a narrow margin of 51-49%. The groups most opposed to the reforms included the Roman Catholic Church, the business commu-

nity, professional associations, and leaders of the marginalized but vocal opposition political parties. In addition, many supporters of President Chávez in the urban shantytowns abstained, fearing that the reforms would eliminate private property.

and in early November Pope Benedict welcomed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for the first official meeting between a pope and a reigning Saudi monarch. The financial health of the Vatican seemed to be good. Disclosure of the 2006 budget showed that its revenues had increased substantially, which allowed the Vatican state to cover the costs of its many activities throughout

During the second quarter of 2007, Venezuelas GDP grew 8.9% over the same period in 2006, when the country registered a 9.4% growth rate. GDP in 2007 was expected for the first time to reach $200 billion. The nonpetroleum sector grew at a rate of 10.8% in the second quarter of 2007, although the petroleum sector contracted by 3.9%. The annual accumulated inflation by

the world.

higher rates among less-developed economies. Investment banks believed that inflation for the entire year would settle at 16%, more than exceeding the government’s goal of 12%. On November 1 the collection of the new tax on

(GREGORY O. SMITH)

VENEZUELA

November

2007

was

financial transactions

Area: 916,445 sq km (353,841 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 26,024,000

Capital: Caracas Head of state and government: President Hugo Chavez Frias

19%,

one

(known

of the

as ITF)

took effect. This measure was the core of the government’s plan to close the financial gap resulting from its decision to cut value-added tax. Corporations had to pay the Integrated National Customs and Tax Administration Service 1.5% on movements in their bank accounts. Additionally, ITF would be 489

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Vietnam Fernando Llano/AP

control of facilities belonging to Petrobras (the Brazilian oil giant). According to agreements signed by Bolivia and Venezuela,

Caracas would intervene in

any conflict between Bolivia and another country.

(DAVID J. MYERS)

VIETNAM

ficial visit to Japan in May to promote investment.

Triet’s visit to Beijing resulted in a joint communiqué that stressed longterm trade and economic cooperation and addressed territorial issues. Friction arose in bilateral relations arising from Vietnam’s political relations with Taiwan and development plans in the South China Sea. Shortly after the summit,

Area: 331,212 sq km (127,882 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 87,375,000

Venezuelans rally in Caracas against constitutional reforms proposed by Pres. Hugo Chávez.

levied on self-employed professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Petroleum remained central to Venezuela's economy. Over the past decade reserves of sweet crude had declined, and heavy-oil projects in the Orinoco Basin had become more important. In May President Chávez unilaterally modified the contracts under which foreign companies exploited four heavy-oil projects. Two companies that had developed these projects, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, refused to accept the terms that the government offered and were nationalized. Four other companies with significant investments in the heavy-oil projects (Chevron, BP, Total, and Statoil) agreed to remain as minority partners in joint

ventures

controlled

(Petróleos

de

by

Venezuela),

PDVSA the

state

Capital: Hanoi Chief of state: President Nguyen Minh Triet Head of government: Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung

a Chinese

naval

vessel

fired

on

Vietnamese fishermen in disputed waters. Triet’s trip to Washington was clouded by Hanoi’s crackdown on prodemocracy activists earlier in the year. Pres. George W. Bush pointedly received a delegation of Vietnamese American community leaders prior to Triet’s visit. In a speech delivered in California, Triet promoted bilateral trade and investment and reached out to the Vietnamese-American community. In May, Vietnam Communist Party

The year 2007 was marked in Vietnam by two significant foreign-policy achievements. In January Vietnam became the World Trade Organization's 150th

member,

and

in

October

the

country was elected to nonpermanent membership on the UN Security Council. These two events set the context for an intense year of diplomacy. Deputy Prime

Minister

and

Foreign

Minister

Pham Gia Khiem traveled in March to the U.S. and China to pave the way for visits by Pres. Nguyen Minh Triet in May and June, respectively. Khiem opened negotiations on a trade and investment framework agreement while in Washington, and he also paid an of

Secretary-General journeyed

Nong

Duc

Manh

to Chile, Brazil, Venezuela,

and Cuba. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited India in July to cement a strategic partnership. During his whirlwind trip the following month to Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar

(Burma), and Brunei, he fo-

cused on trade and investment. In September Dung made stops in Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic before addressing the UN General Assembly on September 27. He then flew to Paris. Meanwhile,

President

Triet

attended

the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Australia and made a side visit to New Zealand.

Vietnam Communist Party Secretary-General Nong Duc Manh (left) attends a ceremony at the Revolution Palace in Havana with Cuba's acting president, Raul Castro, on June 1.

company. In October the National Assembly approved joint-venture contracts between PDVSA BP, Total, and Statoil.

and

Chevron,

Relations between Caracas and Washington remained frosty. The administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush was frustrated over the increasing volume of cocaine trafficked through Venezuela. In Moscow President Chávez proclaimed, "Either we break U.S. imperialism or U.S. imperialism will definitely break the world." Relations with Brazil were outwardly cordial, but below the surface a potentially huge conflict persisted over the issue of Bolivian natural gas. In 2006 Bolivian Pres. Evo Morales had nationalized the gas reservoirs, and the Bolivian armed forces had taken Javier Galeano/AP

490

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Zambia Jon Bjoergvinsson—UNHCR/AP

In March Vietnam hosted diplomatic talks between North Korea and Japan aimed at normalizing relations. In October Secretary-General Manh made a pathbreaking journey to Pyongyang, N.Kor, that was immediately reciprocated by Prime Minister Kim Jong Il. On

the domestic

front,

the

Central

Committee of the Vietnam Communist Party held two meetings. At the fourth plenum in January, the number of Central Committee commissions was reduced from 11 to 6; a directive was is-

sued for the party, army, police, and mass organizations to divest themselves of commercial enterprises; and a resolution was made to draw up a national maritime strategy forward to 2020. During the fifth plenum in July, resolutions were approved on ideology, control of the media, inspection work,

and party leadership over the political

Refugees from East Africa rest on a beach in Yemen.

system.

The National Assembly met (July 19-August 2) and approved a cabinet reshuffle that increased the number of deputy prime ministers from three to five but decreased the number of ministerial positions from 26 to 22. The five-year term of the National Assembly was cut by one year to bring it into alignment with the scheduling of national party congresses.

(CARLYLE A. THAYER)

YEMEN

and feared dead. East Africans were leaving poverty and war behind, in hopes of a better future living in the Middle East. The refugees used Yemen as an entry point into oil-rich Gulf

launched Zambia’s Fifth National Development Plan, which focused on good governance; improving health, educa-

states.

couraging foreign investment. The plan

In March two foreign students (one of whom

was

a Muslim

from

France)

were killed by Shi'ite rebels in an attack on a religious school. A mosque was firebombed in April by two unidentified

attackers,

who

doused

people with gasoline before lighting them on fire. On July 2 a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of Spanish tourists, killing seven Spaniards and two Yemenis at the Queen of Sheba temple in Marib. Yemeni government forces attacked the outskirts of Marib,

Area: 528,076 sq km (203,891 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 22,231,000

Capital: Sanaa Chief of state: President Maj. Gen. ‘Ali *Abdallah Salih Head of government: Prime Ministers ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Ba Jamal and, from April 7, Ali

allegedly killing the al-Qaeda militants responsible for planning the attack, including Kassem al-Raimi, who was thought to have masterminded the attack. Yemen continued to work with U.S. special forces based in Djibouti to fight al-Qaeda.

Muhammad Mujawar The year 2007 was a tumultuous one for Yemen. Clashes in January-March between security forces and al-Houthi rebels in the north left more than 80 dead. In June the Shabab al-Muminay

(AYESHA SIDDIQUA CHAUDHRY)

ZAMBIA

from East Africa, and at least 400 died

along the way, with as many missing

tion,

Area: 752,612 sq km (290,585 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 11,477,000

Capital: Lusaka Head of state and government: President Levy Mwanawasa

and

received

the an

infrastructure; early

setback,

and

en-

however,

when in February China’s Pres. Hu Jintao canceled a visit to Zambia's Copperbelt region because of complaints about working conditions and low wages in a Chinese-owned mine. The government hastened to rebut the charges, and in April China made Zambia a loan of $39 million to repair flood damage. In March a Malaysian investment team visited the country in hopes of collaborating in a variety of manufacturing projects and promoting trade, and in May Zambia received $50 million from a variety of Western sources to help clean up pollution created by mining. In June the United Kingdom agreed to provide £400 million (£1 = about $2.00) to relieve poverty over the next 10 years, while in October the Japanese ambassador said that his country would help to attract foreign investment by improving Zambias infrastructure. The countrys decaying railway system received a boost in June when investors from the United Kingdom,

leader, ‘Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, finally

accepted a cease-fire. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 20,000 people entered Yemen illegally

In January 2007 Pres. Levy Mwanawasa

South Africa,

and the U.S. pro-

vided $250 million to connect copper mines in Zambia and eventually to link Zambia's railway system with Angola’s Benguela Railway. An important strand in the development program was Mwanawasa' continuing

campaign

In February

against

he issued

corruption.

a warning

to 491

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

World Affairs: Zimbabwe

corrupt civil servants, and this was followed by the arrest of a senior police officer and two other men. In March Mwanawasa dismissed his sonin-law and the deputy lands minister; he previously had sacked the lands minister. Even the judiciary, it was re-

police, and on March

11, MDC

leaders

other case against the former president

in Harare were arrested on their way to what they claimed was a prayer meeting. After learning what had happened, Tsvangirai drove to the police station where his supporters were being held and was himself arrested. He and his supporters were savagely beaten; Tsvangirai and 14 others required hospital treatment. Photographs of the injured circulated widely, arousing indignant protests from a number of Western powers, but on March 19 President Mugabe threatened to expel any foreign diplomats who offered support to the opposition. In light of Tsvangirais failure in previous elec-

resumed in Lusaka, and a further case

tions,

opened in December. Heavy rains that began in December 2006 and continued into the new year seriously affected 21 of the country’s 73 districts. Initial fears that there might

MDC began in June to question his suitability as a candidate for the presidential elections in 2008. At the end of July, the breakaway faction of the party, led by Arthur Mutambara, decided to contest the elections on its own, describing Tsvangirai as weak

vealed in June, was not immune corruption.

from

In May a High Court judge in London found former president Frederick Chiluba guilty of having misappropriated £23 million of government money, but Chiluba (speaking through a spokesman) rejected the court’s jurisdiction.

On

August

15, however,

an-

be a shortage of corn (maize) were dis-

pelled in July when the government promised to authorize the export of surplus corn to Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Controversy swirled in March when Mwanawasa announced that there would be a nationwide demolition of illegal shantytowns that had sprouted up around urban centres. Work began immediately in Lusaka, but the people left homeless began a legal challenge against the government, citing their loss of property. (KENNETH INGHAM)

ZIMBABWE

leaders

and indecisive.

of his

faction

In December,

of the

however,

Tsvangirai offered to bury political dif ferences to present a united front against Mugabe. At a meeting in March of leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Mugabe explained that his reactions were a response to a challenge orchestrated by the U.K. and its allies who sponsored the MDC,

which

aimed

to overthrow

his government. The SADC leaders reaffirmed their support for Zimbabwe

and invited South Africa’s Pres. Thabo Mbeki to encourage dialogue between the government and the opposition groups. Though Western powers blamed the crumbling economy on bad governance, Mugabe attributed the state of the economy to the imposition of sanctions,

which

had

resulted

in

acute

shortages of food and fuel and with a rise in inflation from 1,73096 in Febru-

ary to 7,892% in September. In spite of the country’s economic problems, in June, Lonrho, a company with longstanding links with Zimbabwe, announced that it would invest £100 million there (about $198 million).

Only

days later a bill was published that stipulated that black Zimbabweans were required to hold at least 51% of shares in every company. Early in July the government ordered that prices of many essential goods be reduced by up to 70%, and in September the currency was devalued by 1,200%. At a meeting of EU and African leaders

in Lisbon

in December,

German

Chancellor Angela Merkel launched a powerful verbal attack on Mugabe’s government, but on December 13 a special congress of the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front affirmed Mugabe as its sole candidate for president in the 2008 elections. Ian Smith, the former prime minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) died in November. (See OBITUARIES.) (KENNETH INGHAM)

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai (centre) leaves a court in Harare on March 13 after he and a number of his supporters were arrested and beaten.

Area: 390,757 sq km (150,872 sq mi) Population (2007 est.): 12,311,000, of which

about 3,000,000—4,000,000 people might be living outside the country Capital: Harare Head of state and government: President Robert Mugabe After

a year

during

which

Morgan

Tsvangirai (see BIOGRAPHIES) and his opposition Movement for Democratic

Change (MDC) had been campaigning for "mass action" to effect regime change, Pres. Robert Mugabe in 2007 banned political rallies across Zimbabwe. Further attempts by the opposition

to

mount

demonstrations

in

Harare and Bulawayo were blocked by Desmond Kwande—AFP/Getty Images

492

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

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Author of 50 Years

*NOBEL PRIZES (in part); PHYSICAL SCIENCES: Physics

of World Championship Grand Prix Motor Racing and Four Seasons at Ferrari: The Lauda Years. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Automobile Racing: Grand

Jones, Mark P. Professor of Political Science,

Prix Racing

Democracies. “BIOGRAPHIES (in part); WORLD AFFAIRS: Argentina Jubb, Nadine. Political Scientist; Research

Hersh, Philip. Olympic Sports Writer, Chicago Tribune. Contributor to Real Sports Reporting. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Ice Skating

D.C.

Author of Political Change in Post-Communist Slovakia and Croatia: From Nationalist to Europeanist. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Czech Republic; Slovakia

SPORTS

(in part)

Union

automobiles and racing. Author of The Encyclopedia of Auto Racing Greats. SPORTS AND GAMES: Automobile Racing: U.S. Auto Racing;

Twentieth Century. *BIOGRAPHIES

(in part); OBITUARIES

Helm, Toby. Chief Political Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph. «WORLD AFFAIRS: European

Caravan?: The Middle East, Islamism and

Specialist, Global Insight, Inc., Washington,

Hammer, William R. Fritiof Fryxell Professor of Geology, Augustana College, Rock Island, Ill. Author of Gondwana Dinosaurs from the Jurassic of Antarctica. «LIFE SCIENCES: Paleontology Hayes, David C. Freelance Science Editor.

Jameson,

Rice University Houston. Author of Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential

Associate,

Hobbs, Greg. Senior Contributing Writer, Football Historian; longtime writer with newspapers and the Australian Football League. Author of Allen Aylet: My Game and several books on Australian football. SPORTS AND GAMES: Football: Australian Hoffman, Dean A. Member, Communicators Hall of Fame, Harness Racing Museum. Author of Yankeeland: The Farm the Kellers Built;

Castleton Farm: A Tradition of Standardbred Excellence; Quest for Excellence: Hanover Shoe Farms: The First 75 Years; and The Hambletonian: America’s Trotting Classic. “BIOGRAPHIES (in part); SPORTS AND GAMES: Equestrian Sports: Harness Racing

Centre for Research

on Latin America

and the Caribbean, York University, Toronto. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Nicaragua

Kaplan, Eben. Associate Editor, CFR.org. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Somalia Kapp, Clare. Freelance Journalist; Contributor to The Lancet.

“WORLD

AFFAIRS: Switzerland

Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Professor and Founding Director, Center for Persian Studies, University of

Maryland. Poetry Editor of Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. Coeditor of Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry. LITERATURE: Persian Karns, Margaret P. Professor of Political Science,

University of Dayton, Ohio. Coauthor of

Molecular

Hollar, Sherman. Associate Editor, Encyclopedia

International Organizations: The Politics and

Fuller, Elizabeth. Editor, Newsline, Radio Free

Britannica. eBIOGRAPHIES (in part); OBITUARIES (in part) Homel, David. Freelance Writer; Lecturer,

Processes of Global Governance. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Multinational and Regional

Medicine, Atlanta. «LIFE SCIENCES:

Biology and Genetics Europe/Radio Liberty, Prague. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Georgia Furmonavitius, Darius. Postdoctoral Research

Fellow, Department of Languages and European Studies, University of Bradford, Eng. Author of Lithuania Rejoins Europe. “WORLD AFFAIRS:

Lithuania Gallagher, Tom. Professor of Ethnic Peace and Conflict, University of Bradford, Eng. Author of

Theft ofa Nation: Romania Since Communism and others. *SPECIAL REPORT: Tony Blair: A 10Year Retrospective; WORLD AFFAIRS: Moldova; Romania Ganado, Albert. Lawyer; Former Chairman, Malta National Archives Advisory Committee; President,

Malta Historical Society. Author of Valletta Città Nuova: A Map History (1566-1600) and Malta in World War II: Contemporary Watercolours by Alfred Gerada (1940-1942).

*WORLD AFFAIRS:

Malta Garrod, Mark. Golf Correspondent, PA Sport, U.K. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); SPORTS AND GAMES: Golf

Gibbons, J. Whitfield. Professor of Ecology, Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, University of Georgia. Coauthor of Ecoviews: Snakes, Snails,

and Environmental Tales. eLIFE SCIENCES: Zoology

494

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Concordia University, Montreal. Author of The Speaking Cure: A Novel and others. «LITERATURE: French: Canada Hunter, Paul. Hockey Reporter, Toronto Star. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Ice Hockey Hussainmiya,

Department of History, University of Brunei Darussalam. Author of The Brunei Constitution of 1959: An Inside History. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Brunei

Ingham, Kenneth. Professor Emeritus of History, University of Bristol, Eng. Author of Politics in Modern Africa: The Uneven Tribal Dimension and (in part); WORLD

Kazamaru, Yoshihiko. Literary Critic; Assistant Professor, Morioka College, Japan. *LITERATURE: Japanese Kelling, George H. Ph.D.; Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army (ret.). Author of Countdown to Rebellion:

British Policy in Cyprus, 1939-1955.

B.A. Associate Professor,

others. “BIOGRAPHIES

Organizations

AFFAIRS:

Angola; Congo, Democratic Republic of the; Kenya; Malawi; Mozambique; Sudan, The; Tanzania; Uganda; Zambia; Zimbabwe Iovtcheva, Iva. Process and Systems Improvement Specialist, Johnsonville Sausage, LLC,

Sheboygan, Wis. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Bulgaria (in part) Jamail, Milton. Author of Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball and Venezuelan Bust, Baseball

*WORLD

AFFAIRS: Cyprus Kellner, Peter. President, YouGov PLC. Author

of The New Mutualism and others. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); WORLD AFFAIRS: United Kingdom Knox, Paul. Associate Professor and Chair,

School of Journalism, Ryerson University, Toronto. WORLD

AFFAIRS: Bolivia; Ecuador

Koper, Keith D. Associate Professor of Geophysics, St. Louis (Mo.) University eEARTH SCIENCES: Geophysics Krause, Stefan. Freelance Analyst. eÁWORLD AFFAIRS:

Greece; Macedonia

Kuiper, Kathleen. Senior Editor, Encyclopedia Britannica. Editor of Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. «BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Lamb, Kevin M. Health and Medical Writer,

Boom: Andrés Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier. eSPORTS AND GAMES: Baseball: Latin

Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. Author of

America

*SPORTS AND GAMES: Football: Canadian; U.S.

Quarterbacks,

Nickelbacks & Other Loose Change.

Contributors

Lawler Nancy Ellen. Professor Emerita, Oakton Community College, Des Plaines, Ill. Author of Soldiers, Airmen, Spies, and Whisperers: The Gold

Coast in World War II and others. eWORLD AFFAIRS: Benin; Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Central

African Republic; Congo, Republic of the; Cóte

Matié, Davorka.

Associate Professor, Department

of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Coeditor of Democratic

Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education & Media. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Croatia Matthíasson, Bjórn. Economist, Ministry of

d'Ivoire; Gabon; Guinea; Mali; Mauritania; Niger;

Finance, Iceland. *BIOGRAPHIES

Senegal; Togo

AFFAIRS: Iceland

Lawson,

Fred H. Professor of Government,

Mills

College, Oakland, Calif. Author of Why Syria Goes to War. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Syria

Le Comte, Douglas. Meteorologist, Climate Prediction Center, U.S. National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration. “EARTH SCIENCES: Meteorology and Climate Legassick, Martin. Emeritus Professor of History, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, S.Af.

Author of Subjugation and the Roots of Democracy in South Africa: The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 1800-1854. *WORLD AFFAIRS: South Africa Lehman, Clarence. Adjunct Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University

of Minnesota. eSPECIAL REPORT: Biofuels—The Next Great Source of Energy? Levin, Ben. Documentary Filmmaker; Professor, Department of Radio, Television, and Film,

University of North Texas. Co-producer and Codirector Verso Negro: Black Verse Poetry of the Spanish Caribbean. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); PERFORMING ARTS: Motion Pictures: Documentary

(in part); WORLD

London. Author of The Boundaries of Modern Iran. Coeditor of Land-Locked States of Africa and

The Cricketer. Author of The Complete Guide to Cycling. «BIOGRAPHIES (in part); SPORTS AND GAMES: Cricket; Cricket: Sidebar

Luebering, J.E. Associate Editor, Encyclopedia Britannica.

*BIOGRAPHIES

(in part)

Macpherson, Cluny. Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey

University, Albany Campus, Auckland, N.Z. Coauthor of Samoan Medical Belief and Practice. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Dependent States: Pacific Ocean; Fiji; Kiribati; Marshall Islands; Micronesia, Federated States of; Samoa; Solomon Islands; Tonga; Tuvalu; Vanuatu

Maguire, Robert. Director, Trinity University Haiti Program, Washington, D.C. Author of Haiti Held

Hostage: International Responses to the Quest for Nationhood 1986-1996. «WORLD AFFAIRS: Haiti Malik, Mohan.

Professor, Asia-Pacific Center for

Security Studies, Honolulu. Author of Dragon on Terrorism: Assessing China's Tactical Gains and Strategic Losses Post-September 11. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Myanmar

(Burma)

Mancoff, Debra N. Adjunct Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Author of Treasure of the DIA: The Detroit Institute of Arts. Coauthor of Treasures from the Art Institute of Chicago. «BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Mango, Andrew. Foreign Affairs Analyst. Author of Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey and The Turks Today. «BIOGRAPHIES (in part); WORLD AFFAIRS: Turkey Marek, Janele M. Account Executive, The

Woodbine Agency. SPORTS AND GAMES: Bobsleigh, Skeleton, and Luge: Luge Marples, David R. Professor of History University of Alberta. Author of Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine; Belarus: A Denationalized Nation; and Motherland:

Russia in the Twentieth Century. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Belarus; Ukraine Marston, John A. Professor, Centro de Estudios de

Asia y África, El Colegio de México. Coeditor of History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia. «WORLD AFFAIRS: Cambodia

University, New Delhi. Author of Conflict and Peacemaking in South Asia. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Maldives Poudel, Keshab. Freelance Journalist.

eWORLD

400 Years Prothero, Neil. Editor and Economist,

Graduate Program Director, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. «LITERATURE: Portuguese: Portugal Michaeli, Ethan. Publisher, Residents! Journal.

Contributor to Black Zion: African American Encounters with Judaism. eBIOGRAPHIES (in part) Middlebrook, Kevin J. Reader in Latin American Politics, Institute for the Study of the Americas,

University of London. Editor of Dilemmas of Political Change in Mexico. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Mexico Moore, Jenny. *ART AND ART EXHIBITIONS: Art; Art

Remembering the Jamestown Colony After Economist

Intelligence Unit, Europe. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Austria Ranson, K. Anne. Editorial Consultant, Huberta Editorial Services. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Rauch, Robert. Freelance Editor and Writer. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); NOBEL PRIZES (in part) Raun, Toivo U. Professor of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University. Author of Estonia

and the Estonians. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Estonia Ray, Michael. Research Editor, Encyclopedia Britannica. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); COMPUTERS

AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS: Sidebar

Exhibitions

Myers, David J. Professor of Political Science,

Pennsylvania State University. Coeditor of and contributor to The Unraveling of Representative Democracy

Sunday Times (London); Former Assistant Editor,

Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru

Mendes, Victor K. Associate Professor and

Malaysia Morgan, Paul. Editor, Rugby World. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Football: Rugby

Longmore, Andrew. Senior Sports Writer, The

Sahadevan.

Price, David A. Author of Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart ofa New Nation, *SPECIAL REPORT:

News. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); SPORTS AND GAMES: Track and Field Sports (Athletics) Litweiler, John. Jazz Critic. Author of The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 and Ornette (in part); PERFORMING ARTS:

Author of Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Laos

McMillan, Neale. Managing Editor, South Pacific News Service. Author of Top of the Greasy Pole: New Zealand Prime Ministers of Recent Times. *WORLD AFFAIRS: New Zealand

Moredock, Janet. Freelance Writer and Editor. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); WORLD AFFAIRS:

part); OBITUARIES Music: Jazz

Almanac. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Gymnastics Pholsena, Vatthana. Research Fellow, CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), France.

AFFAIRS: Bhutan; Nepal

AFFAIRS: fran

Films Lindstrom, Sieg. Managing Editor, Track & Field

Coleman: A Harmolodic Life. “BIOGRAPHIES (in

U.S.A. Gymnastics. Author of The Gymnastics

Ponmoni

McLachlan, Keith $. Professor Emeritus, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of

Asia. “WORLD

Peszek, Luan. Publications Director and Editor,

in Venezuela.

*WORLD

AFFAIRS:

Venezuela Nishizaki, Yoshinori. Research Fellow, The

Australian National University Canberra. eWORLD AFFAIRS: Thailand Noda, Hiroki. Sporting News Reporter, Kyodo News, Tokyo. “SPORTS AND GAMES: Baseball: Japan

Nolan, Polly. Senior Commissioning Editor, Children’s Fiction, Oxford University Press.

*LITERATURE: English: United Kingdom O’Leary, Christopher. Contributing Editor and Writer, Investment Dealers Digest; Contributing Writer, Best Life and Registered Rep. *BUSINESS

André. Assistant Editor, Amateur

Wrestling News. «SPORTS AND GAMES: Wrestling: Freestyle and Greco-Roman Renwick, David. Freelance Journalist. eWORLD AFFAIRS: Antigua and Barbuda; Bahamas, The;

Barbados; Dependent States: Caribbean and Bermuda; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Jamaica; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Saint Vincent

and the Grenadines; Trinidad and Tobago Reuning, Winifred. Editor and Web Manager, Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Antarctica

Rhodes, Colin. Professor and Dean, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. *SPECIAL REPORT: Outsider Art: Moving in from the Margins Robbins,

Paul. Freelance Writer; Correspondent,

Ski Trax and Ski Racing. SPORTS AND GAMES: Skiing Roby, Anne. Freelance Journalist; Program Associate, Institute for Mathematics

and Science

Education, University of Illinois at Chicago.

OVERVIEW

Oppenheim, Lois Hecht. Professor of Political Science, American Jewish University, Los Angeles. Author of Politics in Chile: Socialism, Authoritarianism, and Market Democracy, 3rd ed.

Coeditor of After Pinochet: The Chilean Road to Democracy and the Market. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Chile O’Quinn, Jim. Editor in Chief, American

Theatre.

PERFORMING ARTS: Theatre: U.S. and Canada Ortega, Robert. Journalist; Assistant Professor,

School of Journalism, Ryerson University, Toronto. Author of In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Paraguay Orwig, Sarah Forbes. Associate Editor,

Encyclopedia Britannica. Contributor to The Next Phase of Business Ethics: Integrating Psychology and Ethics. “BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Palacio, Joseph O. Ph.D.; Former Resident Tutor and Head, University Centre, University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies, Belize. Author of Development in Belize, 1960-1980:

Initiatives at the State and Community Levels. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Belize Parsons, Neil. Professor of History, University of Botswana. Author of King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen. WORLD AFFAIRS: Botswana Pérez, Orlando J. Professor of Political Science,

Central Michigan University. Editor of PostInvasion Panama: The Challenges of Democratization

Reddington,

in the New

World Order and

others. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Panama

*WORLD AFFAIRS: Andorra; Liechtenstein; Luxembourg; Monaco

Rollin, Jack. Editor, Sky Sports Football Yearbook and Playfair Football Annual. Author of Soccer at War 1939-45 and others. eBIOGRAPHIES

(in part);

SPORTS AND GAMES: Football: Association Football (Soccer): Africa and Asia; Europe Sanders, Alan J.K. Freelance Mongolist; Former Lecturer in Mongolian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of

London. Author of Historical Dictionary of Mongolia. Coauthor of Colloquial Mongolian. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Mongolia Sandvik,

Hilde. Dr. Philos.; Associate Professor,

Department of History, University of Oslo. Author of Norsk historie 1300-1625. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Norway Saracino, Peter. Freelance Defense Journalist. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part); MILITARY AFFAIRS; OBITUARIES (in part); SPECIAL REPORT: Advances

in Battlefield Medicine Saunders, Christopher. Professor of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town. Coauthor of Historical Dictionary of South Africa and South Africa: A Modern History. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Cape Verde; Chad; Equatorial Guinea; Gambia, The; Guinea-Bissau; Lesotho; Madagascar; Namibia;

São Tomé and Principe Schiavo, Leda. Professor Emerita, University of

Illinois at Chicago. Author of El éxtasis de los limites: temas y figuras del decadentismo. *LITERATURE:

Spanish: Latin America

495

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Contributors

Schmidt,

Fabian. Head of the Albanian Program,

Deutsche Welle. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Albania Schreiber, Barbara A. Editorial Assistant,

Encyclopaedia Britannica. eBIOGRAPHIES (in part); OBITUARIES (in part) Schuster, Angela M.H. Editor in Chief, JCON (the

architectural preservation quarterly of the World Monuments Fund); Contributing Editor, Archaeology; Contributor, New York Times; Editor,

The Explorers Journal. “ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY: Archaeology: Eastern Hemisphere Sego, Stephen. Freelance Journalist; Former Director, Radio Free Afghanistan.

*WORLD

AFFAIRS: Afghanistan Seligson, Mitchell A. Centennial Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville.

Editor of Elections and Democracy in Central America, Revisited. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Costa Rica Serafin, Steven R. Director, Writing Center, Hunter

College, City University of New York. Coeditor of The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature and The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. eNOBEL PRIZES (in part) Shelley, Andrew. Chief Executive, Women's

International Squash Players Association; Technical Director, World Squash Federation.

Author of Squash Rules: A Player's Guide. *SPORTS

Shepherd,

AND

GAMES:

Squash

Encyclopaedia Britannica. eOBITUARIES (in part); SPORTS AND GAMES: Automobile Racing: Rallies AFFAIRS:

Dependent States: Burope and the Atlantic Shubinsky, Valery. Freelance Critic and Journalist. Author of Mikhail Lomonosov: vserosstiskii chelovek and Nikolay Gumilyov: zhizn poeta. LITERATURE: Russian Simons, Paul. Freelance Journalist. Author of The

Action Plant. «LIFE SCIENCES: Botany Simpson, Jane. Freelance Writer. ‘PERFORMING ARTS: Dance: Buropean Smith, Gregory O. Director, European Management

Institute, Rome.

WORLD

AFFAIRS:

San Marino; Vatican City State Smith, Lahra. Assistant Professor, Georgetown

University, Washington, D.C. WORLD Ethiopia Snodgrass,

AFFAIRS:

Donald. Institute Fellow Emeritus,

Harvard University. Coauthor of Economics of Development, 5th ed. WORLD AFFAIRS: Sri Lanka Sparks, Karen J. Editor, Encyclopædia Britannica. *OBITUARIES (in part) Spencer, Donna. Journalist, Canadian Press. *SPORTS

AND

GAMES: Curling

Stern, Irwin. Teaching Associate Professor of Foreign Languages, North Carolina State University. Editor of Dictionary of Brazilian Literature. Coauthor of Paso a Paso: Spanish for Health Professionals. «LITERATURE: Portuguese: Brazil Stos, William. Ph.D. Candidate, York University, Toronto. eBIOGRAPHIES (in part) WORLD AFFAIRS:

Canada Streicker, John. Coordinator, Northern Climate Exchange, Northern Research Institute. Coauthor

of Quilt Sensations. SPECIAL REPORT: Climate Change—The Global Effects; WORLD AFFAIRS: Arctic Regions Sumrall, Harry. Classical Music Editor, Gracenote,

Inc. ePERFORMING ARTS: Music: Classical Susel, Rudolph

M. Editor, American

Home.

*WORLD AFFAIRS: Slovenia Susser, Leslie D. Diplomatic Correspondent, The Jerusalem Report. Coauthor of Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Israel

496

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Taylor, Jolanda Vanderwal. Associate Professor of Dutch and German,

University of Wisconsin

at Madison. Author of A Family Occupation: Children of the War and the Memory of World War II in Dutch Literature of the 1980s. “WORLD AFFAIRS: The Netherlands Taylor Richard. Basketball Correspondent, The Independent; Production and Sports Editor, Midland Weekly Media (Trinity Mirror) eSPORTS AND GAMES: Basketball: International Taylor-Robinson, Michelle M. Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University. Coauthor of Negotiating Democracy: Transitions

from Authoritarian Rule. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Honduras Teague, Elizabeth. U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. (The opinions expressed are personal and do not necessarily represent those of the British government.) *WORLD AFFAIRS: Russia

Thayer, Carlyle A. Professor of Politics, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra. Author of The Vietnam People’s Army Under Doi Moi. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Vietnam Thimangu, Patrick L. Reporter, St. Louis (Mo.) Business Journal. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Eritrea Education,

University of California, Santa

Barbara. Author of Recent Theories of Human Development and High-Stakes Testing: Coping with Collateral Damage. «EDUCATION Tikkanen, Amy. Corrections Manager,

Encyclopedia Britannica. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Trumbull, Charles. Freelance Writer and Editor. *BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Tuimaleali'ifano, Morgan. Senior Lecturer,

Division of History, Faculty of Arts and Law, University of the South Pacific. Author of O Tama a Aiga: The Politics of Succession to Samoa’s Paramount Titles. “BIOGRAPHIES (in part) Turner, Darrell J. Freelance Writer; Former

Religion Writer, Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette; Former Associate Editor, Religion News Service. “BIOGRAPHIES (in part); RELIGION

Urbansky, Julie. Merchandising Communications Manager, Sprint Nextel. SPORTS

Webb, Sarah. Freelance Science Writer, Discover,

Science, Science News, Analytical Chemistry, and

Writer. “WORLD AFFAIRS: Hungary

Thomas, R. Murray. Professor Emeritus of

Melinda C. Senior Editor,

and Other Races (in part); WORLD

Szilagyi, Zsofia. Political Consultant and Freelance

AND GAMES:

Bobsleigh, Skeleton, and Luge: Bobsleigh; Skeleton Verdi, Robert. Senior Writer, Golf Digest and Golf World; Contributing Columnist, Chicago Tribune. Author of Chicago Blackhawks: Seventy-Five Years. Coauthor of McMahon!: The Bare Truth About Chicago’s Brashest Bear; Once a Bum, Always a Dodger: My Life in Baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles; and Holy Cow! *SPORTS AND GAMES: Baseball: U.S. and Canada Wang Xiaoming. Professor of Chinese Literature and Chair of the Board of the Center for Modern Chinese Literature, East China Normal University; Professor of Cultural Studies and

Director of the Center for Contemporary Culture Studies, Shanghai University. Author of Life Cannot Be Faced Straight-On: A Biography of Lu Xun. «LITERATURE: Chinese Wanninger, Richard S. Freelance Journalist. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Volleyball Watson, Rory. Freelance Journalist, specializing in

others. “NOBEL PRIZES (in part); PHYSICAL

SCIENCES: Chemistry Weil, Eric. Columnist and Contributor, Buenos Aires Herald; Associated Press Reporter; South America Correspondent, World Soccer Magazine; Contributor,

FIFA Magazine.

¢SPORTS

William Paterson University of New Jersey. Author of Uruguay: Democracy at the Crossroads and numerous articles and book chapters on Uruguay. *WORLD AFFAIRS: Uruguay White, Martin L. Freelance Writer. eBIOGRAPHIES (in part); OBITUARIES (in part)

Whitney, Barbara. Copy Supervisor, Encyclopaedia Britannica. (in part)

*BIOGRAPHIES

(in part); OBITUARIES

Whitten, Phillip. Executive Director, College Swimming Coaches Association of America; Former Editor in Chief (1992-2006), Swimming World. Author and/or editor of 18 books,

including The Complete Book of Swimming. *BIOGRAPHIES Swimming

(in part); SPORTS AND GAMES:

Wilkinson, John R. Sportswriter, Coventry Newspapers. *SPORTS AND GAMES: Cycling Williams, Jody. Founding Coordinator (1992),

International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. *SPECIAL REPORT: Toward a World Free of Land Mines: Ten Years of Progress Wilson, Keith. Editorial Director, Outdoor

Photography and Black & White Photography. Author of The AVA Guide to Travel Photography. *ART AND ART EXHIBITIONS: Photography Wines, James. President of SITE Environmental Design, New York City; Professor of Architecture,

Penn State University. Author of Green Architecture. SPECIAL REPORT: Green Architecture: Building for the 21st Century Winner, Christopher P. Editor and Publisher, The American Magazine (Rome). *WORLD AFFAIRS:

Italy Woods, Elizabeth Rhett. Writer. Author of 1970:

A Novel Poem; Beyond the Pale; The Absinthe of Desire; Family Fictions; If Only Things Were Different (I): A Model for a Sustainable Society; and others. *LITERATURE: English: Canada Woodward,

Ralph Lee, Jr. Professor Emeritus

of Latin American History, Tulane University, New Orleans. Author of A Short History of Guatemala.

“WORLD AFFAIRS: El Salvador;

Guatemala Wyllie, Peter J. Professor Emeritus of Geology, California Institute of Technology. Author of The Dynamic Earth and The Way the Earth Works. *EARTH SCIENCES: Geology and Geochemistry Yovchev Boris. Network Security and Directory Services Specialist, Abbott Laboratories, Abbott

Park, Ill. ‘WORLD AFFAIRS: Bulgaria (in part) Zegura, Stephen L. Professor of Anthropology, University of Arizona. ANTHROPOLOGY

Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Western

European

Organization and World Politics.

AFFAIRS: Belgium

AND

ARCHAEOLOGY: Anthropology Ziring, Lawrence. Arnold E. Schneider

Express Guide to Brussels. Contributor to The Union: How Does It Work? *WORLD

GAMES:

Football: Association Football (Soccer): The Americas Weinstein, Martin. Professor of Political Science,

Michigan Twentieth Pakistan: Coauthor

European Union affairs; Brussels Correspondent, The Times (London). Coauthor of The American

AND

University. Author of Pakistan in the Century: A Political History and At the Crosscurrent of History. of The United Nations: International

AFFAIRS: Pakistan

“WORLD

Ed Harris—Reuters/Landoy

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© 2008 ENCYCLOP/EDIA BRITANNICA, INC. Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica Book of the Year, and the thistle logo are registered trademarks of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

CONTENTS 500

Introduction

501

Glossary

506

The Nations of the World

506 Afghanistan 507 | Albania 508 Algeria 509 American Samoa 510 Andorra 511 Angola 512 Antigua and Barbuda 513 Argentina 514 Armenia 515 Aruba 516 Australia 518 Austria 519 Azerbaijan 520 Bahamas, The 521 Bahrain 522 Bangladesh 523 Barbados 524 Belarus 525 Belgium 526 Belize 527 Benin

564 East Timor 565 Ecuador 566 Egypt 567 ElSalvador 568 Equatorial Guinea 569 Eritrea 570 Estonia 571 Ethiopia 572 Faroe Islands 573 Fiji 574 Finland 575 France 577 French Guiana 578 French Polynesia 579 Gabon 580 Gambia, The 581 Georgia 582 Germany 584 Ghana 585 Greece 586 | Greenland

625 626 627 628 629 630 631 632 633 634 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645

Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mayotte Mexico

679 680 681 683 684 685 686 687 688 689 690 691 692 693 694 695 696 697 698 699

Réunion Romania Russia Rwanda St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino São Tomé and Príncipe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia

528

Bermuda

587

647

Micronesia, Federated

700

South Africa

529 530 531 532 533 535 536 537 538 539 540

Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon

588 | Guadeloupe 589 Guam 590 Guatemala 591 Guernsey 592 Guinea 593 Guinea-Bissau 594 Guyana 595 Haiti 596 Honduras 597 Hong Kong 598 Hungary

648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657

States of | Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar (Burma) Namibia Nauru Nepal

701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709 710 711

Spain Sri Lanka Sudan, The Suriname Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria ‘Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania

541

Canada

599

Iceland

658

Netherlands, The

712

Thailand

600 602 603 604 605 606 607 608 610 611 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 621

India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Korea, North Korea, South Kuwait

659 660 661 662 663 664 665

Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Northern Mariana Islands Norway Oman Pakistan Palau Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland

713 714 715 716 717 718 719 720 721 722 723 725 733 734 735 736 737 738

Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago ‘Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Wietnam Virgin Islands (U.S.)

622 623 624

Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia

Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar

739 740 741

Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe

543 544 545 546 547 548 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561 562 563

Cape Verde Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad Chile China | Colombia Comoros Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Costa Rica Côte d'Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic

Grenada

742

Comparative National Statistics

742 744 750 756 766

World and regional summaries Government and international organizations Area and population Major cities and national capitals Language

828

Bibliography and sources

771 774 780 786 792 798

666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 678

Religion Vital statistics, marriage, family National product and accounts Employment and labour Crops and livestock Energy

804 810 816 822

Communications Health services Social protection and defense services (social security, crime, military) Education

499

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

INTRODUCTION

Britannica World Data provides a statistical portrait of some 219 countries and dependencies of the world, at a level appropriate to the significance of each. It contains 216 country statements (the “Nations of the World” section), ranging in length from one to eight pages, and permits, in the 15 major thematic tables (the “Comparative National Statistics” [CNS] section), comparisons among these larger countries and 3 other states. Updated annually, Britannica World Data is particularly intended as direct, structured support for many of Britannica’s other reference works—encyclopaedias, yearbooks, atlases—at a level of detail that their editorial style or design do not permit. Like the textual, graphic, or cartographic modes of expression of these other products, statistics possess their own inherent editorial virtues and weaknesses. Two principal goals in the creation of Britannica World Data were up-to-dateness and comparability, each possible to maximize separately, but not always possible to combine. If, for example, research on some subject is completed during a particular year ( x ), figures may be available for

100 countries for the preceding year ( x — 1 ), for 140 countries for the year before that ( x — 2 ), and for 180 countries for the year before that ( x — 3 ). Which year should be the basis of a thematic compilation for 218 countries so as to give the best combination of up-to-dateness and comparability? And, should x - 1 be adopted for the thematic table, ought up-to-dateness in the country table (for which year x is already available) be sacrificed for agreement with the thematic table? In general, the editors have opted for maximum up-todateness in the country statistical boxes and maximum comparability in the thematic tables. Comparability, however, also resides in the meaning of the numbers compiled, which may differ greatly from country to country. The headnotes to the thematic tables explain many of these methodological problems; the Glossary serves the same purpose for the country statistical pages. Published data do not always provide the researcher or editor with a neat, unambiguous choice between a datum compiled on two different bases (say, railroad track length, or route length), one of which is wanted and the other not. More often a choice must be made among a variety of official, private, and external

intergovernmental

(UN,

FAO,

IMF)

sources,

each

reporting its best data but each representing a set of

problems: (1) of methodological variance from (or among) international conventions; (2) of analytical completeness (data for a single year may, successively, be projected [based on 10 months’ data], preliminary [for

12 months], final, revised or adjusted, etc.); (3) of time frame, or accounting interval (data may represent a full Gregorian calendar year [preferred], a fiscal year, an Islamic or other national or religious year, a multiyear period or average [when a one-year statement would

contain unrepresentative results]); (4) of continuity with previous data; and the like. Finally, published data on a 500

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

particular subject may be complete and final but impossible to summarize in a simple manner. The education system of a single country may include, for example, public

and

private

sectors;

local,

state,

or

national

systems; varying grades, tracks, or forms within a single system; or opportunities for double-counting or fractional

counting

of a student,

teacher,

or

institution.

When no recent official data exist, or they exist, but may be suspect, the tables may show unofficial estimates, a range (of published opinion), analogous data, or no data at all. The published basis of the information compiled is the statistical collections of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., some of the principal elements of which are enumerated in the Bibliography. Holdings for a given country may include any of the following: the national statistical abstract; the constitution; the most

recent censuses

of

population; periodic or occasional reports on vital statistics, social indicators, agriculture, mining, labour, manu-

facturing, domestic and foreign trade, finance and banking, transportation, and communications. Further information is received in a variety of formats—telephone, letter, fax, microfilm

and microfiche,

and most

recently, in electronic formats such as computer disks, CD-ROMs,

and

the

Internet.

So substantial

has the

resources of the Internet become that it was decided to add uniform resource locators (URLs) to the great majority of country pages and a number of the CNS tables (summary world sites with data on all countries still being somewhat of a rarity) so as to apprise the reader of the possibility and means to access current information on these subjects year-round. The recommendations offered are usually to official sites (national statistical offices, general national governments,

central

banks,

embassies,

intergovernmental

organizations [especially the UN Development Programme], and the like). Though often dissimilar in content, they will usually be updated year-round, expanded as opportunity permits, and lead on to related sites, such as parliamentary offices, information offices, diplomatic and consular sites, news agencies and newspapers, and, beyond, to the myriad academic, commercial,

and

private sites now accessible from the personal computer. While these URLs were correct and current at the time of writing, they may be subject to change. The great majority of the social, economic, and financial data contained in this work should not be interpreted in isolation. Interpretive text of long perspective, such as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica itself; political, geographic, and topical maps, such as those in the Britannica Atlas; and recent analysis of political events and economic trends, such as that contained in the arti-

cles of the Book of the Year, will all help to supply analytic focus that numbers alone cannot. By the same token, study of those sources will be made more concrete by use of Britannica World Data to supply up-to-date geographic, demographic, and economic detail.

GLOSSARY

A number of terms that are used to classify and report data in the “Nations of the World” section require some explanation. Those italicized terms that are used regularly in the country compilations to introduce specific categories of information (e.g., birth rate, budget) appear in this glossary in italic boldface type, followed by a description of the precise kind of information being offered and how it has been edited and presented. All other terms are printed here in roman boldface type. Many terms have quite specific meanings in statistical reporting, and they are so defined here. Other terms have less specific application as they are used by different countries or organizations. Data in the country compilations based on definitions markedly different from those below will usually be footnoted. Terms that appear in small capitals in certain definitions are themselves defined at their respective alphabetical locations. Terms whose definitions are marked by an asterisk (*) refer to data supplied only in the larger two- to four-page country compilations. activity rate, see participation/activity rates. age breakdown, the distribution of a given population by age, usually reported here as percentages of total population in 15-year age brackets except for, when available, the 75-84

group. When substantial numbers of persons do not know, or state, their exact age, distri-

butions may not total 100.0%. aquatic plants production, the weight of aquatic plants (primarily seaweeds) harvested in freshwater or marine areas; the share harvest-

ed by farming is aquaculture production. area, the total surface area of a country or its administrative subdivisions, including both land and inland (nontidal) water area. Land area is usually calculated from “mean low water” on a “plane table,” or flat, basis. area and population, a tabulation usually includ-

ing the first-order administrative subdivisions of the country (such as the states of the United States), with capital (headquarters, or administrative seat), area, and population. When these subdivisions are especially numerous or, occasionally, nonexistent, a planning, electoral, census, or other nonadministrative scheme of

regional subdivisions has been substituted. associated state, see state. atheist, in statements of religious affiliation,

one who professes active opposition to religion; “nonreligious” refers to those professing only no religion, nonbelief, or doubt. balance of payments, a financial statement for a country for a given period showing the balance among: (1) transactions in goods, services, and income between that country and the rest of the world, (2) changes in ownership or valuation of that country’s monetary gold, SPECIAL DRAWING RIGHTS, and claims on and liabilities

to the rest of the world, and (3) unrequited transfers and counterpart entries needed (in an accounting sense) to balance transactions and changes among any of the foregoing types of exchange that are not mutually offsetting. Detail of national law as to what constitutes a

size of a transaction visible to fiscal authorities all result in differences in the meaning of a particular national statement.* balance of trade, the net value of all international goods trade of a country, usually excluding reexports (goods received only for transshipment), and the percentage that this net represents of total trade. Balance of trade refers only to the “visible” international trade of goods as recorded by customs authorities and is thus a segment of a country’s BALANCE OF PAYMENTS, which takes

all visible and invisible trade with other countries into account. (Invisible trade refers to imports and exports of money, financial instruments, and services such as transport, tourism,

and insurance.) A country has a favourable, or positive (+), balance of trade when the value

Abbreviations Measurements cum cubic metre(s) kg kilograms(s) km kilometre(s) kW kilowatt(s) kW-hr kilowatt-hour(s) metric ton-km | metric ton-kilometre(s) mi mile(s) passenger-km passenger-kilometre(s) passenger-mi ^ passenger-mile(s) short ton-mi short ton-mile(s) sq km square kilometre(s) sqm square metre(s) sq mi square mile(s) troy oz troy ounce(s) yr year(s) Political Units and International

Organizations ASEAN CACM

Caricom

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Central American Common Market

Caribbean Community

CFA

and Common Market Communauté Financiére Africaine

CFP

Change franc Pacifique

CIS

CUSA

Commonwealth of

Independent States Customs Union of Southern Africa

EC

European Communities

ESCWA

Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia

EU FAO ILO

IMF OECD

European Union United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization International Labour Organisation International Monetary Fund Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

of exports exceeds that of imports and negative (-) when imports exceed exports. barrel (bbl), a unit of liquid measure. The barrel conventionally used for reporting crude petroleum and petroleum products is equal to 42 U.S. gallons, or 159 litres. The number of barrels of crude petroleum per metric ton, ranging typically from 6.20 to 8.13, depends upon the specific gravity of the petroleum. The world average is roughly 7.33 barrels per ton. birth rate, the number of live births annually per 1,000 of midyear population. Birth rates for individual countries may be compared with the estimated world annual average of 20.3 births per 1,000 population in 2005. budget, the annual receipts and expenditures— of a central government for its activities only; does not include

OECS Serb.-Mont. U.A.E. UNDP

Months Jan. Feb. Aug. Sept.

state, provincial,

or local

Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Serbia and Montenegro United Arab Emirates United Nations Development Programme

January February August September

Oct. | October Nov. November Dec. December

Miscellaneous AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome avg. average Gif.

commun. CPI est. excl. f.o.b. GDP GNP govt.

incl. n.a. n.e.s. no. pl. pub. admin. SDR SITC svcs. teacher tr. transp. VAT voc. $ £ —

cost, insurance, and freight

communications consumer price index estimate(d) excluding free on board gross domestic product gross national product government

including not available (in text) not elsewhere specified number plural public administration Special Drawing Right Standard International Trade Classification services teacher training transportation value-added taxes vocational dollar (of any currency area) pound (of any currency area) not available (in tables) none, less than half the smallest unit shown, or not

applicable (in tables)

transaction, the basis of its valuation, and the

501

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Britannica World Data

governments or semipublic (parastatal, quasinongovernmental) corporations unless otherwise specified. Figures for budgets are limited to ordinary (recurrent) receipts and expenditures, wherever possible, and exclude capital expenditures—i.e., funds for development and other special projects originating as foreign-aid grants or loans. When both a recurrent and a capital budget exist for a single country, the former is the budget funded entirely from national resources (taxes, duties, excises, etc.) that would recur (be generated by economic activity) every year. It funds the most basic governmental services, those least able to suffer

interruption. The capital budget is usually funded by external aid and may change its size considerably from year to year. capital, usually, the actual seat of government and administration of a state. When more than one capital exists, each is identified by kind; when interim arrangements exist during the creation or movement of a national capital, the de facto situation is described. Anomalous cases are annotated, such as those

in which (1) the de jure designation under the country's laws differs from actual local practice (e.g., Benin's designation of one capital in constitutional law, but another in actual practice), (2) international recognition does not validate a country's claim (as with the proclamation by Israel of a capital on territory not internationally recognized as part of Israel), or (3) both a state and a capital have been proclaimed on territory recognized as part of another state (as with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus). capital budget, see budget. causes of death, as defined by the World Health

Organization (WHO), “the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of accident or violence which produced the fatal injury.” This principle, the “underlying cause of death,” is the basis of the medical judgment as to cause; the statistical classification system according to which these causes are grouped and named is the International List of Causes of Death, the latest revision of which is the Tenth. Reporting is usually in terms of events per 100,000 population. When data on actual causes of death are unavailable, information

on morbidity, or illness rate, usually given as reported cases per 100,000 of infectious diseases (notifiable to WHO as a matter of international agreement), may be substituted. chief of statefhead of government,

paramount

national governmental officer(s) exercising the highest executive and/or ceremonial roles of a country’s government. In general usage, the chief of state is the formal head of a national state. The primary responsibilities of the chief of state may range from the purely ceremonial—convening legislatures and greeting foreign officials—to the exercise of complete national executive authority. The head of government, when this function exists separately, is the officer nominally charged (by the constitution) with the majority of actual executive powers, though they may not in practice be exercised, especially in military or single-party regimes in which effective power may reside entirely outside the executive governmental machinery provided by the constitution. A prime minister, for example, usually the actual head of government, may in practice exercise only Cabinet-level authority.

In communist countries an official identified as the chief of state may be the chairman of the policy-making organ, and the official given as the head of government the chairman of the nominal administrative/executive organ. cif. (trade valuation): see imports. commonwealth (U.K. and U.S.), a self-governing political entity that has regard to the common weal, or good; usually associated with

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

the United Kingdom or United States. Examples include the Commonwealth (composed of independent states [from 1931 onward]), Puerto Rico since 1952, and the Northern Marianas since 1979. communications, collectively, the means available for the public transmission of information within a country. Data are tabulated for: daily newspapers and their total circulation; television as total numbers of receivers; tele-

phone data as landlines, or the number of subscriber lines (not receivers) having access to the public switched network; cellular telephones and Internet broadband users as number of subscribers; and personal computers and Internet users as number of units. For each, a rate per 1,000 persons is given. constant prices, an adjustment to the members of a financial time series to eliminate the effect of inflation year by year. It consists of referring all data in the series to a single year so that “real” change may be seen. constitutional monarchy, see monarchy. consumer price index (CPI), also known as the retail price index, or the cost-of-living index, a series of index numbers assigned to the price of a selected “basket,” or assortment, of

basic consumer goods and services in a country, region, city, or type of household in order to measure changes over time in prices paid by a typical household for those goods and services. Items included in the CPI are ordinarily determined by governmental surveys of typical household expenditures and are assigned weights relative to their proportion of those expenditures. Index values are period averages unless otherwise noted. coprincipality, see monarchy. current prices, the valuation

United Nations from the age and sex distributions, average body weights, and environmental temperatures in a given region to determine the calories needed to sustain a person there at normal levels of activity and health. The daily per capita caloric requirement ranges from 2,200 to 2,500.

de facto population, for a given area, the population composed of those actually present at a particular time, including temporary residents and visitors (such as immigrants not yet granted permanent status, “guest” or expatriate

workers,

refugees,

or

tourists),

but

excluding legal residents temporarily absent. de jure population, for a given area, the population composed only of those legally resident at a particular time, excluding temporary residents and visitors (such as “guest” or expatriate workers,

refugees,

or tourists),

but

including legal residents temporarily absent. death rate, the number of deaths annually per 1,000 of midyear population. Death rates for individual countries may be compared with the estimated world annual average of 8.6 deaths per 1,000 population in 2005. density (of population), usually, the DE FACTO POPULATION of a country divided by its total area. Special adjustment is made for large areas of inland water, desert, or other uninhabitable

areas—e.g., excluding the ice cap of Greenland. dependency, an area annexed to, or controlled by, an independent state but not an integral part of it; a non-self-governing territory. A dependency has a charter and may have a degree of self-government. A crown dependency is a dependency originally chartered by the British government (see Table). direct taxes, taxes levied directly on firms and

of a financial aggregate as of the year reported.

individuals, such as taxes on income, profits,

daily per capita caloric intake (supply), the calories equivalent to the known average daily supply of foodstuffs for human consumption in a given country divided by the population of the country (and the proportion of that supply provided, respectively, by vegetable and animal sources). The daily per capita caloric intake of a country may be compared with the corresponding recommended minimum daily requirement. The latter is calculated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the

or burden, of direct taxes is on the firms and individuals thus taxed; direct taxes on firms

and capital gains. The immediate incidence, may, however, be passed on to consumers and other economic units in the form of higher prices for goods and services, blurring the distinction between direct and indirect taxation. divorce rate, the number of legal, civilly recognized divorces annually per 1,000 population. doubling time, the number of complete years required for a country to double its population at its current rate of natural increase.

Dependencies! Australia Christmas Island

Cocos (Keeling) Islands Norfolk Island

Denmark Faroe Islands Greenland

France French Guiana French Polynesia Guadeloupe Martinique Mayotte New Caledonia Réunion Saint-Barthélemy Saint-Martin Saint Pierre and Miquelon Wallis and Futuna

United Kingdom Anguilla Bermuda British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands Falkland Islands Gibraltar Guernsey Isle of Man Jersey Montserrat Pitcairn Island Saint Helena and Dependencies Turks and Caicos Islands

United States American Samoa Guam Northern Mariana Islands Puerto Rico

Virgin Islands (of the U.S.)

Netherlands, The Aruba Netherlands Antilles

New Zealand Cook Islands Niue Tokelau ‘Excludes territories (1) to which Antarctic Treaty is applicable in whole or in part, (2) without permanent civilian population, (3) without internationally recognized civilian government (Western Sahara, Gaza Strip), or (4) representing unadjudicated unilateral or multilateral territorial claims.

Glossary earnings index, a series of index numbers comparing average wages in a collective industrial sample for a country or region with the same industries at a previous period to measure changes over time in those wages. It is most commonly reported for wages paid on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis; annual figures may represent total income

or averages

of

these shorter periods. The scope of the earnings index varies from country to country. The index is often limited to earnings in manufacturing industries. The index for each country applies to all wage earners in a designated group and ordinarily takes into account basic wages (overtime is normally distinguished), bonuses, cost-of-living allowances, and contributions toward social security. Some countries include payments in kind. Contributions toward social security by employers are usually excluded, as are social security benefits received by wage earners. economically active population, see population

economically active. education, tabulation of the principal elements of a country’s educational establishment, classified as far as possible according to the country’s own system of primary, secondary, and higher levels (the usual age limits for these levels being identified in parentheses), with total number of schools (physical facilities) and of teachers and students (whether full- or part-time). The student-teacher ratio is calculated whenever available data permit. educational attainment, the distribution of the population age 25 and over with completed educations by the highest level of formal education attained or completed; it must sometimes be reported, however, for age groups still in school or for the economically active only. emirate, see monarchy. enterprise, a legal entity formed to conduct a business, which it may do from more than one establishment. ethnic/linguistic composition, ethnic, racial, or linguistic composition of a national population, reported here according to the most reliable breakdown available, whether published in official sources (such as a census) or in external analysis (when the subject is not addressed in national sources). exchange rate, the value of one currency compared with another, or with a standardized unit of account such as the SPECIAL DRAWING RIGHT, or as mandated

by local statute

when one currency is “tied” by a par value to another. Rates given usually refer to free market values when the currency has no, or very limited, restrictions on its convertibility into other currencies. exports, material goods legally leaving a country (or customs area) and subject to customs regulations. The total value and distribution by percentage of the major items (in preference to groups of goods) exported are given, together with the distribution of trade among major trading partners (usually single countries or trading blocs). Valuation of goods exported is free on board (f.0.b.) unless otherwise specified. The value of goods exported and imported f.o.b. is calculated from the cost of production and excludes the cost of transport. external debt, public and publicly guaranteed debt with a maturity of more than one year owed to nonnationals of a country and repayable in foreign currency, goods, or services. The debt may be an obligation of a national or subnational governmental body (or an agency of either), of an autonomous public body, or of a private debtor that is guaranteed by a public entity. The debt is usually either outstanding (contracted) or disbursed (drawn). external territory (Australia), see territory. federal, consisting of first-order political subdivisions that are prior to and independent of the central government in certain functions.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

federal constitutional monarchy, see monarchy. federal republic, see republic. federation, union of coequal, preexisting political entities that retain some degree of auton-

omy and (usually) right of secession within the union. fertility rate, see total fertility rate. financial aggregates, tabulation of seven-year time series, providing principal measures of the financial condition of a country, including:

(1) the exchange rate of the national crurency against the U.S. dollar, the pound sterling, and the International Monetary Fund’s SPECIAL DRAWING RIGHT (SDR), (2) the amount and kind of international reserves (holdings of SDRs, gold, and foreign currencies) and reserve position of the country in the IMF, and (3) principal economic rates and prices (central bank discount rate, government bond yields, and industrial stock [share] prices). For BALANCE OF PAYMENTS, the origin in terms of

component balance of trade items and balance of invisibles (net) is given.* fisheries production, the live-weight equivalent of the aquatic animals (including fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and other aquatic mam-

mals) caught in freshwater or marine areas by national fleets and landed in domestic or foreign harbours for commercial, industrial, or

subsistence purposes. The share of fisheries production that is harvested by farming is aquaculture production. f.o.b. (trade valuation), see exports. food, see daily per capita caloric intake. foreign

direct investment

(FDI),

a long-term

investment with a significant degree of control by a business entity or individual of one country into another country’s economy. FDI comprises three components—equity capital, reinvested earnings, and intra-company loans. The net balance of the three FDI components is often volatile from one year to the next. If negative for a particular time period, the balance of the three components is called a reverse investment, or disinvestment. form of government/political status, the type of

administration provided for by a country’s constitution—whether or not suspended by extralegal military or civil action, although such de facto administrations are identified— together with the number of members (elected, ap-pointed, and ex officio) for each legislative house, named according to its English rendering. Dependent states (see Table) are classified according to the status of their political association with the administering country. gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of the final goods and services produced by residents and nonresidents within a given country during a given accounting period, usually a year. Unless otherwise noted, the value is given in current prices of the year indicated. The System of National Accounts (SNA, published under the joint auspices of the UN, IMF, OECD, EC, and World Bank) provides a framework for international comparability in classifying domestic accounting aggregates and international transactions comprising “net factor income from abroad,” the measure that

distinguishes GDP and GNP. gross national income (GNI), also called gross national product (GNP), the total value of final goods and services produced both from within a given country and from external (foreign) transactions in a given accounting period, usually a year. Unless otherwise noted, the value is given in current prices of the year indicated. GNI is equal to GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT adjusted by net factor income from abroad, which is the income residents receive

from abroad for factor services (labour, investment, and interest) less similar payments made to nonresidents who contribute to the domestic economy.

head of government, see chief of state/head of government.

health, a group of measures including number of accredited physicians currently practicing or employed and their ratio to the total population; total hospital beds and their ratio; and INFANT MORTALITY RATE.

household, economically autonomous individual or group of individuals living in a single dwelling unit. A family household is one composed principally of individuals related by blood or marriage. household income and expenditure, data for aver-

age size of a HOUSEHOLD (by number of individuals) and median household income. Sources of income and expenditures for major items of consumption are given as percentages. In general, household income is the amount of funds, usually measured in monetary units, received by the members (generally those 14 years old and over) of a household in a given time period. The income can be derived from (1) wages or salaries, (2) nonfarm or farm SELF-EMPLOYMENT, (3) transfer payments, such as pensions, public assistance, unemployment benefits, etc., and (4) other income, including interest and dividends, rent, royalties, etc. The income of a household is expressed as a gross amount before deductions for taxes. Data on expenditure refer to consumption of personal or household goods and services; they normally exclude savings, taxes, and insurance; practice with regard to inclusion of credit purchases differs markedly. imports, material goods legally entering a coun-

try (or customs area) and subject to customs regulations; excludes financial movements. The total value and distribution by percentage of the major items (in preference to groups of goods) imported are given, together with the direction of trade among major trading partners (usually single countries), trading blocs (such as the European Union), or customs areas (such as Belgium-Luxembourg). The value of goods imported is given free on board (f.0.b.) unless otherwise specified; f.o.b. is defined above under EXPORTS. The principal alternate basis for valuation of goods in international trade is that of cost, insurance, and freight (c.i.f.); its use is restricted to imports, as it comprises the principal charges needed to bring the goods to the customs house in the country of destination. Because it inflates the value of imports relative to exports, more countries have, latterly, been

estimating imports on an f.o.b. basis as well. incorporated territory (U.S.), see territory. independent, of a state, autonomous and con-

trolling both its internal and external affairs. Its date usually refers to the date from which the country was in effective control of these affairs within its present boundaries, rather than the date independence was proclaimed or the date recognized as a de jure act by the former administering power. indirect taxes, taxes levied on sales or transfers

of selected intermediate goods and services, including excises, value-added taxes, and tariffs,

that are ordinarily passed on to the ultimate consumers of the goods and services. Figures given for individual countries are limited to indirect taxes levied by their respective central governments unless otherwise specified. infant mortality rate, the number of children per 1,000 live births who die before their first birthday. Total infant mortality includes neonatal mortality, which is deaths of children within one month of birth. invisibles

(invisible

trade),

see

balance

of

trade. kingdom, see monarchy. labour force, portion of the POPULATION ECONOMICALLY ACTIVE (PEA) comprising those most fully employed or attached to the labour

503

504

Britannica World Data

market (the unemployed are considered to be "attached" in that they usually represent persons previously employed seeking to be reemployed), particularly as viewed from a shortterm perspective. It normally includes those who are self-employed, employed by others (whether full-time, part-time, seasonally, or on

around the city; the population of the whole usually has strong economic and cultural affinities with the central city. military expenditure, the apparent value of all identifiable military expenditure by the central government on hardware, personnel, pen-

some other less than full-time, basis), and, as

ed here both as a percentage of the GNP, with a comparison to the world average, and as a per capita value in U.S. dollars. military personnel, see total active duty personnel. mobility, the rate at which individuals or households change dwellings, usually measured between censuses and including international as well as domestic migration.* monarchy, a government in which the CHIEF OF STATE holds office, usually hereditarily and for life, but sometimes electively for a term. The state may be a coprincipality, emirate, kingdom, principality, sheikhdom, or sultanate. The powers of the monarch may range from absolute (Le. the monarch both reigns and rules) through various degrees of limitation of authority to nominal, as in a constitutional monarchy, in which the titular monarch reigns but others, as elected officials, effectively rule. monetary unit, currency of issue, or that in official use in a given country; name and abbreviation or symbol according to local practice or name and 3-digit code according to the ISO (International Organization for Standardization); and valuation in U.S. dollars and U.K. pounds sterling, usually according to free-market rates. See also exchange rate. natural increase, also called natural growth, or

noted above, the unemployed (both those previously employed and those seeking work for the first time). In the “gross domestic product and labour force” table, the majority of the labour data provided refer to population economically active, since PEA represents the longer-term view of working population and, thus, subsumes more of the margin-

al workers who are often missed by shorterterm surveys.

land use, distribution by classes of vegetational cover or economic use of the land area only (excluding inland water, built-up areas, and wasteland), reported as percentages. The principal categories utilized include: (1) arable land under temporary cultivation including land left fallow for less than five years, (2) land under permanent cultivation (significantly tree crops but also grapes, pineapples, and bananas), (3) pastures and rangeland, which includes land in temporary or permanent use whose principal purpose is the growing of animal fodder, and (4) forest areas, whose definition overlaps with other land use classes per the FAO State of the World's Forests; forest areas may include scrub forests, forest plantations, and recently afforested or reforested land. life expectancy, the number of years a person born within a particular population group (age cohort) would be expected to live, based on actuarial calculations. literacy, the ability to read and write a language with some degree of competence; the precise degree constituting the basis of a particular national statement is usually defined by the national census and is often tested by the census enumerator. Elsewhere, particularly where much adult literacy may be the result of literacy campaigns rather than passage through a formal educational system, definition and testing of literacy may be better standardized. major cities, usually the five largest cities/towns proper (national capitals are almost always given, regardless of size); fewer cities/towns may be listed if there are fewer urban localities in the country. For multipage tables, 10 or more may be listed.* Populations for cities/ towns will usually refer to the city/town proper—i.e., the legally bounded corporate entity, or the most compact, contiguous, demographically urban portion of the entity defined by the local authorities. Occasionally figures for

METROPOLITAN

AREAS,

urban

areas,

or

urban agglomerations are cited when the relevant civil entity at the core of a major agglomeration had an unrepresentatively small population.

sions, research and development, etc., report-

the balance of births and deaths, the excess of

births over deaths in a population; the rate of natural increase is the difference between the BIRTH RATE and the DEATH RATE of a given population. The estimated world average during 2005 was 11.7 per 1,000 population, or 1.3596 annually. Natural increase is added to the balance of migration to calculate the total growth of that population. nonreligious, see atheist. official development assistance, officially administered grants and concessional loans that donors (usually developed countries) give to developing countries to promote economic development and welfare. official language(s), that (or those) prescribed by the national constitution for day-to-day conduct and publication of a country's official business or, when no explicit constitutional provision exists, that of the constitution itself,

the national gazette (record of legislative activity), or like official documents. Other languages may have local protection, may be permitted in parliamentary debate or legal action (such as a trial), or may be “national languages," for the protection of which special provisions have been made, but these are not deemed official. The United States, for exam-

ances, including automobiles, telephones, television receivers, refrigerators, air condi-

ple, does not yet formally identify English as “official,” though it uses it for virtually all official purposes. official name, the local official form(s), short or long, of a country's legal name(s) taken from the country's constitution or from other official documents. The English-language form is usually the protocol form in use by the country, the U.S. Department of State, and the United Nations. Official religion, generally any religion prescribed or given special status or protection by the constitution or legal system of a country. Identification as such is not confined to constitutional documents utilizing the term explicitly. organized territory (U.S.), see territory.

tioners, and washing machines.* metropolitan area, a city and the region of dense, predominantly urban, settlement

overseas department (France), see department. overseas territory (France), see territory. parliamentary state, see state.

manufacturing, mining, and construction enterprises/retail sales and service enterprises, a

detailed tabulation of the principal industries in these sectors, showing for each industry the number of enterprises and employees, wages in that industry as a percentage of the general average wage, and the value of that industry’s output in terms of value added or turnover.* marriage rate, the number of legal, civilly recognized marriages annually per 1,000 population. material well-being, a group of measures indicating the percentage of households or dwellings possessing certain goods or appli-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

part of a realm, a dependent Dutch political entity with some degree of self-government and having a special status above that of a colony (e.g., the prerogative of rejecting for local application any law enacted by The Netherlands). participation/activity rates, measures defining differential rates of economic activity within a population. Participation rate refers to the percentage of those employed or economically active who possess a particular characteristic (sex, age, etc.); activity rate refers to the fraction of the total population who are economically active. passenger-miles, or passenger-kilometres, aggregate measure of passenger carriage by a specified means of transportation, equal to the number of passengers carried multiplied by the number of miles (or kilometres) each passenger is transported. Figures given for countries are often calculated from ticket sales and ordinarily exclude passengers carried free of charge. people’s republic, see republic. place of birth/national origin, if the former, numbers of native- and foreign-born population of a country by actual place of birth; if the latter, any of several classifications, including those based on origin of passport at original admission to country, on cultural heritage of family name, on self-designated (often multiple) origin of (some) ancestors, and on other systems for assigning national origin.* political status, see form of government/political status. population, the number of persons present within a country, city, or other civil entity at the date of a census of population, survey, cumulation of a civil register, or other enumeration. Unless otherwise specified, populations given are DE FACTO, referring to those actually present, rather than DE JURE, those legally resident but not necessarily present on the referent date. If a time series, noncensus year, or per capita ratio referring to a country’s total population is cited, it will usually refer to midyear of the calendar year indicated. population economically active, the total number of persons (above a set age for economic labour, usually 10-15 years) in all employment statuses—self-employed, wage- or salary-earning, part-time, seasonal, unemployed, etc. The International Labour Organisation defines the economically active as “all persons of either sex who furnish the supply of labour for the production of economic goods and services.” National practices vary as regards the treatment of such groups as armed forces, inmates of institutions, persons seeking their first job, unpaid family workers, seasonal workers and persons engaged in part-time economic activities. In some countries, all or part of these groups may be included among the economically active, while in other countries the same groups may be treated as inactive. In general, however, the data on economically active population do not include students, persons occupied solely in family or household work, retired persons, persons living entirely on their own means, and persons wholly dependent upon others. See also labour force. population projection, the expected population in the years 2010 and 2020, embodying the country’s own projections wherever possible. Estimates of the future size of a population are usually based on assumed levels of fertility, mortality, and migration. Projections in the tables, unless otherwise specified, are medi-

um (i.e, most likely) variants, whether based on external estimates by the United Nations, World Bank, or U.S. Department of Commerce or on those of the country itself. price and earnings indexes, tabulation comparing the change in the CONSUMER PRICE

Glossary INDEX over a period of seven years with the change in the general labour force's EARNINGS INDEX for the same period. principality, see monarchy.

such as VALUE ADDED, can be obtained, this is given, ranked by value; otherwise, and more

usually, quantity of production is given. public debt, the current outstanding debt of all periods of maturity for which the central government and its organs are obligated. Publicly guaranteed private debt is excluded. For countries that report debt under the World Bank Debtor Reporting System (DRS), figures for outstanding, long-term EXTERNAL DEBT are given. of measures

including weekly hours of work (including overtime); rates per 100,000 for job-connected injury, illness, and mortality; coverage of labour force by insurance for injury, permanent disability, and death; workdays lost to labour strikes and stoppages; and commuting patterns (length of journey to work in minutes and usual method of transportation).* railroads, mode of transportation by self-driven or locomotive-drawn cars over fixed rails. Length-of-track figures include all mainline and spurline running track but exclude switching sidings and yard track. Route length, when given, does not compound multiple running tracks laid on the same trackbed. recurrent budget, see budget. religious affiliation, distribution of nominal religionists, whether practicing or not, as a percentage of total population. This usually assigns to children the religion of their parents. remittances, amount of a migrants earnings sent from the migration destination to the place of origin. Remittance data are compiled somewhat differently from one country source to another but usually include cash transfers of long-term legal migrants. Cash transfers of short-term (“for less than one year of residence”) legal migrants or the cash transfers of illegal migrants and refugees are also often included with remittances. The standard (but not universal) sources used in BWD for national remittances are the latest editions of World Bank publications and UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics. Estimates of both are generally based on remittances of both long-term and short-term derivation. republic, a state with elected leaders and a centralized presidential form of government, local subdivisions being subordinate to the national government. A federal republic (as distinguished from a unitary republic) is a republic in which power is divided between the central government and the constituent subnational administrative divisions (e.g., states, provinces, or cantons) in whom the central government itself is held to originate, the division of power being defined in a written constitution and jurisdictional disputes usually being settled in a court; sovereignty usually rests with the authority that has the power to amend the constitution. A unitary republic (as distinguished from a federal republic) is a republic in which power originates in a central authority and is not derived from constituent subdivisions. A people's republic, in the dialectics of Communism,

is

the first stage of development toward a communist state, the second stage being a socialist republic. An Islamic republic is structured around social, ethical, legal, and religious precepts central to the Islamic faith. retail price index, see consumer price index.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

facturing, mining, and construction enterprises/retail sales and service enterprises. roundwood,

production, the physical quantity or monetary value of the output of an industry, usually tabulated here as the most important items or groups of items (depending on the available detail) of primary (extractive) and secondary (manufactured) production, including construction. When a single consistent measure of value,

quality of working life, a group

retail sales and service enterprises, see manu-

wood

obtained

from

removals

from forests, felled or harvested (with or without bark), in all forms. Roundwood used

sponding distribution of the labour force (when possible POPULATION ECONOMICALLY

ACTIVE) that generates the GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT.

sultanate, see monarchy.

territory, a noncategorized political dependen-

for fuel is fuelwood; other roundwood used in

cy; a first-order administrative subdivision; a

construction, paper products, flooring, furni-

dependent political entity with some degree of self-government, but with fewer rights and less autonomy than a colony because there is no charter. An external territory (Australia) is a territory situated outside the area of the country. An organized territory (U.S.) isa territory for which a system of laws and a settled government have been provided by an act of the United States Congress. An overseas territory (France) is an overseas subdivision of the French Republic with elected representation in the French Parliament, having individ-

ture

manufacture,

etc., is called

industrial

roundwood. rural, see urban-rural. self-employment, work in which income derives from direct employment in one’s own business, trade, or profession, as opposed to work in which salary or wages are earned from an employer. self-governing, of a state, in control of its internal affairs in degrees ranging from control of most internal affairs (though perhaps not of public order or of internal security) to complete control of all internal affairs (ie., the state is autonomous) but having no control of external affairs or defense. In this work the term self-governing refers to the final stage in the successive stages of increasing self-government that generally precede independence. service/trade

enterprises,

see

manufacturing,

mining, and construction enterprises/retail sales and service enterprises. sex distribution, ratios, calculated as percentages, of male and female population to total population. sheikhdom, see monarchy. social deviance, a group of measures, usually reported as rates per 100,000 for principal categories of socially deviant behaviour, including specified crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.* social participation, a group of measures indica-

tive of the degree of social engagement displayed by a particular population, including rates of participation in such activities as elections, voluntary work or memberships, trade unions, and religion.* social security, public programs designed to protect individuals and families from loss of income owing to unemployment, old age, sickness or disability, or death and to provide other services such as medical care, health and

welfare programs, or income maintenance. socialist republic, see republic. sources of income, see household income and

expenditure. Special Drawing Right (SDR), a unit of account utilized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to denominate monetary reserves available under a quota system to IMF members to maintain the value of their national currency unit in international transactions.* state, in international law, a political entity possessing the attributes of: territory, permanent civilian population, government, and the capacity to conduct relations with other states. Though the term is sometimes limited in meaning to fully independent and internationally recognized states, the more general sense of an entity possessing a preponderance of these characteristics is intended here. It is, thus, also a first-order civil administrative

subdivision, especially of a federated union. An associated state is an autonomous state in free association with another that conducts its external affairs and defense; the association

may be terminated in full independence at the instance of the autonomous state in consultation with the administering power. A parliamentary state is an independent state of the Commonwealth that is governed bya parliament and that may recognize the British monarch as its titular head. structure of gross domestic product and labour

force, tabulation of the principal elements of the national economy, according to standard industrial categories, together with the corre-

ual statutes, laws, and internal organization

adapted to local conditions. ton-miles, or ton-kilometres, aggregate measure

of freight hauled by a specified means of transportation, equal to tons of freight multiplied by the miles (or kilometres) each ton is transported. Figures are compiled from waybills (nationally) and ordinarily exclude mail, Specie, passengers' baggage, the fuel and stores of the conveyance, and goods carried free. total active duty personnel, full-time active duty military personnel (excluding militias and part-time, informal, or other paramilitary elements), with their distribution by percentages among the major services. total fertility rate, the sum of the current agespecific birth rates for each of the child-bearing years (usually 15-49). It is the probable number of births, given present fertility data, that would occur during the lifetime of each woman should she live to the end of her childbearing years. tourism, service industry comprising activities connected with domestic and international travel for pleasure or recreation; confined here to international travel and reported as expenditures in U.S. dollars by tourists of all nationalities visiting a particular country and, conversely, the estimated expenditures of that country’s nationals in all countries of destination. transfer payments, see household income and expenditure. transport, all mechanical methods of moving persons or goods. Data reported for national establishments include: for railroads, length of track and volume of traffic for passengers and cargo (but excluding mail, etc.); for roads, length of network and numbers of passenger cars and of commercial vehicles (ie., trucks and buses); and for air transport, traffic data for passengers and cargo. unincorporated territory (U.S.), see territory. unitary republic, see republic. urban-rural, social characteristic of local or national populations, defined by predominant economic activities, “urban” referring to a group of largely nonagricultural pursuits, “rural” to agriculturally oriented employment patterns. The distinction is usually based on the country’s own definition of urban, which may depend only upon the size (population) of a place or upon factors like employment, administrative status, density of housing, etc. value added, also called value added by manufacture, the gross output value of a firm or industry minus the cost of inputs—raw materials, supplies, and payments to other firms— required to produce it. Value added is the portion of the sales value or gross output value that is actually created by the firm or industry. Value added generally includes labour costs, administrative costs, and operat-

ing profits.

505

The Nations of the World Afghanistan

cularly lapis lazuli), n.a. Manufacturing

textiles, wearing apparel, and fur 569; base metals 139. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004-05) 783,000,000 (623,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 34,000 (34,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (183,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 3,050,000 (3,050,000). Household income and expenditure (2003). Average household size 8.0; sources of income: wages and salaries 49%, self-employment 47%; expenditure (2004)13: food 60.695, housing and energy 16.5%, clothing 9.1%. Population economically active (19944: total 5,557,000; activity rate of total population 29.4% (participation rates: female 9.0%; unemployed [2005] 8.5% ).

[249].

Head of state and government: President. Capital: Kabul. Official languages: Dari; Pashto?. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: (new) afghani (Af); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Price index (March 2001 = 100) 2001 2002 Consumer price index! 1000 143.4

1US.$ = Af 49.58; 1 £ = Af 99.663. Population (2006)4 population d

in Af 000,000;

2005-06): food 48,575; chemicals 1,206; cement, bricks, and ceramics 809;

Official name: Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Jomhüri-ye Eslami-ye Afghanestan [Dari]); Da Afghanestan Eslami Jamhuriyat (Pashto)1. Form of government: Islamic republic! with two legislative bodies (House of Elders [102]; House of the People

Province

(value added

Province

population i

Province

Badakhshan Badghis Baghlan Balkh Bamian Daykundis Farah Faryab

823.0 429.5 779.0 1,096.1 387.3 399.6 438.0 858.6

Jowzjan Kabol (Kabul) Kandahar Kapisa Khowst Konar Kondoz Laghman

461.7 3,138.1 1,011.7 382.6 498.0 390.2 851.3 386.4

Orüzgan Paktia Paktika Panjshiré Parvan Samangan Sar-e Pol Takhar

Ghazni Ghowr Helmand Herat

1,062.6 598.6 799.0 1,578.2

Lowgar Nangarhar Nimrüz Nurestan

339.7 1,289.0 141.4 128.4

Vardak Zabol TOTAL

population d 303.6 477.5 377.1 133.2 573.1 334.8 482.9 845.3 517.2 263.2 22,575.9

2003

2004

2005

218.4

241.3

280.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 12.1%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 46.0%; overall forest area (2005) 1.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (1998) 1.0; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 20; official development assistance (2005) 2,775. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1997) 1.0; remittances, n.a.

Foreign trade!5. 16 Balance of trade (current prices) 2000-01 221 40.0%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001-02 —1,628 92.3%

2002-03 -2,352 92.2%

2003-04 -1,957 87.2%

2004-05 —1,872 75.4%

2005-06 —2,087 73.1%

Imports (2005-06): U.S.$2,471,000,000 (machinery and equipment 12.2%; base and fabricated metals 10.6%; fabrics, clothing, and footwear 10.3%; mineral

fuels 10.0%; flour 5.1%). Major import sources: Japan 16.8%; Pakistan 15.9%; China 12.8%; Russia 9.2%; Uzbekistan 8.3%.

Demography

Exports (2005-06): U.S.$384,000,000 (carpets and handicrafts 39.6%; dried fruits 33.4%; skins 8.4%; fresh fruits 8.496). Major export destinations:

Area: 249,347 sq mi, 645,807 sq km.

Population (2007): 27,145,0007.

Pakistan 77.6%; India 6.0%; Russia 3.4%; U.A.E. 2.9%; Germany 1.8%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 108.9, persons per sq km 42.0.

Urban-rural (2006): urban 21.5%; rural 78.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.14%; female 48.86%.

Transport and communications

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 44.6%; 15-29, 26.7%; 30-44, 16.0%; 45-59, 8.6%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75 and over 0.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 30,389,000; (2020) 40,993,000. Ethnolinguistic composition (2004): Pashtun c. 42%; Tajik c. 27%; Hazara c. 9%; Uzbek c. 9%; Chahar Aimak c. 4%; Turkmen c. 3%; other c. 6%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Sunni Muslim c. 8296; Shr1 Muslim c. 1796; other c. 196.

Major cities (2006): Kabul 2,536,300; Herat 349,000; Kandahar (Qandahar) 324,800; Mazar-e Sharif 300,600; Jalalabad 168,600.

Transport. Railroads (2006): none. Roads (2005): total length 34,782 km (paved 7%). Vehicles (2004-05): passenger cars 197,449; trucks and buses 123,964. Air transport (2004-05): passenger-km 681,000,000; metric ton-km cargo

20,624,000.

Communications Medium

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

1,20017

2005

100

Telephones Cellular

Landline

units Medium

date

Televisions 4817

4.0

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2003

312

14

Internet users

2005

30

1.3

Broadband

2005

0.2217

0.0117

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 46.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.3 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 6.69. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 43.2 years; female 43.5 years.

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 28.1%; males 43.1%; females 12.6%. Education (2004)

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: Af 67,531,000,000 (grants for development revenue 51.3%; grants for current revenue 24.8%; domestic revenue 23.9%, of

which taxes 18.2%). Expenditures: Af 91,417,000,000 (development expenditure 64.0%; current expenditure 36.0%). Gross domestic income (2006): U.S.$8,309,000,0008 (U.S.$319 per capita).

Primary Secondary Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

5,854 2,423 19

67,983 34,27118 1,886

4,430,142 400,000 39,514

65.2 18.118 21.0

Health: physicians (2005) 4,747 (1 per 5,000 persons); hospital beds (2004)19 9,667 (1 per 2,381 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 160.2.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005-06

Agriculture? Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Transp. and commun. Construction Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. administration

Services Other TOTAL

2002-03

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Af 000,000

value

force4

force4

129,309 788 51,401 461

38.2 0.2 15.2 0.1

5,181,400

69.6

362,200

4.9

31,384 30,135 28,347 19,380 21,860

9.3 8.9 8.4 5.7 6.5

169,500 98,600 509,600

2.3 1.3 6.8

14,461 11,0149 338,541 10

43 3.29 100.0

expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 9.996; per capita expenditure c. U.S.$31.

1From promulgation of new constitution on Jan. 26, 2004. ?Six additional locally official languages per the 2004 constitution are Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Kafiri (Nuristani), Pashai, and Pamiri. ?The afghani was re-denominated on Oct. 7, 2002; from that date

1,126,000

153

7,447,300

100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): c. U.S.$8,000,000,00011.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): wheat 4,265,000, rice 470,000, grapes 350,000, barley 337,000, corn (maize) 315,000, potatoes 240,000, watermelons 91,958, berries 57,000, apricots

38,448, nuts 23,774, opium poppy 4,100; livestock (number of live animals)

8,800,000 sheep, 7,300,000 goats, 180,000 camels; roundwood 3,226,629 cu

m, of which fuelwood 45%; fisheries production (2004) 1,000 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: salt (2004) 38,000; gemstones (parti© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 50,000 (army 100% )?°. Military

100 (old) afghanis equaled 1 (new) afghani. ^Refers to settled population only and excludes refugees in Pakistan and Iran. 5Created in 2004 from part of Orüzgàn. $Created in 2004 from part of Parvàn. "Includes Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran and nomadic population. 8Excludes value of opium production (U.S.$3,000,000,000 in 2006). ?[axes on imports less imputed bank service charges. !°Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !!Mainly bilateral debt owed to Russia. !2Represents 87% of world production. “Weights of consumer price index components. “March 21 to March 20 fiscal year. PExports are f.o.b. and imports are c.i.f. “Commodities data refer to March-December 2006. "Subscribers. 182002. 1?Public hospitals only. Foreign troops (September 2007) NATO-sponsored security forces 35,000 (including 12,000 U.S. troops); other U.S. 14,000. Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistics Office http://www.cso.gov.af

Nations of the World — 507

rying (2004): chromium

Albania Official name: Republika e Shqipérisé (Republic of Albania). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Assembly [140]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Tirana (Tirané). Official language: Albanian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: lek (L); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = 91.07 leks;

Counties Berat

Dibér Durrés Elbasan

Fier Gjirokastér

Korçë Kukës Lezhë Shkodér Tirané

Vloré TOTAL

sq mi

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

sq km

696

1,802

968

2,507

166,367

319 1,266

827 3,278

280,996 353,825

380,736

729

1,887 2,883

107,416

1,433 916 610 1,375

3,711 2,373 1,581 3,562

263,585 102,037 159,881 250,351

612

1,586

677,871

1,045 11,082

2,706 28,703

Korçë Kukës Lezhë Shkodér Tirana (Tirané)

Vloré

*000,000,000 leks % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 286.6, persons per sq km 110.7. Urban-rural (20052: urban 44.5%; rural 55.5%. Sex distribution (20052): male 49.82%; female 50.18%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 26.9%; 15-29, 25.3%; 30-44, 19.8%; 45-59, 16.0%; 60-74, 9.3%; 75-84, 2.4%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 3,231,000; (2020) 3,415,000. Doubling time: 86 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Albanian 91.7%; Vlach (Aromanian) 3.6%; Greek 2.3%; other 2.4%.

Traditional religious groups (2005): Muslim c. 68%, of which Sunni c. 51%, Bektashi c. 17%; Orthodox c. 2296; Roman Catholic c. 10963. Major cities (2001): Tirana (Tiran&) 343,078; Durrés 99,546; Elbasan 87,797; Shkodér 82,455; Vloré 77,691.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2004): 13.8 (world avg. 21.1). Death rate per 1,000 population (2004): 5.7 (world avg. 8.8). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2004): 8.1 (world avg. 12.3). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 8.4/0.9. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.03. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 74.8 years; female 80.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 419.4, of which cerebrovascular disease 151.5, ischemic heart disease 1214; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 114.9; diseases of the respiratory system 43.3; accidents 41.9.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: 199,600,000,000 leks (tax revenue 91.3%, of which turnover tax/VAT 31.7%, social security contributions 18.4%, customs duties and excise taxes 17.0%, taxes on income and profits 11.8%; other revenue

8.7%). Expenditures: 245,100,000,000 leks (current expenditure 79.4%, of which social security and welfare 22.5%, wages and salaries 22.5%, debt service 12.2%; development expenditure 20.6%). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$9,542,000,000 (U.S.$3,008 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

151,562 5,522

20.2 0.7

545,000 6,000

50.2 0.6

62,539

8.3

56,000

5.2

sie

12,000

1.1

94,300 62,196 147,514

125 8.3 19.6

52,000 19,000 80,000

48 ee 7.4

157,347

20.9

162,000

14.9

71,3884 752,368

9.54 100.0

153,0005 1,085,000

14.15 100.0

Public utilities

eae

Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

|

2005

000,000 leks

Manufacturing

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,375,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): alfalfa for forage and silage 1,800,000, wheat 260,000, corn (maize) 219,900, watermelons 204,000, potatoes 169,300, tomatoes 152,000, grapes 115,100; livestock (number of live animals) 1,760,000 sheep, 941,000 goats, 655,000 cattle, 4,671,000 chickens; roundwood 296,200 cu m, of which fuelwood 7596;

fisheries production (2004) 5,132 (from aquaculture 3196). Mining and quar© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0 84.9

100.0 100.0

103.1 115.1

111.1 131.4

111.7 142.5

114.2 163.1

116.9 179.2

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 3,176,000.

Agriculture Mining

2000

Foreign trade

202,295 3,127,261!

2004

1999

energy 9.2%, transportation and communications 6.6%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 854; remittances (2006) 1,359; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 222; official development assistance (2005) 3017. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 786; remittances (2006) 27. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 21.1%, in permanent crops 4.4%, in pasture 15.4%; overall forest area (2005) 29.0%.

181,901

1,113

Gjirokastér

in

sions 14.8%, other 21.0%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 68.2%,

2004 estimate

Berat

Fier

(value added

Household income and expenditure (2002). Average household size 4.3; average annual income per household: 401,928 leks (U.S.$2.868); sources of income (2000)6 wages and salaries/self-employment 64.296, transfers/pen-

population

Peshkopi Durrés Elbasan

Manufacturing

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

area

Capitals

148,392.

2004) 109,000 (118,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 2,769,000 (2,769,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 270,000 (1,183,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 16,299,000 (16,299,000). Population economically active (2005): total 1,085,000; activity rate of total population 34.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 57.8%; female 39.6%; unemployed [October 2005-September 2006] 14.096).

1 £ = 183.07 leks.

Area and population

ore

U.S.$'000,000; 2004): base metals 31; textiles 29; leather (all forms) 29; glass and glass products 28; coal derivatives 21. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 5,559,000,000 (5,762,000,000); lignite (metric tons;

2001 -146 62.4%

2002 —163 63.2%

2003 -171 61.1%

2004 —174 58.3%

2005 —196 59.9%

2006 -222 58.8%

Imports (2006): 299,134,000,000 leks (nonelectrical and electrical machinery 20.2%; food, beverages, and tobacco 17.9%; construction materials and base and fabricated metals 16.0%; mineral products 13.9%; textiles and footwear

11.7%). Major import sources: Italy 28.1%; Greece 15.7%; Turkey 7.6%; China 6.0%; Germany 5.7%. Exports (2006): 77,633,000,000 leks (textiles and footwear 54.7%; construction materials and base and fabricated metals 16.8%; food, beverages, and tobac-

co 7.9%). Major export destinations: Italy 72.6%; Greece 9.6%; Germany 3.2%; Macedonia 1.6%; Turkey 1.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length (2005) 447 km; passenger-km 89,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 32,000,000. Roads (2002): total length 18,000 km (paved 3996). Vehicles (20052): passenger cars 190,004; trucks and buses 71,875. Air transport (2005)8: passenger-km 152,000,000; metric ton-km, none. Communications Medium Televisions

date 2003

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

989

318

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2004 2004

1,26010 275

40310 88

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2002

36

12

2003

769

259

2005 2005

188 ss

60 ER

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Population age 20 and over having: no formal schooling/incomplete primary education 7.896; primary 55.696; lower secondary 2.7%; upper secondary 17.9%; vocational 8.8%; university 7.2%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 98.7%; males 99.2%; females 98.3%. Education (2004)

Primary (age 6-9) Secondary (age 10-17) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

1,721

11,653

250,487

21.5

374 11

22,560 2,066

397,056 53,014

17.6 257

Health: physicians (2004) 3,699 (1 per 845 persons); hospital beds (2005) 9,284 (1 per 339 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 20.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,918 (vegetable products 70%, animal products 3096); 14796 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 21,500 (army 74.4%, navy 9.3%, air force 16.396). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1496; per capita expenditure U.S.$37.

1Summed total of average annual population; reported total is 3,127,263. @January 1. 3In actuality, a majority of citizens are secular after decades of rigidly enforced atheism. ^Net taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. 5Unemployed. ‘Urban areas only. "Figure represents commitments. SAlbanian Air only. ?Circulation of daily newspapers. !°Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Albania http://www.bankofalbania.org * Instituti i Statistikés http://www.instat.gov.al

508

Britannica World Data

Algeria

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Al-Tumhürtyah al-Jaza'iriyah ad-Dimuqratiyah ash-Sha‘biyah (Arabic) (People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative bodies (Council of the Nation [144]1; National People’s Assembly [389]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Algiers. Official language: Arabic?. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Algerian dinar (DA); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Agriculture E

Ain Temouchent

Alger Annaba Batna Béchar

population

313,417 658,897

El-Bayadh El-Oued

172,957 525,083

Et-Tarf

Ghardaia Guelma lizi Jijel

Ouargla Oum el-Bouaghi

444,683 529,540

350,789

Relizane

646,175

311,678 444,231 34,189 582,865

Saida Sétif Sidi bel-Abbès Skikda

345,009 326,862 651,239

Souk Ahras Tamanrasset Tébessa

313,351 1,299,116 535,634 793,146

Bordj Bou Arreridj Bouira

561,471 637,042

Médéa Mila

859,273 663,578

Tiaret Tindouf

770,194 27,053

608,806 807,371

Mostaganem M'Sila

636,884 835,701

Tipaza Tissernsilt

507,959 274,380

805,298 874,917

Naama Oran

131,846 1,208,171

Tizi Ouzou Tlemcen

1,100,297 873,039

TOTAL

365,106 138,704 565,125

29,273,343

577,000 3,394,0006

7.7 45.16

1,616,200 135,1008

174 1.46

2931000

Bet

846,7008

8.95

}

79,100 967,600 435,900 1,339,200 141,200 1,113,300 1,104,100 1,691 ,6008 9,470,000

TA

1,451,000

19.3

646,000 499,0007 7,519,000

8.6 6.67 100.09

0.8 10.2 4.6 144 15 11.8

Tor 17.98 100.0

Consumer price index

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

99.7

100.0

104.2

105.7

108.4

112.3

114.1

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 184; remittances (2005) 1,950; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 955; official development assistance (2005) 51110. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 370; remittances, n.a.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 412,879 41.3%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001 49,609 33.6%

2002 46,6900 21.8%

2003 411,147 29.6%

2004 414,266 28.4%

2005 +26,810 40.7%

Imports (2004): U.S.$17,954,000,000 (industrial equipment 37.2%, semifinished products 19.1%, food 18.9%, consumer goods 14.5% ).Major import sources:

Demography

France 22.6%; Italy 8.5%; Germany 6.5%; U.S. 6.0%; China 5.0%.

Area: 919,595 sq mi, 2,381,741 sq km.

Exports (2004): U.S.$32,220,000,000 (crude petroleum 39.0%, natural and manufactured gas 34.4%, condensate 15.1%, refined petroleum 9.4%).Major

Population (2007): 33,858,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 36.8, persons per sq km 14.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 60.0%; rural 40.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.46%; female 49.54%.

export destinations: U.S. 23.6%; Italy 16.1%; France 11.4%; Spain 11.2%; The

Netherlands 7.4%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 29.7%; 15-29, 32.1%; 30-44, 21.0%; 45-59, 10.8%; 60-74, 5.0%; 75-84, 1.2%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 35,423,000; (2020) 40,630,000. Doubling time: 56 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Algerian Arab 59.1%; Berber 26.2%, of which Arabized Berber 3.0%; Bedouin Arab 14.5%; other 0.2%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim 99.7%, of which Sunni 99.1%, Ibadiyah 0.6%; Christian 0.3%. Major cities (1998): Algiers 1,519,5703; Oran 692,516; Constantine Annaba 348,554; Batna 242,514; Blida 226,512.

462,187;

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.89. Marriage rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.5. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 71.7 years; female 74.9 years. Notified cases of infectious diseases per 100,000 population (2003): measles 39.8; meningitis 19.6; brucellosis 8.7; hepatitis 6.5; dysentery 6.1.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: DA 3,081,700,000,000 (hydrocarbon revenue 76.3%, nonhydrocarbon revenue 23.7%). Expenditures: DA 1,985,900,000,000 (current expenditure 65.1%, capital expenditure 34.9% ). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$15,476,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): wheat 2,415,000, potatoes 2,156,000, barley 1,033,000, tomatoes 1,023,000, onions 685,500, dates 516,300, oranges 435,200, grapes 334,000, olives 316,500; livestock (number of live animals) 18,909,100 sheep, 3,590,000 goats; roundwood 7,742,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 99%; fisheries production

(2004) 140,588 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2004): iron ore 1,414,000; phosphate rock 784,000; zinc (metal content; 2003) 5,201.

Manufacturing

forces

559,000

population

836,301 568,701 796,616

Djelfa Ech-Cheliff

Khenchela Laghouat Mascara

Provinces

Bejaia Biskra Blida

Boumerdes Constantine

% of labour

forces

Price index (2000 = 100) Provinces

337,570

labour

value

Population economically active (2006): total 10,109,600; activity rate of population c. 30% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [1998] 52.6%; female 16.9%; unemployed 12.3%).

population

2,423,694 559,898 987,475 232,012

% of total

Public utilities Construction } Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Services Pub. admin., defense Other TOTAL

Population (1998 census) Adrar Ain Defla

in value DA '000,000

Manufacturing

DA 69.57; 1 £ = DA 139.85.

Provinces

natural gas

2004

(value added in U.S.$'000,000; 1997): food products 463;

cement, bricks, and tiles 393; iron and steel 118; tobacco products 114; paints,

soaps, and related products 105. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 31,250,000,000 (31,264,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (615,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 471,000,000 (146,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 39,061,000 (11,209,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2004) 81,291,000,000 (21,173,000,000).

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.296, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 13.3%; overall forest area (2005) 1.0%. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.2; disposable income per household (2002) c. U.S.$5,700; sources of income (2004): self-employment 39.9%, wages and salaries 36.9%, transfers 23.2%; expenditure (1989)4: food and beverages 44.1%, clothing and footwear 11.6%, transportation and communications 11.5%, household furnishings 6.8%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$111,547,000,000 (U.S.$3,345 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 2,468 mi, 3,973 km; (2000) passenger-km 1,142,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,029,000,000. Roads (2004): tota.

length 67,295 mi, 108,302 km (paved 70%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 1,692,148; trucks and buses 948,553. Air transport (2005)11: passenger-km 3,101,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 36,177,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

3,633

114

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2005 2005

13,6611? 3,200

41618 97

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

1,920

58

2004

8737?

27?

2005 2005

1,920 19513

58 5.919

Education and health Educational attainment (1998). Percentage of economically active population age 6 and over having: no formal schooling 30.1%; primary education 29.9%; lower secondary 20.7%; upper secondary 13.4%; higher 4.3%; other 1.6%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 72.1%; males literate 80.6%; females literate 63.4%. Education (2004-05) Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

17,041 5,267 55

171,471 168,434 26,072

4,361,744 3,379,355 721,833

25.4 20.1 27.7

Health: physicians (2003) 36,347 (1 per 877 persons); hospital beds (1999) 57,796 (1 per 520 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 29.9. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,510 (vegetable products 90%, animal products 10%); 188% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 137,500 (army 87.3%, navy 5.4%, air force 7.3%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$89. lIncludes 48 nonelected seats. 2The Berber language, Tamazight, became a national language in April 2002. Algiers urban agglomeration (2003) 3,060,000. ^Weights of consumer price index components; Algiers only. °Based on labour force survey. 6Petroleum and natural gas excludes (and Manufacturing includes) refined petroleum. "Import taxes and duties. 5Nearly all unemployed including 1,149,400 seeking first employment. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !JFigure represents commitments. Air Algérie. Circulation. Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information:

* Statistiques Algérie http://www.ons.dz/them sta.htm * Banque d' Algerie http://www.bank-of-algeria.dz

Nations of the World — 509

American Samoa

38,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2004) 4,043, of which

tuna, bonitos, and billfish 4,025 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: n.a. Manufacturing (value of exports in U.S.$; 2003): canned tuna

Official name: American Samoa (English); Amerika Samoa (Samoan). Political status: unincorporated and unorganized territory of the United States with two legislative houses (Senate [18]; House of Representatives

467,700,000; pet food 9,800,000; other manufactures include garments, hand-

icrafts, soap, and alcoholic beverages. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 189,000,000 (167,000,000); coal, none (n.a.); crude petroleum, none (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 2002) none (93,000); natural gas, none (n.a.). Public debt: n.a. Population economically active (2000): total 17,664, activity rate of total population 30.896 (participation rates: ages 16 and over 52.096; female 41.596; unemployed 5.196).

[211]).

Chief of state: President of the United States. Head of government: Governor. Capital: Fagatogo? (legislative and judicial) and Utulei (executive). Official languages: English; Samoan. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index? 1000

2001 1014

2002

2003

2004

2005

103.4

108.4

116.1

122.1

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 5.7; income per household (2000): U.S.$24,000; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1995): food and beverages 30.9%, housing and furnishings 25.8%, church

1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

donations 20.7%, transportation and communications 9.4%, clothing 2.9%, Area and population

area

population sq km

2000 census

25.9

67.1

23,441

25.3

65.5

21,673

Aunu’u Island Western District

0.6 28.8

1.6 74.6

1,768 32,435

Tutuila Island (part) Manu'a District (Manu'a Islands) Ofu Island Olosega Island Ta'u Island Rose Island? Swains Island? LAND AREA

28.8 21.9 2.8 2.0 17.4 0.1 0.6 77.8

74.6 56.7 7.2 5.2 44.3 0.3 T5 200.2

32,435 1,378 289 216 873 0 37 =

INLAND WATER (HARBOUR) AREAS TOTAL AREA

Tl 84.4

18.4 218.6

— 57,291

Districts and islands

sq mi

Eastern District

Tutuila Island (part)

Demography Population (2007): 64,400.

other 10.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1998) 10; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment, n.a. Disbursements for

(U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1996) 2.0; remittances, na. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 10%, in permanent crops c. 15%, in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) c. 90%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—203.0 24.2%

—111.1 12.5%

-164.3 15.2%

—158.1 15.1%

-132.4 15.0%

490.2 11.7%

Imports (2005): U.S.$506,200,000 (fish for cannery 43.9%, consumer goods 18.0%, other food 17.0%, mineral fuels 8.8%). Major import sources (2000): United States 56.7%; Australia 14.9%; New Zealand 11.1%; Fiji 5.7%; Samoa 3.1%.

Density (2007)4: persons per sq mi 833.1, persons per sq km 321.7. Urban-rural (2003): urban 54.0%; rural 46.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.42%; female 48.58%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$373,800,000 (canned tuna 94.1%, pet food 5.8%, fish meal 0.196). Major export destination (2000): United States 99.696.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 34.7%; 15-29, 24.9%; 30-44, 22.4%; 45-59, 13.0%; 60-74, 4.1%; 75 and over, 0.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1991): total length 217 mi, 350 km (paved, 4396). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 7,349; trucks and buses 657. Air trans-

Population projection: (2010) 67,000; (2020) 77,000. Doubling time: 32 years.

Ethnic composition (2000): Samoan 88.2%; Tongan 2.8%; Asian 2.8%; Caucasian 1.1%; other 5.1%. Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant c. 38%, of which Congregational c. 21%; Mormon c. 19%; Roman Catholic c. 15%; other (including nonreligious) c.

28%. Major villages (2000): Tafuna 8,406; Nu’uuli 5,154; Pago Pago 4,278 (urban agglomeration [2001] 15,000); Leone 3,568; Fagatogo 2,0962.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 26.3 (world avg. 21.1); within marriage 65.9%; outside of marriage 34.1%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 4.3 (world avg. 8.8). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.0 (world avg. 12.3). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.16. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2005) 3.2/(1993) 0.5. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 72.5 years; female 79.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 121.7; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 59.3; diseases of the respiratory system 54.6; diabetes mellitus 39.0; accidents, injuries, and violence

port (2005): passenger arrivals 64,211; passenger departures 64,908; incoming cargo 920 metric tons, outgoing cargo 379 metric tons. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2000

13

211

2005 2005

8.18 11

taxes 29.0%, charges for services 4.1%, other 22.0%). Expenditures: U.S.$192,421,535 (general government 32.1%, education and culture 27.9%, health and welfare 19.3%, public safety 6.7%, economic development 5.2%, public works and parks 3.7%, capital projects 3.0%, debt 2.1%). Gross domestic product (2002): U.S.$559,000,000 (U.S.$9,040 per capita).

1238 163

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

aes 2004 2005 2005

m 6.37

sa 1957 3

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling to some secondary education 31.2%; completed secondary 42.696; some college 19.0%; bachelor’s degree 5.0%; graduate degree 2.2%. Literacy (2000): total population age 10 and over literate 99.4%; males literate 99.4%; females literate 99.5%. Education (2005)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-14)

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: U.S.$188,877,568 (U.S. government grants 44.9%,

units number

Secondary (age 14-18) Vocational? Higher!?

teachers

students

teacher ratio

33

528

11,477

217

12 is 1

269 21 67

4,982 160 1,601

18.5 7.6 23.9

Health (2003): physicians 49 (1 per 1,253 persons); hospital beds 128 (1 per 480 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 7.0. Food: daily per capita caloric intake, n.a.

Military Military defense is the responsibility of the United States.

Structure of labour force 2000

labour force

% of labour force

Agriculture, forestry,

517

2.9

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun.

and fishing

5,900 1,066 1,036

33.4 6.0 5.9

Trade Finance, real estate Public administration Services Other TOTAL

1,790 311 1,550 4,548 9465 17,664

10.1 1.8 8.8 25.7 54 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): coconuts 4,700, taros 1,500, bananas 750, yams 100, coconut oil 65, citrus fruits 25, pineapples 20; livestock (number of live animals) 10,500 pigs,

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lIncluding the appointed nonvoting delegate from Swains Island. ?The seat of the legislature, as defined by the Constitution of American Samoa, is at Fagatogo, one of a number of villages within an urban agglomeration collectively known as Pago Pago. 3Not within district administrative structure. Swains Island is administered by a village government and a representative of the governor. “Based on land area. ^Includes 909 unemployed and 37 in military. 5Excludes rent. "Circulation of daily newspapers. 5Subscribers. 21997-98. 10American Samoa Community College at Mapusaga.

Internet resources for further information: * U.S. Department of the Interior: Pacific Web http://www.pacificweb.org * American Samoa Government Department of Commerce http://www.asdoc.info

510

Britannica World Data

Andorra

Structure of labour force 2005

Official name: Principat d'Andorra (Principality of Andorra). Form of government: parliamentary coprincipality with one legislative house (General Council [28]). Chiefs of state: President of France; Bishop of Urgell, Spain. Head of government: Head of Government. Capital: Andorra la Vella. Official language: Catalan. Official religion: nonel. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74; 1 £ = €1.48.

labour forces Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade? Restaurants, hotels Finance, real estate, insurance Pub. admin., defense

Services Other

TOTAL

remittances,

area

Capitals

Andorra la Vella

population

sq mi

Andorra la Vella

2007? estimate

sq km

11

27

24,211

Canillo Encamp Escaldes—Engordany

Canillo Encamp Escaldes-Engordany

47 29 12

121 74 32

5,067 13,685 16,391

La Massana Ordino Sant Julià de Lória TOTAL

La Massana Ordino Sant Julià de Lória

23 34 23 179

61 89 60 464

8,953 3,467 9,448 81,222

Demography Population (2007): 82,600. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 461.5, persons per sq km 178.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 93%; rural 7%. Sex distribution (2005): male 52.16%; female 47.84%. Age breakdown (20053): under 15, 14.896; 15-29, 19.496; 30-44, 29.396; 45-59,

20.2%: 60-74, 10.3%: 75-84, 4.295; 85 and over, 1.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 85,000; (2020) 89,000. Doubling time: 98 years. Ethnic composition (by nationality; 20053): Spanish 37.4%; Andorran 35.7%; Portuguese 13.0%; French 6.6%; British 1.3%; Moroccan 0.7%; Argentinian 0.5%; other 4.8%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman

Catholic 89.1%; other Christian 4.3%;

Muslim 0.6%; Hindu 0.5%; nonreligious 5.0%; other 0.5%.

Major urban areas (20063): Andorra la Vella 24,211;

Escaldes-Engordany

16,391; Encamp 13,685.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 3.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.30. Marriage rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 80.6 years; female 86.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (1998-2002 avg.): malignant neoplasms (cancers) 107.2; diseases of the circulatory system 93.6; injuries and poisoning 30.8; diseases of the respiratory system 26.9; diseases of the digestive system 19.9.

National economy €308,500,000

(indirect taxes 70.9%,

investment

income 7.196, taxes and other income 22.096). Expenditures: €308,500,000

(current expenditures 52.696; development expenditures 47.296; financial operations 0.296). Public debt (2004): c. U.S.$278,000,000. Production. Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): tobacco 335 metric tons; other traditional crops include hay, potatoes, and grapes; livestock (number of live animals; 2004-05) 3,214 sheep4, 1,572 cattle, 507 goats; roundwood, n.a.; fish-

eries production, n.a. Quarrying: small amounts of marble are quarried. Manufacturing (value of recorded exports in €'000; 2003): motor vehicles and parts 17,513; electrical machinery and apparatus 11,433; optical, photographic, and measuring apparatus 10,658; fabricated metal products 6,107; perfumery and cosmetic preparations 5,008. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 83,900,000 (568,000,000); coal, none (n.a.); crude petroleum, none (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 1998) none (nearly 100,000); natural gas, none (n.a.). Household income and expenditure (2003): average household size 2.8; expenditure per household €35,470 (U.S.$40,034); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure: transportation 22.196, food, beverages, and tobacco products 19.496,

housing

and energy

16.1%,

hotels and restaurants

7.8%,

clothing and

footwear 7.6%, recreation and culture 6.9%.

Population economically active (2005): total 42,416; activity rate of total population c. 55% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2003] 75.1%; female 45.8%; unemployed, n.a.5). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)6 Consumer price index Annual earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0 100.0

102.8 105.8

106.3 111.4

109.3 116.8

113.0 123.5

116.5 130.0

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$3,337,000,000

(U.S.$44,962 per capita)’.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

0.3

1,710 6,747 160 1,271 11,404 5,648 5,267 4,030 5,509 532 42,416

40 15.9 0.4 3.0 26.9 13.3 12.4 9.5 13.0 1.3 100.0

n.a.;

foreign

direct

investment,

n.a.

Disbursements

for

(U.S.$000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances (2001-02) 12. Land use as % of total land area (2000): in temporary and permanent crops c. 4%, in pasture c. 45%; overall forest area (2005) c. 36%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 —1,054 91.4%

£000,000 % of total

2001 —1,103 90.4%

2002 —1,202 90.0%

2003 —1,258 88.9%

2004 —1,313 87.0%

2005 —1,328 85.4%

Imports (2005): €1,442,000,000 (food and beverages 16.6%; electrical machinery and apparatus 13.0%; motor vehicles 11.3%; clothing and knitwear 7.8%; perfumes, cosmetics, and soaps 7.4%; mineral fuels 4.6%). Major import sources (2005): Spain 53.2%; France 21.0%; Germany 5.6%; Japan 3.7%; Italy 3.2%. Exports (2005): €114,000,000 (food and beverages 28.7%; electrical machinery and apparatus 18.7%; motor vehicles 16.3%; optical equipment, photo equipment, and other professional goods 6.3%; perfumes, cosmetics, and soaps 3.0%). Major export destinations (2005): Spain 59.1%; France 17.0%; Germany 11.6%; U.K. 5.0%; Portugal 3.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none; however, both French and Spanish railways stop near the border. Roads (1999): total length 167 mi, 269 km (paved 74%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 49,632; trucks and buses 4,621. Communications Medium

Budget (2005). Revenue:

138

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism;

Area and population Parishes

% of labour force

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in ‘000s

persons

2000

36

461

2005

6512

83712

2005

35

459

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

PCs Dailies’? Internet users

a 2004 2005

As 23211 284

Broadband

2005

sus 7" 269 10.312

Medium

13412

Education and health Educational attainment, n.a. Literacy: resident population is virtually 100% literate.

Education (2004-05)

student’ schools!?

Primary/lower secondary (age 7—15) Upper secondary Vocational Higher

teachers

12 6 wie 1

students

teacher ratio

6,871 720 231 1,17314

Health (2003): physicians 244 (1 per 296 persons); hospital beds 233 (1 per 310 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 4.0. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel: none. France and Spain are responsible for Andorra's external security; the police force is assisted in alternate years by either French gendarmerie or Barcelona police. Andorra has no defense budget.

1Roman Catholicism enjoys special recognition in accordance with Andorran tradition. 2The French franc and Spanish peseta were the former monetary units; on Jan. 1, 2002, F 6.56 = €1 and Pta 166.39 = €1. January 1. ‘Large herds of sheep and goats from Spain and France feed in Andorra in the summer. ‘The restricted size of the indigenous labour force necessitates immigration to serve the tourist trade, especially seasonal cross-border workers from Portugal and Spain. 6All indexes are end of year. 7Tourism (including winter-season sports, fairs, festivals, and income earned from lowduty imported manufactured items) and the banking system are the primary sources of gross national income. ŝIncludes motor vehicle maintenance and repair. ?In 2005, Andorra had 11,049,490 visitors, of which daily excursionists from Spain 4,558,686, daily

excursionists from France 3,867,674. !°Data apply to the readership of the Diari d'Andorra, one of two daily newspapers. !iCirculation. !2Subscribers. 131999—2000. MIncludes students in Andorra (342), in Spain (644), in France (181), and elsewhere 6).

Internet resources for further information: * Ministeri de Finances, Servei d'Estudis http://www.estadistica.ad/indexdee.htm

* Cambra de Comere Indüstria i Serveis d'Andorra http://www.ccis.ad/ing/index.html

Nations of the World

Angola

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$43,088,000,000

(U.S.$2,602 per capita).

Official name: República de Angola (Republic of Angola). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [220]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Luanda. Official language: Portuguese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: kwanza (AOA); valuation

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003 % of labour

force

force

Public utilities

8.2 48.3 4.6 3.8 3.6

400

4,406,000

71.0

1,796,000

29.0

TT 6,202,000

m 100.0

0.1

146,800

14.2

155,800

181

Finance Transp. and commun.

population

Provinces

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Bengo Benguela

Caxito Benguela

12,112 12,273

31,371 31,788

Bié Cabinda

Kuito Cabinda

27,148 2,807

70,314 7,270

Cuando Cubango Cuanza Norte Cuanza Sul Cunene Huambo Huíla Luanda Lunda Norte Lunda Sul Malanje Moxico

Menongue N'dalatando Sumbe Ondjiva Huambo Lubango Luanda Lucapa Saurimo Malanje Luena

76,853 9,340 21,491 34,495 13,233 28,959 934 39,685 17,625 37,684 86,110

199,049 24,190 55,660 89,342 34,274 75,002 2,418 102,783 45,649 97,602 223,023

Namibe Uíge

Namibe Uíge

22,447 22,664

58,137 58,698

15,494

40,130

481,354

1,246,700

TOTAL

labour

value

Trade, restaurants

area

M'banza Congo

% of total

84,900 498,400 46,900 39,300 36,800

Pub. admin., defense

Area and population

in value AOA 000,000 Agriculture Crude petroleum®. 4 Diamond mining Manufacturing Construction

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = AOA 74.97; 1£= AOA 150.71.

Zaire

511

2004 estimate

22,000 1,031,400

2.1 100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$9,428,000,000. Population economically active (1999): total 5,729,000; activity rate of total

population 57.7% (participation rates over age 10 [1991] 60.1%; female 38.4%; unemployed [2002] 70%). Price index (end of December 2000 = 100) 2000 2001 2002 Consumer price index 100.0 269.7 527.6

2003 1,045.8

2004 1,510.0

2005 1,872.8

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.6%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 43.3%; overall forest area (2005) 47.4%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) Um

11,521,000

Demography Population (2007): 12,264,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 25.5, persons per sq km 9.8. Urban-rural (2005): urban 53.396; rural 46.796. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.48%; female 49.52%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 43.8%; 15-29, 26.5%; 30-44, 16.7%; 45-59, 8.5%; 60-74, 3.9%; 75 and over, 0.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 13,068,000; (2020) 15,898,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Ovimbundu 25.2%; Kimbundu 23.1%; Kongo 12.6%; Lwena (Luvale) 8.2%; Chokwe 5.0%; Kwanyama 4.1%; Nyaneka 3.9%; Luchazi 2.3%; Ambo (Ovambo) 2.0%; Mbwela 1.7%; Nyemba 1.7%;

mixed race (Eurafrican) 1.0%; white 0.9%; other 8.3%. Religious affiliation (2001): Christian 94.1%, of which Roman Catholic 62.1%, Protestant 15.0%; traditional beliefs 5.0%; other 0.9%.

Major cities (2004): Luanda (urban agglomeration; 2005) 2,766,000; Huambo 173,600; Lobito 137,400; Benguela 134,500; Namibe 132,900.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 45.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 25.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 19.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 6.35. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 36.5 years; female 38.2 years. Major causes of death (percentage of total deaths; 2002): diarrheal diseases 16%; respiratory infections 15%; HIV/AIDS

|

Services Other TOTAL

7%; perinatal conditions 6%;

malaria 6%. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.7% (world avg. 1.0% ).

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: AOA 602,187,000,000 (tax revenue 99.1%, of which taxes on petroleum 77.9%; nontax revenue 0.9%). Expenditure: AOA 591,955,000,000 (current expenditure 87.6%; development expenditure

12.4%).

Household income and expenditure (2002). Average household size 5.0; annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditurel: food and nonalcoholic beverages 46.1%, housing and energy 12.3%, household furnishings 6.5%, transportation 6.5%. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 8,606,210, corn (maize) 720,275, sweet potatoes 659,451, sugarcane 360,000, potatoes 307,296, bananas 300,000, oil palm fruit 280,000, millet

137,864, dry beans 108,116, peanuts (groundnuts) 66,001, pineapples 40,000, coffee 1,250; livestock (number of live animals) 4,150,000 cattle, 2,050,000 goats, 780,000 pigs; roundwood 4,670,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 77%; fish-

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

+4,881 44.5%

43,355 34.6%

44,568 37.8%

44,028 26.9%

47,643 39.6%

415,756 48.5%

Imports (2005): U.S.$8,353,000,000 (consumer goods 61.1%, capital goods 28.6%, intermediate goods 10.3%). Major import sources: South Korea 20.5%; Portugal 13.4%; U.S. 12.5%; South Africa 7.4%; Brazil 7.0%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$24,109,400,000 (crude petroleum 93.7%, diamonds 4.5%, refined petroleum 1.0%). Major export destinations: U.S. 39.8%; China 29.6%; France 7.8%; Chile 5.4%; Taiwan 4.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length of lines in operation c. 850 km; (2001) passenger-km 3,722,300,000; metric ton-km cargo, n.a. Roads (2001): total length 31,956 mi, 51,429 km (paved 10%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 117,200; trucks and buses 118,300. Air transport: passenger-km (2001) 732,968,000; metric ton-km cargo (2004) 64,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2003

582

52

Telephones Cellular Landline

2005 2005

1,0949 94

928 7.9

units Medium

date

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

PCs

2004

27

23

Dailies

2005

517

4.37

Internet users Broadband

2005 2005

176 sa

15 awe

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2006): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 67.4%; males literate 82.9%; females literate 54.2%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-9) Secondary (age 10-16) Voc., teacher tr. Higher

teachers

students

12,448? 3,999? 1,285

1,057,188? 317,155 76,540 12,566

teacher ratio

Cy 9.8

Health: physicians (2004) 1,165 (1 per 9,890 persons); hospital beds (2001) 13,810 (1 per 769 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 186.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,518 (vegetable products 92%, animal products 895); 14096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 108,400 (army 92.396, navy 2.296, air force 5.596). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 5.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$140.

eries production (2004) 240,005 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2004): diamonds 6,631,000 carats?. Manufacturing (2003): fuel oil 639,319; cement 500,620; diesel fuel 407,542; jet fuel 324,841; wheat flour 38,168; frozen fish 36,173; beer 1,920,000 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 2,339,000,000 (2,339,000,000); coal, none

(none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 453,300,000 (21,200,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,784,000 (1,836,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004)

730,000,000 (730,000,000).

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 88; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,750; official development assistance (2005) 442. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 74; remittances (2005) 215. © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Weights of consumer price index components; Luanda only. @Excludes illegal production estimated to be nearly 1; of the legal production in 2004. "Includes liquefied petroleum gas. ^Roughly 6596 of crude petroleum production comes from offshore Cabinda, an exclave separated from Angola proper by a sliver of the Dem. Rep. of the Congo. Onshore exploration in Cabinda is scheduled to begin in 2007. 5Import duties. ?eTAAG airline. "Circulation of daily newspapers. $Subscribers. ?1999—2000.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Angola http://www.bna.ao

512

Britannica World Data

Antigua and Barbuda

Gross national income (2005): U.S.$885,000,000 (U.S.$10,920 per capita). Atlantic Ocean

Official name: Antigua and Barbuda. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [17]; House of Representatives [171]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Saint John’s. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Eastern Caribbean dollar (EC$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = EC$2.70; 1 £ = EC$5.43. Area and population

Agriculture, fishing Quarrying Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants,

and hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

sami

Saint George

John’s (city) John's (rural) Mary Paul Peter Phillip

Other islands2 Barbuda Redonda TOTAL

2001

population _sqkm_

9.3

24.1

2.9 25.6 22.0 18.5 12.7 17.0

7.5 66.3 57.0 47.9 32.9 44.0

62.0 05 170.5

160.6 1.3 441.6

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

71.4 33.1

3.0 1.4

946 106

2.4 0.3

39.8 319.9

1.7 13.6

1,541 3,122

3.9 7.9

57.7

25

513

1.3

410.0

17.5

2,808

73

389.8

16.6

9,927

25.1

317.4 330.1

13.5 14.0

2,509 4,376

6.3 114

59 10.38 100.0

7,417 6,2999 39,564

18.7 15.99 100.0

138.9 241.88 2,349.9

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$519,900,000. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 1896, in e manent crops c. 596, in pasture c. 996; overall forest area (2005) c. 2 a

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): fourisin (2005) 327; remittances (2005) 11; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 118. Disbursements for (U.S.$°000,000): tourism (2005) 40; remittances, na.

2001

Saint Saint Saint Saint Saint Saint

2005 in value EC$’000,000

area

Parishes (of Antigua)?

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

census 6,673

24,451 20,895 6,793 7,848 5,439 3,462

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

1,325 0 76,8863

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

-318 80.8%

—290 73.596

—281 77.696

—296 79.0%

—308 77.496

—324 74.596

Imports (1999): U.S.$356,000,000 (machinery and equipment 32.2%, agricultural products 24.796, basic manufactures 15.496, petroleum products 10.596). Major import sources (2004): United States 21.6%; Singapore 17.1%; China

Demography Population (2007): 85,900.

9.7%; Poland 5.4%; Trinidad and Tobago 6.0%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 503.8, persons per sq km 194.5. Urban-rural (2003): urban 37.7%; rural 62.3%. Sex distribution (2001): male 46.96%; female 53.04%. Age breakdown (2001): under 15, 28.3%; 15-29, 24.4%; 30-44, 25.0%; 45-59, 13.0%; 60-74, 6.2%; 75-84, 2.3%; 85 and over 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 91,000; (2020) 100,000. Ethnic composition (2000): black 82.4%; U.S. white 12.0%; mulatto 3.5%; British 1.3%; other 0.8%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Christian c. 74%, of which Anglican c. 23%, independent Christian c. 23%, other Protestant (including Methodist, Moravian, and Seventh-day Adventist) c. 28%; Rastafarian c. 2%; atheist/nonreligious c. 596; other/unknown c. 1996.

Major city (2004): Saint John’s 23,6004.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.9 (world avg. 20.3); (2001) within marriage 25.7%; outside of marriage 74.3%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.24. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2001): 23.6/1.2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 69.8 years; female 74.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 317, of which cerebrovascular disease 127, ischemic heart disease 71; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 129; communicable diseases 106; diabetes mellitus 54; accidents and injuries 33.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: EC$1,080,000,000 (tax revenue 42.1%, of which taxes on international transactions 25.9%, income taxes 5.9%; current nontax rev-

Exports (1999): U.S.$37,800,000 (reexports [significantly, petroleum products reexported to neighbouring islands] 60.396, domestic exports 39.796). Major export destinations (2004): Germany 49.3%; United Kingdom 29.1%; France 3.4%; Bermuda 2.9%; United States 2.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroad. Roads (2002): total length 725 mi, 1,165 km (paved 33%). Vehicles: passenger cars (1998) 24,000; trucks and buses (1995) 1,342. Air transport (2001): passenger-km 304,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 200,000. Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

2001

34

449

2004 2004

541? 38

70112 494

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

ds 2005 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

std 29 s

m 373 as

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 0.6%; incomplete primary education 2.6%; complete primary 27.9%; secondary 43.6%; higher (not university) 14.4%; university 10.9%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 85.8%. Education (2000-01)

Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12-16) Higher"?

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

55

525

10,427

19.9

14 1

361 68

5,794 841

16.0 12.4

enue 3.695; development revenue 1.796; grants 52.6965). Expenditures: EC$657,500,000 (current expenditures 85.796, of which interest payments 13.6%; development expenditures 14.3%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): tropical fruit (including papayas, guavas, soursops, and oranges) 7,900, man-

Health: physicians (1999) 76 (1 per 867 persons); hospital beds (1996) 255 (1 per 269 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 18.9. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,045 (vegetable products 67%, animal products 33%).

goes 1,430, melons 840, eggplants 340, lemons and limes 285, carrots 240,

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): a 170-member defense force (army

“Antiguan Black” pineapples 210; livestock (number of live animals) 19,000 sheep, 14,300 cattle; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2004) 2,527 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: crushed stone for local use. Manufacturing: manufactures include cement, handicrafts, and furniture, as

well as electronic components for export. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 109,000,000 (109,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (135,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2001): total 39,564; activity rate of total population 51.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 77.0%; female c. 50%; unemployed 8.4%).

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0 100.0

101.5 100.0

103.9 m

105.9 M

108.0 5s

110.3 E

Household income and expenditure (2001). Average household size 3.1; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure?: housing 21.8%, food 21.4%, transportation and communications

furnishings 12.6%, clothing and footwear 11.1%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Directly elected seats only; attorney general and speaker may serve ex officio if they are not elected to House of Representatives. 2?Community councils on Antigua and the local government council on Barbuda are the organs of local government. 3Based on table of detailed de facto census results released in July 2004. 4Large settlements include (2001): All Saints 3,412; Liberta 2,239; Potters Village 2,067; Codrington 980. 5Primarily

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings indexé

73.5%, navy 26.5%) is part of the Eastern Caribbean regional security system. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 0.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$57.

15.4%, household

debt forgiveness of EC$547,250,000. 5Public sector only. "Weights of consumer price index components. $Net indirect taxes less imputed bank service charges. ?Includes 3,329 unemployed and 2,970 inadequately defined activities. 1?Data includes reexports. iMostly nonoperative privately owned tracks. !?Subscribers. Antigua State College; 2002-03.

Internet resources for further information: * Eastern Caribbean Central Bank http://www.eccb-centralbank.org * Reports and Statistics http://www.antigua.gov.ag/gov_v2/government/statsandreports/index.html

Nations of the World

Argentina

27,904 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2002): food products 10,152, of which vegetable oils and fats 3,864; base metals 4,031; industrial and agricultural chemicals 2,770; refined petroleum products 2,514; bev-

Official name: Repüblica Argentina : :

o

dud

z

cds

with us legislative houses (Senate [72]; Chamber of Deputies [257])

Head of stale and gov Dra

T

d 2007]. U O i i. ARS 635. m

erages 1,977; transport equipment 1,958. Energy production (consumption):

E

electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 100,260,000,000 (103,729,000,000); coal (metric tons:

2004) 51,000 (937,000); crude petroleum (barrels; (161,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons;

]

President 8 i Capital: Büenos-Aires Official language:Spanish. Official religion: Roman Catholicism.

i

Atlantic Ocean

7

s e

3

T

Population economically active (2001): total 15,264,783; activity rate of total population 42.1% (participation rates: ages 14 and over 57.2%; female 40.9%; unemployed [October 2004-September 2005] 12.196).

T

population

area

population

2001

Entre Rios

sq km

census

307,571 ee

13,827,208 ae

:

I

dee Rel 88,199 78,781

done ao 930,991 1,158,147

Formosa

72,066

486,559

Jujuy

La Pampa

53,219

143,440

611,888

La Rioja Mendoza

89,680 148,827

289,983 1,579,651

Misiones

29,801

965,522

299,294

2001

Provinces

sq km

Neuquén feHegre sa = en Santa Cruz

101,079

203 2,780,403

2,776,138 36,260,130

mestizo

6.5%;

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 79.8% 2; Protestant 5.4%; Muslim 1.9%; Jewish 1.3%; other 11.6%. Major cities (2001): Buenos Aires 2,776,138 (11,460,5753); Córdoba 1,267,521; San Justo 1,253,921; Rosario 908,163; La Plata 563,943; Mar del Plata 541,733.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2004): 19.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2004): 7.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2004): 11.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.16. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2003): 3.4/n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 72.4 years; female 80.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 239.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 144.8; accidents and violence 47.7; infectious and parasitic diseases 35.2; diabetes mellitus 24.4.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: ARS 82,106,000,000 (tax revenue 77.4%; social security contributions 16.2%; nontax revenue 2.3%; other 4.1%). Expenditure: ARS 77,531,000,000 (current expenditure 88.2%, of which interest on debt

13.0%; capital expenditure 11.8%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$61,952,000,000. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$208,992,000,000

(U.S.$5,340 per capita).

2001

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

ARS '000,000

value

force

force

8,520

Services Other TOTAL

910,996 37,979 1,245,544

6.0 0.2 8.2

45

638,566

42

1.6

90,165

0.6

44,428 70,558 75,001 26,621

8.4 13.3 144 5.0

717,573 2,213,065 898,264 969,280

4.7 14.5 5.9 6.3

54,397 39,1144 531,9398

10.2 7.44 100.0

2,762,447 4,780,9045 15,264,783

18.1 31.35 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): alfalfa (2004) 38,783,000, soybeans 38,300,000, corn (maize) 19,500,000, sugarcane 19,300,000, wheat 16,000,000, sunflower seeds 3,652,000, sorghum 2,900,000, grapes 2,365,000, potatoes 2,021,020, lemons and limes 1,300,000, apples 1,262,440, rice 1,027,000, tobacco leaves 118,000; livestock (number of live animals; 2004) 50,768,000 cattle, 12,450,000 sheep, 3,655,000 horses; roundwood 14,917,000 cu m, of which industrial roundwood 63%, fuelwood 37%; fisheries production 933,902 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and

quarrying (2005): copper (metal content) 187,317; silver 263,766 kg; gold

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

141.3

147.5

161.7

179.4

of income: n.a.; expenditure (1996-97): food products 26.8%, transportation

i

Foreign trade® Balance

1 of tase (Curren! pricas) 2002

42,452 4.9%

47,385 16.2%

417,178 50.3%

5003 416,448 38.5%

2064

2008

413,239 — 412,805 23.7% 19.0%

9.3%; Germany 4.5%; Mexico 2.8%; Italy 2.6%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$40,106,000,000 (minerals 18.5%, vegetables 16.0%, food products 14.8%, fats and oils 8.2%, live animals 7.5%, transport equipment 7.496, chemical products 6.196). Major export destinations: Brazil 15.896; U.S. 11.4%; Chile 11.2%; China 9.1%; Spain 3.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: (2003) route length 35,753 km; (2004) passenger-km 7,526,000,000; (2001) metric ton-km cargo 11,603,000,000. Roads (2003): total

length 144,779 mi, 233,000 km (paved 31%). Vehicles: passenger cars (2000) 5,386,700; commercial vehicles and buses (1998) 1,496,567. Air transport (2003): passenger-km 12,485,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 113,400,000. Communications Medium

Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

12,500

323

Telephones Cellular

2006

31,51019

Landline

2006

9,460

80510

242

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2000 2006 2006

3,500 1,4719 8,184 1,56810

90 409 209 4010

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 3.7%; incomplete primary education 14.2%; complete primary 28.0%; secondary 37.1%; some higher 8.3%; complete higher 8.7%. Literacy (2001): percentage of total population age 10 and over literate 97.4%; males literate 97.4%; females literate 97.4%. Education (2000-01) Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-17) Higher! !

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

24,059

124.5

Imports (2005): U.S.$28,689,000,000 (electrical machinery and equipment 29.7%, transportation equipment 17.0%, chemicals 16.2%, plastic and rubber products 7.296). Major import sources: Brazil 35.5%; U.S. 14.1%; China

Amerindian 3.4%; Arab 3.3%; other 0.4%.

Public utilities

98.9

804,457

1,338,523

Population projection: (2010) 40,738,000; (2020) 44,486,000. Doubling time: 60 years. Ethnic composition (2000): European extraction 86.4%;

Construction

100.0

and communications 15.0%, housing and energy 13.4%, health 10.2%. Land use as % of total land area (2000): in temporary crops 12.2%, in permanent crops 0.5%, in pasture 51.9%; overall forest area 12.7%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 26.4%; 15-29, 25.5%; 30-44, 19.1%; 45-59, 15.0%; 60-74, 9.6%; 75-84, 3.5%; 85 and over, 0.9%.

8.7 5.4 21.4

2006

Sea 196,958 3,000,701

Population (2007): 39,531,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 36.8, persons per sq km 14.2. Urban-rural (2003): urban 90.1%; rural 9.9%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.90%; female 51.10%.

46,331 28,820 114,091

2005

TS n 243,943 133,007

in

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing

2004

Household size and expenditure. Average household size (2001) 3.6; average annual income per household (1996-97): ARS 12,972 (U.S.$12,978); sources

22,524

2005

2003

474,155 eee

Tucumán TOTAL

2002

]

Santiago del Estero — 136,351 Tierra del Fuego! 21,571 Autonomous city Buenos Aires

2001

94,078 ae

:

Santa Fe

Consumer price index

2000

census

Demography

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,753; remittances (2005) 413; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 2,981; official development assistance (2005) 1157. Disbursements for m ds n 2,817; remittances (2005) 279; foreign direct

Price index (2000 = 100)

area

Buenos Aires peel ERO C Corrientes

2005) 246,000,000 2004) 25,224,000

(19,470,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 52,390,000,000 (43,459,000,000).

Area and population

Provinces

513

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

22,283 21,114 36

306,210 182,863 117,596

4,668,006 3,419,901 1,196,581

15.2 18.7 10.2

Health: physicians (2004) 122,706 (1 per 312 persons); hospital beds (2000) 150,813 (1 per 244 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 14.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,854 (vegetable products 7296, animal products 2896); 12296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 71,400 (army 58.096, navy 24.596, air force 17.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$50.

1Area of Tierra del Fuego excludes claims to British-held islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. ?Less than 2096 practicing. *Metropolitan area per official definition of Greater Buenos Aires. ^Import duties and VAT less imputed bank service charges. ‘Includes 427,307 (2.8%) not defined and 4,351,596 (28.5%) unemployed. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Figure represents commitments. *Import figures are £.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. ?Circulation of daily newspapers. "Subscribers. HState universities only; 2001-02.

Internet resource for further information: * National Institute of Statistics and Censuses http://www.indec.mecon.ar

514

Britannica World Data

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Armenia

potatoes 564,211, wheat 258,361, tomatoes 234,948, grapes 164,353, watermelons 117,798, barley 110,771, apples 85,700, onions 48,787; livestock (number of live animals) 573,260 cattle, 556,597 sheep, 4,590,000 chickens; roundwood 41,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 10%; fisheries production (2004) 1,031

Official name: Hayastani Hanrapetut'yun (Republic of Armenia). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with a single legislative body (National Assembly [131]). Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Yerevan. Official language: Armenian. Official religion: none}. Monetary unit: dram (AMD); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

(from aquaculture 79%). Mining and quarrying (2004): copper concentrate (metal content) 17,600; molybdenum (metal content) 3,000; gold (metal content) 2,100 kg. Manufacturing (value of production in AMD '000,000; 2005): base and fabricated metals 259,305; food products and beverages 202,057; construction materials 23,648; wood and paper products 4,688; 320,000 carats of

cut diamonds were processed in 2004. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2006) 5,941,000,000 ([2005] 5,503,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (300,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (1,300,000,000). Population economically active: total (2004) 1,196,500; activity rate of total population (2001) 49.596 (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2001] 72.196; female [2004] 48.296; officially unemployed [2006] 7.496).

1 U.S.$ = AMD 336.75; 1£= AMD 676.92. Area and population

Districts

area

2006 estimate

Centres

sq mi

Aragatsotn

Ashtarak

1,063

2,753

139,500

Ararat

Artashat

809

2,096

274,200

Armavir Gegharkunik Kotayk Lori

Armavir Gavar Hrazdan Vanadzor

479 2,0652 807 1,463

1,242 5,3482 2,089 3,789

279,200 239,400 275,100 283,400

Shirak Syunik

Gyumri Kapan

1,035 1,740

ljevan

Tavush

Vayots-Dzor

Yeghegnadzor

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

population sq km

2,681 4,506

281,400 153,000

1,044

2,704

134,400

891

2,8308

55,800

88

227

1,103,800

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

—

TOTAL

11,4848

29,7438

17.9%; 60-74, 10.2%; 75-84, 3.8%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection?: (2010) 2,987,000; (2020) 2,955,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Armenian 97.9%; Kurdish 1.3%; Russian 0.5%; other 0.3%. Religious affiliation (2005): Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) 72.9%; Roman other Christian

1.3%; Yazidi

1.3%;

other/nonreligious 18.1%. Major cities (20064): Yerevan 1,103,800; Gyumri 148,300; Vanadzor Vagharshapat 56,700; Hrazdan 52,800.

105,500;

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 11.7 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 88.5%; outside of marriage 11.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 3.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.33. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.2/0.8. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 70.3 years; female 76.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 453.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 145.0; diabetes mellitus 48.8; diseases of the respiratory system 46.1; accidents and violence 34.8.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: AMD 374,746,900,000 (tax revenue 81.2%, of which VAT 39.2%, tax on profits 12.4%, excise tax 10.3%, income tax 7.1%; nontax revenue 18.8%). Expenditures: AMD 417,505,900,000 (defense 15.4%; education and science 14.6%; public administration 10.6%; social security

10.6%; police 8.4%; health 7.4%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$923,000,000. Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size 3.8; money

income per household AMD 1,720,195 (U.S.$3,758); sources of money income: rent, self-employment, and remittances 38.9%, wages and salaries

34.5%, transfers 7.1%, other 19.5%; expenditure: food and beverages 56.6%, services 24.0%, non-food goods 14.3%, tobacco 5.1%.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 17.6%, in permanent crops 2.1%, in pasture 29.6%; overall forest area (2005) 10.0%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,152,000,000 (U.S.$2,040 per capita).

in value Agriculture, forestry

Mining Manufacturing

Trade, hotels

labour

% of labour

force

force

22.6

507,600

42.4

370,200

19.4

134,600

11.2

72,593

3.8

34,400

2.9

297,168 113,785

15.6 6.0

34,600 49,700

2.9 4.2

213,733

11.2

108,900

9.1

87,300 53,741

4.6 28

6,100 28,200

0.5 2.4

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

value

431,110

Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun.

2005 % of total

132,600 135,7168 1,907,946

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

6.9 7.18 100.0

193,700 98,0009 1,195,800

2005

102.9 88.8

100.0 100.0

102.8 107.8

100.9 120.3

103.7 153.2

112.0 191.3

112.7 228.3

2002 —482 32.3%

2003 —594 30.2%

2004 —628 30.3%

2005 -828 29.8%

2006 —1,190 37.2%

Imports (2005): U.S.$1,801,735,900 (precious and semiprecious stones [mostly rough diamonds] 19.3%; food products 15.1%; mineral fuels 14.7%; machinery and apparatus 8.7%; motor vehicles 8.1% ). Major import sources: Russia 13.5%; Belgium 8.0%; Germany 7.8%; Ukraine 7.0%; Turkmenistan

6.3%; U.S. 6.2%. Exports (2005): U.S.$973,920,500 (base and fabricated metals 34.7%; precious and semiprecious stones [nearly all cut diamonds] 34.5%; beverages [nearly all wine and grape brandy] 8.7%; metal ores and scrap 5.3%). Major export destinations: Germany 15.6%; The Netherlands Russia 12.2%; Israel 11.5%; U.S. 6.4%.

13.7%;

Belgium

12.8%;

Transport and communications Transport (2005). Railroads: length 732 km; passenger-km 26,600,000; metric ton-km cargo 654,100,000. Roads: length 7,515 km (paved 69%). Vehicles: Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in ‘000s

persons

2003

687

229

2005 2005

32018 537

10719 180

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004 2004 2005 2004

200 2712 161 113

67 9.012 54 0.313

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 0.7%; primary education 13.0%; completed secondary and some postsecondary 66.0%; higher 20.3%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 99.4%; male 99.7%; female 99.2%. Education (2005-06)

student’ schools

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary {age 14—17)14

}

teachers

students

teacher ratio

1,467

42,700

536,900

12.6

Voc., teacher tr.

83

2,984

27,800

9.3

Higher

89

8,574

97,800

11.4

Health (2005): physicians 12,307 (1 per 242 persons); hospital beds 14,353 (1 per 208 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 12.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,379 (vegetable products 80%, animal products 20%); 120% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 48,160 (army 93.4%, air force 6.696); Russian troops (March 2006) 3,500. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$46.

Structure of net material product and labour force

AMD '000,000

2004

n.a. Air transport: passenger-km 959,500,000; metric ton-km cargo 10,700,000.

Vital statistics

2004

2003

2001 —536 43.9%

3,219,2004. 5.6

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 261.4, persons per sq km 100.9. Urban-rural (20064): urban 64.1%; rural 35.9%. Sex distribution (20064): male 48.28%; female 51.72%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 20.9%; 15-29, 27.2%; 30-44, 19.5%; 45-59,

2.4%;

2002

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007)7: 3,002,000.

4.0%; Sunni Muslim

2001

Foreign trade

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Catholic

2000

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 141; remittances (2006) 1,175; foreign direct investment (2001-05) 16510; official development assistance (2005) 31211. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 117; remittances (2006) 148.

City Yerevan

1999

16.2 8.29 100.0

1The Armenian Apostolic Church (Armenian Orthodox Church) has special status per 1991 religious law. ?Includes the 485 sq mi (1,256 sq km) area of Lake Sevan. 3In addition, about 16% of neighbouring Azerbaijan (including the 4,400 sq km geographic region of Nagorno-Karabakh [Armenian: Artsakh]) has been occupied by Armenian forces since 1993. ‘January 1 de jure estimate. “January 1 de facto estimate equals 3,014,000. In addition, the 2005 final census total for Nagorno-Karabakh

is 137,737.

7De facto population. Taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. 9Officially registered unemployed. !°Average of 5 years. Figure represents commitments. !2Circulation. Subscribers. !4Public schools only.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistical Service http://www.armstat.am * Central Bank of Armenia http://www.cba.am/index.html

Nations of the World

Population economically active (2004): total 41,500; activity rate of total population 42.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2000] 70.9%; female [2000] 46.6%; unemployed [2005] 6.996).

Aruba Official name: Aruba. Political status: nonmetropolitan territory of The Netherlands with one legislative house (States of Aruba [21]). Chief of state: Dutch Monarch represented by Governor. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Oranjestad. Official language: Dutch. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Aruban florin! (Af.); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = Af. 1.79; 1 £ = Af. 3.60. Area and population Census region

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index’?

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0 100.0

103.1 100.0

106.7 107.9

110.2 107.9

113.0 111.2

116.8 111.2

age annual income per household (1999) Af. 39,000 (U.S.$21,800); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (September 2000)14: housing 23.095, transporta-

tion and communications 19.7%, food 14.7%, clothing and footwear 10.9%,

household furnishings 10.096, recreation and education 8.096. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 1196, in permanent crops, none, in pasture, negligible; overall forest area (2005) c. 296. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 1,096; remittances (2006) 13; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 98. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 241; remittances (2006)

population

sq mi

sq km

2000 census

14 5 4 10 9 4 18 11 75

37 13 10 25 23 10 47 28 193

16,944 14,224 12,131 9,037 10,118 5,730 12,326 9,996 90,506

69.

Foreign trade!5 Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 —834 14.9%

Af. '000,000 % of total

2001 -317 5.0%

2002 —1,101 21.1%

2003 -923 12.5%

2004 -522 4.7%

2005 +216 1.4%

Imports (2005): Af. 7,614,000,000 (crude petroleum 77.6%, electrical and nonelectrical machinery 4.196, food products 2.396). Major import sources16: United

Demography

States 60.496; The Netherlands 11.796; Venezuela 2.896; Netherlands Antilles

Population (2007): 105,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,400.0, persons per sq km 544.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 45.4%; rural 54.6%. Sex distribution (2005): male 47.72%; female 52.28%.

2.896. Exports (2005): Af. 7,830,000,000 (refined petroleum 99.4%, remainder 0.6% ). Major export destinations16: United States 48.5%; Netherlands Antilles

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 21.2%; 15-29, 18.9%; 30-44, 26.1%; 45-59, 21.3%; 60-74, 9.6%; 75-84, 2.2%; 85 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 110,000; (2020) 139,000. Linguistic composition (2000): Papiamento 69.4%; Spanish 13.2%; English 8.1%; Dutch 6.1%; Portuguese 0.3%; other 2.0%; unknown 0.9% 3

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 82.7%, Protestant other/nonreligious 7.1%. Major urban areas (2000): Oranjestad 26,3554; San Nicolas 15,8485.

10.2%,

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 12.3 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 50.8%; outside of marriage 49.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 4.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.79. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.76/4.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 76.0 years; female 82.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001-04): diseases of the circulatory system 177.7, malignant neoplasms (cancers) 129.2, communicable diseases 36.2, diabetes mellitus 32.5, suicide, accidents 31.5, violence 13.2.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: Af. 907,300,000 (tax revenue 85.7%, of which taxes on income and profits 40.0%, sales tax 29.2%; nontax revenue 11.2%; grants

3.1%). Expenditures: Af. 1,032,200,000 (wages 29.5%, goods and services 14.8%, social security contributions 13.1%, interest 8.1%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing: aloes are cultivated for export; small amounts

of tomatoes,

beans, cucumbers,

gherkins, watermelons, and lettuce are grown on hydroponic farms; divi-divi pods, sour orange fruit, sorghum, and peanuts (groundnuts) are nonhydroponic crops of limited value; livestock (number of live animals) Aruba has very few livestock; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2004) 162 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: excavation of sand for local use. Manufacturing?: refined petroleum, rum, cigarettes, aloe products, and soaps. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 816,000,000 (816,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 880,000 (3,335,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (247,000); natural gas, none (none). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,244,000,000 (U.S.$21,625 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2000 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Af. 000,000

value

force

force

}

Mining

13

Oe

Manufacturing Construction

918 202

2.78 6.1

Public utilities

2129

6.49

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

287 796 877 390

8.6 23.9 26.4 TET

365 9210 3,326

11.0 2.810 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

212

0.5

38

0.1

2,440 3,892

54 8.6

500

1.4

2,905 14,763 5,206 3,528

6.5 32.8 11.6 7.8

8,129 3,42311 45,036

21.3%; The Netherlands 15.4%; Venezuela 4.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1995): total length 497 mi, 800 km (paved 64%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 49,521; trucks and buses 1,207. Air transport (2001)17: passenger-km 800,000,000; metric ton-km cargo, n.a. Communications

Vital statistics

Agriculture

2000

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$478,700,000. Household income and expenditure: average household size (2000) 3.1; aver-

area?

Noord/Tanki Leendert Oranjestad East Oranjestad West Paradera San Nicolas North San Nicolas South Santa Cruz Savaneta TOTAL

515

18.1 7.611 100.012

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2001

20

218

Cellular

2004

9819

2002

37

Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

E 2004

vu 33.918

1,00219

Internet users

2002

24

397

Broadband

2005

sse

su 34818 257

nee

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling or incomplete primary education 9.796; primary education 33.9%; secondary/vocational 39.2%; advanced vocational/higher 16.2%; unknown status 1.0%. Literacy (2000): percentage of total population age 13 and over literate 97.3%. Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

teachers

Primary (age 6-12)

37

478

9,806

20.5

Secondary (age 12-17)

12

495

7,087

14.3

1

118

1,480

12.5

3

78

552

74

Vocational

Higher

students

teacher ratio

Health (2005): physicians 144 (1 per 699 persons); hospital beds 31020 (1 per 330 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2003-05) 6.0.

Military Total active duty personnel (2005): more than 1,000 Dutch naval personnel (including 400 marines) are stationed in the Aruba/Netherlands Antilles vicinity. 1The Aruban florin (Af.) is pegged to the U.S. dollar at a fixed rate of Af. 1.79 = 1 U.S.$. 2Areas for census regions are approximate. 3Most Arubans are racially and ethnically mixed; the 4 major ethnic groups are Amerindian, Dutch, Spanish, and black. 4Combined population of Oranjestad East and Oranjestad West. Combined population of San Nicolas North and San Nicolas South. 5Excludes tourists. "Service facilities include a free zone, offshore corporate banking facilities, casino/resort complexes, a petroleum transshipment terminal, a cruise ship terminal, and ship repair and bunkering facilities. Excludes refined petroleum. ?Includes refined petroleum. !°Taxes less subsidies and imputed bank service charges. !! Includes 3,118 unemployed. !2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Minimum wage for the manufacturing and service industries. !^Weights of consumer price index components. Includes crude petroleum imports and refined petroleum exports; excludes imports and exports of Aruban free zone totaling (in 2004) Af. 89,000,000 (of which 9396 food products) and Af. 102,000,000 (of which 95% food products), respectively. “Excludes petroleum imports and exports. "Air Aruba only. 8Circulation of Amigoe de Aruba, Diario, and The News only. Subscribers. ?"Excludes hospital beds in geriatric homes.

Internet resources for further information: * Centrale Bank van Aruba http://www.cbaruba.org

516

Britannica World Data

Social indicators

Australia

Quality of working life. Average workweek (2005): 34.7 hours. Working 50 hours a week or more (2003) 28.8%. Annual rate per 100,000 workers for: accidental injury and industrial disease (2004): 1,220; death (2004) 1.0. Proportion of employed persons insured for damages or income loss resulting from: injury 100%; permanent disability 100%; death 100%. Working days lost to industrial disputes per 1,000 employees (2006): 22. Means of transportation to work (2003): private automobile 74.5%; public transportation 12.0%; motorcycle, bicycle, and foot 5.7%. Discouraged job seekers (2006): 52,900 (0.5% of labour force).

Official name: Commonwealth of Australia. Form of government: federal parliamentary state (formally a constitutional monarchy) with two legislative houses (Senate [76]; House of Representatives [150]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Canberra. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Australian dollar ($A); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Distribution of household income (2003-04) percentage of household income by quintiles

Area and population area!

New South Wales Queensland

Sydney Brisbane

309,130 668,207

800,642 1,730,648

6,854,848 4,132,015

South Australia

Adelaide

379,725

983,482

1,575,714

Tasmania

Hobart

26,410

68,401

491,666

Melbourne

87,806

227,416

5,165,404

976,790

2,529,875

2,080,966

910 52

2,358 135

336,444 1,408

5 28 13

14 73 35

591 390 5

Perth

sq km

Territories Australian Capital Territory Christmas Island

Canberra The Settlement

Cocos (Keeling) Islands Jervis Bay Norfolk Island

West Island — Kingston

Northern Territory

Darwin

TOTAL

highest

8.2%

13.1%

17.9%

23.3%

37.4%

520,902

1,349,129

2,969,978

7,692,208

National economy Gross national income (2006): U.S.$747,304,000,000 (U.S.$36,400 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005-06

212,551

20,851,9975 Agriculture, forestry, fishing

Demography Population (2007): 20,857,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 7.0, persons per sq km 2.7. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 19.8%; 15-29, 20.1%; 30-44, 21.9%; 45-59, 20.196; 60-74, 11.7%; 75-84, 4.8%; 85 and over, 1.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 21,480,000; (2020) 23,547,000. Ethnic composition (2001): white c. 92%; Asian c. 6%; aboriginal c. 2%. Religious affiliation (2006): Christian 63.9%, of which Roman Catholic 25.6%, Anglican Church of Australia 18.7%, other Christian 19.6% (Uniting Church

5.7%, Presbyterian 2.9%, Orthodox 2.6%, Baptist 1.6%, Lutheran 1.3%); Buddhist 2.1%; Muslim 1.7%; Hindu 0.7%; Jewish 0.4%; no religion 18.7%;

other 12.5%. Major urban centres/urban agglomerations (2001/2006): Sydney 3,502,301/ 4,293,105; Melbourne 3,160,171/3,684,461; Brisbane 1,508,161/1,820,375; Perth 1,176,542/1,507,949; Adelaide 1,002,127/1,138,833; Gold Coast 421,557/ (2005) 482,000; Canberra 339,727/328,441; Newcastle 279,975/512,131; Gosford (Central Coast) 255,429/n.a.; Wollongong 228,846/276,155; Sunshine

Coast 169,931/220,199; Geelong 119,504/153,631;

130,194/167,781; Hobart

Cairns

98,981/127,856;

89,338/

121,612. Place ofbirth (2006): 70.9% native-born; 29.1% foreign-born, of which Europe 10.5% (United Kingdom 5.2%, Italy 1.0%, Greece 0.6%, Germany 0.5%, The Netherlands 0.4%, Poland 0.3%), Asia and Middle East 7.3% (China [including Hong Kong] 1.4%, Vietnam 0.8%, India 0.7%), New Zealand 2.096, Africa, the Americas, and other 9.3%.

Mobility (1999). Population age 15 and over living in the same residence as in 1998: 84.4%; different residence between states, regions, and neighbourhoods

15.6%. Households (2006). Total number of households 8,058,248. Average household size 2.6; 1 person (2003-04) 25.4%, 2 persons (2003-04) 33.9%, 3 or more persons (2003-04) 40.7%. Family households 5,665,000 (70.3%), nonfamily 2,393,000 (29.796), of which 1-person 26.596. Immigration (2004—05): permanent immigrants admitted 123,400, from United Kingdom 14.7%, New Zealand 14.0%, China 9.0%, India 7.6%, Sudan 4.6%,

South Africa 3.7%, Philippines 3.4%, Malaysia 2.4%, Singapore 2.4%, Sri Lanka 1.9%, Vietnam 1.8%, Iraq 1.5%. Refugee arrivals: 13,200. Emigration 59,200. Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.8 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 67.8%; outside of marriage 32.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.81. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.4/2.6. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 78.5 years; female 83.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 229.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 188.8; respiratory diseases 53.2; accidents and violence 26.9; diabetes 17.4; suicides 10.3.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in value $A '000,000

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

28,328

34

362,900

3.4

45,241 96,008

49 10.4

92,100 1,069,700

0.9 10.2

Construction

62,405

6.8

856,700

8.2

20,471

2.2

81,900

0.8

67,420 118,498 247,433 35,241

7.3 12.8 26.8 3.8

640,300 2,452,800 1,571,400 583,300

6.1 23.4 15.0 5.5

125,237 76,4877 922,7726

13.6 8.37 100.0

2,222,500 558,8008 10,492,3006

21.2 5.38 100.0

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

Budget (2005-06). Revenue: $A 225,513,000,000 (tax revenue 91.696, of which individual 50.7%, corporate 21.7%, excise duties and sales tax 15.3%; non-

tax revenue 8.4%). Expenditures: $A 209,797,000,000 (social security and welfare 41.2%; health 17.9%; economic services 8.0%; public services 8.0%; education 7.9%; defense 7.5%; interest on public debt 2.6%; other 6.6%).

Public debt (2002-03): $A 69,926,000,000. Retail and service enterprises

126,048/205,510;

Toowomba

2005

Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Public utilities

Urban-rural (2005): urban 88.295; rural 11.896. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.7896; female 50.2296.

Townsville

fourth

Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (2004): 9496; voting is compulsory. Trade union membership in total workforce (2006): 20%. Social deviance (2005). Offense rate per 100,000 population for: murder 1.3; sexual assault (2003) 92; assault (2003) 798; auto theft 419; burglary and housebreaking (2004) 1,534; robbery 69. Incidence per 100,000 in general population of: prisoners 124; suicide 10.3. Material well-being (2005). Households possessing: automobile (1995) 85%; refrigerator 99.9%; washing machine 96.4%; dishwasher 41.5%.

20072 estimate?

sq mi

Western Australia

third

ma 5.4%; unknown 3.0%.

population

Capitals

Victoria

second

Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 15-64 having: no formal schooling and incomplete secondary education 48.5%; completed secondary and postsecondary, technical, or other certificate/diploma 28.9%; bachelor’s degree 14.2%; incomplete graduate and graduate degree or diplo-

1 U.S.$ = $A 1.21; 1 £ = $A 2.44.

States

lowest

no. of estab-

no. of

total wages and salaries

annual turnover

lishments

employees

($A ’000,000)

($A 000,000)

37,305

220,661

44,954

53,166 459

406,299 87,148

63,34010 13,71410

21,688

91,138

11,00510

14,268 S

75,355 ut

Retail? Motor vehicle dealers, gasoline and tire dealers

Food stores Department and general stores Clothing, fabric, and furniture stores Household appliances and hardware stores Recreational goods Services Real estate agents"! Pubs, taverns, and bars Dental services!? Consulting engineering services 13 Legal services! Accounting services!? Computing services! Travel agency services! Market research services! Private security services!!

629 "S

20,55410 7,39310 3,902.7 9,007.210 1,685.2

7,589 4,79212 5,257

52,079 81,72412 24,108

1,847.5 P 568.4

5,514

30,736 73,186 66,792 74,395 24,451 10,744 31,752

2,181.0 "S 4,065.0 647.9 203.4 756.2

10,819 8,389 14,731 3,266 272 1,714

1,242

3,233.3 7,034.3 4,939.1 10,474.0 1,979.5 455.8 1,394.8

Production (gross value in $A '000 except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2004-05): livestock!5 12,030,200 (cattle 7,828,800, sheep and lambs 1,949,000, poultry 1,303,700, pigs 906,000); wheat 4,316,500, wool 2,195,500, grapes 1,508,200, barley 1,233,300, sugarcane 979,500, seed cotton 945,100, apples 529,000, canola 503,000, potatoes 434,000, bananas 327,000, oranges 310,000, sorghum 270,000, oats 171,800, carrots 166,000, tomatoes 162,000, rice 101,000, peaches 99,000, pears 89,000, corn (maize) 81,000, tobacco 28,000; livestock (number of live animals; 2005) 101,125,000 sheep, 27,782,000

cattle, 2,538,000 pigs, 78,187,000 poultry (July 2005); roundwood

(2005)

30,529,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 10%; fisheries production (2005) 293,022

(from aquaculture 16%); aquatic plants production 14,167 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (metric tons except as noted; 2005): iron ore

Nations of the World

(metal content) 280,000,000 (world rank: 3), bauxite 58,000,000 (world rank: 1)), zine (metal content) 1,400,000 (world rank: 2), ilmenite 1,140,000 (world rank: 1, copper (metal content) 930,000 (world rank: 5), lead (metal content) 760,000 (world rank: 2), nickel (metal content) 210,000 (world rank: 2), rutile 160,000 (world rank: 1), cobalt (metal content) 6,600 (world rank: 3), opal (value of production; 2003) $A 65,000,000 (world rank: 1), diamonds 22,700,000 carats (world rank by volume: 1), gold 254,000 kilograms (world rank: 2). Manufacturing (gross value added in $A °000,000; 2004-05): food,

517

leum 12.7%; chemicals and related products 6.1%, of which medicines and

pharmaceuticals 4.3%; textiles and wearing apparel 3.9%). Major import sources (2006-07): China 15.0%; U.S. 13.8%; Malaysia 3.7%; Japan 9.6%; Singapore 5.6%; Germany 5.1%; U.K. 4.1%; Thailand 4.0%; South Korea 3.3%; New Zealand 3.1%; Italy 2.7%.

Exports (2005-06): $A 151,792,000,000 (mineral fuels 24.9%, of which coal [all forms] 16.0%, petroleum products and natural gas 8.9%; food and beverages 12.0%, of which meat and meat preparations 4.4%, cereals and cereal prepa-

beverages, and tobacco 19,076; machinery and apparatus 18,185; fabricated metal products 17,483; mineral fuels 12,817; printing and publishing 10,095; wood and paper products 6,924; cement, bricks, and ceramics 4,852; textiles

rations 3.2%; iron ore 8.2%; aluminum and aluminum ore 6.9%; gold 4.8%;

and wearing apparel 2,621. Population economically active (July 2007): total 10,952,000; activity rate of total population 52.5% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 65.0%; female [2006] 45.0%; unemployed 4.3%).

U.S. 5.8%; New Zealand 5.6%; U.K. 3.7%; Taiwan 3.7%; Singapore 2.7%; Indonesia 2.5%; Thailand 2.5%.

machinery and apparatus 4.1%; transportation equipment 3.5%). Major export destinations (2006-07): Japan 19.4%; China 13.6%; South Korea 7.8%;

Direction of trade (2003-04) imports

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Weekly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

104.4 104.9

107.5 110.3

110.5 116.5

113.1 120.9

116.1 127.6

120.2 132.4

Household income and expenditure (2003—04). Average household size (2006) 2.6; average annual disposable income per household $A 47,528 (U.S.$33,745); sources of income: wages and salaries 57.596, transfer payments 27.7%, self-employment 6.0%, other 8.8%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 17.1%, housing 16.1%, transportation and communications 15.6%, recreation 12.8%, household services and operation 6.1%. Financial aggregates 2000

2001

Exchange rate, $A 1.00 per'é: U.S. dollar 0.55 g 0.37 SDR 0.43 International reserves (U.S.$)15 Total (excl. gold; 000,000) 18,118 SDRs (000,000) 94 Reserve pos. in IMF (000,000) 1,243 Foreign exchange ('000,000) 16,782 Gold (000,000 tine troy oz) 2.56 % world reserves 0.3 Interest and prices Govt. bond yield (short-term; %) 6.18 Industrial share prices (2000 = 100) 100.0 Balance of payments'®

2002

2003

2004

2005

0.51 0.35 0.41

0.57 0.35 0.42

0.75 0.42 0.50

0.78 0.40 0.50

0.73 0.42 0.51

0.79 0.40 0.53

17,955

20,689

32,189

35,803

41,941

53,448

109

136

170

195

193

200

1,412 16,434 2.56 0.3

1,934 18,618 2.56 0.3

2,053 29,966 2.56 0.3

1,706 33,901 2.56 0.3

776 40,972 2.57 0.3

428 52,821 2.57 0.3

4.97

5.30

4.90

5.30

5.27

5.71

103.2

100.2

96.1

111.7

135.5

161.5

%

U.S.$000,000

%

962 48,176 12,076 371

1.0 49.0 12.3 0.4

1,559 49,846 14,849 383

1.9 61.0 18.2 05

Africa Asia Japan South America North and Central America

16,775

17.1

8,699

10.7

United States Europe

14,959 23,528

15.2 23.9

7,090 9,763

8.7 11.9

22,439

22.8

9,419

11.5

4,073

4.

3,849

4.7

1,089

1.4

344

0.4

54 3.9 3.5 100.0

6,988 6,060 4,442 81,680

8.6 7.4 5.4 100.0

European Union

United Kingdom Other Europe

Oceania New Zealand Other TOTAL

5,012 3,792 3,442 98,2656

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 23,954 mi, 38,550 km; passengers carried (2004-05) 616,270,000; passenger-km (2004-05) 11,200,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2004-05) 182,990,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 503,709 mi, 810,641 km (paved 42%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 11,189,000; trucks and buses 2,665,000. Merchant marine (2006): vessels (1,000 gross tons and over) 53; total deadweight tonnage 1,532,874. Air transport (2006)18: passenger-km 88,173,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,633,-

000,000.

Communications Medium

—4,862 68,866 64,004 —9,901

41,736 -5,513 -15,344 -18,069 61,890 70,527 $85,861 105,230 63,626 65,014 70,517 87,161 -9,170 —10,310 —13,301 —20,712

-13,372 -9,684 120,383 134,492 107,011 124,808 —27,560 —31,460

—14,763

-7,433 -15,824 —28,645 —38,781

—40,932 —41,144

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 228,918,000,000 ([2004] 230,497,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2006) 400,000,000 ([2004]

32,900,000); lignite (metric tons; 2005-06) 71,000,000 ([2004] 100,700,000);

crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 171,900,000 ([2005] 320,200,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 33,302,000 (34,264,000); natural gas (cu m;

2006) 38,883,000,000 ([2004] 28,399,000,000).

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 14,940; remittances (2006) 3,064; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 8,715. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 11,282; remittances (2006) 2,681; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 2,536. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 6.1%, in permanent crops 0.04%, in pasture 51.0%; overall forest area (2005) 21.3%.

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

U.S.$000,000

2006

(U.S.$'000,000)

Balance of visible trade Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments, current account

exports

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—4,862 3.7%

41,736 1.4%

-5,513 4.1%

-15,344 9.8%

-18069 9.4%

—13,372 5.9%

—9,684 3.7%

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

14,371

722

2006 2006

19,7602° 9,940

96020 483

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

14,007 2,93419 15,300 3,90020

689 14619 743 18920

Education and health Literacy (2006): total population literate, virtually 1009621, Education (2006) Primary (age 6—12) Secondary (age 13-17) Vocational23 Higher23

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

6,5582? 1,47822 1,950 74

121,215 118,424 26,500 90,407

1,936,118 1,431,918 1,888,700 957,176

16.0 12.1 71.3 10.6

Health (2005-06): physicians 63,300 (1 per 322 persons); hospital beds (2005) 83,349 (1 per 244 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 5.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,101 (vegetable products 68%, animal products 32%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 51,610 (army 48.9%, navy 24.6%, air force 26.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$645.

Trade by commodity group (2003-04) imports SITC Group OO 01 02 03

Food and live animals Beverages and tobacco Crude materials, excluding fuels Mineral fuels, lubricants, and related materials

04

Animal and vegetable

05

Chemicals and related

06

products, n.e.s. Basic manufactures

07

Machinery and transport

08

Miscellaneous manufactured articles Goods not classified by kind

oils, fat, and waxes

equipment

09 TOTAL

U.S.$000,000

exports %

U.S.$'000,000

%

3,762 675

3.8 OF

13,666 2,025

16.7 25

1,448

1.5

15,592

19.1

7,569

7.7

15,326

18.8

276

0.3

269

0.3

11,306 11,819

11.5 12.0

3,974 8,518

4.9 10.4

45,266

46.1

8,957

11.0

14,030

14.3

3,209

3.9

2,113 98,2656

2.1 100.0

10,146 81,6806

12.4 100.0

Imports (2005-06): $A 167,603,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 29.396, of which telecommunications equipment 5.8%, office machines and automatic data-processing equipment 5.3%, electrical machinery 4.8%; transportation equipment 15.8%, of which motor vehicles 12.2%; crude and refined petro© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Mainland and island areas only; excludes coastal water. January 1. "Based on preliminary 2006 census results. ^With permanent civilian population only. ?Total includes 2001 census population for Norfolk Island (2,037). 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Taxes on products less subsidies ($A 77,042,000,000) less statistical discrepancy ($A 555,000,000). 8Includes 535,000 unemployed. 91991-92. 10200102. 111998-99. 121997—98. 151995—96. 141996—97. 15Slaughtered value. 15At end of year. V'Imports and exports f.o.b. 8Domestic carriers only. !?Circulation of daily newspapers. 20Subscribers. 21A national survey conducted in 1996 put the number of persons who had very poor literacy and numeracy skills at about 1796 of the total population (age 15 to 64). 2Excludes 1,181 combined primary and secondary schools. 232005.

Internet resources for further information: * Australian Bureau of Statistics http://www.abs.gov.au * Reserve Bank of Australia http://www.rba.gov.au

518

Britannica World Data

Austria

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: Republik Osterreich (Republic of Austria). Form of government: federal state with two legislative houses (Federal Council [62]; National Council [183]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Chancellor. Capital: Vienna. Official language: German. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

Tirol Vorarlberg

area

Wien (Vienna) TOTAL

sq mi

sq km

20061 estimate

Eisenstadt Klagenfurt Sankt Pólten Linz Salzburg Graz

1,531 3,682 7,404 4,626 2,762 6,329

3,965 9,536 19,178 11,982 7,154 16,392

279,317 560,300 1,581,422 1,402,050 528,351 1,202,087

Innsbruck

4,883

12,648

697,435

1,004

2,601

363,526

160 32,3832

415 83,871

1,651,437 8,265,925

—

% of labour

forces

force

4,000

1.7

210,400

883

0.4

8,600

5.2

0.2

42,392 15,996

17.9 6.7

699,900 313,600

17.4 7.8

5,179

2.2

31,200

0.8

15,356 37,384 47,860 12,392

6.5 15.8 20.2 5.2

241,300 837,700 477,500 238,600

6.0 20.8 11.8 5.9

31,146 24,452 237,0392

13.1 10.3 100.0

756,500 216,9004 4,032,200

18.8 5.44 100.02

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 2.3; average annual disposable income per household (2003) €28,709 (U.S.$32,403); sources of income (1995): wages and salaries 54.8%, transfer payments 25.9%; expenditure (2004-05): housing and energy 22.3%, transportation

population

Capitals

Bregenz

labour

value

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

1 £= €148.

Burgenland Karnten Niederésterreich Oberósterreich Salzburg Steiermark

% of total

Mining

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

States

in value €000,000 Agriculture, forestry Manufacturing Construction

2005

16.1%, recreation and culture 12.6%, food 11.7%.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 16.8%, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 23.3%; overall forest area (2005) 46.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 15,589; remittances (2006) 2,941; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 5,205. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 10,994; remittances (2006) 2,543; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 6,552.

Foreign trade5 Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 8,319,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 256.9, persons per sq km 99.2. Urban-rural (2003): urban 65.8%; rural 34.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.61%; female 51.39%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 16.0%; 15-29, 18.5%; 30-44, 24.1%; 45-59, 19.4%; 60-74, 14.3%; 75-84, 6.1%; 85 and over, 1.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 8,417,000; (2020) 8,668,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Austrian 86.5%; German Swiss 4.0%; German 3.5%; Bosniac 0.9%; Turkish 0.9%; Polish 0.5%; other 3.7%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Christian 81.5%, of which Roman Catholic 73.7%, Protestant (mostly Lutheran) 4.7%, Orthodox 2.2%; Muslim 4.2%; nonreligious 12.0%; other 0.3%; unknown 2.0%.

Major cities (20061): Vienna 1,651,437 (urban agglomeration 1,939,344); Graz

2000 -5.25 3.6%

€ 000,000,000 % of total

2001 —4.44 2.9%

2002 +0.30 0.2%

2003 -2.09 1.3%

2004 -1.25 0.7%

2005 -1.79 0.9%

Imports (2005): €96,499,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 36.8%, of which nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 11.5%, road vehicles 11.5%; mineral fuels 12.2%; chemicals and related products 10.9%; food products 5.2%). Major import sources: Germany 42.2%; Italy 6.6%; France 4.0%; Switzerland 3.3%; Czech Republic 3.3%. Exports (2005): €94,705,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 41.6%, of which nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 17.2%, road vehicles 11.8%, electrical machinery and apparatus 7.3%; chemicals and chemical products 9.8%; iron and steel 5.7%). Major export destinations: Germany 31.8%; Italy 8.6%; United States 5.6%; Switzerland 4.5%; France 4.2%.

244,604; Linz 188,362; Salzburg 148,473; Innsbruck 116,851.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads®: (2004) route length 5,629 km; (2003) passenger-km

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.5 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 63.5%; outside of marriage 36.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 0.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.41. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 4.8/2.4. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 76.7 years; female 82.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 396.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 239.0; diseases of the respiratory system 56.7; endocrine and metabolic disorders 55.1.

8,248,700,000; (2004) metric ton-km cargo 17,931,100,000. Roads (2003): total

length 133,718 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 4,109,129; trucks and buses 342,384. Air transport (2005)7: passenger-km 22,894,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 561,882,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

2,570

315

2006

9,2559 3,564

1,1289

2006

434

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2006

4,000 2,5708 4,200 1,428?

489 31598 512 1729

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue:

€59,237,000,000

(tax revenue

97.3%,

of which

turnover tax 32.0%, individual income taxes 29.2%, corporate income tax

7.396,

other

taxes

28.895;

nontax

revenue

2.796).

Expenditures:

€62,667,000,000 (social security, health, and welfare 34.496; education 14.396;

interest 13.3%; transportation 9.6%; public safety 3.8%; defense 2.8%). Public debt (December 2006): U.S.$194,118,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugar beets 3,084,000, corn (maize) 1,725,000, wheat 1,453,000, barley 880,000, potatoes 763,000, apples 453,000, grapes 302,000, triticale 198,000, rye 164,000, currants 19,000; livestock (number of live animals) 3,125,400 pigs, 2,051,000 cattle; roundwood (2004) 16,483,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 21%;

fisheries production (2004) 2,667 (from aquaculture 85%). Mining and quarrying (2005): iron ore (metal content) 655,000; manganese (metal content) 16,000. Manufacturing (value added in €'000,000; 2004): nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 5,034; electrical machinery and electronics 4,060; fabricat-

ed metals 3,979; food products and beverages 3,767; motor vehicles 2,767;

chemicals and chemical products 2,476. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 64,125,000,000 (67,207,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) none (4,252,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 235,000 (1,228,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 6,200,000 ([2004] 59,800,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 7,200,000 (12,029,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004)

2,142,000,000 (9,792,000,000).

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling through lower-secondary education 2296; upper secondary/higher vocational 6396; university 1496. Literacy: virtually 10096. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary/lower secondary (age 6-13)

4,305

63,632

620,826

9.8

Upper secondary/voc.

1,438

75,404

493,601

6.5

16,099!!

310,915

154!

Higher

1910

Health: physicians (2006!) 39,750 (1 per 208 persons); hospital beds (2005112) 65,053 (1 per 133 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 4.2

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 4,023 (vegetable products 71%; animal products 2996).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 39,900 (army 83.2%; air force 16.8%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$329.

Population economically active (2005)3: total 4,032,200; activity rate of total population 49.7% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 72.4%; female 45.4%; unemployed 7.2%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Net annual income index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

1027 99.7

104.5 100.8

105.9 101.9

108.1

110.6 si

111.6 E

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$318,478,000,000 (U.S.$38,244 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lJanuary 1. 2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Excludes conscripts not employed before their military service. “Includes 207,700 unemployed. ‘Imports c.if., exports f.o.b. ‘Federal railways only. "Austrian Airlines Group. 3Circulation of daily newspapers. ?Subscribers. 102003-04. 2002-03. !?Excludes hospital beds in nursing homes.

Internet resources for further information: * Austrian Central Office of Statistics http://www.statistik.at

Nations of the World

Azerbaijan

519

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Azərbaycan Respublikası (Republic of Azerbaijan). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with a single legislative body (National Assembly [1251]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Baku (Baki). Official language: Azerbaijanian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: (new) manat (AZN)?;

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Agriculture

1,098

9.3

1,513,800

38.8

Petroleum and natural gas, other mining Manufacturing

5,538

46.6

42,200 188,700

1.4 4.8

Public utilities

100

0.9

39,700

1.0

1,192 954

10.0 8.0

194,400 191,500

5.0 4.9

Trade, hotels

821

6.9

653,000

16.7

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

123 356

1.0 3.0

113,800 270,500

2.9 6.9

642,000 56,9004 3,906,500

16.4 1.514 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

18 1,693 11,875

13 n 100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,344,000,000.

Area and population

Abseron

% of total

Construction Transp. and commun.

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = AZN 0.86; 1£= AZN 1.72.

Economic regions+

in value AZN '000,000

area

population

sq km

20063 estimate

Economic regions+

3,290

401,800

Aran Baki (Baku) Dağlıq Şirvan

21,430 2,130 6,060

1,731,000 1,873,600 270,200

Autonomous area

Ganca-Qazax

12,480

1,133,400

Nagorno Karabakh®

Kálbácár-Lacin (part)*

5,420

215,600

Autonomous

Lànkáran Quba-Xaçmaz

6,070 6,960

790,700 471,000

republic Naxçıvan

Şäki-Zagatala

8,960

548,500

TOTAL

area

population

sq km

20063 estimate

3,830

476,900

4,400

137,7377

Yuxarı Qarabağ

(parts)*

5,500

376,400

86,5308

8,426,8379

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 78; remittances (2006) 813; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 2,028; official development assistance (2005) 39615. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 164; remittances (2006) 301; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 739. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 22.2%, in permanent crops 2.7%, in pasture 32.5%; overall forest area (2005) 11.3%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

Demography

2000

2001

2002

+573 19.6%

+883 23.6%

+502 13.1%

2003

2004

2005

-35 0.7%

+100 1.4%

+136 1.6%

Imports (2005): U.S.$4,211,000,000 (machinery and equipment 33.3%, mineral

Population (2007): 8,120,00010.

fuels 15.2%, base and fabricated metals 11.6%, food and agricultural products

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 242.9, persons per sq km 93.8.

Urban-rural (200611): urban 51.6%; rural 48.4%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.16%; female 50.84%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 26.3%; 15-29, 27.9%; 30-44, 22.7%; 45-59, 14.1%; 60-74, 6.7%; 75-84, 1.9%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 8,304,00010; (2020) 9,058,00019. Doubling time: 63 years. Ethnic composition (1999): Azerbaijani 90.6%; Lezgian (Dagestani) 2.2%; Russian 1.8%; Armenian 1.5%; other 3.9%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim 87.0%12, of which Shi7 52.8% 12, Sunni 34.2% 12; nonreligious/other 13.0% 12. Major cities (200611): Baku 1,132,800 (urban agglomeration [2005] 1,856,000); Gäncä 305,600; Sumqayıt (Sumgait) 266,600; Mingácevir (Mingechaur) 95,300; Ali Bayramlı 68,700.

Vital statistics

10.6%). Major import sources: Russia 17.0%; United Kingdom 9.1%; Singapore 9.1%; Turkey 7.4%; Germany 6.1%; Turkmenistan 5.8%. Exports (2005): U.S.$4,347,000,000 (mineral fuels [mostly crude petroleum] 76.8%, of which diesel fuel 17.1%; transport equipment 6.3%; vegetables 4.5%; aluminum oxide 2.3%). Major export destinations: Italy 30.3%; France 9.4%; Russia 6.6%; Turkmenistan 6.3%; Turkey 6.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 2,122 km; passenger-km 881,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 9,524,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 59,141 km (paved 49%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 479,447; trucks and buses 117,587. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 1,587,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 313,-

000,000.

Communications

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.2 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 81.6%; outside of marriage 18.4%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.33. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 8.7/1.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 69.6 years; female 75.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 355.3; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 77.1; diseases of the respiratory system 37.1; accidents, poisoning, and violence 32.6.

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

2,750

334

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

3,32317 1,189

39217 140

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

195

23

2001

13216

16!6

2006 2006

829 2.217

98 0.317

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

number

Internet users Broadband

Education and health Educational attainment (1999). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: primary education 4.1%; some secondary 9.3%; secondary 50.1%; vocational 4.2%; some higher 0.9%; higher 13.3%. Literacy (1999): 98.8%.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: AZN 2,055,200,000 (tax revenue 86.096, of which VAT 29.296, taxes on profits 17.396, personal income tax 15.596, taxes on

international trade 10.0%; nontax revenue

14.0%). Expenditures:

AZN

2,140,700,000 (national economy 21.6%; education 18.1%; social security/

welfare 14.8%; defense/police 10.0%; health 5.6%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): wheat 1,527,000, vegetables 1,491,000, potatoes 1,083,100, barley 368,900, seed cotton 196,616, apples 163,057, persimmons 108,965, grapes 79,655, tobacco leaves 7,135; livestock (number of live animals) 6,887,000 sheep, 2,007,000 cattle; roundwood 13,500 cu m, of which fuelwood 47%; fisheries

production (2004) 9,296 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone 800,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2005): food, beverages, and tobacco products 301; petroleum products 251; base metals, fabricated metals, and machinery 126. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 22,600,000,000 ([2004] 20,600,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 164,000,000 (55,200,000);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 5,875,000 (3,583,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 5,676,000,000 (9,449,000,000). Household income and expenditure (2003). Average household size 4.4; annua income per household AZM 2,254,4502 (U.S.$459); sources of income: wages and salaries 30.5%, self-employment 22.8%, agriculture 15.5%; expenditure: food 54.7%, household furnishings 7.1%, clothing 6.8%. Population economically active (2005): total 3,906,500; activity rate of total population 46.3% (participation rates: ages 15-61 [male], 15-56 [female 71.8%; female 47.7%; officially unemployed 1.4%). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index

98.2

2000 100.0

2001 101.5

2002 104.4

2003 106.7

2004 113.9

2005 124.7

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$18,676,000,000

(U.S.$2,222 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2005-06) Primary (age 6—13) Secondary (age 14-17) }

student/ schools

teachers

4,559

175,154

students

teacher ratio

1,586,222

9.1

Voc., teacher tr.

60

6,813

57,896

8.5

Higher

42

14,442

129,948

9.0

Health (2006): physicians 30,3001! (1 per 265 persons); hospital beds 68,8001 (1 per 117 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 9.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,744 (vegetable products 85%, animal products 15%); 141% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 66,740 (army 85.2%, navy 3.0%, air force 11.8%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$37.

1Statutory number. ?The (new) manat was introduced on Jan. 1, 2006, at a rate of 4,500 (old) manats (AZM) to 1 (new) manat (AZN). 3January 1; official government de jure figures. ^Administratively, Azerbaijan is divided into 59 rayons, 11 cities, and 1 autonomous republic (Naxgivan). 5|Occupied by Armenian forces (in part) since 1992/93. 6Self-proclaimed republic (from 1991) from parts of Kälbäcär-Laçın and Yuxarı Qarabağ that is supported by Armenia. 7Final 2005 census results. Summed total; reported total is 86,600 sq km. Summed total including 2005 census results for Nagorno Karabakh. 10De facto estimate of the U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (updated August 2006). “January 1. The percentage of actual practicing adherents is much lower. !3Includes taxes less subsidies and imputed bank service charges. !4Includes 56,300 unemployed. [Figure represents commitments. !6Circulation. !7Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * The State Statistical Committee of Azerbaijan Republic http://www.azstat.org

520

Britannica World Data

Bahamas, The

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 20027

Official name: The Commonwealth of The Bahamas. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [16]; House of Assembly [41]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Nassau. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Bahamian dollar (B$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

in value B$'000,000

labour force

% of labour force 40 35

205 125

4.6 28

7,010 6,175

Mining Public utilities

} 236

go

2,575

15

Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate

73 432 867

1.6 98 19.6

16,670 10,335 50,670 17,575

95 59 28.7 10.0

Cübcedmin; defense

2,372

47,160

26.7

18,1608 176,330

10.38 100.03

53.5 }

4,430

100.03

Population economically active (2004): total 176,330; activity rate of total population 55.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2000] 76.6%; female 48.8%; unemployed [2005] 10.2%).

Area and population

area!

population

sqmi

sq km

2000 census

649

1,681

13,170

497 5,957 31 23 388 241 484 290 1,373 8 1,551 596 285 207 36 78 163 26 23 13,9393

428 7,686 709 1,717 1,647 350 7,999 3,571 46,994 1,639 969 2,992 259 210,832 72 80 970 1,527 — 303,611

Abaco, Great and Little

Acklins Andros Berry Islands Bimini Islands Cat Island Crooked and Long Cay Eleuthera Exuma, Great, and Exuma Cays Grand Bahama Harbour Island Inagua, Great and Little Long Island Mayaguana New Providence Ragged Island Rum Cay San Salvador Spanish Wells Other uninhabited cays and rocks TOTAL

% of total value

Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing

Services Other TOTAL

1 U.S.$ - B$1.00; 1 £ - B$2.01.

Islands and island Groups?

2004

192 2,300 12 9 150 93 187 112 530 3 599 230 110 80 14 30 63 40 9 5,8382

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

2001 1029

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

103.8

107.3

107.9

110.3

112.3

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,072; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 216. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 344; remittances (2006)

144.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 —1,447 56.6%

B$'000,000 % of total

2001 —1,551 67.4%

2002 —1,450 65.1%

2003 —1,509 67.4%

2004 —1,575 66.2%

2005 -2,138 70.9%

Imports (2005): B$2,567,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 22.1%; mineral fuels 19.8%; food products 13.2%; chemicals and chemical products 7.0%). Major import sources (2005): U.S. 83.9%; Curacao 7.1%; Puerto Rico 1.9%; Japan 1.2%.

Demography Population (2007): 331,000. Density (2006): persons per sq mi 85.1, persons per sq km 32.9. Urban-rural (2003): urban 89.596; rural 10.596. Sex distribution (2006): male 48.9096; female 51.1096. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 27.6%; 15-29, 26.0%; 30-44, 22.2%; 45-59, 14.9%; 60-74, 7.1%; 75 and over, 2.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 343,000; (2020) 381,000. Doubling time: 82 years. Ethnic composition (2000): local black 67.5%; mulatto 14.2%; British 12.0%; Haitian black 3.0%; U.S. white 2.4%; other 0.9%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Baptist 35.4%; Anglican 15.1%; Roman Catholic 13.5%; other Protestant/independent Christian 32.3%; other/nonreligious 3.7%. Major cities (2002): Nassau 179,300; Freeport 42,600; West End 7,800; Cooper’s Town 5,700; Marsh Harbour 3,600.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.6 (world avg. 20.3); (2000) within marriage 43.2%; outside of marriage 56.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.18. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2001) 5.8/(2000) 1.7. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 62.2 years; female 69.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2000): diseases of the circulatory system 145.0; HIV/AIDS 80.7; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 73.8; accidents and violence 71.8; diabetes 34.6.

Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.3% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2004-05). Revenue: B$1,039,376,000 (tax revenue 89.0%, of which import taxes 39.7%, stamp taxes from imports 10.8%, departure taxes 6.7%, business and professional licenses 5.8%; nontax revenue 11.0%). Expenditures: B$1,143,469,000 (education 18.7%, health 16.9%, public order 12.3%, interest on public debt 10.3%, tourism 6.0%, defense 3.1%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$334,600,000.

Exports (2005): B$450,800,000 (domestic exports 60.1%, of which plastics 25.7%, fish, crustaceans, and mollusks [mainly crayfish] 17.2%, alcoholic beverages [mainly rum] 3.7%; reexports 39.9%, of which petroleum 9.0%, nonelectrical machinery 5.1%). Major export destinations (2005): U.S. 68.9%; France 8.3%; Germany 7.0%; U.K. 4.6%; Canada 4.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 1,673 mi, 2,693 km (paved 57%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 80,000; trucks and buses 25,000. Air transport (2001)10: passenger-mi 232,000,000, passenger-km 374,000,000; short ton-mi cargo 1,208,000, metric ton-km cargo 1,764,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

77

247

2005 2005

22812 133

70512 412

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

site 2004 2005 2004

T 3911 103 1312

sed 12211 319 4012

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 1.5%; primary education 8.7%; incomplete secondary 19.9%; complete secondary 53.7%; incomplete higher 8.1%; complete higher 7.1%; not stated 1.0%. Literacy (2005): total percentage age 15 and over literate 95.8%; males literate 95.0%; females literate 96.7%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-16) Higher!4

teachers

students

teacher ratio

11313

2,029

34,079

16.8

5

2,135 160

31,975 3,463

15.0 21.6

1

Health (2001): physicians 458 (1 per 672 persons); hospital beds 1,540 (1 per 200 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 24.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,520 (vegetable products 68%, animal products 3296); 13096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 860 (paramilitary coast guard 10096).

sugarcane 55,500, citrus fruits 21,700; livestock (number of live animals) 3,000,000 chickens; roundwood 17,000 cu m, of which fuelwood, none; fish-

Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$121.

eries production (2004) 11,357 (mainly lobsters, crayfish, and conch; from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2004): salt 1,269,2095; aragonite 19,9185. Manufacturing (value of export production in B$’000; 2004): rum 31,344; chemical products (2001) 13,842. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004)5 2,087,000,000

(2,087,000,000);

petroleum

products (metric tons; 2004) none (652,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2000) 3.5; income per household (2004) B$39,626 (U.S.$39,626); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1995)6: housing 32.895, transportation and communications 14.896, food and beverages 13.8%, household furnishings 8.9%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.8%, in permanent crops 0.4%, in pasture 0.2%; overall forest area (2005) 51.5%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,077,000,000 (U.S.$18,570 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Includes areas of lakes and ponds, as well as lagoons and sounds almost entirely surrounded by land; area of land only is about 3,890 sq mi (10,070 sq km). ?For local administrative purposes, The Out Islands of the Bahamas are divided into 31 districts; New Providence Island is administered directly by the national government. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ^Land area only. ‘Reported figure. ‘Weights of retail price index components. "Derived figures from UN source. 3Includes 170 not adequately defined and 17,990 unemployed. ?Imports cif; exports f.o.b. Bahamasair only. !1Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 131996—97. College of The Bahamas only; 1997-98.

Internet resources for further information: * The Central Bank of The Bahamas http://www.bahamascentralbank.com * Department of Statistics http://www.bahamas.gov.bs/statistics

Nations of the World

Population economically active (2005): total 350,000; activity rate of total population 48.3% (participation rates: ages 15 and over c. 67%; female 23.2%; unemployed [citizens only; early 2006] 16-18%).

Bahrain Official name: Mamlakat al-Bahrayn (Kingdom of Bahrain). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with a parliament comprising two bodies (Council of Representatives [40]; Shura Council [40])1. Chief of state: Monarch. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Manama. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Bahraini dinar (BD); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 BD = U.S.$2.65 = £1.32.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

area

Capital

Central Muharraq? Northern

sq km

2001 census

Manama

13

34

163,696

Ar-Rifa Muharraq?

35 14

90 36

167,691 103,576

50

130

166,824

166 2785

430 7205

44,764 650,6045

Madinat Hamad

Southern* TOTAL

“Awall

Demography Population (2007): 749,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 2,665.5, persons per sq km Urban-rural (2005): urban 96.4%; rural 3.6%. Sex distribution (2005): male 57.52%; female 42.48%.

2005

200613

100.0 100.0

98.8 96.7

98.3 97.5

100.0 94.2

102.3 92.1

104.9 88.0

107.3

2001 +478 12.9%

2002 +294 7.2%

2003 +366 7.9%

2004 +389 7.4%

1,028.8.

Japan 6.2%; U.K. 3.7%; Germany 3.6%; France 3.6%.

Christian 10.596; Hindu 6.396; other 0.896. Major urban areas (2001): Manama 143,035; Muharraq 91,307; Ar-Rifa’ 79,550; Madinat Hamad 52,718; AI- Alt 47,529; Madinat Isa 36,833.

Exports (2005): BD 3,769,000,000 (crude and refined petroleum 77.6%, base and fabricated metals, including aluminum [all forms] 12.9%, chemicals and chemical products 2.6%). Major export destinations (2004): unknown destinations for petroleum exports 76.5%; Saudi Arabia 6.4%; U.S. 3.2%; Taiwan 2.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2003): total length 3,498 km (paved 79%). Vehicles (2005)16: passenger cars 241,813; trucks and buses 44,811. Air transport (2005)17: passenger-km 17,467,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 674,000,000. Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 4.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.63. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 6.6/1.5. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.7 years; female 76.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 86.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 39.3; injury and poisoning 26.5; metabolic and immunity diseases 24.4; diseases of the respiratory system 20.7; diseases of the digestive system 13.8; infectious and parasitic diseases 11.9; ill-defined conditions 39.3.

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2002

273

411

Cellular

2006

83519

Landline

2006

190

Medium

1,14819

262

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2004 2004 2006 2006

National economy

dates 15,000, cow’s milk 10,500, vegetables 7,703 (of which tomatoes 2,100,

onions 1,149), fruit (excluding dates) 5,010, number of hens eggs (2004) 49,350,000; livestock (number of live animals) 40,000 sheep, 26,000 goats, chickens 470,000; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2004) 14,267 (from

aquaculture, negligible). Manufacturing (barrels; 2005): jet fuel 19,956,000;

distillate fuel oil 19,278,000; gasoline 7,309,000; naphtha 1,783,000; aluminum 750,710 metric tons, methanol 375,609 metric tons; cement 191,400 metric

electricity

([2004] 7,198,000,000); coal, none

(kW-hr;

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

121 19818 157 3919

164 28418 230

5219

erate 90.0%; males literate 92.6%; females literate 86.4%.

Primary (age 6—11)

Budget (2005). Revenue: BD 1,671,400,000 (petroleum and natural gas revenue 75.7%; other 24.3%). Expenditures: BD 1,289,200,000 (current expenditure 79.4%; development expenditure 20.6% ). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

number

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education 24.096; primary education 37.196; secondary 26.496; higher 12.596. Literacy (2005): percentage of population age 15 and over litEducation (2002-03)

(consumption):

2005 +781 11.6%

Imports (2005): BD 2,988,000,000 (crude and refined petroleum 52.5%, machinery and apparatus 9.0%, transport equipment 7.3%, chemicals and chemical products 6.4%). Major import sources (2004): Saudi Arabia 47.7%;

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim 82.495, of which Shi'1 c. 5896, Sunni c. 2496;

9,567,000,000

2004

2000 +587 14.4%

BD '000,000 % of total

which Urdu 4.5%, Malayali 3.5%; Persian 13.0%; Filipino 4.5%; British 2.1%; other 1.7%.

production

2003

Balance of trade (current prices)

Population projection: (2010) 788,000; (2020) 913,000. Doubling time: 50 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Bahraini Arab 63.9%; Indo-Pakistani 14.8%, of

Energy

2002

Foreign trade!5

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 27.2%; 15-29, 23.2%; 30-44, 29.9%; 45-59, 15.2%; 60-74, 3.6%; 75-84, 0.8%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

tons.

2001

tion and communications 8.5%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 3%, in permanent crops c. 6%, in pasture c. 6%; overall forest area (2005) c. 1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 920; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 546. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 414; remittances (2006) 1,531; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 661.

population

sq mi

Principal cities

2000

Public debt (December 2004): U.S.$3,866,000,00014. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2001) 5.9; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1984): food and tobacco 33.3%, housing 21.2%, household durable goods 9.8%, transporta-

Area and population

Municipalities?

521

Secondary (age 12-17) Higher?!

|

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

25920

4,953

81,887

16.5

5,198

67,160 18,872

12.9 v

2

Health (2005): physicians 1,973 (1 per 362 persons); hospital beds 2,033 (1 per 352 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 17.3.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 11,200 (army 75.996, navy 10.796, air force 13.4% )22. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$675.

2005-06)

(none); crude petroleum

(barrels; 2005-06) 66,400,000? ([2004] 93,100,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 10,939,000 (1,018,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 10,278,000,000

([2004] 7,030,000,000).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$15,229,000,000 (U.S.$20,609 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

2001

value in

% of total

labour

% of labour

BD '000,000

value

forces

force’

Agriculture, fishing Crude petroleum, nat. gas

Quarrying

Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

19.2 1,267.4

0.4 25.2

655.8 188.4

13.0 3.8

15.2

0.3

4,483 }

2,780

OF

49,979 26,416

16.2 8.6

51.6

1.0

2,515

312.5 610.2 1,631.2 628.3

6.2 124 32.4 12.5

13,769 47,570 24,797 52,389

3.79 —10.610 100.0

61,256 21,5601! 307,514

185.49 —534.010 5,031.2

1.5

0.8 4.5 15.5 8.1 17.0 19.9 7.01 100.012

1Seats of Council of Representatives are elected, and seats of the Shura (consultative) Council are appointed by the monarch. As of the administrative reorganization announced July 2002. 5Official name is Al-Muharraq. ‘Includes the area of Hawar island and other nearby islets awarded to Bahrain by the International Court of Justice in 2001. ^Area per more recent survey is 281 sq mi (728 sq km). Includes 4,053 living abroad. "Includes offshore production totaling 53,200,000 barrels. 8Excludes small number of unemployed non-Bahrainis. ?Private services only. !^Includes import duties less imputed bank service charges. Includes 5,424 inadequately defined and 16,136 unemployed Bahrainis. 12Of which c. 59% non-Bahrainis; non-Bahrainis constituted c. 7096 of labour force in 2006. 3Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. Includes both foreign and domestic debt. Imports c.f; exports f.o.b. léPrivate vehicles only excluding taxis. 17Total air transport data for Gulf Air, the national airline of both Bahrain and Oman. l$Circulation. of daily newspapers. l?Subscribers. ?02005-06. ?12003-04; Bahrain University and Arabian Gulf University only. 22U.S. troops in Bahrain (March 2006): 3,000.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Bahrain http://www.cbb.gov.bh * Ministry of Finance and National Economy http://www.mofne.gov.bh

522

Britannica World Data

Bangladesh

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2006): U.S.$17,938,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$72,050,000,000 (U.S.$462 per capita).

Official name: Gana Prajatantri Bangladesh (People's Republic of Bangladesh). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Parliament [3001]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Dhaka. Official language: Bengali (Bangla). Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Bangladesh taka (Tk); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003-04

Barisal Chittagong

Dhaka Khulna Rajshahi Sylhet Tribal region Chittagong Hill Tracts?

% of labour

force

force

510

15.3

21,887,000

47.2

Fishing Mining

150 36

45 14

1,044,000 82,000

2.3 0.2

Manufacturing Construction

515 261

15.4 7.8

4,343,000 1,541,000

94 3.3

0.2

Trade Finance, real estate Public admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

Administrative centres

sq mi

Barisal

population sq km

2001 census?

5,134

13,297

8,514,000

7,906

20,476

23,796,682

12,015 8,600 13,326 4,863

31,119 22,274 34,513 12,596

40,592,431 15,185,026 31,477,606 8,290,857

5,133

13,295

1,390,631

56,9774

147,5704

Chittagong

Rangamati

TOTAL

labour

value

Public utilities

area

Dhaka Khulna Rajshahi Sylhet

% of total

Transp. and commun.

Area and population Divisions

in value Tk ’000,000,000 Agriculture, forestry

1US.$ = Tk 68.70; 1 £ = Tk 138.09.

129,247,233

Demography

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 35.5%; 15-29, 28.6%; 30-44, 19.5%; 45-59, 10.8%; 60-74, 4.6%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 146,394,000; (2020) 167,247,000. Doubling time: 32 years. Ethnic composition (1997): Bengali 97.7%; tribal 1.9%, of which Chakma 0.4%, Saontal 0.2%, Marma 0.1%; other 0.4%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim (nearly all Sunni) 88.3%; Hindu 10.5%; Christian (mostly Roman Catholic) 0.3%; Buddhist 0.6%; other 0.3%. Major urban areas (2004): Dhaka 10,550,000; Chittagong 2,640,000; Khulna 1,230,000; Rajshahi 725,200; Narayanganj 363,600; Mymensingh 346,600.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 29.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 21.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.11. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2002): 9.5/n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 61.9 years; female 59.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002)6: infectious and parasitic diseases 122.0; old age 79.0; diseases of the respiratory system 71.0; high blood

44

1.3

98,000

359

10.7

3,015,000

6.5

463

13.8

6,671,000

14.4

328 85

9.8 25

417,000 988,000

0.9 24

454 140 3,345

13.6 4.2 100.0

4,238,000 2,002,000 46,324,0008

9.1 4.3 100.08

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 61.3%, in permanent crops 3.4%, in pasture 4.6%; overall forest area (2005) 6.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 70; remittances (2006) 5,922; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 437; official development assistance (2005) 1,321. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 132; remittances (2005) 6.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Population (2007): 140,661,000. Density (2007)5: persons per sq mi 2,614.7, persons per sq km 1,009.5. Urban-rural (2003): urban 24.2%; rural 75.8%. Sex distribution (2005): male 51.09%; female 48.91%.

2002-03

2000-01

2001-02

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

—1,963 13.2%

1,711 12.5%

-2,159 14.2%

-2,237 13.1%

-3,216 15.7%

-2,879 12.1%

Imports (2005-06): U.S.$14,746,000,000 (textile yarn, fabrics, and made-up articles 15.1%; capital machinery 10.4%; imports for export processing zone 7.2%; base metals 6.6%; cotton 5.0%). Major import sources (2004): India 18.5%; China 13.1%; Singapore 10.5%; Japan 5.4%; Hong Kong 5.0%. Exports (2005-06): U.S.$10,526,300,000 (woven garments 38.8%; hosiery and knitwear 36.3%; frozen fish and shrimp 4.4%; jute manufactures 3.4%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 25.6%; Germany 17.6%; U.K. 12.0%; France 7.5%; Italy 4.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2002): route length 1,720 mi, 2,768 km; passenger-km 3,970,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 908,000,000. Roads (2003): total length 148,648 mi, 239,226 km (paved 10%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 185,000; trucks and buses 88,000. Air transport (2005)19: passenger-km 5,163,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 181,034,000.

Communications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

11,581

85

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

1,650

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

19,131 12 1,134

13312 7.9

Internet users Broadband

12

2004

913!!

6.811

2006 2006

450 «t

3.1

pressure, heart disease and stroke 54.0; suicide, accidents, and poisoning 35.0;

malignant neoplasms (cancers) 21.0.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: Tk 448,700,000,000 (tax revenue 80.696, of which value-added tax 27.6%, import duties 18.4%, taxes on income and profits 15.5%; nontax revenue 19.4%). Expenditures: Tk 610,600,000,000 (current expenditure 57.0%, of which education 10.4%, domestic interest payments 10.2%, defense 5.5%, health 3.3%; development expenditure 35.2%; other

7.8%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): paddy rice 41,104,000, sugarcane 6,500,000, potatoes 4,855,000, wheat 1,050,200, jute 801,000, bananas 700,000, rapeseed 191,000, allspice 138,000, tea 58,000, sesame seeds 50,000, ginger 48,000, tobacco leaves 39,000; livestock (number of live animals) 36,900,000 goats, 24,500,000 cattle, 142,000,000 chickens; roundwood 27,944,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 99%; fisheries pro-

duction (2004) 2,102,026 (from aquaculture 43%). Mining and quarrying (2004-05): marine salt 350,000; kaolin 8,400. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$000,000; 1998): wearing apparel 839; tobacco products 634; textiles 567;

industrial chemicals 499; food products 382; footwear 315; iron and steel 153.

Education and health Educational attainment (2004)13. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 48.8%; incomplete primary education 17.9%; complete primary 7.7%; incomplete secondary 15.1%; complete secondary or higher 10.5%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 41.1%; males literate 50.3%; females literate 31.4%. Education (2002-03) Primary (age 6—10)!5 Secondary (age 11-17) Voc., teacher tr. Higher

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

86,737

354,285

18,431,000

52.0

320,779

11,024,326

34.4

61,321

877,335

14.3

Health (2002): physicians 32,498 (1 per 4,049 persons); hospital per 2,886 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,388 (vegetable animal products 295); 13096 of FAO recommended minimum

beds 45,607 (1 (2006) 60.8. products 98%, requirement.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 21,466,000,000 (21,466,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004)? (700,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 1,900,000 ([2004] 9,600,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 842,000 (3,209,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 13,300,000,000 (13,300,000,000). Household income. Average household size (2004) 5.3; average annual income per household (2000) Tk 70,103 (U.S.$1,344); sources of income: self-employ-

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 125,500 (army 87.6%, navy 7.2%, air force 5.2%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$5.

ment 56.9%, wages and salaries 28.1%, transfer payments 9.1%, other 5.9%;

lExcludes 45 seats reserved for women. ?Adjusted figure. 3Autonomous region for non-Bengali tribal people was created by accord signed in December 1997, formally established in May 1999, but mostly not implemented by the government as of mid2007. *The total area excluding the river area equals 53,797 sq mi (139,334 sq km). 5Based on the total area excluding the river area. Based on national sample registration system. 7Commercial coal production began in April 2003. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. "Biman Bangladesh only. “Circulation of daily newspapers. !^Subscribers. Sample survey based on 21,405 people. Through 5th year of secondary education (out of 7 years). 152003-04.

expenditure (2000): food and beverages 54.6%, housing 9.0%, energy 6.8%, clothing and footwear 6.3%. Population economically active (2002-03): total 46,324,000; activity rate of total population 34.7% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 58.6%; female 22.3%; officially unemployed 4.3%). Price and earnings indexes (2000-01 = 100) Consumer price index Average wage index

2000-01

2001-02

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

100.0 100.0

103.0 106.0

107.6 117.6

113.6 125.0

1224 132.3

129.6 145.3

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Internet resource for further information: * Bangladesh Bank http://www.bangladesh-bank.org

Nations of the World

Barbados

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Atlantic Ocean

Official name: Barbados. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [21]; House of Assembly [30]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bridgetown. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Barbados dollar (Bds$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2005 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Bds$'000,000 Agriculture, fishing

Mining Manufacturing

Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, tourism Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

1 U.S.$ = Bds$2.00; 1 £ = Bds$4.02.

184.6

3.0

3,700

44.0

0.7

B

357.4

58

7,200

328.8 1714 327.6 1,455.4 1,004.0 819.6 321.9 T0777 6,122.1

5.4 28 5.3 23.8 16.4 13.4 5.3 TBA 100.0

25

b 49

13,9005 1,900 5,900 32,700 10,000 27,200 30,200 13,100 145,800

9.56 1.3 4.1 224 6.9 18.7 20.7 9.0 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 897; remittances (2005) 140; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 48. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 96; remittances (2005)

Area and population area Parishes!

523

40.

population

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 3796, in pere manent crops c. 296, in pasture c. 596; overall forest area (2005) c. 496.

2000 census

sq mi

sq km

Christ Church St. Andrew

22 14

57 36

49,498 5,254

St. George

IF

44

17,868

St. James St. John St. Joseph St. Lucy St. Michael2 St. Peter St. Philip St. Thomas TOTAL

12 13 10 14 15 13 23 13 166

31 34 26 36 39 34 60 34 4303

22,741 8,873 6,805 9,328 83,684 10,699 11,883 12,397 239,0304

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) Bds$'000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—1,767 61.9%

—1,619 60.9%

—1,659 63.2%

—1,891 65.4%

—2,269 67.1%

—2,490 63.4%

Imports (2005): Bds$3,209,000,000 (machinery 17.0%; food and beverages 13.8%; mineral fuels 11.7%; construction materials 7.5%). Major import sources: U.S. 36.5%; Trinidad and Tobago 22.0%; U.K. 5.5%; Canada 3.6%.

Exports (2005): Bds$719,000,000 (domestic exports 58.6%, of which manufactured goods [other than rum] 27.6%, rum 7.1%, sugar 6.2%; reexports 41.496). Major export destinations: Caricom 37.8%, of which Trinidad and

Demography Population (2007): 294,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,771, persons per sq km 683.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 52.6%; rural 47.4%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.26%; female 51.74%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 19.0%; 15-29, 22.8%; 30-44, 26.1%; 45-59, 19.0%; 60-74, 8.2%; 75-84, 3.8%; 85 and over, 1.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 297,000; (2020) 303,000. Ethnic composition (2000): local black 87.1%; mulatto 6.0%; British expatriates 4.3%; U.S. white 1.2%; Indo-Pakistani 1.1%; other 0.3%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 72.5%,

of which

Anglican 28.3%,

Pentecostal 18.7%, Adventist 5.5%, Methodist 5.1%; Rastafarian 1.1%; Muslim 0.7%; Hindu 0.3%; nonreligious 17.3%; other/unknown 8.1%.

Major urban areas (2004): Bridgetown 99,100; Speightstown 3,600; Oistins (2000) 1,203; Holetown (2000) 1,087.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.65. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2000) 13.1/(1995) 1.5. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 70.8 years; female 74.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 270.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 165.0; communicable diseases 84.1; diabetes mellitus 70.0; accidents, poisonings, and violence 29.3.

Tobago 9.3%, Jamaica 4.8%; U.S. 12.8%; U.K. 8.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 994 mi, 1,600 km (paved 100926). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 92,195; trucks and buses 8,597. Air transport: passenger-mi, n.a.; (2003) metric ton-km cargo 200,000. Communications

Budget (2005-06). Revenue: Bds$2,145,000,000 (tax revenue 95.2%, of which VAT 31.8%, corporate taxes 16.8%, personal income taxes 14.3%; nontax

revenue 4.8%). Expenditures: Bds$2,328,500,000 (current expenditure 85.2%, of which education 18.3%, general public service 14.6%, debt payments 12.8%, health 11.3%, defense 2.2%; development expenditure 14.8%). Public debt (external, outstanding; December 2005): U.S.$763,500,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): raw sugar 38,240, sweet potatoes 2,000, coconuts 1,950, cucumbers and gherkins 1,800, okra 1,550, chilies and green peppers 1,250, yams 1,150; livestock (number of live animals) 19,000 pigs, 10,800 sheep, 3,400,000 chickens; roundwood 6,000 cu m, of which fuelwood, none; fisheries production

(2004) 2,500 (from aquaculture,

none). Manufacturing

(value added

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

78

291

Telephones Cellular

2005

20610

76610

Landline

2005

135

501

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

40

148

Dailies Internet users

2004 2005

359 160

1309 593

Broadband

2005

3210

11810

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of employed labour forcel! having: no formal schooling 0.5%; primary education 14.9%; secondary 58.7%; technical/vocational 5.4%; university 19.6%; other/unknown 0.9%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 99.7%. Education (2004)

student/ schools

Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-15) Higher!?

National economy

units number

10912 3212 4

teachers

students

teacher ratio

1,372 1,264

22,327 21,300

16.3 16.9

339

11,226

33.1

Health (2002): physicians 376 (1 per 721 persons); hospital beds 501 (1 per 541 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 11.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,727 (vegetable products 83%, animal products 17%); 151% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 610 (army 82.0%, navy 18.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$52.

in

U.S.$'000,000; 1997): industrial chemicals 87; food products 63; beverages

(significantly rum and beer) 58; paper and paper products 32; fabricated metal products 23. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 793,000,000 (793,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 612,000 (negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,000 (346,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 25,000,000 (25,000,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 2.8; income per household: n.a.; expenditure (2001): food 33.8%, medical and personal care 17.0%, housing 12.3%, household furnishings and operations 10.1%, education and recreation 7.4%, energy 6.3%. Population economically active (December 2005): total 145,800; activity rate of total population 53.1% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 69.0%; female 49.5%; unemployed [March 2006] 8.1%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

2001 1026

2002

2003

2004

2005

20065

102.7

104.4

105.8

112.3

120.8

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$3,307,000,000 (U.S.$11,291 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Parishes and city of Bridgetown have no local administrative function. ?Includes city of Bridgetown. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 4The incomplete summed total of 2000 census by parish is 239,030; the unadjusted de jure census total is 250,010; the adjusted de jure census total including non-enumerated pesons (16,172) and institutionalized persons (2,610) is 268,792. ^ Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. 5Construction includes Mining. "Net indirect taxes. 3Imports c.i; exports f.o.b. ?Circulation. 1oSubscribers. !iRepresents about 129,300 people. 122002.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Barbados http://www.centralbank.org.bb * Barbados Statistical Service http://www.barstats.gov.bb

524

Britannica World Data

(145,400,000); petroleum products (2004) 15,200,000 (5,049,000); natural gas

Belarus

(cu m; 2005) 228,000,000 (20,407,000,000).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$36,838,000,000 (U.S.$3,781 per capita).

Official name: Respublika Belarus (Republic of Belarus). Form of government: republic with two legislative bodies (Council of the Republic [641]; House of Representatives [1101]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Minsk. Official languages: Belarusian; Russian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Belarusian ruble (Br)2; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

1£=Br

Homyel (Gomel) Hrodna (Grodno)

Mahilyow (Mogilyov) Minsk (Myensk) Vitsyebsk (Vitebsk) City Minsk (Myensk) TOTAL

% of labour

force?

force?

493,000

114

17,428

32.3

987,000

22.2

Construction Transp. and commun.

4,456 5,739

8.3 10.6

231,000 265,000

5.2 5.9

Trade Finance Public admin., defense

6,182

11.5

14,982

27.8

257,000 57,000 84,000

58 13 1.9

Services

Area and population

Brest

labour

value 9.5

Other TOTAL

area

Capitals

% of total

5,125

Mining Manufacturing

4,320.

Provinces

in value Br '000,000 Agriculture, forestry

1 U.S.$ - Br 2,149;

sqmi

Brest

20063 ,estimate-

12,500

32,300

1,445,600

Homyel Hrodna

15,600 9,650

40,400 25,000

1,485,100 1,123,500

Mahilyow Minsk Vitsyebsk

11,200 14,800 15,500

29,000 38,300 40,100

1,146,800 1,474,100 1,294,700

53,912

100.0

1,033,000

23.2

1,039,0008 4,446,000

23.48 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003)9: in temporary crops 26.8%, in permanent crops 0.6%, in pasture 15.4%; overall forest area (2005) 38.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 253; remittances (2005) 370; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 197. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 604; remittances

population

_ sq km_

2003

(2005) 94.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices)

—

950 80,2004

2,500 207,6004

1,780,700 9,750,500

2001 -835 5.3%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 9,692,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 120.8, persons per sq km 46.7. Urban-rural (20073): urban 72.8%; rural 27.2%. Sex distribution (20073): male 46.69%; female 53.31%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 15.2%; 15-29, 24.1%; 30-44, 22.0%; 45-59, 20.296; 60-74, 12.8%; 75-84, 5.0%; 85 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 9,580,000; (2020) 9,217,000. Ethnic composition (1999): Belarusian 81.2%; Russian 11.4%; Polish 3.9%;

2002 -1,071 6.3%

2003 -1,612 75%

2004 -2,717 9.0%

2005 -729 2.2%

2006 -2,584 6.1%

Imports (2006): U.S.$22,323,000,000 (mineral products 33.4%, machinery, equipment, and vehicles 24.1%, chemicals and chemical products 12.6%, food and beverages 9.4%). Major import sources (2004): Russia 68.2%; Germany 6.6%; Ukraine 3.3%; Poland 2.9%; Italy 1.8%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$19,739,000,000 (mineral products [significantly refined petroleum] 38.8%, machinery, equipment, and vehicles 20.0%, chemicals and chemical products 14.4%, food and beverages 7.5%). Major export destinations (2004): Russia 47.0%; United Kingdom 8.3%; The Netherlands 6.7%; Poland 5.3%; Ukraine 3.9%.

Ukrainian 2.4%; Jewish 0.3%; other 0.8%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Belarusian

Orthodox

48.7%; Roman

Catholic

13.2%; unaffiliated Christian 5.9%; other Christian 2.4%; Jewish 0.6%; Muslim 0.3%; nonreligious 24.0%; atheist 4.9%. Major cities (20053): Minsk 1,765,800; Homyel 481,200; Mahilyow 366,900; Vitsyebsk 342,700; Hrodna 316,700.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length (2002) 5,533 km; passenger-km 9,968,000,000; metric ton-km

cargo

45,723,000,000.

Roads

93,310 km (paved 8796). Vehicles: passenger cars (2004) 1,707,888; trucks and buses (2001) 85,791. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 754,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 92,000,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.2 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 75.9%; outside marriage 24.1%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): -5.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.21. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 7.5/3.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 62.9 years; female 75.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 693.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 171.2; accidents, poisoning, and violence 161.6; diseases of the respiratory system 45.0.

Communications Medium

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

3,809

386

Televisions

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

en

Dailies 2006 2006

5,96012 3,368

61412 347

Internet users Broadband

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: Br 17,417,000,000 (tax revenue 72.796, of which value-added tax 21.996, tax on profits 9.396, personal income tax 8.196, excise tax 6.4%; nontax revenue 5.796; other 21.696). Expenditures: Br 17,595,-

000,000 (current expenditure 75.1%; development expenditure 4.6%; other 20.396). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$783,000,000. Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 3.1; income per household, n.a; sources of money income: wages and salaries 49.2%, transfers 18.196, other 32.796; expenditure (2001): food and nonalcoholic beverages 53.6%, clothing and footwear 9.4%, housing and energy 7.2%, transport 6.3%, alcoholic beverages and tobacco products 5.9%. Population economically active (2005): 4,426,3005; activity rate of total population 45.4% (participation rate [1999]: ages 15-64, 69.7%; female 53.1%; officially unemployed [December 2006] 1.2%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

161.1 208.8

229.6 321.1

294.8 425.5

348.1 589.7

384.0 786.7

409.9

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): maize for forage 9,227,000, potatoes 8,185,000, sugar beets 3,065,000, barley 1,864,000, wheat 1,175,000, rye 1,154,855, cabbages 530,000, carrots and turnips 281,000, flax fibre and tow 50,000; livestock (number of live animals) 3,962,600 cattle, 3,406,800 pigs, 24,600,000 chickens; roundwood 7,542,800 cu

m, of which fuelwood 15%; fisheries production (2004) 5,040 (from aquaculture 82%). Mining and quarrying (2004): potash 4,650,000; peat 2,100,000.

Manufacturing (2006): fertilizers 5,469,000; cement 3,495,000; steel 1,607,0006; sausages 274,900; beer 3,320,000 hectolitres; footwear 10,900,000 pairs; refrigerators and freezers 1,050,000 units; tractors 49,200 units. Energy production

(consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 31,800,000,000 ([2005] 34,999,000,000); coal (2004) none (234,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 13,100,000

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

ote

ne

2004

88711

9011

2006 2006

4,200 1117

512 1.212

Education and health Education (2005-06)

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

(2004): total length

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-17) Voc., teacher tr. Higher

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

4,187

138,74413

1,240,900

9.913

204 55

14,77214 21,6841?

154,100 383,000

9.414 15.513

Literacy (2001): total population age 15 and over literate 99.7%; males literate 99.8%; females literate 99.6%.

Health (2005): physicians 45,600 (1 per 214 persons); hospital beds 108,800 (1 per 90 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 6.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,885 (vegetable products 72%, animal products 28%); 146% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 72,940 (army 40.6%, air force and air defense 24.9%, centrally controlled units 34.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 7.296515; per capita expenditure U.S.$3815.

1Statutory number. 2Currency re-denominated Jan. 1, 2000; 1,000 (old) rubles = 1 (new) ruble. 3January 1. “Rounded area figures; exact area figures are 80,153 sq mi (207,595 sq km). *Based on official estimate of de jure population excluding armed forces. 52002. "Based on annual survey. 3Includes 136,000 registered unemployed and 799,000 undistributed self-employed and unregistered unemployed. 925% of Belarusian territory severely affected by radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. !°Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. Circulation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers. 2003-04. 142000-01. Excludes expenditures on military pensions and paramilitary.

Internet resources for further information: * Ministry of Statistics and Analysis http://www.belstat.gov.by/homep/en/main.html * Ministry of Foreign Affairs http://www.mfa.gov.by

Nations of the World

Belgium

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Official name: Koninkrijk Belgié (Dutch); Royaume de Belgique (French) (Kingdom of Belgium). Form of government: federal constitutional monarchy with two legislative bodies (Senate [711]; House of Representatives [150]). Chief of state: Monarch. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Brussels. Official languages: Dutch; French; German. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

Brussels? Flanders Antwerp

East Flanders Flemish Brabant Limburg West Flanders Wallonia®

Hainaut Liège Luxembourg Namur Walloon Brabant

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.5 102.8

104.2 105.4

105.8 107.4

108.0 109.8

110.3 112.5

112.3

2005

area

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

population

sq mi

sq km

2006 estimate

Brussels Brussels4 Antwerp

63 5,2215 1,107

162 13,522 2,867

1,024,492 6,095,416 1,694,475

Ghent

1,151

2,982

1,393,160

Leuven Hasselt Brugge Namur?/Brussels®

813 935 1,214 6,5045

2,106 2,422 3,145 16,8445

1,047,626 817,206 1,142,949 3,421,985

Mons Liège

1,462 1,491

3,786 3,862

1,291,850 1,042,840

Arlon Namur Wavre

1,714 1,415 421

4,440 3,666 1,091

259,698 459,904 367,693

11,7875

30,528

10,541,893

TOTAL

2001

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population Capitals

2000

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$395,886,000,000 (U.S.$37,955 per capita).

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74; 1£ = €1.48.

Regions2 Provinces

525

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€000,000

value

force

force

2,925

1.0 0.1 15.2 43 1.8 7.5 13.0 24.9 6.5 14.6 11.113 100.0

310 45,351 12,911 5,418 22,403 38,825 74,349 19,344 43,717 32,98913 298,5415

82,000

1.8 0.2 15.9 6.0 0.7 6.9 15.4 11.7 9.3 23.3 8.714 100.05

6,800 718,500 272,600 32,300 313,300 697,300 531,000 419,400 1,052,700 393,60014 4,519,500

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 9,845; remittances (2006) 7,154; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 23,072. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism. (2005) 14,787; remittances (2006) 2,548; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 21,525.

Foreign trade!5 Balance of trade (current prices) €'000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

414,600 3.8%

413,060 3.2%

418,841 4.3%

417,657 4.1%

317,100 3.6%

413,690 2.9%

Imports (2003): €208,539,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 16.0%, road vehicles 12.6%, medicine and pharmaceuticals 10.1%, food 7.1%). Major import sources (2005-06): The Netherlands 23.0%; Germany 15.8%; France 12.9%;

Demography Population (2007): 10,597,000.

U.K. 7.6%; U.S. 4.5%.

Exports (2003): €226,196,000,000 (road vehicles 14.0%, machinery and appa-

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 899.0, persons per sq km 347.1.

ratus 13.4%, pharmaceuticals 10.0%, food 7.6%, organic chemicals 6.6%, dia-

Urban-rural (2005): urban 97.2%; rural 2.8%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.94%; female 51.06%.

monds 4.6%). Major export destinations (2005-06): France 17.8%; Germany

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 16.8%; 15-29, 18.1%; 30-44, 21.9%; 45-59, 20.8%; 60-74, 14.1%; 75-84, 6.5%; 85 and over, 1.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,762,000; (2020) 10,979,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Flemish 53.7%; Walloon (French) 31.6%; Italian 2.6%; French 2.0%; Arab 1.8%; German 1.5%; Berber 0.9%; other 5.9%.

Religious affiliation (2001): self-identified

2004

Roman

Catholic

46.7%;

Christian 2.6%; Muslim 3.9%; nonreligious/secular/other 46.8%. Major cities (2006): Brussels 1,024,4929; Antwerp 464,038; Ghent Charleroi 201,456; Li¢ge 187,432; Brugge 117,130.

other

233,925;

16.7%; The Netherlands 12.7%; U.K. 8.1%; Italy 5.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 3,536 km; (2005) passenger-km 9,117,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 8,130,000,000. Roads (2004): total length

150,567 km (paved 7895). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 4,976,286; trucks and buses 638,579. Air transport (2005)16: passenger-km 4,918,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 705,130,000.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 11.2 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 73.1%; outside of marriage 26.9%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.8 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.72. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 4.1/2.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 76.7 years; female 82.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases 359.6, of which ischemic heart disease 145.5, cerebrovascular disease 89.7;

malignant neoplasms (cancers) 275.3.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: €149,218,000,000 (social security contributions 28.2%, personal income tax 24.396, taxes on goods and services 23.096). Expenditures: €149,504,000,000 (social insurance benefits 46.3%, of which health 12.6%; wages

24.1%; interest on debt 9.1%; capital expenditure 5.4%). Public debt (December 2006): U.S.$357,000,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugar beets 5,606,000, potatoes 2,654,000, wheat 1,768,000, chicory roots 648,100, corn (maize) 553,800, apples 325,000, barley 306,200, pears 211,700; livestock (number of live animals) 6,332,000 pigs, 2,695,000 cattle; roundwood 4,950,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 13%; fisheries production (2004) 27,775

(from aquaculture 4%). Mining and quarrying (2005): Belgian bluestone

1,200,000 cu m. Manufacturing (value added in €'000,000; 2005): chemicals and chemical products 8,903; base and fabricated metals 7,116; food/beverages/tobacco 6,046; transport equipment 3,331; electrical and optical equip-

ment 3,264; value of traded polished diamonds handled in Antwerp (2005) U.S.$15,900,000,00010. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr;

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

5,800

557

Telephones Cellular

2006

9,66018

92618

Landline

2006

4,719

452

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004 2004 2005 2005

3,627 1,70617 4,800 2,00518

351 16417 458 19118

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling through lower-secondary education 39%; upper secondary/higher vocational 33%; university 28%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6—11) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher

4,596 1,911 226

teachers

64,1259 112,487 26,454

students

teacher ratio

761,730?

11.919

795,590 298,387

7. 11.3

Health: physicians (2005) 42,176 (1 per 248 persons); hospital beds (2004) 70,865 (1 per 147 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 4.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,109 (vegetable products 63%, animal products 37%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 37,000 (army 67.0%, navy 6.9%, air force 17.296, medical service 4.996, other 4.096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.196; per capita expenditure U.S.$403.

2004-05) 82,665,000,000 ([2004] 85,643,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none

(8,244,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (252,000,00011); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 30,086,000 (17,694,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004)

negligible (21,300,000,000).

Household income and expenditure. Avg. household size (2005) 2.4; average net income per household (2003) €24,455 (U.S.$27,602); sources of income (2003): wages and transfer payments 69.3%, property income 11.1%; expenditure (2004): housing 21.0%, food, beverages, tobacco 15.8%, transportation 13.4%, recreation and culture 8.6%.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 27.6%, in permanent crops 0.8%, in pasture 17.7%; overall forest area (2005) 22.0%. Population economically active (2004): total 4,797,00012; activity rate 46.196 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.3%; female [2002] 43.0%; unemployed

[2006] 8.1%).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Excludes children of the monarch serving ex officio from age 18. ?Belgium has a complex division of responsibilities between 3 administrative regions and 3 linguistic communities. *Officially, Brussels Capital Region. ^Dual capital of Flemish region and community. “Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. The German community (within Wallonia [2005 pop. est. 71,000; capital at Eupen]) lacks expression as an administrative region. 7Capital of Walloon Region. ®Capital of French Community. Pop. of capital region; city proper pop. is 145,717. !°Combined import/export value; excludes December. Includes Luxembourg. !2Includes early retirees and the temporarily unemployed. !?Taxes less subsidies. “Including 380,300 unemployed. !5Imports cif; exports f.o.b. SSN Brussels, European Air Transport, and TNT Airways, S.A. only. "Circulation. 13Subscribers. 192004.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bank of Belgium http://www.bnb.be/sg/index.htm * Statistics Belgium http://www.statbel.fgov.be

526

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,003,000,000 (U.S.$3,560 per capita).

Belize

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Belize. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [121]; House of Representatives [29?]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Belmopan. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Belize dollar (BZ$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2005

Agriculture, fishing, forestry

Mining Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate, insurance Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

1 US.$ = BZ$2.00; 1 £ = BZ$4.02.

Districts Belize Cayo Corozal Orange Walk Stann Creek Toledo

Capitals

sq mi

Belize City San Ignacio/Santa Elena Corozal Orange Walk Dangriga Punta Gorda

TOTAL

population 2005 estimate

sq km

1,663

4,307

87,000

2,006 718 1,790 986 1,704

5,196 1,860 4,636 2,554 4,413

66,800 35,500 44,900 30,000 27,600

8,8673

22,9653, 4

labour force

% of labour force

269,600

12.2

19,250

17.4

10,300

0.5

211

0.2

173,100 82,800

7.8 3.7

9,575 6,884

8.6 6.2

70,900

3.2

934

0.8

246,700 433,200 348,500 229,600

11.2 19.6 15.8 10.4

6,365 25,668 3,708 6,771

5 23.2 3.3 6.1

6.6 9.08 100.0

18,523 12,8979 110,786

16.7 11.69 100.04

146,000 199,2008 2,209,900

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) BZ$'000,000 % of total

291,800

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—405.2 26.5%

425.7 28.4%

-376.5 23.3%

—413.7 24.7%

—349.1 22.2%

—475.7 27.2%

Imports (2005): BZ$1,226,200,000 (mineral fuels and electricity 19.2%; machinery and transport equipment 16.3%; direct imports to commercial free zone 15.0%; food and live animals 9.8%; chemicals and chemical products 7.2%). Major import sources: U.S. c. 39%; Central American countries c. 1996;

Demography Population (2007): 306,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 34.5, persons per sq km 13.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 50.296; rural 49.896. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.5196; female 49.4996.

Mexico c. 9%; EU c. 7%; Caricom c. 2%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 41.0%; 15-29, 27.7%; 30-44, 17.4%; 45-59, 8.1%; 60-74, 4.2%; 75-84, 1.2%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 327,000; (2020) 394,000. Doubling time: 29 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo (Spanish-Indian) 48.7%; Creole (predominantly black) 24.9%; Mayan Indian 10.6%; Garifuna (black-Carib Indian) 6.1%; white 4.3%; East Indian 3.0%; other or not stated 2.4%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman

% of total value

Public debt (external, outstanding; September 2006): U.S.$929,600,000. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 208; remittances (2006) 96; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 34; official development assistance (2005) 2319, Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 42; remittances (2005) 20.

Area and population area

in value BZ$'000

Catholic 49.6%; Protestant 31.8%, of

which Pentecostal 7.4%, Anglican 5.3%, Seventh-day Adventist 5.2%, Mennonite 4.1%; other Christian 1.9%; nonreligious 9.4%; other 7.3%.

Major cities (2005): Belize City 60,800; San Ignacio/Santa Elena 16,800; Orange Walk 15,300; Belmopan 13,500; Dangriga 10,800.

Exports (2005): BZ$643,800,000 (domestic exports 60.4%, of which seafood products [significantly shrimp] 14.1%, citrus [mostly oranges] concentrate 11.9%, raw sugar 10.8%, bananas 7.9%, garments 5.3%; reexports [principally to Mexico] 39.6%). Major export destinations12: U.S. c. 52%; U.K. c. 22%; other EU c. 7%; Caricom c. 11%; Mexico c. 4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 1,854 mi, 2,984 km (paved 14%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 36,952; trucks and buses 7,380. Air transport

(2001)13: passenger

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

52

190

2006 2006

11815 34

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002 2005 2006 2006

35 014 34 5.615

132 014 124 1915

Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 36.6%; primary education 40.9%; secondary 11.7%; postsecondary/advanced vocational 6.4%; university 3.8%; other/unknown 0.6%. Literacy (2001): total population age 14 and over literate 93.4%; males 93.6%; females 93.3%.

Budget (2006-07). Revenue: BZ$598,048,000 (tax revenue 85.9%, of which

Education (2003-04)

on income and profits 22.6%; other revenue 14.1%). Expenditures: BZ$667,943,000 (current expenditure 84.1%; capital expenditure 15.9%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane (2006) 1,188,000, oranges 213,400, bananas (2006) 69,600, grapefruit and pomelos 56,000, plantain 36,900, corn (maize) 32,000, papayas

43015 137

units number

Education and health

National economy taxes on goods and services 33.8%, taxes on international trade 28.5%, taxes

departures

240,900; cargo loaded 186 metric tons, cargo unloaded 1,272 metric tons.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 29.3 (world avg. 20.3); (1997) within marriage 40.3%; outside of marriage 59.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 23.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.68. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2003): 6.3/0.6. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 66.5 years; female 70.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001): diseases of the circulatory system 115.8; accidents 64.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 60.6; diseases of the respiratory system 47.0; violence and suicide 28.4.

arrivals 256,564, passenger

Primary (age 5-12) Secondary (age 13-16) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

275

2,618

62,074

23.7

43 sem

1,074 97

15,344 722

14.3 7.4

27,700; livestock (number of live animals) 57,800 cattle, 1,600,000 chickens;

Health (2004): physicians 221 (1 per 1,279 persons); hospital beds 650 (1 per 435 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 25.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,921 (vegetable products 80%, animal products 2096); 16196 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

centrate, flour, sugar, and beer) 69.2; textiles, clothing, and footwear 7.2; other

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006)16: 1,050 (army 10096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 1.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$55.

roundwood 187,600 cu m, of which fuelwood 67%; fisheries production (2004) 14,335 (from aquaculture 80%). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone 571,000; sand and gravel 162,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$000,000; 2004): food products and beverages (significantly citrus con(incl. cigarettes) 11.5. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr;

2004) 169,000,000 (194,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels;

2006) 810,0005 (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (292,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.4; average annual income of employed head of household (1993) BZ$6,4506

(U.S.$3,2256); sources of income, n.a.; expenditure?: food, beverages, and tobacco 34.7%, transportation 17.0%, housing and energy 16.8%, clothing and footwear 9.2%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.1%, in perma-

nent crops 1.4%, in pasture 2.2%; overall forest area (2005) 72.5%. Population economically active (2005): total 110,786; activity rate of total population 38.2% (participation rates: ages 14 and over 59.4%; female 36.7%; unemployed 11.0%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

101.2

103.4

106.1

109.4

113.3

118.2

1AII seats nonelected. ?Excludes speaker of the House of Representatives, who may be elected by the House from outside its elected membership. *Includes offshore cays totaling 266 sq mi (689 sq km). ‘Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Crude petroleum production began in late 2005. Estimated figure for about 33,000 employed heads of household. "Weights of consumer price index published by central bank in 2006. Taxes less subsidies on products and less financial services indirectly measured. ?Includes 146 not adequately defined and 12,197 unemployed. Figure represents commitments. Imports are £.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. !2Domestic exports only. Belize international airport only. 14Circulation. Subscribers. 6Foreign forces (2006): British army 30.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Belize http://www.centralbank.org.bz

* Statistical Institute of Belize http://statisticsbelize.org.bz

Nations of the World

(kW-hr; 2004) 81,000,000 (659,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum

Benin

(barrels; 2004) 137,000 (negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (737,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2002): total 2,830,900; activity rate of tota population 41.4% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [1997] 84.3%; female [1998 50.8%; unemployed in Cotonou [April 2003] 6.8%).

Official name: République du Bénin (Republic of Benin). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [83]). Head of state and government: President, assisted by Prime Minister!. Capital?: Porto-Novo. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Price index (2000 = 100) Consumer price index

Area and population

Alibori Atakora

Atlantique Borgou Collines Donga

Kouffo Littoral Mono

Ouémé Plateau Zou TOTAL

area

Capitals

2006 estimate

sq km

Kandi

9,916

25,683

619,900

Natitingou

7,899

20,459

634,600

1,248

3,233

982,300

9,772 5,236 4,128

25,310 13,561 10,691

861,900 625,700 400,200

928

2,404

621,800

31 539

79 1,396

719,900 403,000

2,835 1,865 5,106 112,622

836,400 461,700 673,500 7,840,900

Parakou Savalou Djougou

Dogbo Cotonou Lokossa

Porto-Novo Sakété Abomey

1,095 720 1,971 43,4844

96.0

2001 104.0

2002 106.6

2003 108.2

2004 109.1

2005 115.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2002) 5.6; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1996)10: food and nonalcoholic beverages 38.2%, transportation 10.1%, expenditures in cafés and hotels 9.8%, housing and energy 9.5%, clothing and footwear 6.9%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 24.0%, in permanent crops 2.4%, in pasture 5.0%; overall forest area (2005) 21.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 106; remittances (2005) 63; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 38; official development assistance (2005) 349. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2004) 29; remittances (2005) 7.

population

sq mi

Ouidah

2000 100.0

1999

1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.433.

Departments

527

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF '000,000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

-88.1 13.6%

-131.5 19.4%

-181.0 20.5%

-161.5 20.4%

—144.5 19.4%

—154.6 20.5%

Imports (2005): CFAF 454,600,000,000 (food products 31.2%; petroleum products 14.7%; machinery and transport equipment 13.6%). Major import sources (2004): China c. 3296; France c. 1396; Thailand c. 796; Cóte d'Ivoire c. 5%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 300,000,000,000 (domestic exports 59.596, of which cotton 30.495; reexports 40.596). Major export destinations (2004): China c. 30%;

Demography Population (2007): 8,079,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 185.8, persons per sq km 71.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 38.8%; rural 61.2%. Sex distribution (2002): male 48.51%; female 51.49%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 44.5%; 15-29, 28.5%; 30-44, 15.6%; 45-59, 7.5%; 60-74, 3.3%; 75 and over, 0.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 8,836,000; (2020) 11,523,000. Doubling time: 26 years. Ethnic composition (2002)5: Fon 39.2%; Adjara 15.2%; Yoruba (Nago) 12.3%; Bariba 9.2%; Fulani 7.0%; Somba (Otomary) 6.1%; Yoa-Lokpa 4.0%; other 70%.

Religious affiliation (2002): Christian 42.8%, of which Roman Catholic 27.1%, Protestant 5.4%, indigenous Christian 5.3%; Muslim 24.4%; traditional beliefs 23.3%, of which voodoo 17.3%; nonreligious 6.5%; other 3.0%. Major cities (2004): Cotonou 818,100; Porto-Novo 234,300; Parakou 227,900;

Djougou 206,500; Abomey 126,800.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 38.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 26.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.20. Marriage rate per 1,000 population (2002): n.a.6 Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 51.9 years; female 54.2 years.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 422,100,000,000 (tax revenue 79.296; nontax revenue 11.796; grants 9.196). Expenditures: CFAF 455,300,000,000 (current expenditures 73.496, of which interest on public debt 1.5%; development expenditure 26.895; net lending —0.296). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,762,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$4,649,000,000 (U.S.$531 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

2002

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF ’000,000,000

value

force?, 8

force7, 8

1,324,000 39,400 253,100 2,800 70,300 95,600 815,400 2,800 205,300

46.8 14 8.9 0.1 25 3.4 28.8 0.1 72

22,200 2,830,900

0.8 100.0

751.4 53 184.6 28.4 92.9 173.9 382.4

32.6 0.2 8.0 1.2 4.0 TS 16.6

491.4

21.3

193.79 2,304.0

8.49 100.04

}

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 2,861,000, yams 2,084,000, corn (maize) 865,000, seed cotton 425,000, oil palm fruit 244,000, sorghum 169,000, tomatoes 143,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 140,000, pineapples 121,000, dry beans 105,000, okra 76,000; livestock (number of live animals) 1,800,000 cattle, 1,380,000 goats, 750,000 sheep, 322,000 pigs, 13,000,000 chickens; roundwood 6,393,188 cu m, of which fuel-

wood 95%; fisheries production (2004) 39,995 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining (2005): insignificant production of clay and gold. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 1999): food products 74; textiles 42; beverages 36; bricks, tiles, and cement 21. Energy production (consumption): electricity © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 359 mi, 578 km; (2002) passenger-km 62,194,000; (2002) metric ton-km cargo 88,832,000. Roads (2004): total length 11,800 mi, 19,000 km (paved 9.595). Vehicles (1996): passenger cars 37,772; trucks and buses 8,058. Air transport (2003): passengers carried 46,000; metric ton-km cargo 7,000,000.

Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

431

59

Cellular

2006

1,05612

12112

Landline

Vital statistics

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

India c. 19%; Ghana c. 6%; Niger c. 6%; Nigeria c. 4%; Indonesia c. 4%.

2006

7T

8.9

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

32 1611 700 0.112

42 2.211 80 0.0312

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 63.5%; primary education 18.7%; secondary 15.9%; postsecondary 1.9%. Literacy (2005): total percentage of population age 15 and over literate 43.2%; males literate 58.8%; females literate 28.4%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6—11) Secondary (age 12-18) Voc., teacher tr.14

Higher1s

4,68213 ae

2

teachers

students

teacher ratio

25,583 12,205

1,319,600 338,400

51.6 27.7

>

28,867

m

678

21,553

31.8

Health (2001): physicians 923 (1 per 7,183 persons); hospital beds 590 (1 per 11,238 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 79.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,437 (vegetable products 95%, animal products 5%); 135% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): 4,550 (army 94.5%, navy 2.2%, air force 3.3%). Military expenditure as percentage of GNP (2005): 1.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$10.

1Office of Prime Minister vacant from May 1998. 2Porto-Novo, the official capital established under the constitution, is the seat of the legislature, but the president and most government ministers reside in Cotonou. 3Formerly pegged to the French franc and since Jan. 1, 2002, to the euro at the rate of €1 = CFAF 655.96. 4Detail does not add

to total given because of rounding. ‘Data combine principal 5In 2002, 27% of all marriages were polygamous. 7Age 10 census. ?Import taxes and duties. !Weights of consumer Circulation of daily newspapers. !?Subscribers. 132001—02. for Benin's 2 universities in Cotonou and Parakou only.

and related ethnic groups. years and over. Based on price index components. 142002—03. 152003-04 data

Internet resources for further information: e Institut National de la Statistique et de l’ Analyse Economique http://www.insae-bj.org * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm

528

Britannica World Data Gross national income (at current market prices; 2005): U.S.$5,056,000,000

Bermuda

(U.S.$78,538 per capita).

Official name: Bermuda. Political status: overseas territory (United Kingdom) with two legislative houses (Senate [11];

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

House of Assembly [36]). Chief of state: British Monarch,

| Atlantic

:

represented by Governor. Head of government: Premier. Capital: Hamilton. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Bermuda dollar (Bd$); valuation (Sept. 5,

E.

Ocean

s

|

in value DNE fishing Construction Manufacturing

Services Other TOTAL

1 £ = Bd$2.01.

labour

% of labour

value

force?

force

39

0.8

331 80

88 1.6

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate International business Pub. admin., defense

2007) 1 U.S.$ = Bd$1.001;

% of total

Bd$'000,000

}

649

7

3,494 1,003

9.0 2.6

80

1.6

390

1.0

302 650 1,801 1,062 234

62 13.4 37.1 21.9 48

2,782 9,761 7,265 4,213 4,056

7.1 25.1 18.7 10.8 10.4

417 —1399 4,857

8.6 -2.99 100.05

5,334 — 38,947

13.7 — 100.05

sqmi

sq km

Hamilton

0.3

0.8

969

St. George

0.5

13

1,752

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005-06) 453; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 8,620. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (1997) 148; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 2%, in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) c. 2096.

2.0

54

7,307

Foreign trade

Area and population

.area

Municipalities

population. 2000 census

Parishes Devonshire Hamilton Paget Pembroke? St. George's? Sandys Smith's Southampton Warwick TOTAL

20 24 1.8 3.5 2.1 1.8 2.2 2.0 20.545

54 53 46 8.0 54 47 5.6 54 53.145

5,270 5,088 10,337 3,699 7,275 5,658 6,117 8,587 62,0595

Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 —668 86.5%

Bd$'000,000 % of total

2001 —671 87.0%

2002 —696 86.7%

2003 -781 88.2%

2004 -930 93.0%

2005 -939 94.9%

Imports (2002): Bd$746,000,000 (food, beverages, and tobacco 20.2%; machinery 16.5%; chemicals and chemical products 13.996; mineral fuels 7.896; trans-

Demography Population (2007): 64,900. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 3,166, persons per sq km 1,222. Urban-rural (2005): urban 100.096; rural, none. Sex distribution (2006): male 47.8196; female 52.1996. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 18.1%; 15-29, 17.6%; 30-44, 24.8%; 45-59,

32.7%: 60-74, 11.995; 75-84, 3.996; 85 and over, 1.0%.

Population projection: (2010) 65,000; (2020) 67,000. Ethnic composition (2000): black 50.4%; British expatriates 29.0%; mulatto 10.0%; U.S. white 6.0%; Portuguese 4.5%; other 0.1%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Protestant

64.3%,

of which

Anglican 22.6%,

Methodist 14.9%; Roman Catholic 14.9%; nonreligious 13.8%; other 6.0%;

unknown 1.0%. Major cities (2000): St. George 1,752; Hamilton 969.

transport: passenger arrivals and departures (2005) c. 900,000; cargo loaded (2001) 909 metric tons, cargo unloaded (2001) 4.862 metric tons.

Medium

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2004): 13.1 (world avg. 21.1); (2002) within marriage 64.2%; outside of marriage 35.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2004): 7.2 (world avg. 8.8). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2004): 5.9 (world avg. 12.3). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.89. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 13.7/13.1. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 75.8 years; female 80.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 209; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 185; diabetes mellitus 51; diseases of the respiratory system 41; diseases of the nervous system 33.

National economy

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

68

1,077

2006 2006

6012 58

91612 889

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2002 2003 2005 2006

duties 27.1%; taxes on international companies 6.3%; stamp duties 6.1%;

taxes on land 5.4%; other 23.5%). Expenditures: Bd$809,000,000 (current expenditure 89.3%; development expenditure 10.7% ). Public debt (2004-05): U.S.$128,000,000. Production (value in Bd$’000 except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): vegetables 4,709, milk 1,926, eggs 343, fruits 334, flowers 228, honey 197; livestock (number of live animals) 900 horses, 600 cattle, 45,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a. fisheries production 379 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: crushed stone for local use. Manufacturing: industries include pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, electronics, fish processing, handicrafts,

and small boat building?. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kWhr; 2004) 661,000,000 (661,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none

(none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (198,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 2.3; average annual income per household Bd$106,233 (U.S.$106,233); sources of income: wages and salaries 65.1%, imputed income from owner occupancy 14.4%, self-employment 9.2%, net rental income 4.1%, other 7.2%; expen-

diture: housing 33.3%, household furnishings 13.8%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 13.7%, health and personal care 8.7%, transportation 8.0%, foreign travel 5.4%. Population economically active (2000): total 37,879; activity rate of total population 61.0% (participation rates: ages 16-64, 84.8%; female 48.3%; unemployed [2005] 2.1%). 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

102.9

105.3

108.6

112.5

116.0

119.6

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

34 179 42 2412

535 26811 646 36012

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of total population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 0.4%; primary education 7.0%; secondary 39.3%; postsecondary technical 25.7%; higher 26.8%; not stated 0.8%. Literacy (1997): total population age 15 and over literate, 98%. Education (2002-03)

Budget (2004-05). Revenue: Bd$782,500,000 (payroll taxes 31.696; customs

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2002): total length 140 mi, 225 km (paved 10096)10, Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 21,978; trucks and buses 4,873. Air

Communications

Vital statistics

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

port equipment 6.096). Major import sources: United States 7696; Canada 596; United Kingdom 596; Caribbean countries (mostly Netherlands Antilles) 396. Exports (2002): Bd$57,000,000 (nearly all reexports [including sales of fuel to aircraft and ships and pharmaceuticals]; diamond market was established in 1990s). Major export destinations: mostly United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and Spain.

Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-17) Higher'3

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

ius Ho

548 651 is

4,910 4,565 Em

9.0 7.0 is

š

Health: physicians (2005) 135 (1 per 482 persons); hospital beds (2005-06) 351 (1 per 186 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2001—03) 2.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,083 (vegetable products 8196, animal products 1996).

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): 530; part-time defense force assists police and is drawn from Bermudian conscripts.

1The Bermuda dollar is at par with the U.S. dollar. ?ZExcludes the area and population of the city of Hamilton. "Excludes the area and population of the town of St. George. ‘Includes 0.4 sq mi (1.1 sq km) of uninhabited islands. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Excludes 8,335 short-term visitors, 901 institutionalized persons, and 39 transients. 7The economy of Bermuda is overwhelmingly based on service industries such as tourism, insurance companies, offshore financial centres, e-commerce

companies, and ship repair facilities. SEmployed only. Taxes less imputed bank service charges. }0Excludes 138 mi (222 km) of paved private roads. Circulation. Subscribers. 13Many students attend universities abroad because Bermuda does not have a degreeconferring university, business school, or law school.

Internet resources for further information: * Bermuda Government, Department of Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.bm * Bermuda Online: Economy http://bermuda-online.org/economy.htm

Nations of the World

Bhutan

Price index (2000 = 100) Consumer price index

Haa

Haa

Lhuntse

Autsho

Mongar (Monggar) Paro Pema Gatshel Punakha

Mongar (Monggar) Bondey Yalang Punakha

Agriculture, forestry Mining Manufacturing Construction Trade, restaurants Public utilities Transportation and communications Finance and real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

population

sq mi^

sq km^

1,008 667 519 1,616

2,611 1,728 1,344 4,185

2005 census 16,116 74,387 18,222 3,116

637

1,651

11,648

1,067

2,764

15,395

726

1,881

37,069

474 193 356

1,229 499 922

36,433 13,864 17,715

Samdrup Jongkhar

Samdrup Jongkhar

860

2,227

39,961

Samtse

Samtse

578

1,497

60,100

Sarpang Thimphu Trashigang Trashiyangtse

Gelaphu Thimphu Rangjung Trashiyangtse

845 712 845 534

2,188 1,843 2,188 1,382

41,549 98,676 51,134 17,740

Trongsa

Trongsa

667

1,728

13,419

Tsirang

Damphu

237

614

18,667

1,497

3,878

31,135

786

2,035

14,824

38,394

18,636 37,443 672,4255

Wangdue

Phodrang

Zhemgang unallocated population TOTAL

Bajo

Panbang

2003 108.2

2004 113.2

2004

area

Dekiling Phuentsholing Dagana Gasa

2002 106.0

2005 119.1

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population

Bumthang Chhukha Dagana Gasa

96.1

2001 103.4

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$921,000,000 (U.S.$1,420 per capita).

1US.$ = Nu 40.98; 1 £ = Nu 82.38.

Principal towns

2000 100.0

1999

Official name: Druk-Yul (Kingdom of Bhutan). Form of government: monarchy! with one legislative house (National Assembly [1502]). Chief of state: Monarch. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Thimphu. Official language: Dzongkha (a Tibetan dialect). Official religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Monetary unit: ngultrum3 (Nu); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Districts

529

2005

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Nu ’000,000

value

force

force

8,175

24.7

108,617

42.3

432 2,442 6,283 2,670 2,863

1.3 7.4 19.0 8.1 8.6

2,839 4,882 30,887 10,764 4,116

14 1.9 12.0 4.2 1.6

3,445 1,858 3,597

10.4 56 10.9

8,057 2,287 17,494

3.1 0.9 6.8

362 977 33,104

1.1 2.9 100.0

10,353 56,7047 257,000

4.0 22.17 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.2%, in permanent crops 0.4%, in pasture 8.8%; overall forest area (2005) 68.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005-06) 21; remittances (2005) 1.5; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 38; official development assistance (2005) 90. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) 2000-01 —4,059 30.5%

Nu '000,000 % of total

2001-02 —4,796 32.4%

2002-03 —4,481 29.3%

2003-04 4,766 25.0%

2004-05 -10,816 39.5%

2005-06 -5,103 16.0%

Imports (2005): Nu 17,035,000,000 (machinery, transport equipment, and base and fabricated metals 45.596, mineral fuels 16.196; food and beverages 14.996,

textiles 4.296). Major import sources: India 75.1%; Japan 3.8%; Singapore 2.6%; Thailand 1.6%; South Korea 1.5%.

Exports (2005): Nu 11,386,000,000 (electricity 30.2%, copper wire and cable 9.6%, calcium carbide 6.2%, ferroalloys 6.0%, cement 5.4%, polyester yarn 4.2%).Major export destinations: India 87.6%; Hong Kong 6.0%; Bangladesh 4.9%.

Demography Population (2007): 658,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 44.4, persons per sq km 17.1.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 30.9%; rural 69.1%. Sex distribution (2005): male 54.20%; female 45.80%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 33.2%; 15-29, 32.1%; 30-44, 17.6%; 45-59, 10.4%; 60-74, 5.5%; 75-84, 1.1%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 684,000; (2020) 780,000. Doubling time: 33 years. Ethnic composition (2005): Bhutia (Ngalops) c. 50%; Nepalese (Gurung) c. 35%; Sharchops c. 15%. Religious affiliation (2005): Buddhist c. 74%; Hindu c. 25%; Christian c. 1%. Major towns (2001): Thimphu Gelaphu 6,384; Samtse 3,703.

50,510; Phuentsholing

13,292; Gedu

7,826;

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 13.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.55. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 62.9 years; female 66.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritional conditions 452; diseases of the circulatory system 227; malignant neoplasms 59; diseases of the respiratory system 48.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: Nu 13,534,000,000 (grants 47.2%, tax revenue 27.8%, nontax revenue 22.5%, other 2.5%). Expenditures: Nu 16,151,000,000

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 2,581 mi, 4,153 km (paved 59%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 10,574; trucks and buses 3,852. Air transport

5,700,000.

(2002): passenger-km

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

61,000,000;

metric

ton-km

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

25

33

2006 2006

8210 32

12810 49

cargo units

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005 2006 2006 2006

13 os 30 ss

16 09 47 sud

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2005): total population age 6 and over literate 59.5%; males literate 69.1%; females literate 48.7%. Education (2004)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-16) Higher"?

]

m 3

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2.418

91,390

37.9

s 113

29,194 1,045

Ee 9.2

(capital expenditures 55.1%, current expenditures 44.9%). Public debt (external, outstanding; September 2006): U.S.$691,100,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Health (2003): physicians 140 (1 per 5,245 persons); hospital beds 1,093 (1 per 672 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 48.8. Food: daily per capita caloric intake, n.a.

corn (maize) 70,000, potatoes 47,000, rice 45,000, oranges 36,000, nutmeg, mace, and cardamom 5,800, green peppers and chilies 4,443, mustard seed 3,600, ginger 3,100; livestock (number of live animals) 372,000 cattle, 41,000 pigs, 28,000 horses; roundwood 4,679,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 97%; fish-

Military Total active duty personnel (2002): about 6,000 (army 10096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): c. 1.096; per capita expenditure U.S.$11.

housing c. 2796, clothing c. 1096, education 2.8596, health care 1.396.

1Constitution commissioned by the monarch to become effective in 2008. ?Includes 34 nonelective seats occupied by representatives of the King and religious groups. ?Indian currency is also accepted legal tender; the ngultrum is at par with the Indian rupee. ^Estimated district areas are derived from district area percentages of total national area as published in the Statistical Yearbook of Bhutan (2003). *Includes 634,972. residents and 37,453 temporary residents. ‘Bhutan reports household expenditure in lieu of income data; in 2003 average annual per-capita household expenditure was Nu 20,737 (U.S.$425). 7Includes 48,734 in ill-defined activities and 7,970 unemployed. *Imports ci.f.; exports f.0.b. ?Circulation. !°Subscribers. National Institute of Education, Royal Institute of Management, and Sherubtse Degree College only.

eries production (2004) 300 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 536,000; dolomite 388,700; gypsum 150,600; ferrosilicon 20,000. Manufacturing (value of sales in Nu '000,000; 2005): chemical products 857; cement 807; ferroalloys 651; wood board products 158. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 2,355,000,000 (739,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2005) 85,300 ([2004] 65,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (51,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 4.6; income per household: n.a.6; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2003): food 35.696,

Population economically active (2005): total 257,000; activity rate of total population 38.296 (participation rates: ages 15 and over, n.a.; female, n.a.; officially unemployed 3.196).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Internet resources for further information: * Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan http://www.rma.org.bt

530

Britannica World Data

Bolivia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: Repüblica de Bolivia (Republic of Bolivia). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Chamber of Senators [27]; Chamber of Deputies [130]). Head of state and government: President. Capitals: La Paz (administrative); Sucre (judicial). Official languages: Spanish; Aymara; Quechua. Official religion: Roman Catholicism. Monetary unit: boliviano (Bs); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2002

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Bs ’000,0004

value

forces

forces

1,609,700

Agriculture Mining

3,585 941

14.5 3.8

Crude petroleum, nat. gas Manufacturing Construction

1,523 4,164 664

6.1 16.8 27

Public utilities

498

42.1

38,200 435,900 206,500

2.0

1.0 11.4 5.4

7,700

0.2

Transp. and commun.

2,745

11.1

175,900

4.6

Trade, hotels

2,829

11.4

722,600

18.9

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

2,933 2,249

11.8 9.1

95,600 68,800

25 1.8

1,125 1,5347 24,7928

45 6.27 100.0

462,600 — 3,823,500

12.1 — 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.3; annual income per household (1999): Bs 16,980 (U.S.$2,920); expenditure (2000): food 28.6%, transportation and communications 23.1%, rent and energy

1 U.S.$ - Bs 7.76; 1 £ - Bs 15.60.

10.3%, expenditures in cafés and hotels 9.5%, recreation and culture 7.1%, Area and population Departments Beni Chuquisaca Cochabamba

area

La Paz

2001 census

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Trinidad

82,458

213,564

362,521

19,893 21,479

51,524 55,631

531,522 1,455,711

Sucre Cochabamba

La Paz

51,732

133,985

2,350,466

Oruro

Oruro

20,690

53,588

391,870

Pando Potosí

Cobija Potosí

24,644 45,644

63,827 118,218

52,525 709,013

143,098

370,621

2,029,471

14,526 424,164

37,623 1,098,581

391,226 8,274,325

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz

Tarija TOTAL

Tarija

household furnishings 6.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 239; remittances (2006) 1,030; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 274; official development assistance (2005) 5479. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 186; remittances (2005) 66. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.8%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 31.2%; overall forest area (2005) 54.2%.

population

Foreign trade!° Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 9,525,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 22.5, persons per sq km 8.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 64.2%; rural 35.8%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.85%; female 50.15%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 38.1%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 17.6%; 45-59, 10.4%; 60-74, 5.3%; 75-84, 1.3%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,031,000; (2020) 11,638,000. Doubling time: 45 years. Ethnic composition (2001): Amerindian c. 62%, of which Quechua c. 31%,

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-422.9 19.3%

476.2 15.5%

—18.1 0.6%

4366.6 8.9%

3467.1 9.1%

+1,044.4 15.6%

Imports (2005): U.S.$2,343,300,000 (machinery and apparatus 20.1%; chemicals and chemical products 14.6%; base and fabricated metals 11.0%; min-

eral products 10.9%; transport equipment 10.1%). Major import sources: Brazil 21.9%; Argentina 16.7%; U.S. 13.8%; Chile 6.9%; Peru 6.5%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$2,810,400,000 (natural gas 35.0%; soybeans 13.3%; petroleum 12.7%; zine 7.1%; tin 4.5%; silver 2.8%). Major export destinations: Brazil 36.8%; U.S. 14.0%; Argentina 9.5%; Colombia 6.6%; Venezuela 5.8%; Japan 4.9%.

Aymara c. 25%; mestizo c. 28%; white c. 1096, of which German c. 396.

Religious affiliation (2001): Roman Catholic c. 78%; Protestant/independent Christian c. 16%; other Christian c. 3%, of which Mormon

1.8%; nonreli-

gious 2.5%; other 0.5%. Major cities (2001): Santa Cruz 1,116,059 (urban agglomeration [2005] 1,320,000); La Paz 789,585 (urban agglomeration [2005] 1,527,000); El Alto 647,3501; Cochabamba 516,683; Oruro 201,230; Sucre 193,873.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 23.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.85. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 63.2 years; female 68.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (20007: circulatory system disneoplasms (cancers) 73.5.

other tax income 49.596; other 15.196). Expenditures: Bs 26,876,500,000 (current expenditure 65.396; capital expenditure 34.796). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$4,664,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 5,112,000, soybeans 1,689,000, corn (maize) 816,700, potatoes 761,900, bananas 646,300, rice 479,200, cassava 370,500, sorghum 245,600, sunflower seeds 170,000, seed cotton 80,000, chestnuts 34,670, coffee 24,9803; livestock (number of live animals) 8,550,000 sheep, 6,822,200 cattle, 2,984,000 pigs, (2004) 1,900,000 Hamas and alpacas, 1,501,000 goats, 717,000 asses, 323,300 horses; roundwood 3,061,337 cu m, of which fuelwood 74%; fisheries

production (2004) 7,196 (from aquaculture 6%).Mining and quarrying (meta. 2005):

zinc

157,019;

tin

18,694;

silver

420;

gold

8,906

kg.

Manufacturing (value added in Bs '000,000; 20044: food products 1,545; beverages and tobacco products 581; petroleum products 497; textiles, clothing, and leather products 420; bricks, cement, and ceramics 314. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 4,778,000,000 ([2004 4,547,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 15,300,000 (10,700,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,618,000 (1,454,000);

natural gas (cu m; 2004) 9,544,000,000 (1,732,000,000).

Population economically active (2000): total 3,823,937; activity rate of tota population 46.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 71.8%; female 44.6%; unemployed [2006] 8% in urban areas; underemployment widespread). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index*

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.6 106.5

102.5 111.7

106.0

110.7 koi

116.6 bos

121.6 s

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$10,163,000,000 (U.S.$1,087 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Communications

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

1,210

134

Cellular

2006

2,69812

28912

Internet users

2006

667

71

Broadband

Medium

Landline

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2004 2004 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

210 139!! 580 1112

23 1611 62 1.212

diseases 122.6; external causes 109.7; malignant

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: Bs 30,071,900,000 (taxes on hydrocarbons 35.496;

content;

(1997) passenRoads (2004): passenger cars passenger-km

1,704,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 24,348,000.

Vital statistics

eases 370.3; communicable

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 2,187 mi, 3,519 km; ger-km 224,900,000; (1997) metric ton-km cargo 838,900,000. total length 38,823 mi, 62,479 km (paved 7%). Vehicles (2004): 171,642; trucks and buses 173,864. Air transport (2003):

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 19 and over having: no formal schooling 14.6%; some to complete primary education 44.9%; some to complete secondary 24.8%; some to complete higher 15.5%; not specified 0.2%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 87.2%; males literate 93.1%; females literate 81.6%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher

ioc 1213

teachers

students

teacher ratio

65,254

1,544,430

23.7

40,983 16,262

996,577 311,015

24.3 19.1

Health: physicians (2002) 2,987 (1 per 2,827 persons); hospital beds (2005) 9,886 (1 per 954 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 51.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,128 (vegetable products 81%, animal products 19%); 118% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 33,000 (army 75.896, navy 15.196, air force 9.196). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.696; per capita expenditure U.S.$16. 1Within La Paz urban agglomeration. ?Based on a study of 10,744 deaths in the nine departmental capitals. Bolivia was the third largest producer of coca in the world in 2005. 4In 1990 prices. >Private sector only. Population 10 years of age and over. 7Import duties and indirect taxes less imputed bank service charges. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Figure represents commitments. !°Imports c.i.f; exports f.o.b. Circulation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers. 152000.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estadistica http://www.ine.gov.bo * Banco Central de Bolivia http://www.bcb.gov.bo/sitio/introduccion, f.html

Nations of the World

Bosnia and Herzegovina

duction (2004) 8,394 (from aquaculture 7696). Mining (2004): bauxite 480,000; lime 81,000; iron ore (metal content) 64,000; barite (concentrate) 2,000. Manufacturing (value of exports in KM '000,000; 2003): base metals and fabricated metal products 498.3; wood and wood products 398.9; machinery and apparatus 286.1; textiles, wearing apparel, and footwear 228.0. Energy pro-

Official name: Bosna i Hercegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Form of government: emerging republic with bicameral legislature (House of Peoples [151]; House of Representatives [42]). Chiefs of state: nominally a tripartite presidency. International authority: ?. Head of government: Prime Minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers). Capital: Sarajevo. Official languages: Bosnian; Croatian; Serbian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: convertible marka (KM3. 4); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

duction (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 12,599,000,000 (10,517,000,-

000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 8,578,000 (8,953,000); crude petroleum, none

(none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (1,088,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (366,000,000). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$2,560,000,000. Population economically active (2006): total 1,177,000; activity rate of tota population 30.696 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 51.396; female c. 3696;

unemployed 31.196).

Price index (2000 = 100) Retail price index

Area and population

„aia

population:

sq km

2005 estimate

aea Autonomous regions Cantons

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

(FBH) Bosnia-Podrinje Central Bosnia Herzegovina-Neretva Posavina Sarajevo Tuzla-Podrinje

Una-Sava

Western Western

26,110 505 3,189 4,401 325 1,277 2,649 4,125

2,328,434 35,214 258,177 224,700 44,548 403,028 502,862 292,197

2000 100.0

1999

1 U.S.$ - KM 144; 1 £ - KM 2.89.

Autonomous regions Cantons

531

sq km

Bosnia Herzegovina

Zenica-Doboj Republika Srpska (RS)

84,157 81,652

3,343

401,899

24,594

1,480,000

493

44.000 y

12 51,209

TOTAL

2005 estimate

4,934 1,362

District Brčko WATER

population

3,852,0005

Demography Population (2007): 3,855,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 195.0, persons per sq km 75.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 45.7%; rural 54.3%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.63%; female 51.37%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 17.6%; 15-29, 21.6%; 30-44, 22.8%; 45-59, 18.9%; 60-74, 15.5%; 75-84, 3.3%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 3,871,000; (2020) 3,764,000. Ethnic composition (1999): Bosniac 44.0%; Serb 31.0%; Croat 17.0%; other 8.0%.

Religious affiliation (2002): Sunni Muslim c. 4096; Serbian Orthodox c. 3195; Roman Catholic c. 1596; Protestant c. 496; nonreligious/other c. 1096.

Major cities (2005): Sarajevo 380,000 (urban agglomeration [2004] 602,500); Banja Luka 165,100; Zenica 84,300; Tuzla 84,100; Mostar 63,500.

99.0

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.0 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 88.896; outside of marriage 11.296. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 0.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.19. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.6/0.5. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 716 years; female 776 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 466.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 162.8; endocrine and metabolic disorders 40.9; diseases of the respiratory system 32.3; accidents, murder, and suicide 30.6.

2002 95.8

2003 96.0

2004 95.8

2005 98.1

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.6; income per household: n.a.; sources of income (1990): wages 53.2%, transfers 18.2%, self-employment 12.0%, other 16.6%; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 565; remittances (2005) 1,844; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 334; official development assistance (2005) 38410. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 123; remittances (2005) 26. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 19.6%, in permanent crops 1.9%, in pasture 20.4%; overall forest area (2005) 43.1%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) KM ’000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—4,572 51.2%

—5,076 52.9%

—5,958 58.8%

—5,996 56.3%

—6,487 53.5%

-7,457 51.3%

Imports (2005): KM 10,990,000,000 (food products 18.0%, machinery and apparatus 16.2%, mineral fuels 14.5%, base metals and fabricated metal products 9.7%). Major import sources: Croatia 16.1%; Germany 12.1%; Serbia and Montenegro 10.0%; Italy 8.7%; Slovenia 6.0%. Exports (2005): KM 3,533,000,000 (base metals and fabricated metal products 26.4%, mineral fuels 14.2%, wood products 10.7%, machinery and apparatus 9.2%). Major export destinations: Croatia 21.7%; Serbia and Montenegro 16.5%; Italy 14.0%; Slovenia 10.3%; Germany 9.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 1,021 km; passenger-km (2005) 51,396,000; metric ton-km cargo (2005) 1,159,000,000. Roads (2005): total length 22,419 km (paved [2001] 64%). Vehicles (1996): passenger cars 96,182; trucks and buses 10,919. Air transport (2001): passenger-km 44,000,000; metric ton-km

(2003) 1,000,000.

Communications

Vital statistics

2001 98.4

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2002

950

248

Cellular Landline

2006 2006

1,88812 989

48312 253

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

ae 2004

EM 10611

2006 2006

950 4012

ee 2811 243 3.612

Education and health Educational attainment (2004), Percentage of population age 18 and over having: no formal schooling 8.0%; some to complete primary education 31.9%; lower secondary 24.4%; upper secondary 26.6%; higher 4.9%; advanced 4.2%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 94.6%; males literate 98.4%; females literate 91.1%.

National economy Budget (2004)7. Revenue: KM 6,191,000,000 (indirect taxes 42.1%, social security contributions 30.1%, taxes on trade 8.1%, other 19.7%). Expenditures: KM 6,601,000,000 (current expenditures 87.3%; development expenditures

12.396).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$11,566,000,000 (U.S.$2,946 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

1999

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

KM ’000,000

value

force

force

Agriculture, forestry

Mining

1,275

9.4

278

24

Manufacturing

1,364

10.1

Construction Public utilities

523 813

3.9 6.0

1,212 1,911 795 1,399

9.0 14.2 5.9 10.4

1,534 2,3938 13,497

11.4 17.78 100.05

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

|

21,000

2.0

224,000

21.6

36,000 45,000 91,000 42,000 73,000 96,000 409,0009 1,037,000

3.5 4.3 8.8 4. 7.0 9.3 39.49 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): corn (maize) 1,004,000, potatoes 458,600, wheat 248,300, plums and sloes 95,971, cabbages 86,729, apples 52,181, tobacco 4,421; livestock (number of live animals) 902,700 sheep, 653,300 pigs, 459,800 cattle, in addition, 259,600 beehives; roundwood 3,806,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 36%; fisheries pro-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-14) Secondary (age 15-18) Higher"?

teachers

students

teacher ratio

1,862 301

20,874 10,792

363,072 169,497

17.4 15.7

65

1,012

53,985

53.3

Health: physicians (2004) 5,004 (1 per 769 persons); hospital beds (2003) 11,981 (1 per 322 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 6.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,068 (vegetable products 87%, animal products 13%); 153% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel:\4, 15, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$46. 1All seats are nonelective. 2High Representative of the international community per the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement/EU Special Representative. ?T'he KM is pegged to the euro. ^The euro also circulates as semiofficial legal tender. “Detail does not add to total given because of gross rounding. ^Rough estimate. "Combined total for the separately constructed budgets of the FBH, RS, and Bréko District. 8Taxes on products and imports less subsidies and imputed bank service charges. "Unemployed. !°Figure represents commitments. 4Circulation. Subscribers. 13FBH only. 4The FBH and RS had no combined military from 1995 through the end of 2005. Establishment of a 12,000-person combined military by late 2007 was formally planned. 5EU-sponsored (EUFOR) peacekeeping troops (November 2007) 2,450.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina http://www.bhas.ba * Central bank http://www.cbbh.ba/en/index.html

532

Britannica World Data

Botswana

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004—05

Official name: Republic of Botswana. Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative body! (National Assembly [632]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Gaborone. Official language: English3. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: pula (P); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ =P 6.29;1£ = P 12.65.

2001

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

P '000,000

value

force10

force10

Agriculture

994

22

55,300

9.9

14,767

33.3

13,099

23

Manufacturing Construction

1,787 2,356

40 5.3

38,968 58,572

7.0 10.5

3,837

0.7

Mining Public utilities

1,214

27

Transp. and commun.

1,566

3:5.

Trade, hotels

5,168

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

15,213

27

11.7

73,837

13.2

5,279 6,885

11.9 155

30,061 69,960

5.4 125

1,711 2,60011 44,327

3.9 5.911 100.04

86,299 113,60712 558,753

15.4 20.312 100.04

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$438,000,000.

North West

Maun

50,166

129,930

142,970

Household income and expenditure (2002-03). Average household size (2004) 4.3; average annual disposable income per household P 29,095 (U.S.$5,320), of which cash income P 25,519 (U.S.$4,670); expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 23.7%, transportation 15.6%, housing and energy 12.9%, alcoholic beverages and tobacco 9.6%, household furnishings 8.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 562; remittances (2005) 125; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 318; official development assistance (2005) 11713. Disbursements for (U.$.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 282; remittances (2005) 123; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 129.

South East Southern

Ramotswa Kanye

687 10,991

1,780 28,467

60,623 171,652

Foreign trade !4

— —

31 65

79 169

83,023 186,007

—

39

100

15,179

— —

16 23

42 60

29,689 49,849

Area and population area Districts

Capitals

Central

Ghanzi Kgalagadi Kgatleng Kweneng North East

population 2001 census

sq mi

sq km

Serowe

57,039

147,730

501,381

Ghanzi

45,525

117,910

33,170

41,290 3,073 13,857 1,977

106,940 7,960 35,890 5,120

42,049 73,507 230,335 49,399

Tsabong Mochudi Molepolole Masunga

Cities Francistown Gaborone

Balance of trade (current prices)

Towns Jwaneng

Lobatse Selebi-Pikwe

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

—

7

Sowa TOTAL

—

61 224,8484

17

159 582,3564

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

+597 12.5%

+509 12.3%

+588 14.3%

+891 17.3%

+878 14.3%

31,148 15.0%

Imports (2005): U.S.$3,247,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 16.3%; food, beverages, and tobacco 13.7%; mineral fuels 13.3%; transport equipment 12.596; chemical and rubber products 11.996). Major import sources: Customs Union of Southern Africa (CUSA) 85.1%; Europe 6.5%, of which U.K. 1.3%;

Townships Orapa

2000

9,151

2,879 1,680,863

Zimbabwe 1.5%; U.S. 1.2%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$4,395,000,000 (diamonds 75.1%; copper-nickel matte 10.3%; textiles 5.0%; meat products 1.796). Major export destinations: Europe

Demography Population (2007): 1,882,000.

77.0%, of which U.K. 75.7%; CUSA 9.0%; Zimbabwe 4.1%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 8.4, persons per sq km 3.2.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 53.6%; rural 46.4%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.12%; female 50.88%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 37.6%; 15-29, 32.8%; 30-44, 14.9%; 45-59, 9.6%; 60-74, 4.1%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,953,000; (2020) 2,165,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Tswana 66.8%; Kalanga 14.8%; Ndebele 1.7%; Herero 1.4%; San (Bushman) 1.3%; Afrikaner 1.3%; other 12.7%.

Religious affiliation (2005): independent Christian 41.7%; traditional beliefs 35.0%; Protestant 12.8%; Muslim 0.3%; Hindu 0.2%; other 10.0%. Major cities (2004): Gaborone 199,600; Francistown 89,100; Molepolole 58,600; Selebi-Pikwe 53,500; Maun 47,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 25.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 15.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.04. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 48.1 years; female 49.0 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 24.1%5 (world avg. 1.0%).

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2002): route length 552 mi, 888 km; (2001) passengerkm 106,000,000; (2001) metric ton-km cargo 747,000,000. Roads (2003): total length 15,679 mi, 25,233 km (paved 35%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 82,056; trucks and buses 74,387. Air transport (2002)15: passenger-km 96,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 300,000.

Communications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

78

44

Telephones Cellular

2006

98017

Landline

2006

137

55717 78

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2004 Internet users — 2005 Broadband

2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

86

49

gore 60

4516 34

1.617

—17

Education and health Educational attainment (1993). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 34.7%; primary education 44.1%; some secondary 19.8%; postsecondary 1.4%. Literacy (2005): total population over age 15 literate 81.4%; males literate 78.6%; females literate 84.1%.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: P 21,697,300,000 (tax revenue 88.2%, of which mineral royalties 50.2%, customs duties and excise tax 16.1%, general sales tax 8.9%; nontax revenue 10.8%, of which property income 2.6%; grants 1.096). Expenditures: P 20,122,200,000 (general government services including defense 27.7%, education 24.5%, economic services 15.4%, health 12.4%,

transfers 9.096). Population economically active (2001): total 587,8826; activity rate of total population 35.0966 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 57.6956; female 43.8965; unemployed [2004] more than 2096). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

Consumer price index 100.0 Monthly earnings index? — 100.0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

106.6 111.4

115.1 127.6

125.7 137.1

134.4 "

143.9 ""

163.57 s

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): roots and tubers 93,000, sorghum 32,000, pulses 17,500, corn (maize) 10,000, sunflower seeds 7,000; livestock (number of live animals) 3,100,000 cattle, 1,950,000 goats, 300,000 sheep; roundwood 765,750 cu m, of which fuelwood

8696; fisheries production (2004) 161 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): soda ash 279,085; nickel ore (metal content) 39,305; copper ore (metal content) 31,300; diamonds 31,890,000 carats?. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): beverages 50; motor vehicles (1997) 33; textiles 12; tanned and processed leather 2. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k W-hr; 2004) 891,000,000 (2,641,000,000); coal (metric tons;

2004) 916,000 (916,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (n.a.). Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.796, in permanent crops 0.01%, in pasture 45.2%; overall forest area (2005) 21.1%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$8,153,000,000 (U.S.$4,387 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2004)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6-13)

773

12,717

328,692

258

Secondary (age 14-18)

278

10,620

225,526

212

A

3,049

RA

15,720

19.7

Teacher training

Higher!?

618

1

796

Health (2006): physicians 526 (1 per 3,346 persons); hospital beds 3,911 (1 per 450 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 52.7. Food (2004): daily per capita caloric intake 2,084 (vegetable products 8296, animal products 1896); 11296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 9,000 (army 94.496, navy, none [landlocked], air force 5.6%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$177. 1In addition, the Ntlo ya Dikgosi (formerly known as the House of Chiefs), a 35-member body consisting of chiefs, subchiefs, and associated members, serves in an adviso-

ry capacity to the government. ?Includes 4 specially elected members and 2 ex officio members. ?Tswana is the national language. ^Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. *Statistically derived midpoint within range. Includes military and paramilitary. "Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. 8Citizens only. "About 7096 gem and neargem quality (Botswana is the world's leading producer of diamonds by value). 0Excludes military and paramilitary. ‘Import duties and indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. !2Includes 109,518 unemployed. /3Figure represents commitments. Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. Air Botswana only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !7Subscribers. 182003. !9University of Botswana only.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistical Office http://www.cso.gov.bw * Bank of Botswana http://www.bankofbotswana.bw

Nations of the World — 533

Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.30. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 68.1 years; female 75.8 years. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 6.3/1.3. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 151.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 72.7; diseases of the respi-

Brazil Official name: Repüblica Federativa do Brasil (Federative Republic of Brazil). Form of government: multiparty federal republic with 2 legislative houses (Federal Senate [81]; Chamber of Deputies [513]). Chief of state and government: President. Capital: Brasília. Official language: Portuguese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: real (R$; plural reais); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

ratory system 53.6; violence and suicide 32.5; accidents 31.0; diseases of the

digestive system 26.0; infectious and parasitic diseases 25.6. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 0.5% (world avg. 1.0%).

Social indicators Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling or less than one year of primary education 15.0%; 1 to 3 years of primary education 13.7%; complete primary/incomplete secondary 40.2%; complete secondary 18.8%; 1 to 3 years of higher education 3.8%; 4 years or more of higher education 8.0%; unknown 0.5%.

1 U.$.$ - R$1.95; 1 £ - R$3.93. Distribution of income (2003) Area and population

area

population sq km

2005 estimate

58,912 10,721 55,141

152,581 27,768 142,815

669,736 3,015,912 594,587

Manaus

606,468

1,570,746

3,232,330

Salvador Fortaleza Vitória Goiânia São Luís Cuiabá

218,029 57,462 17,791 131,308 128,179 348,788

564,693 148,826 46,078 340,087 331,983 903,358

13,815,334 8,097,276 3,408,365 5,619,917 6,103,327 2,803,274

Campo Grande Belo Horizonte

137,887 226,460

357,125 586,528

2,264,468 19,237,450

Pará

Belém

481,736

1,247,690

6,970,586

Paraíba

Jo&o Pessoa

21,792

56,440

3,595,886

Curitiba

76,956

199,315

10,261,856

Recife

37,958

98,312

8,413,593

97,116

251,529

3,006,885

16,871 20,385 108,784

43,696 52,797 281,749

15,383,407 3,003,087 10,845,087

Porto Velho Boa Vista

91,729 86,602

237,576 224,299

1,534,594 391,317

Florianópolis

36,813

95,346

5,866,568

95,834

248,209

40,442,795

8,459 107,190

21,910 277,621

1,967,791 1,305,728

States

Capitals

Acre Alagoas Amapá

Rio Branco Maceió Macapá

Amazonas

Bahia Ceará Espírito Santo Goiás Maranhão Mato Grosso Mato Grosso do Sul Minas Gerais

Paraná Pernambuco

Piauf

sq mi

Teresina

Rio de Janeiro Rio Grande do Norte Rio Grande do Sul

Rondónia Roraima Santa Catarina

S&o Paulo Sergipe Tocantins

Rio de Janeiro Natal Porto Alegre

S&o Paulo Aracaju Palmas

Federal District Distrito Federal

Brasília

2,240

TOTAL

3,287,6121.2

5,802

2,333,108

8,514,8771.2

184,184,264

percentage of national income by decile/quintile 1

2

0.8

1.8

Population (2007): 189,335,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 57.6, persons per sq km 22.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 82.895; rural 17.296. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.34%; female 50.66%.

7

—107—

8

— 184 —

9

10

(highest)

16.3

45.8

Rio de Janeiro only, 56; Sao Paulo only, 54.

Leisure. Favourite leisure activities include: playing soccer, dancing, rehearsing all year in neighbourhood samba groups for celebrations of Carnival, and competing in water sports, volleyball, and basketball. Material well-being (2003). Households possessing: television receiver 89.9%, of which urban 94.5%, rural 69.4%; refrigerator 86.7%, of which urban 91.7%, rural 60.0%; washing machine 34.0%, of which urban 38.1%, rural

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$1,041,609,000,000

(U.S.$5,502 per capita).

black/Amerindian 6.2%; Asian 0.5%; Amerindian 0.4%.

Religious affiliation (2005)3: Roman of God

Catholic 65.1%; Protestant 12.7%, of

9.2%; independent

Christian

10.7%,

of which

Universal Church of the Kingdom of God 2.2%; Spiritist (Kardecist) 1.3%;

Jehovah’s Witness 0.7%; African and syncretic religions 0.4%; Muslim 0.4%;

nonreligious/other 8.7%. Major cities^ and metropolitan areas (2005): S&o Paulo 10,277,500 (19,037,487); Rio de Janeiro 6,094,200 (11,570,524); Belo Horizonte 2,375,300 (5,391,284); Porto Alegre 1,386,900 (3,978,263); Recife 1,501,000 (3,599,181); Brasília 2,231,100 (3,454,961); Salvador 2,672,500 (3,350,523); Fortaleza 2,374,900

(3,349,826); Curitiba 1,757,900 (3,141,366); Campinas 1,028,300 (2,633,938): Belém 1,396,800 (2,042,530); Goiánia 1,193,100 (1,897,961); Manaus 1,634,100 (1,644,690); Santos 416,100 (1,637,565). Other principal cities^/metropolitan areas population 313,300/,612,885 942,300/ ,227,659

population Nova Iguaçu Teresina

830,900 747,000/788,773

Guarulhos

4,224 ,3005

São Bernardo

Natal Maceió Joinville

778,000/1,179,347 901,200/1,116,075 470,500/1 044,349

do Campo 774,8005 Campo Grande — 741,100/749,768 Londrina 473,300/708,523

Joáo Pessoa

660,800/999,180

São Gonçalo Florianópolis Duque de Caxias

6

Quality of working life. Proportion of employed population receiving minimum wage (2002): 53.596. Number and percentage of children (age 5-17) working: 5,400,000 (12.696 of age group). Access to services (1999)8. Proportion of households having access to: electricity (2002) 96.0%, of which urban households having access 98.8%, rural households having access 73.2%; safe public (piped) water supply 79.8%, of which urban households having access 92.3%, rural households having access 24.9%; public (piped) sewage system 43.6%, of which urban households having access 52.5%, rural households having access 4.5%; no sewage disposal 8.5%, of which urban households having no disposal 2.9%, rural households having no disposal 32.9%. Social participation. Voter turnout at last (October 2006) national legislative election: 83.3%. Trade union membership in total workforce (2001): 19,500,000. Practicing Roman Catholic population in total affiliated Roman Catholic population (2000): large cities 10-15%; towns and rural areas 60-70%. Social deviance. Annual murder rate per 100,000 population (2002): Brazil 28;

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Population projection: (2010) 196,834,000; (2020) 219,078,000. Doubling time: 64 years. Racial composition (2000): white 53.7%; mulatto and mestizo 39.1%; black and

Vitória S&o Luis

5

National economy

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 27.8%; 15-29, 27.6%; 30-44, 21.7%; 45-59, 14.1%; 60-74, 6.5%; 75-84, 1.8%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Assemblies

—6.2—

4

10.0%.

Demography

which

3

960,8008 385,000/933,560 839,5005

Osasco

Santo André Jaboatão Blumenau

705,4008

669,6008 626,3007 270,800/604,721

Families. Average family size (2005) 3.2; (1996) 1-2 persons 25.2%, 3 persons 20.3%, 4 persons 22.2%, 5-6 persons 23.3%, 7 or more persons 9.0%. Emigration (2000): Brazilian emigrants living abroad 1,887,895; in the U.S. 42.3%, in Paraguay 23.4%, in Japan 12.0%. Immigration (2000): foreign-born immigrants living in Brazil 683,830; from Europe 56.3%, of which Portugal 31.2%; South/Central America 21.0%; Asia

17.8%, of which Japan 10.4%. Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.4 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2003 in value R$'000,000 Agriculture, forestry

138,191

2004 % of total value

labour force’

% of labour force

8.9

17,733,900

19.1

Mining Public utilities Manufacturing

54,888 47,594 337,457

3.5 3.1 21.7

325,400 353,600 11,723,600

0.4 0.4 12.6

Construction

100,951

6.5

5,354,400

5.8

Transportation and 78,337

5.0

3,994,200

4.3

Trade, hotels

communications

107,501

6.9

17,676,300

19.0

Finance, real estate

240,003

15.4

5,719,400

62

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

144,884 220,459 85,9179 1,556,182

9.3 14.2 5.59 100.0

4,203,900 17,380,200 8,495,30010 92,860,10011

45 18.7 9.110 100.02

Budget (2004). Revenue: R$422,450,000,000 (tax revenue 76.4%, of which income tax 24.3%, social security contributions 18.2%, value-added tax on

industrial products 5.4%; social welfare contributions 22.2%; other 1.4%). Expenditures: R$372,730,000,000 (social security and welfare 33.8%; personnel 23.5%; transfers to state and local governments 18.1%; other 24.6%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$94,497,000,000. Production ('000 metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 420,121, soybeans 50,195, corn (maize) 34,860, cassava 26,645, oranges 17,805, rice 13,141, bananas 6,703, wheat 5,201, seed cotton 3,727, tomatoes 3,304, dry beans 3,076, coconuts 3,034, potatoes 2,950, cof-

fee 2,179, papayas 1,650, cashew apples 1,610, sorghum 1,530, pineapples 1,418, grapes 1,209, dry onions 1,059, lemons and limes 1,000, tobacco 879,

mangoes 850, apples 844, maté 560, oil palm fruit 550, peanuts (groundnuts) 292, cashews 251, cacao beans 214, sisal 213, natural rubber 97, garlic 88, Brazil nuts 29; livestock (number of live animals) 207,000,000 cattle, 33,200,000 pigs, 15,200,000 sheep, 5,700,000 horses; roundwood (2004) 255,880,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 5496; fisheries production (2004)

1,015,916 (from aquaculture 27%). Mining and quarrying (metric tons; 2004): iron ore (metal content) 169,300,000 (world rank: 1); columbium (niobium) 39,741 of pyrochlore in concentrates!2 (world rank: 1); bauxite 19,700,000 (world rank: 2); manganese (metal content in concentrate) 3,143,000 (world rank: 2); tantalum 277 (world rank: 2); asbestos fibre 231,115 (world rank: 4); tin (mine output, metal content) 12,468 (world rank: 5); kaolin (marketable product) 2,148,000; copper (metal content) 103,153; nickel (metal content in ore) 51,886; gold 47,596 kg; diamonds 300,000 carats.

534

Britannica World Data

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.096, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 23.3%; overall forest area (2005) 57.2%.

Balance of trade (current prices)

Manufacturing enterprises (2004) wages number of employees Food products Petroleum products Motor vehicles and parts Iron and steel Paints, soaps, pharmaceuticals, and related products

68.1 539.6 179.0 205.1

21,279 15,533 12,598 11,444

240,000

188.5

10,006

409,400 92,700

128.3 232.4

9,395 8,223

240,700 152,200 360,300

139.3 137.4 88.0

6,728 6,280 5,307

275,900 161,600

72.6 98.2

4,424 4,352

239,500 305,700 126,000

87.9 69.0 143.7

3,683 3,547 3,424

449,600 44,000

49.6 192.8

3,261 3,071

257,400

52.0

2,674

483,900

40.3

2,148

84,900

125.7

2,077

Fabricated metal products Bricks, tiles, cement, and related products Beverages

Plastics Textiles Publishing Footwear, leather processing Nonferrous base metals (excl. furniture) Rubber products

Exports (2005): U.S.$118,300,000,000

Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 18,396 mi, 29,605 km; passenger-km 5,852,000,00016; metric ton-km cargo 154,870,000,00016. Roads (2004): total length 1,088,558 mi, 1,751,868 km (paved [2000] 695). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 24,936,541; trucks and buses 6,294,502. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 50,689,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,530,700,000.

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

106.8 110.7

115.9 118.2

132.9

141.7 que

151.4 eus

157.8 des

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 3,861; remittances (2006) 7,373; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05) 16,481. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 4,720; remittances (2005) 498; FDI (2001-05) 2,559. Retail trade enterprises (1996) no. of businesses

totalno.of employees

annual wage asa% ofall trade wages

10,382

437,452

131.2

35,766

Clothing and apparel Food, beverages, and tobacco

annual values of sales in R$'000,000

9,348

202,892

229.9

30,926

20,388

210,250

124.7

23,199

18,245

158,755

143.7

14,855

81,303

386,285

90.1

14,047

55,534

252,731

110.6

10,881

50,778

240,633

94.2

9,658

128,908 135,672

428,150 378,102

76.4 60.7

9,023 6,900

Vehicles, parts Pharmaceutical and cosmetic products

(food products 22.1%, of which soy

Transport and communications

2002

Electronics, kitchen equipment, musical instruments Metal products, lumber, glass, and construction materials

Germany

2.8%; Chile 2.8%.

2001

Gas stations

2006 446,074 20.1%

United States 18.0%; Argentina 8.5%; China 6.1%; African countries 5.4%; The Netherlands 4.2%; Germany 4.1%; Mexico 3.2%; Japan 2.8%; Italy

2000

Vehicles, new and used

2005 444,800 23.4%

metal products 10.7%; mineral metals 6.8%; chemicals and chemical products 6.3%; machinery and apparatus 5.9%). Major export destinations (2006):

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

General merchandise stores (including food products)

2004 433,662 21.1%

8.6%, meat 6.8%, sugar 4.0%, coffee 2.4%; transportation equipment 16.2%;

Population economically active (2004)8: total 92,860,100; activity rate of total population 51.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.2%; female 43.1%; unemployed [February 2006-January 2007] 10.096).

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2003 424,780 20.4%

16.2%; African countries 8.9%; Argentina 8.8%; China 8.7%; 7.196; Japan 4.2%; South Korea 3.4%; Chile 3.2%; France 3.1%.

Wood and wood products Clothing

2002 313,121 12.2%

Imports (2005): U.S.$73,500,000,000 (mineral fuels 18.3%; mechanical equipment 15.8%; electrical equipment 14.2%; chemicals and chemical products 7.3%; motor vehicles 5.8%). Major import sources (2006): United States

Nonelectrical machinery and Electrical machinery and apparatus !? Paper and paper products

2001 42,642 2.3%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

of employers as a % of avg. value added of all mfg. wages — (in U.S.$000,000)

1,124,100 27,000 350,500 115,100

apparatus Industrial chemicals

Foreign trade

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

65,949

369

2006 2006

99,91918 38,800

52918 205

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

32,130 6,52217 42,600 3,30418

174 3617 226 1818

Education and health Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate/functionally literate 89.0% /76.5%; males literate/functionally literate 88.7% /75.9%; females liter-

ate/functionally literate 89.2%/77.0%. Education (2004) Primary (age 7-14) Secondary (age 15-17) Higher?o

student/ schools

teachers

students

166,484 22,918 1,859

1,623,354 498,202 236,203

33,534,56119 9,738,56519 4,619,409

teacher ratio 21.529 18.620 19.6

Health: physicians (2001) 357,888 (1 per 485 persons); hospital beds (2005) 443,210 (1 per 416 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 25.4.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,244 (vegetable products 79%, animal products 21%); 171% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 287,159 (army 65.8%, navy 11.4%, air force 22.796). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$68.

Households. Average household size (2005) 3.5. Family/household income and expenditure. Average family size (2000) 3.5; average annual income per household (2000) R$14,065 (U.S.$7,686), median annual income per household (2000) R$6,744 (U.S.$3,685); sources of income, n.a.; expenditure (1995-96)14: housing, energy, and household furnishings 28.8%, food and beverages 23.4%, transportation and communications 13.8%, health care 9.2%, education and recreation 8.4%.

Financial aggregates15 2001

Exchange rate, R$ per: U.S. dollar g SDR International reserves (U.S.$) Total (excl. gold; '000,000) SDRs (000,000) Reserve pos. in IMF

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2.32 3.36 2.92

3.53 5.69 4.80

2.89 5.15 4.29

2.65 5.13 4.12

2.34 4.03 3.34

2.14 4.19 3.21

35,740 Hn

37,683 275

49,111 2

52,740 4

53,574 29

85,561 8

35,729 0.46 0.05

37,409 0.44 0.05

49,108 0.45 0.05

52,736 0.45 0.05

53,545 0.44 0.05

85,553 0.44 0.05

30.42 Pr

23.92 s

24.55 eus

25.34 s

19.98 as

(000,000)

Foreign exchange (000,000) Gold (000,000 fine troy oz) % world reserves Interest and prices Central bank discount (%) Govt. bond yield (%) Industrial share prices Balance of payments

21.43 “is

1Total area including inland water per survey of 2002. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Christian data include nominal Christians. Populations are for municipios, which may include adjacent urban or rural districts. >Within São Paulo metropolitan area. 9Within Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. "Within Recife metropolitan area. $Excludes rural population of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondónia, and Roraima. ?Import duties less imputed bank service charges. 1°Includes

(U.S.$'000,000)

Balance of visible trade

Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments, current account

42,550

413,121

424,704

433,660

444,757

55,572 58,223 -25,865

47,240 60,362 -20,758

48,290 73,084 -20,617

62,809 96,475 -21,928

73,551 118,308 -30,558

-23,215

-7,637

+4,177

+11,738

+14,199

8,263,800 unemployed. !'Reported total; summed total equals 92,960,200. !2Also found

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 383,200,000,000 (391,700,000,000);

coal (metric tons; 2004) 6,000,000

(21,300,000);

crude

petroleum (barrels; 2005) 603,700,000 ([2004] 624,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 78,984,000 (72,211,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 9,600,000,000 (17,300,000,000); ethanol production (2005) 102,900,000 barrels, of which exported to U.S. 2,600,000 barrels.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in alloys and oxides. !3Includes televisions, radios, and telecommunications equipment. 14Based on survey of 11 metropolitan areas only. 5End-of-period figures. 6Includes suburban services. !7Circulation. !8Subscribers. 192005. 2°2003.

Internet resources for further information: e IBGE: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística http://www.ibge.gov.br/english/default.php * Central Bank of Brazil: Economic Data http://www.bcb.gov.br/?english

Nations of the World — 535

Brunei

Price index (2000 = 100) Consumer price index

area

Kuala Belait

population

sq mi

sq km

2005 estimate

1,052

2,724

61,800

220 504 450

571 1,304 1,166

255,600 9,500 43,200

2,226

5,765

370,100

Bandar Seri Begawan Bangar Tutong

TOTAL

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 176.5, persons per sq km 68.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 73.5%; rural 26.5%. Sex distribution (2005): male 52.77%; female 47.23%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 29.5%; 15-29, 28.4%; 30-44, 24.1%; 45-59, 13.2%; 60-74, 4.0%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 418,000; (2020) 495,000. Doubling time: 41 years. Ethnic composition (2003): Malay 66.6%; Chinese 10.9%; other indigenous 3.6%; other 18.9%.

Religious affiliation (2004)4: Muslim c. 67%; Buddhist c. 13%; Christian c. 10%; traditional beliefs/other c. 1096. Major cities (2004): Bandar Seri Begawan 81,5005; Kuala Belait 28,400; Seria

23,500.

Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 19.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.10. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.5/1.06. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 74.6 years; female 77.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 85.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 60.9; diseases of the respiratory system 25.4; diabetes mellitus 21.8; accidents and violence 21.8.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: B$8,441,000,000 (tax revenue 62.2%, of which taxes on petroleum and natural gas companies 59.196; nontax revenue 37.896, of which dividends paid by petroleum companies 22.9%, petroleum and natural gas royalties 10.0%). Expenditures: B$5,086,000,000 (current expenditure 80.1%; capital expenditure 19.9% ). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): vegetables 10,500; fruits 5,565, of which pineapples 990, bananas 680; cassava 1,800; rice 1,000; livestock (number of live animals) 5,000 buffalo, 13,000,000 chickens; roundwood 228,637 cu m, of which fuelwood 5%; fish-

eries production (2004) 3,136 (from aquaculture 23%). Mining and quarrying: other than petroleum and natural gas, none except sand and gravel for construction. Manufacturing (value added in B$’000,000; 2005): liquefied natural gas 1,672; textiles and apparel 197; other manufactures 83. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 2.913,000,000 ([2004] 2,726,650,000);

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

42,796 55.8%

42,481 51.7%

42,146 40.8%

43,094 53.8%

43,635 56.1%

434,758 61.5%

(2005): U.S.$1,491,000,000

(machinery

and transport equipment

and chemical products 9.3%). Major import sources: Malaysia 24.4%; Singapore 18.7%; United States 9.7%; Japan 9.1%; China 6.3%. Exports (2005): U.S.$6,249,000,000 (crude petroleum 62.8%, liquefied natural gas 31.3%, machinery and transport equipment 2.0%). Major export destinations: Japan 36.7%; Indonesia 18.6%; South Korea 12.6%; Australia 9.6%;

United States 7.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004)13: length 12 mi, 19 km. Roads (2004): total length 2,212 mi, 3,560 km (paved 78%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 212,000; trucks and buses (2002) 20,000. Air transport (2005)14 passenger-km 3,767,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 134,127,000.

Communications Medium

Vital statistics

([2004]

2005 100.6

32.1%, basic manufactures 24.6%, food and live animals 17.4%, chemicals

Demography Population (2007): 393,000.

coal, none

2004 99.4

Foreign trade!2

Imports

000,000);

2003 98.5

ing and footwear 5.6%, communications 5.5%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.5%, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 1.1%; overall forest area (2005) 52.8%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1998) 37; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,085. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances (2003) 139.

Capitals

Brunei and Muara Temburong Tutong

2002 98.3

8.8%, household furnishings 8.6%, recreation and entertainment 8.1%, cloth-

Area and population

Belait

98.7

2001 100.6

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): none. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2002) 5.6; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2002): food and nonalcoholic beverages 28.8%, transportation 22.5%, housing and energy

1 U.S.$ - B$1.53; 1 £ - B$3.07.

Districts

2000 100.0

1999

Official name: Negara Brunei Darussalam (State of Brunei). Form of government: monarchy (sultanate) with one advisory body (Legislative Council [29]1). Head of state and government: Sultan. Capital: Bandar Seri Begawan. Official language: Malay?. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Brunei dollar (B$)5; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

(none); crude petroleum

petroleum

products

(barrels; 2005) 68,300,000

(metric

tons;

2004)

1,189,000

(1,187,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 12,200,000,000 ([2004] 1,457,000,000).

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

215

648

2006 2006

25416 80

66516 210

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

31 3515 166 1116

87 9515 434 2816

Education and health Educational attainment (1991). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 17.0%; primary education 43.3%; secondary 26.3%; postsecondary and higher 12.9%; not stated 0.5%. Literacy (2002): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 93.9%; males literate 96.3%; females literate 91.4%. Education (2005)

Primary (age 5—11)17 Secondary (age 12-20) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

210

5,237

58,413

11.2

33

3,914

40,850

10.4

9

547

3,586

6.6

2

488

4,29718

8.8

Health (2004): physicians 463 (1 per 773 persons); hospital beds 943 (1 per 379 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 8.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,610 (vegetable products 77%, animal products 23%); 137% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 7,00019 (army 70.0%, navy 14.3%, air force 15.7%). British troops (a Gurkha batallion): 1,120; Singaporean troops 500. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$684.

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$11,481,000,000

(U.S.$30,058 per capita).

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value B$'000,000 Agriculture, fishing, forestry Petroleum, natural gas Mining Manufacturing? Construction

2001 % of total value

labour force

% of labour force

150 8,868 ass 1,952 419

0.9 55.9 ds 12.3 2.6

Public utilities Transportation and

113

0.7

communications

456

2.9

4,803

3.0

516

3.3

20,038

12.7

1,346 1,847

8.5 11.6

8,190

52

79,880

S07

— 15,8649

— 100.09

11,3408 157,594

7.28 100.0

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

196

}

12 }

1,994

1.3

3,954 12,455 12,301

25 7.9 7.8

2,639

1.7

Population economically active (2001): total 157,59419; activity rate of total population 45.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 65.9%; female 41.2%; unemployed [2005] 4.3%). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

ILegislative Council (suspended from 1984) reinstated September 2004 and enlarged August 2005; all seats are nonelected. ?AII official documents that must be published by law in Malay are also required to be issued in an official English version. *Pegged to the Singapore dollar at a ratio of 1:1. ^Excludes expatriates. "Population of urban agglomeration. 5Muslim divorces only. "Includes manufacture of liquefied natural gas (B$1,672,000.000; 10.596 of total value). SUnemployed. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Foreign workers accounted for 70% of the 160,500 economically active in 2004. HWeights of consumer price index components. ?Imports cif; exports f.0.b. Privately owned. “Royal Brunei Airlines. Circulation of daily newspapers. !6Subscribers. !7Includes preprimary. !8SMost of Brunei’s college students attend universities abroad. !?Excludes 3,750 paramilitary.

Internet resources for further information: * The Government of Brunei Darussalam http://www.brunei.gov.bn/index.htm * Brunei Economic Development Board http://www.bedb.com.bn

536

Britannica World Data

Bulgaria

278; cement, bricks, and ceramics 197. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 44,196,000,000 ([2004] 35,742,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 33,000 (4,265,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 26,452,000 (26,292,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 220,000 (38,757,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 4,669,000 (3,563,000); natural gas (cu m;

Official name: Republika Bülgaria (Republic of Bulgaria). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative body (National Assembly [240]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Sofia. Official language: Bulgarian. Official religion: none}. Monetary unit: lev (Lv; plural leva); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ 2 1.44 leva; 1 £ = 2.89 leva.

2004) 354,000,000 (3,301,000,000).

Household income and expenditure (20062). Average household size (2004) 2.7; income per household 5,204 leva (U.S.$3,167); sources of income: wages and salaries 51.8%, transfers 29.9%, self-employment 8.1%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 36.9%, housing and energy 16.0%, communications 5.8%, health 5.5%, transportation 5.0%.

Population economically active (2005): total 3,314,200; activity rate of total population 49.7% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2003] 60.9%; female 44.4%; unemployed [20062] 10.7%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

-

Area and population area

population

area

population

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Consumer price index

100.0

1074

1136

1163

1234

1296

1385

Average monthly wages

100.0

106.9

114.7

121.7

134.3

147.2

Districts Blagoevgrad

sq km 6,449

20062 estimate 333,577

Districts Ruse

sq km 2,803

20062 estimate 256,835

: : Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 30.0%, in permanent crops 1.9%, in pasture 16.2%; overall forest area (2005) 32.8%.

Burgas Dobrich Gabrovo Khaskovo Kurdzhali

7,748 4,720 2,023 5,533 3,209

418,750 205,541 135,780 266,073 158,541

Shumen Silistra Sliven Smolyan Sofiya?

3,390 2,846 3,544 3,193 7,062

198,106 134,093 209,694 131,010 259,961

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 2,383; remittances (2006) 1,695; foreign direct investment (2001-05 1.919. Disb ts for (U.S.$ 000,000): touri 2005) 1.293: it avg.) 1,919. Disbursements for (U.S. ,000): tourism ( ) 1,293; remittances (2006) 47.

4,129

159,214

Kyustendil

3,052

Lovech

Montana Pazardzhik Pernik Pleven Plovdiv Razgrad

152,714

3,636 4,457 2,394 4,335 5,973 2,640

166,775 297,781 140,981 305,025 707,570 139,094

Sofiya-Grad^ Stara Zagora

Targovishte Varna Veliko Tumovo Vidin Vratsa Yambol TOTAL

1,349

1,231,622

5,151

360,203

2,559 3,819 4,662 3,033 3,938 3,355 111,002

135,262 457,922 283,599 117,809 209,124 146,094 7,718,750

.

Foreign trade!0 î Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 2002 €000,000 -1,778 -1,692 % of total 13.5% 122% Imports

(2006): €18,375,000,000

2003 -2,200 14.2%

2004 -2,954 15.6%

2005 -4,369 188%

2006 -6,392 21.1%

(crude petroleum and natural gas 17.4%;

Demography

transport equipment and parts 13.8%; machinery and apparatus 12.1%; tex-

Population (2007): 7,645,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 178.4, persons per sq km 68.9. Urban-rural (20052): urban 70.0%; rural 30.0%. Sex distribution (20052): male 48.55%; female 51.45%.

tiles 7.7%; base and other metals 6.6% ).Major import sources: Russia 17.3%; Germany 12.4%; Italy 8.7%; Turkey 6.0%; Greece 4.9%; China 4.1%.

Exports (2006): €11,982,600,000 (base and fabricated metals 21.6%, of which iron and steel 7.4%; mineral fuels 15.5%, of which petroleum products 13.3%;

Age breakdown (20052): under 15, 13.896; 15-29, 21.296; 30-44, 20.996; 45-59, 21.396; 60—74, 15.996; 75-84, 6.096; 85 and over, 0.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 7,476,000; (2020) 6,887,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Bulgarian 83.9%; Turkish 9.4%; Rom

(Gypsy)

4.7%; other 2.0%.

Religious affiliation (20055): Bulgarian Orthodox c. 81%; Sunnr Muslim c. 12%; Evangelical Protestant c. 296; Catholic c. 196; other c. 496. Major cities (20052): Sofia 1,138,950; Plovdiv 341,464; Varna 312,026; Burgas

189,529; Ruse 158,201.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.2 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 51.0%; outside of marriage 49.0%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.6 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.31. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 69.0 years; female 76.3 years. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 4.3/1.9. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 968.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 231.7; diseases of the respiratory system 57.7; accidents, poisoning, and violence 50.8.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: 17,030,000,000 leva (tax revenue 79.7%, of which VAT 28.2%, social insurance 20.6%; nontax revenue 20.3%). Expenditures: 17,008,000,000

leva

(social insurance

33.1%;

economic

services

14.4%;

defense and security 12.2%; health 11.8%; education 10.7%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 20072): U.S.$7,253 300,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$30,782,000,000 (U.S.$4,002 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

'000,000 leva

value

force

force

Agriculture, forestry,

and fishing

3,341 7,916 2,026 4,952 2,950 1,626 1,682

Manufacturing, mining Construction Transp. and commun.

Trade Public utilities Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

}

8.0 17.4 48 11.8

7.0 3.9 4.0

12,1305

28.95

5,925 41,948

144 100.08

265,400 765,600 190,600 213,900 597,300 64,000 179,400 214,100 487,600 336,3007 3,314,200

8.0 23.1 58 6.5

18.0 1.9 5.4 6.5 14.7 10.17 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): wheat 3,478,000, corn (maize) 1,586,000, sunflower seeds 934,900, barley 657,900, potatoes 375,500, grapes 266,200, tobacco 58,300; livestock (number of live animals) 1,692,507 sheep, 931,402 pigs, 671,579 cattle; roundwood 5,862,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 46%; fisheries production (2004) 10,739

(from aquaculture 23%). Mining and quarrying (2004): copper (metal content) 107,000; iron (metal content) 27,000; gold 2,431 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): refined petroleum products, n.a.; wearing apparel 359; food products 320; nonelectrical machinery and apparatus © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

machinery and transport equipment 14.3%; clothing and footwear 13.4%). Major export destinations: Turkey 11.4%; Italy 10.1%; Germany 9.6%; Greece 8.9%; Belgium 6.5%; France 4.1%; Romania 4.0%.

Transport and communications Transport.

Railroads

(2004):

track

length

6,238

km;

passenger-km

2,404,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 5,212,000,000. Roads (2004): length 44,033

km (paved 99%). Vehicles (2004): cars 2,438,383; trucks and buses 353,681. Air transport (2003): passenger-km 3,005,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 21,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

3,620

2006

8,25312

2006

2,399

453

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies

1,07612

Internet users

313

Broadband

2004 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

461 96111 1,870 38412

59 12411 244

5012

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: no formal schooling to complete primary education 28%; secondary 50%; higher 22%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 98.6%; males 99.1%; females 98.2%. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

Primary (age 5-13) Secondary (age 14-18) Voc., teacher tr. Higher

|

2 a 609 53

teachers

students

teacher ratio

43,866

602,497

137

34,475 19,3521? 23,933

367,340 207,395!3 243,464

10.7 10.718 10.2

Health (20062): physicians 28,030 (1 per 274 persons); hospital beds 50,688 (1 per 152 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 10.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,839 (vegetable products 77%, animal products 2396); 14396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 51,000 (army 49.0%, navy 8.6%, air force 25.7%, other 16.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.4% 14; per capita expenditure U.S.$7414, 1Bulgaria has no official religion; the constitution, however, refers to Eastern Orthodoxy as the “traditional” religion. 2January 1. District nearly encircles Sofiya-Grad district on north, east, and south. ^Sofiya-Grad includes Sofia city and immediately adjacent urban and rural areas. ?"Unofficially up to 4096 of the population is estimated to be atheist or agnostic. Includes hotels, restaurants, and real estate (usually included with Trade and with Finance). "Includes 334,200 unemployed. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Average of second and third quarters. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. for commodities and trading partners. Circulation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers. 132004-05. 4Excludes expenditures for military pensions.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistical Institute http://www.nsi.bg * Bulgarian National Bank http://www.bnb.bg

Nations of the World

Burkina Faso

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003

Official name: Burkina Faso (Burkina Faso). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative body! (National Assembly [111]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Ouagadougou. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade Finance

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

88.9 0.1 1.4 0.1 0.4 0.4 44 0.3

20

sq mi

sq km

2005 estimate

Boucle du Mouhoun Cascades Centre Centre-Est Centre-Nord Centre-Ouest Centre-Sud Est Hauts-Bassins Nord Plateau Central

Dédougou Banfora Ouagadougou Tenkodogo Kava Koudougou Manga Fada N'gourma Bobo-Dioulasso Ouahigouya Ziniaré

13,186 7,107 1,083 4,560 7,656 8,387 4,371 17,859 9,785 6,258 3,299

34,153 18,406 2,805 11,811 19,829 21,722 11,321 46,256 25,344 16,207 8,544

1,464,163 421,715 1,488,176 1,080,344 1,160,961 1,245,052 668,960 1,073,159 1,301,776 1,196,470 738,252

Sahel Sud-Ouest TOTAL

Dori Gaoua

13,649 6,256 103,456

35,350 16,202 267,950

885,421 611,832 13,358,937?

28.6 0.8

eo 80,000 124,000 408,900 e

148 35 5.4 17.7 na

4,513,868 3,979 71,565 2,813 21,076 20,580 224,581 13,131

499,100

21.6

103,926

179,0007 2,308,0009

7.87 100.0

100,0968 5,075,615

2.08 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 17.7%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 21.9%; overall forest area (2005) 29.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 19; remittances (2005) 50; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 17; official development assistance (2005) 660. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2001) 22; remittances (2005) 44.

population

Capitals

661,000 17,700 }

Fub-admin;:detense }

area

1996

CFAF ’000,000

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population Regions

537

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF ’000,000,000 % of total

2000 —236 50.3%

2001 -278 52.4%

2002 —284 54.6%

2003 —264 42.0%

2004 —328 44.3%

2005 —444 55.9%

Imports (2005): CFAF 619,000,000,000 (mineral fuels 24.6%, machinery and apparatus 14.3%, chemicals and chemical products 14.1%, transport equipment 9.1%). Major import sources: France 18.7%; Céte d’Ivoire 18.0%; Togo 11.4%; Benin 6.8%; Ghana 5.9%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 175,000,000,000 (raw cotton 74.5%, sesame 2.9%, cigarettes 2.1%, sugar 1.5%). Major export destinations: Togo 41.1%; Ghana

Demography Population (2007): 14,326,000.

16.7%; Cite dIvoire 10.5%; France 9.8%; Switzerland 9.4%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 138.5, persons per sq km 53.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 18.3%; rural 81.7%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.78%; female 50.22%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 46.7%; 15-29, 28.0%; 30-44, 14.8%; 45-59, 6.5%; 60-74, 3.3%; 75 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 15,667,000; (2020) 20,915,000. Doubling time: 23 years. Ethnic composition (1995): Mossi 47.9%; Fulani 10.3%; Lobi 6.9%; Bobo

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: (2004): route length 386 mi, 622 km; (2003) passengerkm 9,980,000; (2005) metric ton-km cargo 674,900,000. Roads (2006): tota. length 9,490 mi, 15,272 km (paved 17%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 84,161; trucks and buses 38,261. Air transport (2005)10: passenger arrivals 134,247, passenger

departures 137,373; cargo unloaded 2,837 metric tons,

cargo loaded 1,347 metric tons.

6.9%; Mande 6.7%; Senufo 5.3%; Grosi 5.0%; Gurma 4.8%; Tuareg 3.1%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 48%3; traditional beliefs c. 32%; Roman Catholic c. 12953; Protestant/independent Christian c. 8963. Major cities (2005): Ouagadougou 1,488,176; Bobo-Dioulasso 452,349; Koudougou 142,360; Tenkodogo 130,084; Solenzo 123,488.

Vital statistics

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: CFAF 793,000,000,000 (tax revenue 52.3%, of which taxes on goods and services 29.3%; loans 23.2%; grants 18.5%; nontax revenue 3.6%; other 2.4%). Expenditures: CFAF 892,100,000,000 (current

expenditure 50.1%, development expenditure 49.9%). Public debt (external; 2005): U.S.$1,920,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size5 (2003) 6.3; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2003): food, beverages, and tobacco 48.8%, housing and energy 17.8%, transportation 7.0%, clothing 6.8%, health 4.4%, recreation and culture 4.1%.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sorghum

1,552,911,

Medium

millet

1,196,253,

450,000, peanuts

corn

(maize)

(groundnuts)

799,052,

311,234,

seed

fisheries production (2004) 9,005 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 1,397 kg. Manufacturing (value added in CFAF 000,000; 1999): food products, beverages, and tobacco 126,125; textiles 46,217; chemicals and chemical products 9,335; cement, bricks, and ceramics 3,484;

paper and paper products 2,150. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 516,000,000 ([2004] 400,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (352,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (none). Population economically active (1996): total 5,075,615; activity rate 49.2% (participation rates: over age 10, 70.0%; female 48.2%; unemployed, n.a.). 2001 104.9

2002 107.3

2003 109.5

2004 109.0

2005 116.0

20066 119.8

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,226,000,000 (U.S.$434 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004

156

Cellular

2006

1,01712

2006

12

units Medium PCs Dailies

7512

Internet users

7

Broadband

95

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2006

31 1211 80 1.712

2.4 0.911 5.9

0.112

Education and health Educational attainment (2003)5. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling or unknown 85.4%; incomplete to complete primary education 7.9%; incomplete to complete secondary 5.5%; higher 1.2%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 26.6%; males literate 36.8%; females literate 16.6%. Education (2004-05)

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-19) Vocational Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

: 548

30,3417? 3,969

1,390,57113 272,980

77 35

660 645

teacher ratio

45.813 68.8

22,432 27,942

34.0 43.3

Health: physicians (2004) 369 (1 per 35,439 persons); hospital beds (2001) 15,801 (1 per 735 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 91.4.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,593 (vegetable products 93%, animal products 7%); 144% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

cotton

dry cowpeas

127,682, rice 93,516, yams 85,447, shea nuts 70,000, bambara beans 39,600, sesame 17,717; livestock (number of live animals) 10,708,992 goats, 8,010,158 cattle, 7,009,407 sheep; roundwood 13,067,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 91%;

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

date

units number

Televisions Telephones Landline

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 45.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 30.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 6.47. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: n.a.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 47.3 years; female 50.4 years. Major causes of death as percentage of all deaths (2005): malaria 46.396; anemia 8.7%; bronchitis/pneumonia 8.0%; meningitis 7.4%.

750,700, sugarcane

Communications

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 10,800 (army 98.1%, air force 1.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.3%; per capita expendi-

ture U.S.$6.

1[n addition, the 90-member

Economic

and Social

Council

is an advisory board.

2Reported total, summed total is 13,336,281; preliminary December 2006 census results

equal 13,730,258. 3Adherence to beliefs often nominal. Percentage of men in polygamous marriages (1996) 33.2%. 5Based on the 2003 Burkina Faso Demographic and Health Survey, comprising 57,737 people in 9,097 households, about 80% of which are located in rural areas. Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. "Import taxes and duties. SIncludes 71,280 unemployed. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 10Combined data for Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso airports. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 132005—06.

Internet resources for further information: * Institut National de la Statistique et de la Demographie http://www.insd.bf * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm

538

Britannica World Data

Burundi

e Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Republika y'u Burundi (Rundi); République du Burundi (French) (Republic of Burundi).

Indian

Form of government: republic with two legislative bodies (Senate [491]: National Assembly [100?]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Vice Presidents. Capital: Bujumbura’. Official languages: Rundi; French. Official religion: none.

Monetary unit: Burundi franc (FBu); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Ocean -

Atlantic

Ocean

o

1 U.S.$ - FBu 1,104; 1 £ = FBu 2,220.

population

Provinces

sq km

1999 estimate

Bubanza Bujumbura

1,089 1,232

Bururi Cankuzo Cibitoke Gitega Karuzi Kayanza Kirundo Makamba Muramvya

2,465 1,965 1,636 1,979 1,457 1,233 1,703 1,960 696

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

271,100

31.5

Public utilities

}

9,100

2,574,443

93.1

1,419

14

—

1,672

0.1

Manufacturing Handicrafts Construction Transp. and communications

68,700 36,200 41,700 46,900

8.0 4.2 48 5.4

33,867 a 19,737 8,504

1.2 AM 0.7 0.3

Trade

44,700

52

25,822

0.9

29.7

2,005 85,191

0.1 34

Finance Pub. admin., defense

256,000

Services Other TOTAL

86,40010 860,800

}

10.010 100.06

13,270 2,765,9456

0.5 100.0

Population economically active (2003): total 3,464,000; activity rate of total population 49.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 92.2%; female 52.196; unemployed, n.a.).

Area and population area

in value FBu '000,000

Agriculture Mining

1990

area

population

Provinces

sq km

1999 estimate

289,060 755,9944

Muyinga Mwaro

1,836 840

485,347

437,931 172,477 385,438 628,872 384,187 458,815 502,171 357,492 481,8465

Ngozi Rutana Ruyigi

1,474 1,959 2,8339

601,382 244,939 304,567

Urban Province Bujumbura TOTAL LAND AREA INLAND WATER

TOTAL

2003

2004

2005

2006

110.7

118.9

135.7

139.4

5

87 25,950 1,867

27,8166

Price index (2002 = 100) 2002 Consumer price index? 100.0

4

6,490,518

Demography Population (2007): 8,391,000. Density (2007)7: persons per sq mi 837.4, persons per sq km 323.4. Urban-rural (2005): urban 10.0%; rural 90.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.82%; female 51.18%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 45.1%; 15-29, 29.0%; 30-44, 13.7%; 45-59, 8.2%; 60-74, 3.296; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 9,281,000; (2020) 12,266,000. Doubling time: 24 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Hutu 80.9%; Tutsi 15.6%; Lingala 1.6%; Twa Pygmy 1.0%; other 0.9%. Religious affiliation (2004): Christian c. 6796, of which Roman Catholic c. 6296, Protestant c. 596; traditional beliefs c. 2396; Muslim c. 1096.

Major cities (2004): Bujumbura 340,300; Gitega 46,900; Muyinga 45,300; Ngozi

40.200; Ruyigi 36,800.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 45.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 16.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 29.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 6.80. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 47.0 years; female 49.8 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.3958 (world avg. 1.096). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS-related c. 370; lower respiratory infections c. 185; diarrheal diseases c. 128; war-related c. 114; perinatal conditions c. 100; malaria c. 57.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: FBu 220,170,000,000 (tax revenue 71.3%, of which sales tax 37.8%, taxes on international trade 11.7%, company income tax 11.1%, personal income tax 8.7%; grants 18.8%; nontax revenue 6.9%; other

3.095). Expenditures: FBu 319,061,000,000 (current expenditure 70.1%, of which debt service 6.4%; capital expenditure 27.9%; other 2.0% ). Public debt (external, outstanding; September 2006): U.S.$1,227,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): bananas 1,600,000, sweet potatoes 835,000, cassava 710,000, dry beans 220,218, sugarcane 180,000, corn (maize) 123,000, sorghum 67,947, rice 67,947, taros 62,000, peas 33,500, coffee 7,800, tea 7,500, seed cotton 4,564; livestock (number of live animals) 750,000 goats, 396,000 cattle, 243,000 sheep; roundwood 13,067,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 91%; fisheries pro-

duction (2004) 13,631 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2005): columbite-tantalite ore 42,592 kg; gold 3,905 kg. Manufacturing (2005): beer 1,012,500 hectolitres; carbonated beverages 143,600 hectolitres; cottonseed oil 135,900 litres; sugar 19,058 tons; cigarettes 419,055,000 units; blankets

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 38.6%, in permanent crops 14.2%, in pasture 38.6%; overall forest area (2005) 5.9%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 -83.3 56.6%

FBu'000,000,000 % of total

2002 -92.2 61.5%

2003 —129.1 61.4%

2004 —140.9 57.2%

2005 -227.5 64.9%

2006 -382.1 76.0%

Imports (2006): FBu 442,500,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 21.3%, transportation equipment 15.7%, mineral fuels 13.4%, fabricated metals 7.2%, pharmaceuticals 6.6%).Major import sources: Saudi Arabia 12.6%; BelgiumLuxembourg

11.7%;

Kenya

8.2%;

Japan

7.8%;

Russia

4.7%;

United

Kingdom 4.6%. Exports (2006): FBu 60,400,000,000 (coffee 67.7%, tea 17.0%, hides and skins 2.6%, cotton fabric 1.9%). Major export destinations: Switzerland 34.4%; United Kingdom 12.3%; Pakistan 7.8%; Rwanda 5.1%; other EU 24.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 7,657 mi, 12,322 km (paved 7%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 19,800; trucks and buses 14,400. Air transport (2005)13: passenger arrivals 73,072, passenger departures 63,908; cargo unloaded 3,093 metric tons, cargo loaded 188 metric tons.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

280

37

2005 2005

15315 31

2015 44

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004 2004 2006 2006

34 2.514 60 sus

48 0.314 77 vu

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 51.696; males literate 58.596; females literate 45.296. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-12)

Secondary (age 13-19) } Voc., teacher tr. Higher

teachers

students

18,899

968,488

51.2

40016 — 8,047 3

140,735 7

17.5P

15,706

23.5

1,51216

E

669

teacher ratio

Health (2004): physicians 200 (1 per 37,581 persons); hospital beds (1999) 3,380 (1 per 1,657 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 64.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,693 (vegetable products 98%, animal products 296); 9496 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 50,500 (army 89.1%, gendarme 10.9% )17, 18. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 6.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$6.

43,253 units; fabrics 4,811,000,000 sq m. Energy production (consumption):

electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 99,200,000 (119,800,000); coal, none (none); crude

petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (70,000); natural gas, none (none); peat (metric tons; 2005) 4,700 ([2000]

12,000).

Household income and expenditure (2004)9. Average household size 5.6; average annual income per household c. FBu 168,000 (c. U.S.$153); sources of income: agriculture/livestock c. 91%, other c. 9%; expenditure: food c. 46%, housing, n.a., debt service c. 14%, alcoholic beverages and tobacco c. 8%,

transportation c. 6%, health c. 5%, clothing c. 4%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1.5; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) negligible; official development assistance (2005) 365. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 60; remittances (2005) 1.0. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$903,000,000 (U.S.$110 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

134 seats are indirectly elected; 15 additional seats (as of March 2007) are designated for the Twa ethnic group, former presidents, and women (to assure 30% quota for women). ?Excludes seats appointed to assure specific ethnic and gender composition of National Assembly. *Future move of capital to Gitega announced by president in March 2007. ^Bujumbura (province) includes Bujumbura urban province. 5Muramvya includes Mwaro. *Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Based on land area. 8Statistically derived midpoint within range. 7Based on a survey of 4,300 households in rural Burundi. Indirect taxes less subsidies. MEstimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 2Bujumbura only. Figures for Bujumbura airport only. V Subscribers. Circulation of daily newspapers. 151998. Number of active duty personnel is to be reduced per peace accord signed in 2003. !8The UN peacekeeping operation in Burundi ended in December 2006; South African peacekeeping troops (March 2007) 750.

Internet resource for further information: * Banque Centrale du Burundi http://brb.bi

Nations of the World — 539

Cambodia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Preah Reach Ana Pak Kampuchea (Kingdom of Cambodia). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [611]; National Assembly [123]. Chief of state: King. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Phnom Penh. Official language: Khmer. Official religion: Buddhism. Monetary unit: riel; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = 4,015 riels;

population

Provinces

sq km

2004 estimate?

Banteay Mean chey Battambang Kampong Cham

6,679 11,702 9,799

752,392 979,823 1,830,722

Kampong Chanang

5,521

population

Provinces

sq km

2004 estimate?

Ratanak Kiri Siemreap Stung Treng

10,782 10,299 11,092

117,664 841,268 101,136

501,455

Svay Rieng

2,966

532,478

Takeo

3,563

889,777

Kampong Speu

7,017

713,967

13,814

668,895

4,873

595,036

3,568

1,224,433

iEn

Municipalities

ne

"T

Sum

803

34 "aD

KonKong

e

19e64

Phnom Penh

200

1,272386

Mondul Kiri

14298

41.201

Sihanoukville

868

201,981

6,158

95410

A WA FA

13,788 4,883 12,692

148,407 1,035,672 421,528

TOTAL

oS 181.035 $

13,542.4102 x $

Demography Population (2007): 13,893,000. Density (2007)3: persons per sq mi 202.1, persons per sq km 78.0. Urban-rural (2004): urban 15.0%; rural 85.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.75%; female 51.25%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 36.6%; 15-29, 30.5%; 30-44, 18.4%; 45-59, 9.496; 60-74, 4.1%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%. Doubling time: 39 years.

Population projection: (2010) 14,658,000; (2020) 17,542,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Khmer 85.2%; Chinese 6.4%; Vietnamese 3.0%; Cham 2.5%; Lao 0.6%; other 2.3%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Buddhist 84.7%; Chinese folk religionist 4.7%; traditional beliefs 4.3%; Muslim 2.3%; Christian 1.1%; other 2.9%.

Major urban areas (1998): Phnom Penh (2005) 1,364,000; Battambang 124,290; Sisophon 85,382; Siemreap 83,715; Sihanoukville 66,723.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 26.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.37. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 57.4 years; female 61.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases c. 158; HIV/AIDS-related c. 114; tuberculosis c. 90; diarrheal diseases c. 86;

perinatal conditions c. 84.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: 3,280,300,000,000 riels (tax revenue 58.3%; nontax revenue 17.2%; grants 20.096; other 4.596). Expenditures: 3,294,700,000,000 riels (current expenditure 59.7%, development expenditure 40.396).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): rice 5,986,000, cassava 535,600, corn (maize) 247,800, soybeans 179,100, bananas 148,000, sugarcane 118,200, coconuts 71,000, oranges 63,000, rubber 27,000, tobacco leaves 2,479; livestock (number of live animals) 3,100,000 cattle, 2,500,000 pigs, 650,000 buffalo, 120,000 crocodiles; roundwood 9,334,000

cu m, of which fuelwood 99%; fisheries production (2004) 326,652 (from aquaculture 6%); aquatic plants production 16,840 (from aquaculture 100%). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold, n.a.; gemstones, n.a.; crude stones 600,000; salt 40,000. Manufacturing (value added in 000,000,000 riels; 2002): wearing apparel 1,808; food products 392; base and fabricated metals 120; wood and

paper products and publishing 101; textiles 96. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 130,000,000 (130,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) negligible (174,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (none); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.1; average annual extrapolated monetary and nonmonetary income (1993-94): 2,031,000 riels (U.S.$787); sources of income (1993-94): monetary 67.4%, of which nonagricultural (mostly self-employment) 36.8%, agricultural 18.1%, wages and salaries 9.1%; non-monetary 32.6%, of which agricultural 11.4%; household expenditure (2002): food, beverages, and tobacco 62.6%, housing and energy 19.7%, health 6.0%, transportation and communications 3.4%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 840; remittances (2005) 200; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 178; official development assistance (2005) 538. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 97; remittances (2005) 144. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,177,000,000 (U.S.$435 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

% of labour

force

force

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing

8,208 95 4,583

324 0.4 18.1

4,479,773 10,751 556,388

70.0 02 87

Construction

1,605

6.3

100,123

1.6

129

0.5

4,704

0.1

Transp. and commun.

1,690

6.7

174,711

2.7

Trade, hotels

3,331

13.1

661,406

10.3

Finance, real estate Public admin., defense

1,753 464

6.9 1.8

16,224 143,513

0.3 2.2

252,084 = 6,399,677

3.9 — 100.0

2,147 1,3454 25,350

8.5 5.34 100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,155,000,000. Population economically active (2004): total 7,557,600; activity rate of tota population c. 5596 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 82.696; female 49.496; area

Kampong Thom

Preah Vihear Prey Veng Pursat

labour

value

unemployed5 [November 2001] 1.8%).

area

Oddar Mean chey

% of total

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

Kandal

in value '000,000,000 riels

Public utilities

1 £ = 8,071 riels.

Kampot

2002

Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 100.8 Consumer price index

2000 100.0

2001 99.4

2002 102.6

2003 103.8

2004 107.9

2005 114.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 21.0%, in permanent crops 0.8%, in pasture 8.5%; overall forest area (2005) 59.2%.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—699 20.0%

—699 18.2%

-784 18.1%

—801 16.1%

-949 15.5%

—1,344 18.8%

Imports (2005): U.S.$4,254,000,000 (retained imports 97.3%; imports for reexport 2.7%). Major import sources (2004): Thailand 23.9%; Hong Kong 15.0%; China 13.5%; Singapore 11.5%; Vietnam 7.6%. Exports (2005): U.S.$2,910,000,000 (domestic exports 95.3%, of which garments 77.796, rice 6.1967, rubber 4.1967, fish 2.6957, sawn timber and logs

0.5957; reexports 4.796). Major export destinations

(2004): U.S. 56.296;

Germany 11.5%; U.K. 7.0%; Canada 4.3%; Vietnam 3.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 374 mi, 602 km; (2000) passenger-km 45,000,000; (1999) metric ton-km 76,171,000. Roads (2004): total length 23,770 mi, 38,257 km (paved 6%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 235,298; trucks and buses 35,448. Air transport (2005-06): passenger-km 198,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,214,000.

Communications Medium

date

Televisions

2003

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

103

8.0

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

1,1409 33

799 23

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004

38

2004

368

2.6

2.78

2005 2005

44 1.09

3.1 0.1?

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of literate population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 4.496; incomplete primary education 54.096; complete primary 23.796; incomplete secondary 11.396; secondary/vocationa 5.396; higher 1.196; unknown 0.296. Literacy (2004): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 74.4%; males literate 82.1%; females literate

67.4%.

Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

48,433

2,747,411

56.7

Voc., teacher tr. 10

2,915

9,983

4.3

Higher

2,479

43,210

17.4

Primary (age 6—10)

Secondary (age 11—16)

5,915

594

22,830

543,885

23.8

Health: physicians (2004) 2,122 (1 per 6,169 persons); hospital beds (2002) 9,800 (1 per 1,405 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 68.8.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,370 (vegetable products 9296, animal products 896); 13496 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006)11: 124,300 (army 60.396, navy 2.395, air force 1.296, provincial forces 36.296). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.89512; per capita expenditure U.S.$812.

Includes 57 indirectly elected seats and 4 nonelected seats. ?Projection based on 1998 census; 2004 population estimate based on 2004 intercensal survey is 13,091,000. *Based on land area. “Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. 5Registered; for population age 10 and over. ‘Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. "Includes estimates for illegal exports. $Circulation of daily newspapers. ?Subscribers. 101997—98. lFigures exclude 67,000 paramilitary. Includes expenditures for police.

Internet resource for further information: * National Institute of Statistics http://www.nis.gov.kh

540

Britannica World Data

Cameroon

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

Official name: République du Cameroun (French); Republic of Cameroon (English). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [180]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Yaoundé. Official languages: French; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2001 104.4

2002 107.4

2003 108.0

2004 108.3

2005 110.5

2006 116.88

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$5,521,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 2,139,000, sugarcane 1,450,000, plantains 1,356,000, oil palm fruit 1,300,000, taro 1,152,000, corn (maize) 1,023,000, bananas 855,974, sorghum 523,000, tomatoes 417,000, yams 292,800, peanuts (groundnuts) 233,600, cacao 178,500, seed cotton 170,000, natural rubber 45,892, coffee 43,620; livestock (number of live animals) 6,000,000 cattle, 4,400,000 goats, 3,800,000 sheep; roundwood 11,285,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 84%; fisheries

production (2004) 108,330 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): pozzolana 600,000; limestone 130,000; gold 1,500 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2002): food products 97; refined petroleum 88; beverages 78; paints, soaps, and varnishes 51; wood products (excl. furniture) 48; rubber products 38. Energy production (consumption):

1 US.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 4,004,000,000 (3,264,000,000); coal, none (none);

Area and population Regions

area

2004 estimate

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Adamoua

Ngaoundéré

24,595

63,701

782,000

Centre Est

Yaoundé Bertoua

26,623 42,086

68,953 109,002

2,703,000 816,000

Extrême-Nord

Maroua

13,229

34,263

2,941,000

Littoral Nord

Douala Garoua

7,818 25,517

20,248 66,090

2,380,000 1,326,000

Nord-Ouest Ouest

Bamenda Bafoussam

6,680 5,364

17,300 13,892

1,989,000 2,142,000

18,221 9,8111

47,191 25,4101

578,000 1,343,000

Sud Sud-Ouest

Ebolowa Buea

LAND AREA INLAND WATER

TOTAL

crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 21,900,000 ([2004] 14,043,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,752,000 (917,000); natural gas, none (none). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 12.8%, in permanent crops 2.6%, in pasture 4.3%; overall forest area (2005) 45.6%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 36; remittances (2005) 31; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 4.0; official development assistance (2005) 3589. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2003) 212; remittances (2005) 63; FDI (2001-03 avg.) 24.

population

179,9432 3,707

466,050 9,600

183,6491.2

475,6501

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)

17,000,000

CFAF ’000,000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 18,060,000. Density (2007)3: persons per sq mi 100.4, persons per sq km 38.8. Urban-rural (2004): urban 53.4%; rural 46.6%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.15%; female 49.85%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 41.5%; 15-29, 29.0%; 30-44, 15.7%; 45-59, 8.8%; 60-74, 4.1%; 75-84, 0.8%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 19,294,000; (2020) 23,471,000. Doubling time: 31 years. Ethnic composition (1983): Fang 19.6%; Bamileke and Bamum 18.5%; Duala, Luanda, and Basa 14.7%; Fulani 9.6%; Tikar 7.4%; Mandara 5.7%; Maka 4.9%; Chamba 2.4%; Mbum 1.3%; Hausa 1.2%; French 0.2%; other 14.5%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 27.4%; traditional beliefs 22.2%; Protestant 20.2%; Sunni Muslim 20.0%; nonreligious/other 10.2%. Major urban areas (2004): Douala 1,532,800; Yaoundé 1,434,700; 409,000; Kousséri 332,900; Bamenda 298,500; Maroua 297,600.

Garoua

2002

2003

2004

2005

454.6 2.0%

450.3 2.0%

—108.2 41%

-48.2 1.6%

Imports (2005): CFAF 1,524,200,000,000 (crude petroleum 27.8%, machinery and apparatus 11.6%, chemicals and chemical products 11.1%, cereals 7.4%, motor vehicles 6.196). Major import sources: Nigeria 21.0%; France 17.7%; China 5.0%; U.S. 4.6%; Japan 3.9%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 1,476,000,000,000 (crude petroleum 44.8%, fuels and lubricants 12.2%, sawn wood 12.0%, cocoa beans 7.5%, aluminum 4.7%, raw

cotton 4.7%, bananas 2.4%, coffee 2.3%). Major

export destinations: Spain

19.7%; France 12.7%; Italy 11.7%; The Netherlands 7.6%; U.S. 6.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 631 mi, 1,016 km; passenger-km 323,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,119,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 31,068 mi, 50,000 km (paved 10%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 175,981; trucks and buses 59,399. Air transport (2001): passenger-km 796,567,000; metric ton-km cargo 23,255,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 35.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 22.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 4.58. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 51.7 years; female 53.0 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 5.4%4 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS-related c. 308;

Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

units Medium

Televisions Telephones

2004

720

43

Cellular

2005

2,25211

13311

Internet users

2005

100

6.1

Broadband

Landline

PCs Dailies

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005 2006 2006

200 5910 370 E

12 3.510 22

"A

lower respiratory infections c. 201; malaria c. 119; diarrheal diseases c. 88;

Education and health

perinatal conditions c. 69.

Educational attainment (2004)12: Percentage of population 25 and over having: no formal schooling 32.9%; primary education 35.3%; secondary 26.2%; higher 4.2%; other/unknown 1.4%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total popula-

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 1,590,000,000,000 (non-oil revenue 69.4%, of which VAT 22.0%, direct taxes 16.5%, customs duties 11.9%, nontax revenue 7.9%; oil revenue 27.6%; grants 3.0%). Expenditures: CFAF 1,278,000,000,000 (current expenditure 82.6%, of which interest on public debt 10.1%; cap-

tion age 15 and over literate 74.6%; males 81.5%; females

ital expenditure 16.1%; other 1.3%). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$17,707,000,000 (U.S.$974 per capita).

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 15-24) Vocational Higher!3

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Agriculture, fishing, forestry

2001

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF '000,000,000

value

force

force

1,574

20.3

555 12

7.2 0.2

Manufacturing

1,422

18.3

Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade

203 58 522 1,554

2.6 0.7 6.7 20.0

98

13

Crude petroleum other Mining

Finance, real estate

Other TOTAL

1,294

16.7

4665 7,7572

6.05 100.0

ae 5,464,853

ex 100.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.8; expenditure (1993)6: food 49.196, housing 18.095, transportation and communications 13.0%, health 8.6%, clothing 7.6%, recreation 2.4%.

Population economically active (2003)7: total 6,093,000; activity rate of total population 38.7% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 68.4%; female 39.696; unemployed, n.a.).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

10,519 1,106 346 7

49,042 27,595 10,455 2,223

2,798,523 669,129 137,044 58,251

57.1 24.2 13.1 26.2

Health (2004): physicians 2,966 (1 per 5,609 persons); hospital beds 38,06714 (1 per 437 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 67.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,634 (vegetable products 94%, animal products 695); 14296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 14,100 (army 88.795, navy 9.296, air force 2.196). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.3%; per capita expenditure U.S.$13.

Services Public admin., defense

Education (2002-03)

67.9%.

1Excludes the 270-sq-mi (700-sq-km) Bakassi Peninsula, which was formally ceded by Nigeria to Cameroon in August 2006. Expect full implementation of the transfer by 2008. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Based on land area. 4Statistically derived midpoint within range. “Indirect taxes less subsidies and imputed bank service charge. Weights of consumer price index components. "Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. $Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. "Figure represents commitments. !°Circulation. !Subscribers. !2Based on 2004 survey of 17,506 persons. 13Universities only; 2003-04. !4Includes health centres with fewer than 10 beds.

Internet resource for further information: * National Institute of Statistics http://www.statistics-cameroon.org

Nations of the World

Social indicators

Canada

Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: incomplete primary and complete primary education 8.8%; incomplete secondary 15.7%; complete secondary 19.3%; some university/higher vocational 39.0%; bachelor’s degree or higher 17.2%.

Official name: Canada. Form of government: federal multiparty parliamentary state with two legislative houses (Senate [1051]; House of Commons [308]). Chief of state: Queen of Canada (British Monarch). Representative of chief of state: Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Ottawa. Official languages: English; French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Canadian dollar (Can$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ 2 Can$1.05; 1 £ - Can$2.11.

Distribution of income (1999) percentage of household income by quintile

area sq mi

sq km

2006 estimate

Alberta British Columbia Manitoba

Edmonton Victoria Winnipeg

255,541 364,764 250,116

661,848 944,735 647,797

3,375,800 4,310,500 1,177,800

28,150

72,908

749,200

156,453 21,345 415,599

405,212 55,284 1,076,395

509,700 934,400 12,687,000

Fredericton

St. John's Halifax Toronto

Prince Edward Island

Charlottetown

2,185

5,660

138,500

Quebec

Quebec

595,391

1,542,056

7,651,500

Saskatchewan

Regina

251,367

651,036

985,400

Yellowknife

519,735

1,346,106

41,900

Iqaluit

808,185

2,093,190

30,800

Whitehorse

186,272

482,443

Yukon Territory

TOTAL

4

5 (highest)

7.4%

11.6%

15.3%

242%

41.5%

946.1, of which assault 731.8, sexual assault 73.7, homicide 2.0; property crime 3,990.9, of which auto theft 530.7, breaking and entering 859.9.

Leisure (1998). Favourite leisure activities (hours weekly): television (2004) 21.4; radio (2005) 19.1; social time 13.3; reading 2.8; sports and entertainment 1.4 Material well-being (2003). Households possessing: automobile 62.4%; telephone 96.3%; cellular phone 53.9%; colour television 99.0%; central air conditioner 39.3%; cable television 65.1%; home computers 66.8%; Internet access 56.9%.

Territories Northwest Territories

3

6.8. Average days lost to labour stoppages per 1,000 employee-workdays (2001): 0.7. Average commuting distance (2001): 4.5 mi, 7.2 km; mode of transportation: automobile 80.7%, public transportation 10.5%, walking 6.6%, other 2.2%. Labour force covered by a pension plan (2001): 33.6%. Access to services. Proportion of households having access to: electricity (2002) 100%; public water supply (1996) 99.8%; public sewage collection (1996) 99.3%. Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (January 2006): 64.9%. Population over 18 years of age participating in voluntary work (2000): 26.7%. Union membership as percentage of civilian labour force (2003) 25.0%. Attendance at religious services on a weekly basis (2006): 17%. Social deviance (2004). Offense rate per 100,000 population for: violent crime

population

Capitals

Newfoundland and Labrador Nova Scotia Ontario

2

100,000 workers for (2005): injury, accident, or industrial illness 2,090; death

Provinces

New Brunswick

1

Quality of working life. Average workweek (2005): 35.2 hours. Annual rate per

Area and population

Nunavut

541

3,855,103?

9,984,670?

31,200

32,623,500?. ^

National economy Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$1,249,635,000,000

Demography Population (2007): 32,945,000. Density (2007)*: persons per sq mi 9.4, persons per sq km 3.6. Urban-rural (2003): urban 80.4%; rural 19.6%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.52%; female 50.48%.

(U.S.$38,360 per capita).

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 17.3%; 15-29, 20.4%; 30-44, 22.3%; 45-59, 21.9%; 60-74, 11.8%; 75-84, 4.7%; 85 and over, 1.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 33,928,000; (2020) 36,707,000. Ethnic origin (2000): Anglo-Canadian 45.5%; French-Canadian

23.5%;

Chinese 3.4%; British expatriates 3.3%; Indo-Pakistani 2.6%, of which Punjabi 2.3%; German 2.4%; Italian 2.2%; U.S. white 1.8%; Métis (partIndian) 1.8%; Indian 1.5%, of which detribalized 0.5%; Jewish 1.4%; Arab 1.3%; Ukrainian 1.2%; Eskimo (Inuit) 0.1%; other 8.0%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Christian 77.1%, of which Roman Catholic 43.2%,

Protestant 28.3%, unspecified Christian 2.6%, Orthodox 1.7%, other Christian 1.3%; Muslim 2.0%; Jewish 1.1%; Hindu 1.0%; Buddhist 1.0%; Sikh 0.9%; nonreligious 16.5%; other 0.4%. Major metropolitan areas (2006): Toronto 5,113,149; Montreal 3,635,571; Vancouver 2,116,581; Ottawa-Hull 1,130,761; Calgary 1,079,310; Edmonton 1,034,945; Quebec 715,515; Winnipeg 694,668; Hamilton 692,911; London

457,720.

Abbotsford Barrie Halifax Kingston Kitchener

159,020 177,061 372,858 152,358 451,235

population Oshawa Regina St. Catharines— Niagara St. John’s

330,594 194,971 390,317 181,113

population Saskatoon Sherbrooke Sudbury Victoria Windsor

233,923 186,952 158,258 330,088 323,342

Place of birth (2001): 81.6% native-born; 18.4% foreign-born, of which U.K. 2.0%, other European 5.7%, Asian countries 5.8%, U.S. 0.8%, other 4.1%.

Mobility (2001). Population living in the same residence as in 1996: 58.1%; different residence, same municipality 22.4%; same province, different municipality 3.3%; different province 12.7%; different country 3.5%. Households. Total number of households (2004) 11,952,550. Average household size (2004) 2.67; 1 person (1997) 25.2%, 2 persons 33.0%, 3 persons 16.7%, 4 persons 16.3%, 5 or more persons 8.8%. Family households (2001): 8,371,020 (72.4%), nonfamily 3,191,955 (27.6%, of which 1 person 75.6% ). Immigration (2004): permanent immigrants admitted 235,824; from Asia 48.6%, of which China 15.4%, India 10.8%, Philippines 5.6%; Europe 17.8%, of which U.K. 2.6%, France 2.1%; U.S. 3.2%; refugee arrivals 26,526; over-

all refugee population (end of 2004) 141,398.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005-06): 10.6 (world avg. 20.3); (1997) within marriage 72.3%; outside of marriage 27.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005-06): 7.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005-06): 3.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.61. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2006) 4.6/(2003) 2.2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 76.9 years; female 83.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 240.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 207.5; diseases of the respiratory system 56.6; accidents and violence 44.1 (including suicide 11.6).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

26 of total

labour

2e of labour

value

force

force

23,371

24 3.6 15.9 6.1 25 48 15.0 24.6 5.6 19.7 — 100.09

40,134 175,066 67,616 28,043 52,784 164,915 270,212 61,527 216,657 — 1,100,32511

341,1008 321,000? 2,131,200 1,057,100 121,200 801,400 3,624,600 2,767,400 850,000 4,306,200 1,152,500 17,473,50012

2.08

1.89 12.2 6.1 0.7 46 20.7 158 4.9 24.6 6.6 100.0

Budget (2005-06)13. Revenue: Can$229,660,000,000 (income tax 62.9%, sales tax 15.4%, contributions to social security 9.6%, other 12.1%). Expenditures: Can$216,156,000,000 (social services and welfare 37.1%, defense and socia protection 11.2%, health 10.0%, public debt interest 9.9%, resource conser-

vation and industrial development 3.8%, education 2.3% ). Public debt (20076): U.S.$582,601,000,000.

Other metropolitan areas (2006) population

in value Can$'000,0007 Agriculture, fishing, forestry

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transportation Trade, hotels Finance, real estate! Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

20066

Manufacturing, mining, and construction enterprises (2004)

Manufacturing Transport equipment

no. of employees

weekly wages asa % of avg. of all wages'4. 15

annual value added (Can$000,000)!6

228,358

148.4

28,101

Food and beverages Chemicals and related products Electrical and electronic products

270,09617 93,735 128,858

100.2 147.5 140.1

22,28717 17,239 14,085

Metal fabricating

195,350

123.2

14,164

85,475

153.9

12,261

Wood products (excl. furniture)

133,853

111.9

13,725

Paper and related products Nonelectrical machinery Rubber and plastic products Furniture and fixtures Nonmetallic mineral products

97,649 143,421 130,504 101,164 59,315

154.4 145.9 111.3 99.7 121.5

11,393 12,490 10,341 5,848 5,639

81,119

109.6

5,610

67,864 46,799

72.6 101.9

2,558 2,154

17,056

186.1

1,991

17 164,010

201.3 180.5

17 41,193

1,056,276

115.4

63,559

Primary metals

Printing, publishing, and related products

Wearing apparel Textiles Petroleum and coal products

Tobacco products industries Mining Construction

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): wheat 26,775,000, barley 12,481,200, rapeseed 9,660,200, corn (maize) 9,460,800, potatoes 4,386,500, oats 3,432,300, soybeans 3,161,300, dry peas 3,099,800, lentils 1,277,900, linseed 1,082,000, tomatoes 839,250, apples 394.100, canary seed 227,200, mustard seed 201,400, cranberries and blueberries 139,099, mushrooms 80,000; livestock (number of live animals; 20076) 14,329,000 pigs, 14,315,000 cattle, 590,500 sheep; roundwood 199,345,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 196; fisheries production 1,255,821 (from aquaculture

12%). Mining and quarrying (value of production in Can$'000,000; 2005)18:

542

Britannica World Data

nickel 3,302 (3); potash 2,839 (1); copper 2,455 (8); gold 2,041 (8); diamonds (gemstones) 1,684 (4); iron ore 1,496 (9); sand and gravel 1,165; stone 1,133; zinc 998 (4); salt 420 (5); silver 299 (6); lime 262 (10); gypsum 100 (3); cobalt 91 (4). Manufacturing (value added in Can$'000,000,000; 2005)7: transporta-

chemical products 6.8%; natural gas 6.0%; wood and wood pulp 4.9%; paper and paperboard 2.4%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 78.9%; U.K. 2.6%; Japan 2.3%; other European Economic Community countries 4.7%.

tion equipment 28.1; food 17.6; chemicals 17.2; fabricated metal products 14.2;

Trade by commodities (2002)

wood industries 13.7; machinery 12.5; primary metals 12.3; paper products 11.4; rubber and plastic products 10.3; computers and electronic products 103. Retail trade (2002) no. of employees!5 Motor vehicle dealers Food stores Clothing and footwear stores Home furnishings and electronics Automotive stores Service stations Furniture and appliance stores Pharmacies

326,40019 496,700 144,600 173,200 19 19 87,000 54,200

annual sales (Can$'000,000)

143.5 84.2 79.4 81.7 143.5 143.5 119.2 M

89,979.0 66,424.38 27,229.0 24,501.5 23,078.5 22,679.5 18,275.9 14,356.7

Sporting goods

eus

Sa

11,686.9

Hardware stores Electronics, including computers Personal care products

os 20 20

81.7 92.0 79.4

8,113.0 8,108.2 7,620.0

92.0

53,767.7

Other

235,30020

SITC Group

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 567,600,000,000

117,367,000 (107,573,000): natural gas (cu m; 2004) 180,000,000,000 (93,300,000,000).

Population economically active (20076): total 17,825,800; activity rate of total population 55.696 (participation rates: ages 15 and over 67.596; female 46.796; unemployed [February 2007] 6.196). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000 2001 2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Consumer price index Hourly earnings index?

107.7 107.8

109.7 110.6

112.2

114.4 xs

100.0 — 100.0

102.5 101.6

104.8 104.4

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 2.7; average annual income per family (2003) Can$72,700 (U.S.$51,888); sources o income (2001): wages, salaries, and self-employment 71.8%, transfer payments 14.0%, other 14.2%; expenditure (2004): housing 26.9%, transportation 19.0%, food 15.2%, recreation 9.3%, household operations 6.4%, cloth-

ing 5.5%, household furnishings 4.1%, health 3.7%, alcoholic beverages and tobacco 3.3%, education 2.4%, other 4.2%. 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Exchange rate, Can$ per:

U.S. dollar23 ga SDHR?? International reserves (U.S.$) Total (excl. gold; '000,000)23 SDRs ((000,000)23 Reserve pos. in IMF ((000,000)23 Foreign exchange ((000,000)23 Gold (000,000 fine troy oz)23 % world reserves Interest and prices Central bank discount (%)24 Govt. bond yield (%)24 Industrial share prices (2000 = 100)24 Balance of payments

1.49 2.24 1.95

1:55 2.29 2.00

1.57 2.37 2.15

1.40 2.29 1.92

1.30 2.38 1.87

1.21 2.20 1.66

%

11,285,900 1,371,900

5.1 0.6

16,230,800 1,002,600

6.4 0.4

6,095,900

2.8

18,507,000

7.3

10,928,100

4.9

31,904,000

12.6

303,900

(T

420,700

0.2

20,909,300 29,427,100

9.4 13.2

14,789,900 38,240,600

5.9 15.1

109,498,100

49.3

96,048,800

38.1

27,382,200

12.3

17,056,100

6.8

23 100.0

18,222,700 252,418,50012

7.2 100.0

Direction of trade (2002) imports

exports

U.S.$'000 Africa Asia China Japan South Korea Other Americas Mexico United States Other Americas Europe EU Other Europe Oceania TOTAL

%

2,000,200 34,300,700 10,185,300 9,824,800 3,098,300 11,192,300 151,657,300 8,100,700 139,157,900 4,398,700 29,360,200 24,830,300 4,529,900 1,466,400 222,241,00012, 25

U.S.$000

0.9 15.4 46 4.4 1.4 5.0 68.2 3.6 62.6 2.0 13.2 11.2 2.0 0.7 100.025

1,049,400 13,961,100 2,608,900 5,352,700 1,273,200 4,726,300 224,005,000 1,537,300 220,111,300 2,356,400 12,505,900 11,085,900 1,420,000 895,500 252,418,50012

% 0.4 5.5 1.0 24 0.5 1.9 88.7 0.6 87.2 0.9 5.0 44 0.6 0.4 100.0

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 72,168 km; passenger-km 1,472,781,000; metric ton-km cargo 352,133,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 1,408,900 km (paved c. 3596). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 18,123,885; trucks and buses 785,649. Air transport (2003): passenger-km 90,136,000,000; metric tonCommunications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

22,384

707

Telephones

31,924 574

33,962 614

36,984 719

36,222 838

34,429 924

32,962 897

2,509

2,863

3,580

3,847

3,338

1,401

28,841 1.18 0.12

30,484 1.05 0.11

32,685 0.60 0.06

31,537 0.11 0.01

30,167 0.11 0.01

30,664 0.11 0.01

6.00 5.89

2.50 5.78

3.00 5.66

3.00 5.28

2.75 5.08

3.50 4.39

100.0

80.5

73.2

74.5

90.0

105.8

Cellular Landline

445,717

436,488

441,076

450,682

455,303

—243,975 289,022 -25,425

-226,132 271,849 -29,435

-227,431 263,919 -23,032

-244,836 285,912 -27,716

-279,430 330,112 -28,682

-319,301 374,604 -30,035

+19,622

416,281

413,456

413,360

+22,000

425,268

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 5.0%, in permanent crops 0.7%, in pasture 1.7%; overall forest area (2005) 33.6%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 13,584; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 18,558. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 18,341; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 32,331.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Can$'000,000,000 % of total

457.6 7.8%

366.1 8.3%

466.7 7.9%

453.6 6.2%

370.7 9.2%

457.3 7.496

Imports (2006): Can$404,535,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 24.7%; transport equipment 23.4%, of which road vehicles and parts 19.7%; chemicals and chemical products 7.3%; base metals 6.9%; food products 5.8%; crude

petroleum 5.6%). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 65.5%; Japan 2.9%; U.K. 2.4%; other European Economic Community countries 8.0%. Exports (2006): Can$458,166,900,000 (transport equipment 22.7%, of which road vehicles and parts 18.1%; machinery and apparatus 16.4%; base metals and alloys 9.9%; crude petroleum 8.4%; food products 6.9%; chemicals and © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2005 2005

17,01727 20,780

52527 501

Internet users Broadband

2004 2004 2005 2006

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

22,390 5,35026 20,00028 7,67627

701 16726 62028 23627

Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate virtually 100%. Education (2001-02)

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 14-18) Higher

+45,047

units number

Education and health

Postsecondary

(U.S.$'000,000)

current account

U.S.$000

km cargo 1,880,000,000.

Financial aggregates

Balance of visible trade, of which: Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments,

%

5,043,100 222,241,00012

(556,600,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 29,261,000 (18,057,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 36,700,000 (40,804,000); crude petroleum?! (barrels;

2004) 1,146,000,000 (840,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

exports

U.S.$'000

00 Food and live animals 01 Beverages and tobacco 02 Crude materials, excluding fuels 03 Mineral fuels, lubricants, and related materials 04 Animal and vegetable oils, fats, and waxes 05 Chemicals and related products, n.e.s. 06 Basic manufactures 07 Machinery and transport equipment 08 Miscellaneous manufactured articles 09 Goods not classified by kind TOTAL

weekly wages as a % of all wages'4, 15

imports

}

student/ schools??

teachers

students

teacher ratio

JE 505

142,531

2,482,315

17.4

:

136,963

2,520,348

18.4

10,990

102,125

37,2032?

735,59932

19930

7531

9.3

19.832

Health: physicians (2004) 67,087 (1 per 476 persons); hospital beds (2002-03) 115,120 (1 per 274 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 4.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,486 (vegetable products 72%, animal products 28%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 62,100 (army 53.2%, navy 19.3%, air force 27.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$403. 1Statutory number. ?Total area equals 3,855,103 sq mi (9,984,670 sq km), of which land area equals 3,511,023 (9,093,507 sq km), inland water area equals 310,296 sq mi (803,663 Sq km), and Great Lakes water area equals 33,784 sq mi (87,500 sq km). ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 42006 preliminary unadjusted census total equals 31,612,897. “Based on land area. ‘January 1. "At prices of 1997. 8Excludes fishing, forestry. Includes fishing, forestry. !°Includes professional, scientific, and technical services. GDP at current values in 2005 was Can$1,371,425,000,000. Detail does not add to total given because of discrepancies in estimates. Federal government revenue and expenditure. “Excludes agriculture, fishing and trapping, private household services, religious organizations, and the military. 152000. 1eFor 2005 in constant dollars of 1997. 17Food and beverages includes tobacco. !8World ranking by production volume is in parentheses. Motor vehicle dealers includes Service stations and Automotive stores. 2°Other includes Electronics and Personal care products. ?!In 2003 there were 322,100,000 barrels of marketable crude petroleum produced in the Alberta oil sands. 22Manufacturing only. End of period. “Period average. “Total for imports includes U.S.$3,456 300,000 (1.6% of total imports; mostly special transactions) not distributable by region. ?9Cireulation of daily newspapers. 7/Subscribers. 2%Estimated figure. 231999—2000. *3?Community colleges. *!Universities only. 32200304.

Internet resource for further information: * Statistics Canada http://www.statcan.ca

Nations of the World

Cape Verde

tricity (kW-hr; 2004) 220,000,000 (220,000,000); coal, none

Official name: Repüblica de Cabo Verde (Republic of Cape Verde). Form of government: multiparty

zc

republic with one legislative house

Atlantic

(National Assembly [72]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Praia. Official language: Portuguese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: escudo (C.V.Esc.); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ 2 C. VEsc. 81.10; 1 £ = C.V.Esc. 163.02.

cean

Leeward Brava2

;

area Principal towns

sq mi

Islands

Fogo? Maio? Santiago^ Windward Islands

Boa Vista? Sal?

6941 25

2005 estimate

1,798 64

317,990 6,462

S&o Filipe

184

476

37,861

Porto Inglés Praia

103 383 858

267 991 2,223

7,506 266,161 157,959

Sal Rei

239

620

5,398

83

216

17,631

—

Santo Antão? São Nicolaus Sáo Vicente?

population sq km

Nova Sintra

Santa Maria

Santa Luzias

" À

Porto Novo Ribeira Brava Mindelo

Other islets TOTAL

14

35

300 134 88

779 346 227

5 1,557

12 4,033

2005

2006

105.7

106.9

104.9

105.4

111.4

2002 -28,143 75.6%

2003 -29,425 75.4%

2004 -30,219 75.7%

2005 —30,810 65.5%

2006 | —40,292 73.4%

0

Imports (2006): C.V.Esc. 47,578,000,000 (food and agricultural products 27.2%, machinery and apparatus 10.7%, mineral fuels 8.6%, transport equipment 5.4%, iron and steel 5.2%, cement 4.5%). Major import sources: Portugal

47,484 13.310 74,136

0 475,949

30.9%; The Netherlands and Belgium 13.3%; U.S. 12.8%; Spain 7.6%; Brazil

5.4%. Exports (2006): C.V.Esc. 7,286,000,000 (reexports [significantly resold fuel (bunkering) to passing ships and aircraft] 75.9%; domestic exports 18.2%, of which fresh fish 10.5%, clothing 6.7%, footwear 3.3%). Major export destinations\1; Portugal 49.8%; Spain 27.3%; other 22.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 524,000; (2020) 628,000. Doubling time: 38 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Cape Verdean mestico (black-white admixture) 69.6%; Fulani 12.2%; Balanta 10.0%; Mandyako 2.0%; other 1.6%.

4.6%; Portuguese white

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 95.196, of which Roman Catholic 88.196, Protestant 3.3%, independent Christian 2.7%; Muslim 2.8%; other 2.1%. Major cities (2005): Praia 111,500; Mindelo 70,000; Santa Maria (2000) 13,220; Assomada 11,900; Pedra Badejo 10,700.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 24.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.90. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 68.3 years; female 76.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (1999): circulatory system diseases 151.0; respiratory system diseases 58.3; infectious and parasitic diseases 55.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 48.7; accidents and violence 48.0.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: C. V.Esc. 34,603,000,000 (tax revenue 68.1%, of which consumption taxes 28.696, taxes on income and profits 22.096; grants 20.296; nontax revenue 11.096; net lending 0.796). Expenditures: C.V.Esc. (current expenditure 59.7%; capital expenditure 34.8%; other

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$545,800,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,089,000,000 (U.S.$2,099 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

8,904

9.1

29,876 5,520

24.7 4.6

7,530

7.3

883 410

0.7 0.3

9,112 18,621

9.3 19.0

22,722 6,138

18.9 54

Trade, hotels

20,288

20.7

12,747

10.6

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

8,775 11,813

8.9 12.0

821

DT

11,0178 98,139!

11.28 100.0

Public utilities Mining Construction Transp. and commun.

2,078

24

17,358

ae

24,090 120,565

20.0 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 14,000, fruits 9,000, pulses 7,000, bananas 6,000, tomatoes 4,500,

sweet potatoes 4,000, corn (maize) 3,648; livestock (number of live animals)

205,000 pigs, 112,500 goats; roundwood 1,542 cu m, of which fuelwood 10096;

fisheries production (2004) 8,446 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): salt 1,600; pozzolana, n.a. Manufacturing (1999): flour 15,901; soap 1,371; frozen fish 9007; canned fish 2007; garments, n.a.; cigarettes and

cigars 77 kg; beer 41,045 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): elec-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2001): total length 870 mi, 1,400 km (paved [2000] 69%). Vehicles (200412): passenger cars 23,811; trucks and buses 5,032. Air transport (2002): passenger-km 279,000,000; metric ton-km cargo, nua. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

48

105

2006 2006

10914 72

21014 138

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2005 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

48 E 25 1.814

102 1113 53 3.714

Education and health Educational attainment (1990). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 47.9%; primary 40.9%; incomplete secondary 3.9%; complete secondary 1.496; higher 1.596; unknown 4.496. Literacy (2006): tota. population age 15 and over literate 78.9%; males 86.5%; females 71.9%. Education (2003-04)

Primary (age 6—11) Secondary (age 12-17) Teacher training Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

425

3,169

85,138

26.9

2,193 52. 425

49,790 948 3,03615

22.7 18.2 74

33 3

Health (2005): physicians 241 (1 per 1,976 persons); hospital beds 950 (1 per 501 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 30.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,875 (vegetable products 84%, animal products 16%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 1,200 (army 83.3%, air force 8.3%, coast guard 8.496). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$15.

1990

C.V.Esc. '000,000 Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing

Services

2004

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2006) 4.9; expenditure (1997): food 38.7%, transportation 13.6%, alcoholic beverages 10.1%, housing 7.7%, household furnishings 6.0%, energy 5.0%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 11.4%, in permanent crops 0.7%, in pasture 6.2%; overall forest area (2005) 20.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 122; remittances (2006) 123; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 15; official development assistance (2005) 161. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 67; remittances (2004) 1.0.

C. V.Esc. '000,000 % of total

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 39.4%; 15-29, 31.0%; 30-44, 16.6%; 45-59, 7.5%; 60-74, 4.196; 75-84, 1.296; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Other TOTAL

2003

Balance of trade (current prices)

Population (2007): 496,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 318.6, persons per sq km 123.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 55.996; rural 44.196. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.47%; female 51.53%.

5.5%).

2002

Foreign trade!°

Demography

uu ud

(none); crude

petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (89,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2003): total 157,0009; activity rate of total population c. 32.5969 (participation rates: ages 15-64 c. 58969; female c. 34969; unemployed [2006] 21.196). Price index (2000 = 100) 2001 103.7 Consumer price index

5

Area and population Island Groups Islands/Counties

2

: [re

543

1Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Island/county areas are coterminous. ?Administratively split into 3 counties. *Administratively split into 9 counties. 5Administered by Sáo Vicente. ^Administratively split into 2 counties. 72002. 9Taxes and duties on imports less imputed bank service charges. ?Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. !°Including reexports. !1Domestic exports only. January 1. 13Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. j5Excludes pupils studying abroad; applicable number for year earlier (2002-03) was 1,743.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estatística de Cabo Verde http://www.ine.cv * Banco de Cabo Verde http://www.bcv.cv

544

Britannica World Data

Cayman Islands

Population economically active (2006): total 18,303; activity rate of total population 58.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 82.4%; female 50.3%; unemployed 3.7%).

Official name: Cayman Islands. Political status: overseas territory (United Kingdom) with one legislative house (Legislative Assembly [181]). Chief of state: British Monarch, represented by Governor. Head of government: Leader of Government Business. Capital: George Town. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: 1 Cayman Islands dollar (CI$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) CI$1.00 = U.S.$1.232 = £0.61.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000 2001 2002 Consumer price index 1000 101.1 1037

2003

2004

2005

104.2

108.9

116.5

Monthly earnings index

Household income and expenditure (1999). Average household size 2.6; average annual income per household CI$52,400 (U.S.$62,880); sources of income: wages and salaries 76.2%, self-employment 13.4%, transfers 1.2%; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 633; cruise ship visitors (mostly day-trip participants; 2005) 1,799,000; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 3,746. Disbursements for (U.$.$000,000): tourism, n.a; remittances, n.a; FDI

(2001-05 avg.) 2,634.

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 4%, in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture c. 896; overall forest area (2005) c. 4896.

Area and population area Islands Grand Cayman? Cayman Brac^

Little Cayman^ TOTAL

population

sq mi

sq km

1999 census

76 15

197 39

37,473 1,822

11 1025

28 2645

115 39,410

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) CI$'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 56,200.

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—573.7 99.3%

—512.7 99.1%

—493.6 98.8%

-552.5 98.5%

-723.8 99.4%

-889.1 99.7%

Imports (2005): CI$990,403,000 (transportation equipment 15.3%; food prod-

Density (2006)6: persons per sq mi 604.3, persons per sq km 233.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 10096; rural 096. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.8896; female 51.1296. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 21.0%; 15-29, 18.3%; 30-44, 25.9%; 45-59,

ucts and beverages 11.3%; cement, bricks, and ceramics 8.9%; mineral fuels

8.4%; machinery and apparatus 4.9%; furniture 4.0%). Major import sources: U.S. 76.5%; Netherlands 0.7%.

Antilles 8.6%; Japan 1.1%; U.K. 0.7%; Jamaica

22.6%; 60-74, 9.2%; 75 and over, 3.0%.

Exports (2005): CI$1,300,000 (significantly manufactured consumer goods, turtle products, fish, and cut flowers [mainly orchids]). Major export destinations: mostly the U.S.

19.3%; Jewish 1.9%; Indo-Pakistani 0.3%; other 1.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2002): total length 488 mi, 785 km (paved 10096). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 23,583; trucks and buses 6,620. Air

Population projection: (2010) 64,000; (2020) 81,000. Doubling time: 64 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mulatto 51.5%; West Indian black 25.8%; British Religious affiliation (2000): Protestant (significantly Presbyterian) c. 5596; Spiritist (Rastafarian) c. 1596; independent Christian c. 10%; unaffiliated Christian c. 10%; nonreligious c. 4%; Jewish c. 2%; other c. 4%.

Major urban areas (2007): George Town 31,785; West Bay 11,436; Bodden Town 6,918.

transport (2005): passengers arriving 357,200, passengers departing 342,500; freight loaded 480 metric tons, freight unloaded 3,810 metric tons. Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.4 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 3.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.90. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2005) 1.7/(2004) 0.47. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 77.3 years; female 82.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2000): diseases of the circulatory system 136.8, of which ischemic heart disease 39.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 99.5; accidents and violence 34.8; diseases of the respiratory system 24.9.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CI$428,600,000 (taxes on international trade 40.1%; sales tax 40.0%; property tax 5.096). Expenditures: CI$430,300,000 (current expenditures 78.9%, of which wages and salaries 38.1%, transfers 17.8%; capital expenditures 11.3%; other 9.8%). Public debt (December 2005): U.S.$207,500,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): bananas 206, pumpkins, squash, and gourds 73, guavas and mangoes 36, plan-

Medium

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

1997

23

639

2004 2002

3414 38

76614 884

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2006 2004 2006 2006

oa 1213 21 a

oa 26413 391 ea

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Education and health Educational attainment (2006). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling/unknown 3.5%; incomplete primary education through incomplete secondary 19.0%; complete secondary 40.0%; vocational/technical degree 17.4%; higher 20.1%. Literacy (1998): total population literate 98.0%; males literate 98.0%; females literate 98.0%. Education (2004) Primary (age 5-10)

Secondary (age 11-16)

student/ }

schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

i

251

3,361

13.4

8

239

Voc., teacher tr.

Higher!*

2701 2

ius

27

43 D

390

144

tains 33, yams 32, tomatoes 27; livestock (number of live animals) 1,300 cat-

tle, 399 pigs, 269 goats; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2004) 125 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: crushed stone for local use. Manufacturing: industries include fish and turtle processing, handicrafts, and small-boat building’. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 454,000,000 (428,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) n.a. (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 2003) none (99,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) n.a. (n.a.). Gross national income (at current market prices; 2005): U.S.$2,217,000,000 (U.S.$47,744 per capita).

Health (2005): physicians 76 (1 per 691 persons); hospital beds 119 (1 per 441 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 8.2. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel: none; defense is the responsibility of the United Kingdom.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value U.S.$'000,000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing

Mining and quarrying

2006 % of total value

labour force

% of labour force

6.0

0.4

805

2.2

528 27.6

3a 1.7

126 383

20 14

152.0 368.0

9.6 23.2

6,344 8,011

17.7 22.3

172.0

10.8

1,477

4.1

786.0

49.4

7,648

21.3

2,380 7,242

6.6 20.1

94310 35,959

2.610 100.0

}

Public utilities Manufacturing Construction Trade, hotels, restaurants

Transportation and communications Finance, real estate, insurance, international

business? Pub. admin., defense Services

Other TOTAL

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

25.6 1,590.0

1.6 100.0

1Includes three nonelective seats. ZRounded pegged rate. Grand Cayman has no local government structure. “Cayman Brac and Little Cayman together are administered by a district commissioner appointed by the governor. 5Area includes 9 sq mi (23 sq km) of inland water. Density based on land area. 7Divorces filed. 5The economy of the Cayman Islands is overwhelmingly based on service industries such as tourism, insurance companies, offshore financial centres, and e-commerce companies. 7The Cayman Islands is the world’s largest centre for offshore banking, with 432 licensed banks, including 284 offshore banking facilities, in 2005. In that year the assets of Cayman Islands banks exceeded U.S.$1,000,000,000,000. Also of great importance to the economy are

the insurance, mutual and hedge fund (80% of the world’s hedge funds are registered in the Cayman Islands), trust management, and ship registration sectors. Unemployed. liNative Caymanians only. ?Imports c.if; exports f.o.b. Circulation. !^Subscribers. 152001.

Internet resources for further information: * Economics and Statistics Office http://www.eso.ky * Cayman Islands Government http://www.gov.ky

Nations of the World

Central African

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Republic

2003

Official name: République Centrafricaine (Central African Republic). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative body (National Assembly [105]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bangui. Official languages: French; Sango. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Public utilities Transp. and commun.

Trade Services Pub. admin., defense

Other TOTAL

378,800 46,100

544 6.6

1,113,900 15,400

80.4 1.1

16,100 30,900

2.3 4.4

22,400 7,000

1.6 0.5

5,400

0.8

1,500

0.1

26,600

3.8

1,500

0.1

72,300 42,100

10.4 6.0

118,000 15,600

8.5 1.1

47,000

6.8

91,700

6.6

31,3004 696,4005

4.54 100.0

— 1,387,000

— 100.0

Population economically active (2003): total 1,786,0006; activity rate of tota population 45.4969 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 80.4966; female 46.2966; unemployed [Bangui only; 2001] 2396).

area

population

Prefectures

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Bamingui-Bangoran Basse-Kotto

Ndélé Mobaye

22,471 6,797

58,200 17,604

43,229 249,150

Haut-Mbomou Haute-Kotto Kemo Lobaye Mambéré-Kadéi

Obo Bria Sibut Mbaiki Berbérati

21,440 33,456 6,642 7,427 11,661

55,530 86,650 17,204 19,235 30,203

57,602 90,316 118,420 246,875 364,795

Mbomou Nana-Gribizi Nana-Mambéré

Bangassou Kaga-Bandoro Bouar

23,610 7,721 10,270

61,150 19,996 26,600

164,009 117,816 233,666

Boali Bambari

12,292 19,266

31,835 49,900

356,725 276,710

Ouham Ouham-Pendé

Bossangoa Bozoum

19,402 12,394

50,250 32,100

369,220 430,506

Sangha-Mbaéré Vakaga

Nola Birao

7,495 17,954

19,412 46,500

101,074 52,255

26 240,324

67 622,436

622,771 3,895,139

Autonomous commune Bangui

in value

Manufacturing Construction

2003 census

Bangui TOTAL

1988

CFAF '000,000

Agriculture Mining

Area and population

Ombella-M'poko Ouaka

545

Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 96.9

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0

103.8

106.3

110.6

108.4

111.5

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 4.0; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1.0; official development assistance (2005) 95. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2004) 32; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.1%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 5.0%; overall forest area (2005) 36.5%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 426.6 13.6%

CFAF 000,000,000 % of total

2001 425.6 14.0%

2002 +18.6 10.0%

2003 +6.1 4.3%

2004 -11.4 7.9%

2005 -22.9 14.5%

Imports (2005): CFAF 90,300,000,000 (petroleum products 19.6%, unspecified 80.4%). Major import sources: France c. 17%; The Netherlands c. 10%; Cameroon c. 10%; U.S. c. 7%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 67,400,000,000 (diamonds 48.7%, wood and wood products 38.3%, cotton 1.6%, coffee 1.3%). Major export destinations: Belgium

Demography Population (2007): 4,343,000.

c. 35%; France c. 10%; Spain c. 9%; Italy c. 8%; China c. 7%; Indonesia c.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 18.1, persons per sq km 7.0.

6%.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 38.0%; rural 62.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.72%; female 51.28%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 42.7%; 15-29, 28.1%; 30-44, 14.7%; 45-59, 8.8%; 60-74, 4.6%; 75-84, 1.0%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,592,000; (2020) 5,434,000. Doubling time: 47 years. Ethnolinguistic composition (2004): Gbaya (Baya) c. 33%; Banda c. 27%; Mandjia c. 13%; Sara c. 10%; Mbum c. 7%; Ngbaka c. 4%; other c. 6%.

Religious affiliation (2005): independent Christian 20.2%; Roman

Catholic

19.8%; traditional beliefs 19.5%; Protestant 16.4%; Sunni Muslim 14.5%; non-

religious/other 9.6%. Major cities (2003): Bangui 622,771; Bimbo 124,176; Berbérati 76,918; Carnot 45,421; Bambari 41,356.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2005): total length 6,200 mi7, 10,000 km7 (paved c. 7%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 5,300; trucks and buses 6,300. Air transport

(2003): passenger

arrivals

19,2508, passenger

departures

19,1078; metric ton-km cargo 7,000,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

24

6.1

2005 2005

10010 10

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2510 25

date 2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

12 49 13 oa

3.0 1.09 3.2

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 33.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 4.41. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 43.5 years; female 43.6 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 10.7% 1 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS-related c. 604; lower respiratory infections c. 184; malaria c. 158; diarrheal diseases c. 105.

Education and health Educational attainment (1994-95)11. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 54.196; at least some primary education 30.596; at least some secondary education 14.4%; unknown 1.0%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 42.7%; males literate 53.8%; females literate 32.0%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11)

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 88,000,000,000 (taxes 57.5%, of which indirect domestic taxes 30.0%, direct taxes on income and profits 16.7%, taxes on

international trade 10.8%; grants 33.5%; nontax revenue ditures: CFAF

120,400,000,000

(current expenditure

62.6%;

9.0%). Expendevelopment

expenditure 31.9%; interest payments 5.5%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$871,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 563,000, yams 350,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 140,000, corn (maize) 110,000, bananas 110,000, taro 100,000, sesame seeds 42,800, sorghum 42,480, pulses 27,000, coffee 3,300, seed cotton 1,000; livestock (number of live animals) 3,423,000 cattle, 3,087,000 goats, 805,000 pigs; roundwood 2,832,000 cu

m, of which fuelwood 71%; fisheries production (2004) 15,000 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): diamonds 380,000 carats. Manufacturing (2002): refined sugar 10,570; palm oil 2,743; soap 1,625; aluminum products 812; cigarettes (2003) 16,100,000 packets; beer (2003) 121,700 hectolitres; soft drinks (2003) 38,400 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 110,000,000 (110,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (82,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.3; average annual income per household (1988) CFAF 91,985 (U.S.$435); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1991)3: food 70.5%, clothing 8.5%, energy 7.3%. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$1,416,000,000

(U.S.$332 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Secondary (age 12-18) Vocational Higher?2, 13

n n ie 1

}

teachers

students

4,004

420,712

1,005 $ 154

66,49212 i 6,474

teacher ratio

105.1 ex oad 42.0

Health: physicians (2004) 331 (1 per 11,867 persons); hospital beds (2001) 4,365 (1 per 879 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 85.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,104 (vegetable products 86%, animal products 14%); 117% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 2,550 (army 54.9%; navy, none; air force 5.9%; paramilitary [gendarmerie] 39.2%); (2006) 200 French troops. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$2. 1Statistically derived midpoint of range. 2Official figure; a roughly equal amount was smuggled out of the country in 2004. *Weights of consumer price index components. ‘Indirect taxes and customs duties. “Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ‘Estimate of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. "National roads only; much of the 9,700mi (15,600-km) local road network is unusable. 9Bangui airport only. ?Circulation. 10Subscribers. Based on demographic and health survey of 9,414 people. 122002—03. 13University of Bangui only.

Internet resource for further information: * Statistics, Economic Studies, and Social Division http://www.stat-centrafrique.com

546

Britannica World Data Population economically active (2003)5: total 3,385,000; activity rate of total population 37.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.2%; female 47.3%).

Chad Official name: Jumhiriyah Tshad (Arabic); République du Tchad (French) (Republic of Chad). Form of government: unitary republic with one legislative body (National Assembly [155]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: N'Djamena. Official languages: Arabic; French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Price index (2000 = 100) Consumer price index

Brea...

1993 census

Batha Bourkou-Ennedi-

88,800

288,458

600,350

73,185

S

m

Ouaddaï

58,950

306,253

Salamat

shy 114,520 22,320

Men 279,927 252,932

Tandjilé Wadi Fira

455,489 441,064 OP

City! N'Djamena TOTAL

8,695 28,035 253

2005

2006

100.0

112.4

118.3

116.2

110.0

118.7

133.3

1993

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF ’000,000

value

force

force

83.1

and mining Petroleum production/

sq km

Logone Occidental Logone Oriental Mandoul

2004

Agriculture, fishing,

Regions!

Hadjer-Lamis Kanem Lac

2003

2005

area , ^ population:

Guéra

2002

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population

Tibesti

2001

Gross national product (2006): U.S.$3,509,000,000 (U.S.$335 per capita).

1 US.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

Chari-Baguirmi

2000

Regions!

sq km

_Population: 1993 census

Mayo-Kebbi Est Mayo-Kebbi Ouest Moyen-Chari

i 46,850

sig 184,807

E 1,284,000

m 6,279,931

transportation Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

20.5

1,904,248

1,348,200

42.7

— 33,670 10,885 2,026 13,252 211,812 1,071 61,875 45,453 9,271 2,291,5771°

}

143,3008 67,1007 9,200

4.56 247 0.3

423,900 see 208,300

184 s 6.6

257,800 53,4008 3,111,200?

8.2 1.78 100.0

— 1.4 0.5 0.1 0.6 92 — 27 2.0 0.4 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.9%, in permanent crops 0.02%, in pasture 35.7%; overall forest area (2005) 9.5%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF ’000,000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 10,239,0002.

648,900

2000 -40.2 13.4%

2001 -239.5 46.4%

2002 -904.7 77.896

2003 -104.0 13.0%

2004 4730.5 47.7%

2005 41,203.0 66.6%

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 20.7, persons per sq km 8.0.

Imports (2005): CFAF 323,500,000,000 (non-petroleum private sector 42.7%; public sector 19.3%; petroleum sector 15.6%). Major import sources: France

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 48.0%; 15-29, 26.7%; 30-44, 13.7%; 45-59, 7.3%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Exports (2004): CFAF 1,152,300,000,000 (crude petroleum 84.5%; live cattle 10.496; cotton 3.396). Major export destinations: U.S. c. 7896; China c. 1096; Taiwan c. 496.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 25.3%; rural 74.7%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.82%; female 51.18%.

Population projection: (2010) 11,170,000; (2020) 14,839,000. Doubling time: 23 years. Ethnolinguistic composition (1993): Sara 27.7%; Sudanic Arab 12.3%; MayoKebbi peoples 11.5%; Kanem-Bornu peoples 9.0%; Ouaddai peoples 8.7%; Hadjeray (Hadjarai) 6.7%; Tangale (Tandjilé) peoples 6.596; Gorane peoples 6.3%; Fitri-Batha peoples 4.7%; Fulani (Peul) 2.4%; other 4.2%. Religious affiliation (2005): Sunni Muslim 57.0%; animist 18.8%; Protestant 10.5%; other (significantly Roman Catholic and nonreligious) 13.7%. Major cities (2000): N’Djamena (2005) 888,0003; Moundou 108,728; Sarh 95,050; Abéché 63,165; Kelo 36,643; Pala 31,281.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 46.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 16.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 29.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 6.32. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 45.6 years; female 48.9 years. Adult population (age 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.5%4 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): lower respiratory infections c. 226; HIV/AIDS-related c. 124.

c. 204; malaria c. 181; diarrheal diseases

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 311,100,000,000 (tax revenue 45.996; petroleum revenue 43.7%; nontax revenue 10.496). Expenditures: CFAF 482,000,000,000

(capital expenditure 61.996; current expenditure 38.196, of which wages and salaries 13.9%, materials and supply 7.8%, transfer payments 7.1%, defense 6.3%, debt service 2.9%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,537,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sorghum 582,600, millet 578,300, peanuts (groundnuts) 450,000, cassava 325,000, yams 230,000, seed cotton 217,700, cottonseed 135,000, corn (maize) 201,300, rice 148,700, pulses 121,000, cotton fibre 76,200, sesame seed 35,000,

gum arabic (2006) 20,000; livestock (number of live animals) 6,540,000 cat-

tle, 5,843,000 goats, 2,628,000 sheep, 740,000 camels; roundwood 7,249,000 cu

m, of which fuelwood 90%; fisheries production (2004) 70,000 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): aggregate (gravel) 300,000; natron 12,000; salt 10,000; gold 150 kg. Manufacturing (2004-05): cotton fibre 88,158; refined sugar 51,823; woven cotton fabrics (2000) 1,000,000 metres; carbonated beverages 104,205 hectolitres; beer 76,485 hectolitres; edible oil

(2003-04) 74,514 hectolitres; cigarettes 41,873,000 packs. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 99,000,000 (99,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 62,000,000 (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 59,000 (41,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.0; average annual income per household (1993) CFAF 96,806 (U.S.$458); sources of income (1995—96; urban): informal-sector employment and entrepreneurship 36.7%, transfers 24.8%, wages 23.6%, ownership of real estate 8.6%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 14; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 656; official development assistance (2005) 380. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2002) 80; remittances, n.a.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

c. 21%; Cameroon c. 15%; U.S. c. 12%; Belgium c. 7%; Portugal c. 5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2002): total length 33,400 km (paved 196). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 8,900; trucks and buses 12,400. Air transport: passenger-km (2001) 130,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2004) 7,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions

Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

55

5.9

2006 2006

46611 13

4711 1.3

units Medium PCs

Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

15

1.6

2005 2006 2006

al? 60 "A

ee 6.0 sn

Education and health Educational attainment (2003)13. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 74.596; primary education 17.496; secondary education 6.8%; higher education 1.3%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 47.5%; males 56.0%; females 39.3%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-19) Higher!

Be 1

teachers

students

teacher ratio

16,228

1,124,992

69.3

6,464 203

222,167 5,183

34.4 25.5

Health: physicians (2004) 345 (1 per 27,180 persons); hospital beds (1998) 4,105 (1 per 1,908 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 93.1. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,190 (vegetable products 93%, animal products 7%); 120% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 25,350 (army 78.9%; air force 1.4%; other 19.7%); French peacekeeping troops (November 2006) 1,550. Military oe ture U.S.$6.

as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expendi-

YThe effectiveness of the 2002 administrative reorganization was unclear in mid-2007. 2Excludes about 235,000 Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad in mid-2007. 3Urban agglomeration. 4Statistically derived midpoint of range. ‘Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. Includes handicrafts. Includes construction of petroleum pipeline. 3Import duties and taxes. ?Reported total; summed total equals CFAF 3,160,100,000,000. 1^Official census total; summed total equals 2,293,563. !Subscribers. 12The only daily newspaper is the bulletin of the official news agency. Based on the 2003 Chad Demographic and Health Survey, comprising 27,879 people in 5,369 households, about 80% of which were in rural areas. !^University of N'Djamena only (Chad’s only university).

Internet resources for further information: * National Institute of Statistics and Economic and Demographic Studies http://www.inseed-tchad.org * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm

Nations of the World — 547

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$126,436,000,000 (U.S.$7,679 per capita).

Chile

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repüblica de Chile (Republic of Chile). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [38]; Chamber of Deputies [120]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Santiagol. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: peso (Ch$); valuation

2004

Pacific Ocean

~ d

i

S

av

Agriculture, fishing

di cea

ji

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 US.$ = Ch$523.20;

Bd

à

a

1 £= Ch$1,052.

Regions

population

sq km

2005 estimate

Aisén del General

Carios Ibáñez del Campo

108,495

99,300

Antofagasta

126,049

541,100

31,842

929,000

16,873 75,176

6 270,400

37,063 40,580

1,969,200 666,900

Araucanía Arica y Parinacota* Atacama

Bío-Bío Coquimbo Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins

area

population

Regions

sq km

2005 estimate

Los Lagos

48,583

Los Rios?

16,387

840,600

18,30 |

Construction Transp. and commun.

1/156,300

Magallanes y Chilena

132,297

156,0004

Maule Región

30,296

967,100

Metropolitana Tarapacá

15,403 42,226

6,538,900 469,9008

16,396 756,096

1,662,700 16,267,3007

Valparaíso TOTAL

% of labour

force

force

2,476

6.0

777,100

12.2

3,263 6,601 1,185

7.9 15.9 28

74,300 775,000 34,800

1.2 12.2 0.5

3,302 3,226

8.0 7.8

471,300 471,500

7.4 7.4

4,478

10.8

1,114,800

17.6

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

8,116 1,438

19.6 Bb.

521,200

8.2

1,665,100

26:2

2,97614 41,427

7.214 100.0

Services

4,366

105

}

440,40015 6,345,4007

6.915 100.07

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.4; average annual income per household (2001) Ch$6,804,000 (U.S.$9,530); sources of income (2001): wages and salaries 39.5%, transfer payments 19.7%, rent on property 14.5%, self-employment 9.8%, other 16.5%; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,256; remittances (2006) 3; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 4,979. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,057; remittances (2006) 6; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 1,446.

Foreign trade!6 Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

+1,844 5.3%

+2,386 7.0%

43,522 8.9%

49,019 16.4%

49,581 13.7%

422,214 23.6%

Imports (2005): U.S.$32,021,400,000 (capital goods 22.3%; consumer goods 14.7%; crude petroleum 11.8%; free zone imports 5.1%). Major import sources (2004): Argentina 18.5%; U.S. 15.1%; Brazil 12.4%; China 8.3%. Exports (2005): U.S.$39,881,400,000 (copper 45.9%; foodstuffs 12.0%, of which

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 56.9, persons per sq km 22.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 87.0%; rural 13.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.47%; female 50.53%.

salmon and trout 4.2%; fruits 5.3%; wood and wooden furniture 4.5%; paper

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 24.9%; 15-29, 24.3%; 30-44, 23.0%; 45-59, 16.2%; 60-74, 8.3%; 75-84, 2.5%; 85 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 17,094,000; (2020) 18,549,000. Ethnic composition (2002): mestizo c. 72%; white c. 22%; Amerindian c. 5%, of which Araucanian (Mapuche) c. 4%; other c. 1%. Religious affiliation (2002)8: Roman Catholic 70.0%; Protestant/independent Christian 15.1%; other Christian 2.0%; atheist/nonreligious 8.3%.

Major urban agglomerations (2002): Santiago 5,428,590; Valparaiso/Vifia del Mar 803,683; Concepción 666,381; La Serena/Coquimbo 296,253; Antofagasta

285,255.

and paper products 4.2%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 14.8%;

Japan 12.0%; China 10.4%; South Korea 5.8%; The Netherlands 5.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2002): route length 5,410 mi, 8,707 km; (2004) passenger-km 830,259,000; metric ton-km cargo 3,899,000,000. Roads (2003): tota

length 50,023 mi, 80,505 km (paved 22%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 1,406,796; trucks and buses 681,974. Air transport (2005)!7: passenger-km 18,977,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,757,000,000.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.8 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.00. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2003): 3.6/9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 73.5 years; female 80.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 148.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 123.5; diseases of the respiratory system 46.6; diseases of the digestive system 41.4; accidents 30.6.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: Ch$15,680,877,000,000 (tax revenue 71.3%, copper revenue 15.6%, other 13.1%). Expenditures: Ch$10,582,361,000,000 (subsidies and grants 31.0%, pension payments 28.7%, wages and salaries 23.8%,

goods and services 11.1%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$9,096,000,000. Population economically active (2005): total 6,345,40010; activity rate of total population 39.2% 10 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 59.3% 10; female 35.6% 10;

unemployed [2006] 7.896). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

103.6 105.2

106.1 110.0

109.1 114.2

110.3 117.5

113.6 123.3

117.5

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugar beets 2,800,000, grapes 2,250,000, wheat 1,852,000, corn (maize) 1,508,000, apples 1,350,000, tomatoes 1,230,000, potatoes 1,116,000, oats 357,400, peaches and nectarines 315,000, avocados 163,000; livestock (number of live animals) 4,200,000 cattle, 3,450,000 pigs, 3,400,000 sheep; roundwood 46,051,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 29%; fisheries production 5,028,539

(from aquaculture 14%); aquatic plants production 425,343 (from aquaculture 496). Mining (2004): copper (2005) 5,320,50011; iron ore 4,477,00011; lithium carbonate 41,667; molybdenum 33,50011; iodine 15,580; silver 1,329,00011

kg; gold 38,5001! kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$’000,000; 2003)12: food products 2,041; nonferrous base metals

1,877; beverages 962; refined

petroleum 845; paper and paper products 802; paints, soaps, pharmaceuticals 617. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005)

§1,575,000,000 ([2004] 49,100,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 188,000

(4,435,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 1,210,000 ([2005] 86,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 10,118,000 (10,641,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2004) 1,967,000,000 (8,436,000,000).

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.6%, in permanent crops 0.4%, in pasture 17.3%; overall forest area (2005) 21.5%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

labour

value

Antártica

Demography Population (2007): 16,598,000.

Consumer price index Hourly earnings index

% of total

Trade, hotels

Other TOTAL

Area and population? area

in value Ch$'000,000,000:3

Mining Manufacturing Public utilities

H

200510

Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

4,305

268

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2006 2006

12,45118 3,326

75618 202

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,800

172

2004

8161?

5219

2006 2006

4,156 97818

252 6018

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling/other 5.4%; incomplete primary education 24.6%; complete primary 8.7%; secondary 43.9%; higher technical 4.9%; university 12.5%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 95.7%; males literate 95.8%; females literate 95.6%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17)20 Higher

:

teachers

students

50,261 1,713,538 47,108 . 1,557,120

226

teacher ratio

34.1 33.1

567,114

Health: physicians (2004) 20,726 (1 per 778 persons); hospital beds (2003) 39,782 (1 per 401 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 8.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,079 (vegetable products 7496, animal products 26%); 160% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 78,098 (army 61.1%, navy 24.8%, air force 14.196). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.89621; per capita expenditure U.S.$27021. lLegislative bodies meet in Valparaiso. 2Excludes the 480,000-sq mi (1,250,000-sq km) section of Antarctica claimed by Chile (and administered as part of Magallanes y Antártica Chilena region) and “inland” (actually tidal) water areas. ?Created in March 2007. ^Includes 130 people in Chilean-claimed Antarctica. [Created in March 2007 from part of Tarapacá. *Tarapaca includes Arica y Parinacota. 7Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 3For population age 15 years and older. ?Divorce became legal in Chile in November 2004. ??Civilians only. Metal content. Establishments employing 50 or more employees only. In constant prices of 1996. Import duties and VAT less imputed bank service charges. Unemployed. !^Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. "Data for LAN Chile Group of LAN

Airlines, Aerolineas

Del Sur, Aerovías

DAP,

and Sky Service.

18Subscribers.

1?Circulation of daily newspapers. ?"Includes vocational. ?!Includes military pensions.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas http://www.ine.cl * Banco Central de Chile http://www.bcentral.cl/eng

548

Britannica World Data

Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.72. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2004) 6.7/(2005) 1.4. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 70.9 years; female 74.3 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 0.1% (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): malignant neoplasms

China Official name: Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo (People's Republic of China). Form of government: single-party people's republic with one legislative house (National People's Congress [2.9801]. Chief of state: President. Head of government: Premier. Capital: Peking (Beijing). Official language: Mandarin Chinese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: renminbi (yuan) (Y); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = Y 7.55; 1 £= Y 15.18.

(cancers) 133.5, of which stomach cancer 31.9, liver cancer 24.9; cerebrovas-

cular disease 126.9; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 98.6; ischemic heart disease 54.0; accidents and poisoning 52.3; infectious and parasitic diseases 39.0, of which tuberculosis 20.8; diseases of the digestive system 27.9;

violence/suicide 24.0.

Social indicators Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no schooling and incomplete primary 15.6%; completed primary 35.7%; some secondary 34.0%; complete secondary 11.1%; some postsecondary through advanced degree 3.6%. Distribution of income (2004)

Area and population2 Provinces® Anhui (Anhwei) Fujian (Fukien) Gansu (Kansu) Guangdong (Kwangtung) Guizhou (Kweichow) Hainan Hebei (Hopeh) Heilongjiang (Heilungkiang) Henan (Honan) Hubei (Hupeh) Hunan Jiangsu (Kiangsu) Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Jilin (Kirin) Liaoning (Liaoning) Qinghai (Tsinghai) Shaanxi (Shensi) Shandong (Shantung) Shanxi (Shansi) Sichuan (Szechwan) Yunnan Zhejiang (Chekiang)

Autonomous regions’ Guangxi Zhuang (Kwangsi Chuang) Inner Mongolia (Nei Mongol) Ningxia Hui (Ningsia Hui) Tibet (Xizang) Xinjiang Uygur

(Sinkiang Uighur)

Municipalitiess Beijing (Peking) Chongqing (Chungking) Shanghai Tianjin (Tientsin) TOTAL

area?

Capitals®

population 20054

1

2

3

4

5

9.2

13.7

17.5

22.4

37.2

.Sqmi

sqkm

estimate.

54,000 47,500 141,500 76,100 67,200 13,200 78,200

139,900 123,100 366,500 197,100 174,000 34,300 202,700

64,610,000 35,110,000 26,190,000 83,040,000 39,040,000 8,180,000 68,090,000

179,000 64,500 72,400 81,300 39,600 63,600 72,200 58,300 278,400 75,600 59,200 60,700 188,000 168,400 39,300

463,600 167,000 187,500 210,500 102,600 164,800 187,000 151,000 721,000 195,800 153,300 157,100 487,000 436,200 101,800

38,170,000 97,170,000 60,160,000 66,980,000 74,330,000 42,840,000 27,090,000 42,170,000 5,390,000 37,050,000 91,800,000 33,350,000 87,250,000 44,150,000 47,200,000

Nanning

85,100

220,400

48,890,000

Hohhot

454,600

1,177,500

23,840,000

Yinchuan Lhasa Urümqi

25,600 471,700

66,400 1,221,600

5,880,000 2,740,000

635,900

1,646,900

19,630,000

Hefei Fuzhou Lanzhou ^ Guangzhou (Canton) Guiyang Haikou Shijiazhuang Harbin Zhengzhou

Wuhan Changsha Nanjing (Nanking) Nanchang Changchun Shenyang Xining Xi'an (Sian) Jinan Taiyuan Chengdu Kunming Hangzhou

(Urumchi)

— — — —

6,500 31,700 2,400 4,400 3,696,100

16,800 82,000 6,200 11,300 9,572,900

percentage of urban household income by quintile

14,930,000 31,220,000 17,420,000 10,240,000 1,299,880,000°

Quality of working life. Average workweek (1998): 40 hours. Annual rate per 100,000 workers for (2006): death in mining, industrial, or commercial enterprises 3.33. Death toll from work accidents (2006) 112,822. Access to services. Percentage of population having access to electricity (2003) 97.7%. Percentage of total (urban, rural) population with safe public water supply (2002) 83.6% (94.0%, 73.0%). Sewage system (1999): total (urban, rural) households with flush apparatus 20.7% (50.0%, 4.3%), with pit latrines 69.3% (33.6%, 86.7%), with no latrine 5.3% (7.8%, 4.1%). Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election: n.a. Population participating in voluntary work: n.a. Trade union membership in total labour force (2004): c. 1896. Percentage of population who consider themselves religious (2005-06) 31.496. Social deviance. Annual reported arrest rate per 100,000 population (2004) for: murder, n.a.; rape, n.a.; thievery 197; robbery 23.

Material well-being. Urban households possessing (number per household; 2004): bicycles 1.4; colour televisions 1.3; washing machines 1.0; refrigerators 0.9; air conditioners 0.7; cameras 0.5. Rural families possessing (number per household; 2004): bicycles 1.2; colour televisions 0.8; washing machines 0.4; refrigerators 0.2; air conditioners 0.05; cameras 0.04.

National economy Gross national product (2006): U.S.$2,641,846,000,000 (U.S.$2,035 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003 in value Y '000,000 Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities

Population (2007): 1,317,925,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 356.6, persons per sq km 137.7. Urban-rural (20074): urban 43.9%; rural 56.1%. Sex distribution (20074): male 51.52%; female 48.48%. Age breakdown (2004): under 15, 19.3%; 15-29, 22.1%; 30-44, 27.2%; 45-59, 19.0%; 60-74, 9.6%; 75-84, 2.4%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,338,959,000; (2020) 1,408,064,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Han (Chinese) 91.53%; Chuang 1.30%; Manchu

0.86%; Hui 0.79%; Miao 0.72%; Uighur 0.68%; Tuchia 0.65%; Yi 0.62%; Mongolian 0.47%; Tibetan 0.44%; Puyi 0.24%; Tung 0.24%; Yao 0.21%; Korean 0.15%; Pai 0.15%; Hani 0.12%; Kazakh 0.10%; Li 0.10%; Tai 0.09%;

other 0.54%. Religious affiliation (2005): nonreligious 39.2%; Chinese folk-religionist 28.7%; Christian 10.096, of which unregistered Protestant 7.7%’, registered Protestant 1.2%7, unregistered Roman Catholic 0.5%7, registered Roman Catholic 0.4%7; Buddhist 8.4%; atheist 7.8%; traditional beliefs 4.4%; Muslim 1.5%.

Major urban agglomerations (2005): Shanghai 14,503,000; Beijing 10,717,000; Guangzhou 8,425,000; Shenzhen 7,233,000; Wuhan 7,093,000; Tianjin 7,040,000; Chongqing 6,363,000; Shenyang 4,720,000; Dongguan 4,320,000; Chengdu 4,065,000; Xi’an 3,926,000; Harbin 3,695,000; Nanjing 3,621,000; Guiyang 3,447,000; Dalian 3,073,000; Changchun 3,046,000; Zibo 2,982,000; Kunming 2,837,000; Hangzhou 2,831,000; Qingdao 2,817,000; Taiyuan 2,794 000; Jinan 2,743,000; Zhengzhou 2,590,000; Fuzhou 2,453,000; Changsha

2,451,000; Lanzhou 2,411,000. Households. Average household size$ (2004) 3.6, of which urban households

3.08, rural households 4.18; 1 person 7.896, 2 persons 19.696, 3 persons 31.496,

4 persons 21.896, 5 persons 12.496, 6 or more persons 7.096; non-family households 0.896. Mobility (2004). Population residing in registered enumeration area 91.3%; population not residing in registered enumeration area for more than 6 months 7.496; remainder 1.396.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.8 (world avg. 8.6).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2002 % of total value

labour force ('000)

}

% of labour force

1,092,810 5,309,290 we

14A 45.2 sta

324,870 5,580 83,070 2,900

43.1 0.7 11.0 0.4

818,120 664,430

7.0 5.7

38,930 20,840

5.2 28

Trade, hotels

923,840

7.9

49,690

6.6

Finance/real estate

884,490

£5

4,580

0.6

Construction Transp. and commun.

Demography

(highest)

Pub. admin. Services Other TOTAL

313,850 1,099,990 32,200 11,739,020

2.7 9.4 0.3 100.010

10,750 33,150 179,2409 753,600

1.4 44 23.89 100.0

Budget (2004). Revenue: Y 2,639,647,000,000 (tax revenue 91.5%, of which VAT 34.2%, corporate income taxes 15.0%, business tax 13.6%, consumption tax 5.7%; nontax revenue 8.5%). Expenditures: Y 2,848,689,000,000 (economic development 27.8%, of which agriculture 8.3%; social, cultural, and educational development 26.3%; administration 19.4%; defense 7.7%;

other 18.8%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$82,853,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): grains—rice 184,254,000, corn (maize) 131,145,000, wheat 96,160,250, barley 3,200,000; oilseeds—soybeans 16,900,300, peanuts (groundnuts) 14,638,500, rapeseed 11,300,010, sunflower seeds 1,850,000; fruits and nuts—watermelons 69,315,000, apples 25,006,500, citrus 16,019,500, cantaloupes 15,138,000, pears 11,625,000, bananas 6,390,000; other—sweet potatoes 107,676,100, sugarcane 92,130,000, potatoes 73,776,500, cabbage 34,101,000, tomatoes 31,644,040, cucumbers 26,559,600, onions 19,047,000, eggplants 17,030,300, seed cotton 16,305,000, chilies and peppers 12,531,000, garlic 11,093,500, asparagus 5,906,000, spinach 4,494,000, tobacco leaves 2,505,500, tea 900,500,

silkworm

cocoons

(2003) 667,000; livestock

(number

of live animals)

488,809,978 pigs, 195,758,954 goats, 170,882,215 sheep, 115,229,500 cattle, 22,745,250 water buffalo, 4,360,243,000 chickens, 725,018,000 ducks; roundwood 286,103,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 67%; fisheries production

49,467,309 (from aquaculture 66%); aquatic plants production 11,103,395 (from aquaculture 97%). Mining and quarrying (2005; by world rank): metal content of mine output—iron ore 138,000,000 (3), zine 2,450,000 (1), man-

ganese 1,100,000 (5), lead 1,000,000 (1), copper 740,000 (7), antimony 120,000 (1), tin 110,000 (1), tungsten 61,000 (1), silver 2,500 (3), gold 225 (2); metal ores—bauxite

18,000,000

(3), vanadium

17,000

(1); nonmetals—salt

44,547,000 (2), phosphate rock 9,130,000 (2), magnesite 4,700,000 (1), barite 4,200,000 (1), tale 3,000,000 (1), fluorspar 2,700,000 (1), asbestos 520,000 (2),

strontium 140,000 (2). Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2003): electrical machinery (incl. telecommunications equipment) 66,521; industri-

Nations of the World al chemicals, paints, and soaps 45,727; transportation equipment 35,000; iron

and steel 34,119; nonelectrical machinery (incl. computers) 31,395; food products 25,776; textiles 23,036; tobacco products 19,010; cement, bricks, and tiles 16,334; refined petroleum 15,554; fabricated metal products 11,731; wearing

apparel 11,073; nonferrous base metals 10,899. Distribution of industrial production (percentage of total value added by sector; 2004): directly stateowned and state-controlled enterprises 42.496; private enterprises 15.196; collectives 5.3%; remainder!! 37.2%. Retail trade (percentage of total sales by sector; 2004): domestically funded enterprises 81.8%, of which shareholding corporations 29.2%, limited liability corporations 23.8%, private enterprises 18.3%, state-owned enterprises 6.8%, collectives 1.0%; foreignfunded enterprises 11.1%; Hong Kong-, Macau-, or Taiwan-based enterprises 7.1%. annual wages asa % of avg. of all wages

no. of employees'!?

annual gross output value (Y '000,000)

Manufacturing Machinery, transport equipment, and metal manufactures, of which,

56,473

Metal products

21,560

5,000,698

9,746

1,810,000

385,740

12,546 8,281 5,856 2,515

7,020,000 3,540,000 1,630,000 820,000

571,121 1,121,405 1,583,976 163,672

14,863 9,717 19,277

6,340,000 1,680,000 4,710,000

772,520 342,602 1,291,142

of which, Food processing Beverages Tobacco manufactures

15,828 3,194 255

3,170,000 1,210,000 330,000

844,239 223,322 223,581

Chemicals,

13,803

8,140,000

924,486

Industrial equipment Transport equipment Electronic goods Measuring equipment

Textiles Garments Foodstuffs,

of which, Pharmaceuticals

4,063

1,020,000

288,998

Plastics Secondary forest products (including paper and stationery)

8,382

1,050,000

306,383

7,616

2,310,000

324,602

Primary forest products

3,501

1,140,000

99,279

Nonferrous and ferrous metals Petroleum and natural gas

2,189 112

810,000 1,250,000

92,421 347,902

Coal

3,139

5,050,000

245,938

Mining

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 2,834,400,000,000

([2004] 2,178,000,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2006) 2,380,000,000 (2,370,-

000,000);

crude

petroleum

(barrels; 2006)

1,347,000,000

(2,346,000,000);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 212,352,000 (244,178,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2006) 58,550,000,000 (55,600,000,000). Financial aggregates'!? Exchange rate, Y per: U.S. dollar g SDR International reserves

Land use as % of total land area (2004): in temporary crops or permanent crops c. 13.5%, in pasture c. 41.5%; overall forest area (2005) 21.2%.

Foreign trade! 2001 422,545 4.4%

U.S.$ 000,000 % of total

2002 430,426 4.9%

2003 425,468 2.9%

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

8.28 12.00 10.40

8.28 13.34 11.25

8.28 14.77 12.30

8.28 15.99 12.85

8.07 13.90 11.53

7.81 15.33 11.75

2005 4102,000 7.2%

2006 177,775 10.1%

import sources: Japan 16.8%; Taiwan 11.5%; South Korea 11.1%; United States 8.0%; Germany 5.4%; Malaysia 3.2%; Singapore 2.5%; Russia 2.2%;

Hong Kong 2.1%; Australia 2.1%. Exports (2004): U.S.$593,326,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 41.8%, of which computers and office machines [2003] 14.3%, telecommunications, sound recording and reproducing equipment [2003] 10.3%, electrical machinery [2003; including microcircuits] 9.9%; wearing apparel and accessories 11.3%; iron and steel incl. finished products 4.2%; chemicals and chemical

products 4.196; transport equipment 3.596). Major export destinations: United States 21.1%; Hong Kong 17.0%; Japan 12.4%; South Korea 4.7%; Germany 4.0%;

The

Netherlands

3.1%;

United

Kingdom

2.5%;

Taiwan

2.3%;

Singapore 2.1%; France 1.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length (2004) 46,230 mi, 74,400 km; passenger-km 662,200,000,000;

metric ton-km cargo 2,195,400,000,000.

Roads

(2004): total length 1,162,373 mi, 1,870,661 km (paved 81%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 17,359,100; trucks 8,930,000. Air transport (2006): passengerkm 236,990,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 9,430,000,000.

Communications

units

units

number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

493,902

381

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2007^ 20074

461,08018 367,810

35018 279

Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

52,990 96,6007 137,000 50,91618

40 7417 104 3918

Education and health Literacy (2000): total population age 15 and over literate 90.9%; males literate 95.1%; females literate 86.5%.

291,128 998

408,151 1,102

614500 1,247

821,514 1,251

1,068,493 1,068

3,723

3,798

3,320

1,391

1,081

286,407

403,251

609,932

818,872

1,066,344

19.3 24

19.3 24

19.3 24

19.3 22

19.3 22

2.70 “its

2.70 te

3.33 his

3.33 e

3.33 ees

Education (2004) Primary (age 7-13) Secondary (age 13-17) Higher (regular) Science/technology

student/ schools

teachers

394,200 79,100 1,731

5,629,000 4,668,000 858,000

32,724

students

teacher ratio

112,462,000 86,954,000 13,335,000

20.0 18.6 15.5

2,252,000

ae

Health (20074): physicians!? 1,970,000 (1 per 668 persons); hospital beds 3,216,000 (1 per 409 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 244.

Food (2003): daily per capita caloric intake 2,740 (vegetable products 82%, animal products 18%); 142% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

(U.S.$000,000)

Balance of visible trade, of which: Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b.

434,017

444,167

444,652

458,982

4134,189

—232,058 266,075

-281,484 325,651

-393,618 438,270

-534,410 593,393

-628,295 762,484

Balance of invisibles

| —16,616

—8,745

41,223

49,677

426,629

417,401

435,422

445,875

468,659

4160,818

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 2,255,000 (army 71.0%, navy 11.3%, air force 17.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$34.

Balance of payments,

Population economically active (2003): total 766,430,00014; activity rate of total population 59.096514 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 82.492614; female 44.696514; registered unemployed in urban areas [2005] 4.296). Urban employed workforce (2004): 264,760,000; by sector: state enterprises 67,100,000, privately run enterprises 29,940,000, self-employment 25,210,000,

limited liability corporations 14,360,000. Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

100.5 116.0

99.7 132.6

100.9 149.8

104.8 171.0

106.6 ee

108.2 s

Household income and expenditure. Average annual per capita disposable income of household (2006): rural households Y 3,587 (U.S.$450), urban households Y 11,579 (U.S.$1,452). Sources of income (2004): rural households—income from household businesses 59.5%, wages 34.0%, transfers and

property 6.5%; urban households—wages 70.6%, transfers 22.9%, business income 4.9%, property 1.6%. Expenditure: rural (urban) households—food 47.2% (37.8%), housing and energy 14.8% (10.2%), education and recreation

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2004 432,007 2.8%

Imports (2004): U.S.$561,229,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 41.7%, of which transistors/microcircuits [2003] 12.7%, computers and office machines [2003] 5.9% ,machines specialized for particular industries [2003] 5.0%; mineral fuels 8.6%; professional and scientific equipment 7.4%; plastics and related products 5.0%; organic chemicals 4.2%; iron and steel 4.2%). Major

Cellular Landline

2001

(US$)

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2,602; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 4,472.

Telephones

Total (excl. gold; 000,000) 215,605 SDRs (000,000) 851 Reserve pos. in IMF (000,000) 2,590 Foreign exchange (000,000) 212,165 Gold (000,000 fine troy oz) 16.1 % world reserves 1.7 Interest and prices Central bank discount (%) — 3.24 Govt. bond yield (%) Industrial share prices Balance of payments

current account

11.3% (14.4%), transportation and communications 8.8% (11.7%), clothing 5.5% (9.6%), medicine and medical service 6.0% (7.4%), household furnishings 4.1% (5.7%). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006) 33,950; remittances (2005) 22,492; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 57,232; official development assistance (2005) 1,96215. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 21,800; remittances (2005)

Balance of trade (current prices)

Manufacturing and mining enterprises (2003) no. of enterprises

549

1Includes 36 seats allotted to Hong Kong and 12 to Macau. ?Data for Taiwan, Quemoy, and Matsu (parts of Fujian province occupied by Taiwan); Hong Kong and Macau are excluded. Estimated figures. “January 1. 5Preferred names in all instances are based on Pinyin transliteration (except for Inner Mongolia and Tibet, which are current Englishlanguage conventional names). 9Total includes 5,730,000 military personnel not distributed by province, autonomous region, or municipality. "Percentage is rough estimate. 3Family households only. ?Includes 7,700,000 registered unemployed; remainder mostly activities not defined. !°Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. HShareholding enterprises or foreign-funded enterprises (incl. enterprises funded from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan) that are not state owned or state controlled. 12In state-owned and collective-owned industries only; 1996. BAI data are for end of period. “Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 15Figure represents commitments. 165Imports c.i.f., exports f.o.b. Circulation. !3Subscribers. i?Includes assistant doctors.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bureau of Statistics of China http://www.stats.gov.cn/english * Embassy of The People's Republic of China in the U.S. http://www.china-embassy.org

550

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$125,898,000,000 (U.S.$2,763 per capita).

Colombia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repüblica de Colombia (Republic of Colombia). Form of government: unitary, multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [102]; House of Representatives [1661]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Bogota. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: peso (Col$); valuation

2004

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Col$2,157; 1 £ = Col$4,335. Area and population

Departments

area

population

sq km

2005 adjusted census

Departments

area

population

sq km

2005 adjusted census

Antioquia

63,612

5,671,689

Nariño

33,268

1,531,777

Atlántico Bolívar

3,388 25,978

2,112,128 1,860,445

Norte de Santander Orinoquía-

21,658

1,228,028

Boyacá Caldas Caquetá

23,189 7,888 88,965

1,211,186 908,841 404,896

Amazonía? Quindío Risaralda

483,083 1,845 4,140

1,040,304 518,691 863,663

Cauca Cesar

29,308 22,905

1,244,886 879,914

San Andrés y Providencia

44

59,573

Chocó Córdoba

46,530 25,020

441,395 1,472,699

Santander Sucre

30,537 10,917

1,916,336 765,285

Cundinamarca

22,623

2,228,478

19,890 20,848

1,006,797 623,250

Valle del Cauca

Magdalena

23,188

1,136,901

Capital District

Meta

85,635

789,276

Huila La Guajira

Tolima

Bogota TOTAL

23,562

1,335,177

22,140

4,060,196

1,587 1,141,7493

6,778,691 42,090,502

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Col$'000,000

value

force

force

29,541,116 17,343,664 36,838,341 13,391,667 11,625,842 18,773,366 28,030,192 37,368,127

11.5 6.8 14.4 5.2 45 7.3 11.0 14.6

4,074,000 214,900 2,351,000 859,000 2 1,201,000 4,431,000 1,074,500

19.8 1.0 11.4 42 d 58 21.5 52

52,658,281

20.6

4,009,000

19.4

10,413,7779 255,984,373

4.19 100.0

2,405,960 20,620,360

11.7 100.0

}

Other TOTAL

20058

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (March 2004) 3.8; sources of income (2002): wages 42.6%, self-employment 38.9%; expenditure (1992): food 34.2%, transportation 18.5%, housing 7.8%, health care 6.4%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,218; remittances (2006) 4,200; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 3,946; official development assistance (2005) 83810. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,127; remittances (2006) 66; FDI

(2001-05 avg.) 1,315.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 4333 1.4%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2002 +78 0.3%

2003 +105 0.4%

2004 +1,104 3.4%

2005 +1,388 3.4%

2006 —143 0.3%

Imports (2006): U.S.$26,162,000,000 (chemicals and chemical products 20.2%, transportation equipment 15.3%, nonelectrical machinery 11.2%, telecommunications equipment 8.6%). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 26.5%; Mexico 8.8%; China 8.5%; Brazil 7.2%; Venezuela 5.7%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$24,391,000,000 (crude and refined petroleum 26.0%, coal

Demography Population (2007): 42,870,0004.

11.9%, chemicals and chemical products 7.4%, base metals 6.6%, food, bev-

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 97.2, persons per sq km 37.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 72.7%; rural 27.3%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.25%; female 50.75%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 30.3%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 21.6%; 45-59, 13.4%; 60-74, 5.6%; 75-84, 1.6%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 44,506,000; (2020) 49,476,000. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo 47.3%; mulatto 23.0%; white 20.0%; black 6.0%; black-Amerindian 1.0%; Amerindian/other 2.7%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 92.5%; Protestant 2.8%; independent Christian 2.4%; Mormon 0.3%; Muslim 0.2%; other 1.8%. Major cities (2005): Bogotá 6,763,325; Medellín 2,187,356; Cali 2,039,626; Barranquilla 1,109,067; Cartagena 845,801; Cticuta 566,244.

erages, and tobacco 6.5%, coffee 6.0%, textiles and clothing 5.4%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 39.6%; EU 13.7%; Venezuela 11.1%; Ecuador 5.1%; Peru 2.8%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 2,053 mi, 3,304 km; passenger-km (1999) negligible; metric ton-km cargo (1999) 473,000,000. Roads (2000): total length 70,214 mi, 112,998 km (paved 23%). Vehicles (1999): cars 1,803,201; trucks 319,294. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 7,764,000,000; metric tonkm cargo 252,852,000.

Communications Medium

Vital statistics

Televisions

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.54. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 68.2 years; female 76.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): violence and suicides 91.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 79.9; ischemic heart disease 66.2; cerebrovas-

Telephones Cellular

cular diseases 40.2; accidents 33.6.

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

11,358

268

2006

29,76313

2006

7,865

64313

170

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

1,892 1,2941? 6,705 62813

44 3012 145 1413

Education and health Educational attainment (2005)14. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no schooling/unknown 10.2%; primary education 40.1%; secondary 34.2%; higher 15.5%. Literacy (2003): population age 15 and over literate 92.5%; males literate 92.4%; females literate 92.6%.

National economy Budget (2003-04). Revenue: Col$39,951,400,000,000 (tax revenue 92.0%, nontax revenue 8.0%). Expenditures: Col$53,934,600,000,000 (transfers 53.1%,

debt service 19.0%, other 27.9%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$22,491,000,000. Population economically active (2005): total 20,575,2005; activity rate 46.1% (participation rates: ages 12-55, 65.7%; female 42.1%; unemployed 11.8%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Minimum wage

Landline

units number

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

108.0 110.0

114.8 118.8

123.0 127.6

130.3 137.6

136.9 146.7

142.7

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 39,850,000, plantains 3,457,000, rice 2,502,000, cassava 2,050,000, corn (maize) 1,876,000, bananas 1,765,000, coffee 693,480, avocados 185,811;6 livestock (number of live animals) 25,699,000 cattle, 3,332,993 sheep, 2,553,621 horses; roundwood 9,658,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 83%; fish-

eries production 181,074 (from aquaculture 33%). Mining and quarrying (2004): nickel (metal content) 75,032; gold 37,739 kg; emeralds 9,825,000 carats. Manufacturing (value added in Co1$'000,000,000; 2003): processed food 6,471; chemicals 5,737; beverages 3,775; petroleum products 3,712; cement, bricks, and ceramics 2,648; clothing 1,969; paper products 1,723; base

metals 1,645; plastic products 1,475.7 Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 50,291,000,000 (48,657,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 53,700,000 (3,144,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 189,200,000 (112,400,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 14,106,000 (9,164,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 6,354,000,000 (6,219,000,000). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.0%, in permanent crops 1.3%, in pasture 34.5%; overall forest area (2005) 58.5%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2005) Primary (age 6-10) Secondary (age 11-16) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

52,110 26,011 32115

188,215 185,768 87,5441

5,045,450 3,795,745 1,112,57416

teacher ratio 26.8 20.4 12.716

Health (2004): physicians 59,235 (1 per 714 persons); hospital beds 50,773 (1 per 833 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 20.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,744 (vegetable products 8396, animal products 1796); 15096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 207,000 (army 86.0%, navy 10.6%, air force 3.496). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.796; per capita expenditure U.S.$106. 1Up to five seats are reserved for representatives from indigenous communities. 2Geographic designation for eight political entities in eastern Colombia elevated to departmental status in the early 1990s. 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 4Based on November 2005 adjusted census total. ^Includes ages 11 and under. 6Also major producer of cut flowers; export value (2006) U.S.$1,000,000,000. Mlegal cocaine production (2004) 430 metric tons. 8Third quarter; includes ages 10 and over. ?Import duties and VAT, less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. !°Figure represents commitments. Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. “Based on the 2005 Colombia Demographic and Health Survey, comprising 117,205 people in 37,2211 households, about three-fourths

162004.

of which are located in urban areas.

152002.

Internet resources for further information: * National Administration Department of Statistics http://www.dane.gov.co

Nations of the World

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$397,000,000 (U.S.$485 per capita).

Comoros!

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: L'Union des Comores (French); Udzima wa Komori (Comorian); (Union of the Comoros)?. Form of government: republic3 with one legislative house (Assembly of the Union [334]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Vice Presidents. Capital: Moroni. Official languages: Comorian (Shikomor); Arabic; French. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Comorian franc? (CF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2005

Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transportation and communications Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, insurance Public admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

1 £ = CF 727.82. Area and population area Autonomous islands

Capitals Fomboni Moroni Mutsamudu

population

sq mi

sq km

2003 censuse

112 443 164 719

290 1,148 424 1,862

35,751 296,177 243,732 575,660

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force!!

force’!

78,110

51.0

ae

Pe

6,666 7,876

4.4 5.1

2,292

1.5

14,111 27,2617? 8,698 15,854

92 17.812 5.7 10.4

130 -7,88613 153,112

0.1 -5.213 100.0

270,000

71.8

106,000

28.2

376,000

100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 14; remittances (2005) 12; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1.0; official development assistance (2005) 25. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1998) 3.0; remittances, n.a. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 369614, in permanent crops c. 239614, in pasture c. 79614; overall forest area (2005)! 2.996.

Foreign trade!5 Balance of trade (current prices) CF '000,000,000 % of total

Demography

2004

CF '000,000

Mining

1 U.S.$ = CF 362.08;

Mwali (Mohéli) Ngazidja (Grande Comore) Nzwani (Anjouan) TOTAL

551

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

-21.3 71.8%

-15.8 52.1%

-18.6 50.4%

-17.6 47.1%

-18.4 43.6%

—28.1 70.9%

Population (2007): 629,0007. Imports (2004): CF 33,917,000,000 (food products 30.3%, of which rice 14.3%, meat 8.9%; petroleum products 20.9%; vehicles 11.5%; cement 5.1%).Major

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 874.8, persons per sq km 337.8.

Urban-rural (2003): urban 35.0%; rural 65.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.61%; female 50.39%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 42.7%; 15-29, 26.6%; 30-44, 17.8%; 45-59, 8.2%; 60-74, 3.9%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 668,000; (2020) 814,000. Doubling time: 24 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Comorian (a mixture of Bantu, Arab, Malay, and Malagasy peoples) 97.1%; Makua 1.6%; French 0.4%; Arab 0.1%; other 0.8%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim (nearly all Sunni) 98.4%; other 1.6%. Major cities (2002): Moroni (2003) 41,557 (urban agglomeration [2003] 53,000); Mutsamudu 21,558; Domoni 13,254; Fomboni 13,053; Tsémbéhou 10,552.

import sources: France c. 23%; South Africa c. 11%; United Arab Emirates c. 7%; Kenya c. 7%; Mauritius c. 6%.

Exports (2004): CF 5,777,000,000 (cloves 49.9%, vanilla 30.8%, ylang-ylang 14.796). Major export destinations: United States c. 4296; France c. 18%; Singapore c. 1696; Turkey c. 596; Germany c. 496.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 493 mi, 793 km (paved 70%). Vehicles (1996): passenger cars 9,100; trucks and buses 4,950. Air transport (2001): passengers arriving/departing Moroni 108,000. Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 36.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 28.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.03. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 60.0 years; female 64.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 261.6, of which malaria 65.0, diarrheal diseases 52.0, measles 49.8;

diseases of the circulatory system 118.9; accidents and injuries 68.1; perinatal conditions 59.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 46.9.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CF 30,509,000,000 (tax revenue 58.396, of which taxes on international trade 31.0%, income and profit taxes 20.3%; grants 21.4%;

nontax revenue 20.396). Expenditures: CF 30,425,000,000 (current expenditures 77.3%, of which education 25.1%, health 15.6%, interest on debt 3.9%;

development expenditures 22.7%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$301,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): coconuts 77,000, bananas 65,000, cassava 58,000, rice 17,000, taro 9,200, yams 4,000, corn (maize) 4,000, cloves 3,000, vanilla 395, ylang-ylang essence 47;

other export crops grown in small quantities include coffee, cinnamon, and tuberoses; livestock (number of live animals) 115,000 goats, 45,000 cattle, 21,000 sheep; roundwood 8,650, of which fuelwood, none; fisheries produc-

tion 15,070 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: sand, gravel, and crushed stone from coral mining for local construction. Manufacturing: products of small-scale industries include processed vanilla and ylang-ylang, cement, handicrafts, soaps, soft drinks, woodwork, and clothing. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 36,000,000 (35,900,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (29,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2000)8: total 287,000; activity rate of total population 41.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.2%; female 40.4%; unemployed [2005] 13.3%).

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

13

23

2005 2005

1617 17

2617 28

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

5.0 16 21 sid

6.3 16 26 Di

Education and health Educational attainment (1996)18, Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 72.7% 19; primary education 11.096519; secondary 15.196; unknown 1.296. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 56.8%; males literate 63.9%; females literate 49.7%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Higher

teachers

34820 ss

2,908 3,399

121

students

106,972 38,272 2,187?1

teacher ratio

36.8 11.3 ,

Health (2004): physicians 48 (1 per 12,417 persons); hospital beds (1995) 1,45022 (1 per 34222 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 72.9. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,766 (vegetable products 93%, animal products 726); 9796 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): the Comoros small standing army is not necessarily accepted by each of the islands; each island also has its own armed security. France provides training for military personnel. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): c. 3.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$21.

1Excludes Mayotte, an overseas possession of France, unless otherwise indicated. ?The short-form Arabic name is Al-Qumur. 3In actuality, a loose union of semiautonomous

islands. ^Includes 15 nonelected seats. “Formerly pegged to the French franc and since Jan. 1, 2002, to the euro at the rate of €1 = CF 491.97. Preliminary. "7Excludes Comorians

Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 95.4

2000 100.0

2001 105.9

2002 109.3

2003 113.4

2004 118.5

2005 122.3

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.8; average annual income per household (2004) CF 699,0009 (U.S.$1,764); sources of income (2004)9: wages/self-employment 36.9%, value ascribed to self-produced food 27.7%, value ascribed to principal dwelling 23.9%; expenditure (1999)10: food, beverages, and tobacco products 68.0%, housing and energy 15.5%, clothing and footwear 4.7%, education 4.2%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

living abroad in France or Mayotte (about 150,000 people). SILO Employment Trends Unit estimates. ?Includes both monetary and nonmonetary income. !?Weights of consumer price index components. UFAO estimate. Includes import duties and taxes. Less imputed bank service charge. Includes Mayotte. Imports c.i.f; exports f.o.b. 16Circulation data unavailable for the one daily newspaper. !"Subscribers. 3Based on sample survey of 4,881 persons on all three islands. !?Basic education may also be received through Qur'anic schools. 201998. 212004—05 data for the Comoros’

versity opened in 2003. Estimated figure.

Internet resources for further information: * Banque Centrale des Comores http://www.bancecom.com

first uni-

552

Britannica World Data

Congo, Democratic Republic of the

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$7,784,000,000 (U.S.$128 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: République Democratique du Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with two legislative bodies (Senate [108]; National Assembly [500]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Kinshasa. Official language: Frenchl. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Congo frane (FC); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2003

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

FC '000,000

value

force

force

47.4 10.2 52 43 3.3 38 15.6 1.7 6.5 2.07 100.0

13,604,000

61.8

8,417,000

38.2

22,021,000

100.0

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Pub. admin., defense Finance and services Other TOTAL

1,226,700 262,400 135,400 110,000 85,100 97,800 404,200 44,600 168,900 52,4007 2,587,500

Population economically active (2003)8: total 21,718,000; activity rate 40.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 77.1%; female 41.1%; unemployed, n.a.).

1 US.$ = FC 560.00;

Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 15.4

1 £= FC 1,126.2 Area and population Provinces?

Capitals

Bandundu

Bandundu

Bas-Congo

Matadi

Equateur Kasai-Occidental

Mbandaka Kananga

Kasai-Oriental

Mbuji-Mayi

Katanga

Lubumbashi

Maniema Nord-Kivu

Kindu Goma

Orientale

Sud-Kivu City Kinshasa TOTAL

Kisangani

Bukavu —

area

population

sq mi

sq km

1998 estimate

114,154

295,658

5,201,000

20,819

53,920

2,835,000

155,712 59,746

403,292 154,742

4,820,000 3,337,000

65,754

170,302

3,830,000

191,845

496,877

4,125,000

51,062 22,967

132,250 59,483

1,246,787 3,564,434

194,302

503,239

5,566,000

25,147

65,130

2,837,779

3,847 905,355

9,965 2,344,858

4,787,000 42,150,000

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0

413.7

571.3

644.6

670.9

813.6

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

+217 13.8%

+73 4.3%

-17 0.8%

—156 5.5%

—243 6.3%

-423 9.4%

Imports (2005): U.S.$2,465,000,000 (aid-related imports 22.9%, other imports 71.196). Major import sources (2004): South Africa 18.5%; Belgium 15.6%; France 10.9%; U.S. 6.2%; Germany 5.9%; Kenya 4.9%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 692, persons per sq km 26.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 32.1%; rural 67.9%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.48%; female 50.52%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 47.2%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 14.2%; 45-59, 7.4%; 60-74, 3.496; 75-84, 0.6%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Mongo

13.5%;

Rwanda 10.3%; Azande 6.1%; Bangi and Ngale 5.8%; Rundi 3.8%; Teke 2.7%; Boa 2.3%; Chokwe 1.8%; Lugbara 1.6%; Banda 1.4%; other 16.6%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Roman Catholic c. 50%; Protestant c. 20%; Kimbanguist (indigenous Christian) c. 10%; Muslim c. 10%; traditional beliefs and syncretic sects c. 10%. Major urban areas (2004): Kinshasa 7,273,947; Lubumbashi 1,283,380; MbujiMayi 1,213,726; Kananga 720,362; Kisangani 682,599; Bukavu 471,789.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 49.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 30.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 6.70. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 44.3 years; female 47.0 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.2% (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diarrheal diseases c. 219; HIV/AIDS-related c. 217; lower respiratory infections c. 211; malaria c. 191;

war and violence c. 107.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: FC 564,900,000,000 (grants 31.196; customs and excise taxes 25.7%; direct and indirect taxes 19.7%; petroleum royalties and taxes 17.496). Expenditures: FC 655,500,000,000 (current expenditure 65.3%, of which interest on external debt 14.8%; capital expenditure 17.4%; expenditure on demobilization and reintegration 14.8%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$10,822,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 14,975,000, sugarcane 1,800,000, plantains 1,193,000, corn (maize) 1,155,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 368,110, rice 315,480, bananas 313,970, papayas 210,000, mangoes 203,270, pineapples 195,210, dried beans 110,300, avocados 62,630, melonseed 40,000, pimento, allspice 33,000, coffee 31,990;

livestock (number of live animals) 4,022,000 goats, 959,000 pigs, game meat 88,735 metric tons; roundwood (2005) 74,719,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 95%; fisheries production 222,965 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2005): copper (mine output, metal content) 92,000; cobalt (mine output, metal content) 22,0004; silver 53,553 kg; gold 4,200 kg; diamonds 30,300,000 carats*. Manufacturing (2004): cement 402,500; flour 199,000; steel 130,000; sugar 81,000; paints 67,000; printed fabrics 4,200,000 sq m; cigarettes 2,922,000,000 cartons; shoes 3,223,000 pairs; beer 1,690,000 hectolitres; soft

drinks 1,160,000 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 6,852,000,000 (5,402,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 108,000 (153,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 10,000,000 (negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (376,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size, n.a.; expenditure (1995)6 food 61.496, housing and energy 13.995, clothing and footwear 4.896, other 19.9%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1.0; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 343; official development assistance (2005) 1,828. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (1997) 7.0; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.0%, in permanent crops 0.5%, in pasture 6.6%; overall forest area (2005) 58.9%.

Demography Population (2007): 62,636,000.

Population projection: (2010) 69,010,000; (2020) 93,375,000. Doubling time: 23 years. Ethnic composition (1983): Luba 18.0%; Kongo 16.1%;

2000

Exports (2005): U.S.$2,042,000,000 (diamonds 48.4%, crude petroleum 20.0%, cobalt [2004] 15.0%, copper [2004] 3.3%, coffee [2004] 0.9%, gold [2004] 0.796). Major export destinations: Belgium 42.5%; Finland 17.8%; Zimbabwe

12.2%: U.S. 9.2%: China 6.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 5,138 km9; passenger-km (2003) 152,930,000; metric ton-km cargo (2003) 506,010,000. Roads (2004): total length 153,497 km (paved c. 2%). Vehicles (1999): passenger cars 172,600; trucks and buses 34,600. Air transport (1999): passenger-km 263,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 39,000,000.

Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

146

Cellular

2006

4,41610

Landline

2006

9.7

2.7 7410

0.2

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005 2005

E

T

Internet users

2006

180

3.0

Broadband

2006

1.510

0.0310

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 65.5%; males literate 76.2%; females literate 55.1%. Education (1998-99) Primary (age 6-11)

Secondary (age 12717) } Voc., teacher tr. Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

17,585

154,618

4,022,411

26.0

6,007

89,461

1,234,528

13.8

3,788

60,341

15.9

Health: physicians (2004) 5,827 (1 per 9,585 persons); hospital beds, n.a.; infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 116.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,398 (vegetable products 97%, animal products 3%); 76% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 64,800 (army 92.6%, air force 4.6%, navy 2.8%); UN peacekeepers (June 2007): 16,600 troops; 1,000 police. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$2. 1National languages are Kongo, Lingala, Swahili, and Tshiluba. @Most transactions are conducted outside of the banking system and often with U.S. dollars. *To be reorganized into 25 provinces and 1 city (Kinshasa) in 2008 or 2009. ^Includes reprocessed tailings. 5Mostly artisanally mined; 2096 of diamonds are of gem quality. 5Weights of consumer price index components. "Import duties and taxes. *Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. ?Not all operational because of civil strife. 19Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Permanent Mission of the Democratic Republic of the Congo http://www.un.int/drcongo * Central Bank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo http://www.bcc.cd/go.html

Nations of the World

Congo, Republic of the

(2001): residual fuel oil 206,0007; refined sugar 71,814; distillate fuel oils 62,0007; gasoline 40,0007; aviation gas 38,0007; wheat flour 35,000; kerosene 21,0007; soap 1,6207; cigarettes 4,000,000 cartons; beer 610,000 hectolitres; nonalcoholic drinks 349,000 hectolitres; veneer sheets 12,000 cu m. Energy

Official name: République du Congo (Republic of the Congo). Form of government: republic with two legislative houses (Senate [661]; National Assembly [1371]). Chief of state and government: President. Capital: Brazzaville. Official language: French2. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 399,000,000 (802,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 82,900,000 ([2004] 5,944,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 535,000 (288,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 124,700,000 (124,700,000). Population economically active (2000): total 1,232,000; activity rate of tota population 35.7% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 60.3%; female [1997 43.4%; unemployed, n.a.). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 100.9

1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970433. Area and population Regions

Bouenza Cuvette Cuvette-Ouest Kouilou

Lékoumou Likouala

area

Capitals

20054 estimate

sq km

Madingou Owando Ewo Pointe-Noire

4,733 18,861 10,039 5,270

12,258 48,850 26,000 13,650

229,820 135,767 55,765 80,951

Sibiti

8,089

20,950

81,672

25,500

66,044

84,513

Niari

Dolisie

10,007

25,918

105,147

Plateaux

Djambala

14,826

38,400

170,978

Pool

Kinkala

13,110

33,955

362,357

Ouesso

21,542

55,795

46,727

Sangha

Communes Brazzaville Dolisie

— —

39 z

100 18

1,174,005 106,262

Mossendjo

—

2

5

18,209

—

3

8

56,686

— —

2 le

5 44

24,322 663,359

Nkayi Ouesso Pointe-Noire

TOTAL

132,047

342,000

2000 100.0

2001 100.0

2002 103.7

2003 106.1

2004 107.2

2005 112.8

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 34; remittances (2004) 1; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 321; official development assistance (2005) 1,5578. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 103; remittances (2003) 24. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 1.4%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 29.3%; overall forest area (2005) 65.8%.

population

sq mi

Impfondo

553

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF 000,000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

+1,320 60.9%

+990 49.8%

31,118 54.3%

31,074 52.7%

41,074 48.2%

431,738 53.8%

Imports (2005): CFAF 746,400,000,000 (nonpetroleum sector 85.9%; petroleum sector 14.196). Major import sources (2002): France c. 26%; U.S. c. 1196; Italy c. 8%; Lebanon c. 6%; The Netherlands c. 596.

Exports (2005): CFAF 2,484,300,000,000 (crude petroleum 92.5%, wood and wood products 4.6%, refined petroleum 1.2%). Major export destinations

3,396,540

(2002): Taiwan c. 27%; North Korea c. 1196; U.S. c. 1096; South Korea c. 795; France c. 726; China c. 796.

Demography Population (2007): 3,768,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 28.5, persons per sq km 11.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 53.3%; rural 46.7%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.68%; female 50.32%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 46.4%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 14.9%; 45-59, 7.3%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,011,000; (2020) 4,907,000. Doubling time: 24 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Kongo 21.2%; Yombe 11.5%; Teke 10.7%; Kougni 8.0%; Mboshi 5.4%; Ngala 4.2%; Sundi 4.0%; other 35.0%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 49%; independent Christian c. 13%; Protestant c. 11%; Muslim c. 296; other (mostly traditional beliefs and

nonreligious) c. 2596.

Major cities (20054): Brazzaville 1,174,005; 106,262; Nkayi 56,686; Ouesso 24,322.

Pointe-Noire

663,359;

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (1998): length 894 km; passenger-km 242,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 135,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 17,289 km (paved 596). Vehicles (1997): passenger cars 37,240; trucks and buses 15,500. Air transport (2002): passenger-km 27,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 3,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

40

12

2005 2005

490? 16

136? 4.0

units Medium

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005 2005

19 d

48 x

2006 2006

70 E

17 a

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Dolisie

Education and health

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 42.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 29.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 6.07. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 51.7 years; female 54.0 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 5.396 (world avg. 1.096).

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 1,300,100,000,000 (petroleum revenue 80.6%; nonpetroleum receipts 16.996; grants 2.596). Expenditures: CFAF 736,400,000,000 (current expenditure 77.095, of which interest 20.496, wages and salaries 17.796; capital expenditure 23.096). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$5,161,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2000) 5.9. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$5,787,000,000 (U.S.$1,569 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

2003

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF ’000,000

value

force

force

Educational attainment (1984). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 58.7%; primary education 21.4%; secondary education 16.9%; postsecondary 3.0%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 85.8%; males literate 91.2%; females literate 80.8%. Education (2004)

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-18) Voc., teacher tr. 10

Higher!!

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2744 869

7,038 4,650

603,180 195,355

85.7 42.0

1,746

23,606

13.5

1,34110

16,862

12.4

Health: physicians (2000) 540 (1 per 5,745 persons); hospital beds (2001) 5,195 (1 per 623 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 85.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,026 (vegetable products 92%, animal products 8%); 111% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 10,000 (army 80.0%, navy 8.0%, air force 12.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$22.

Agriculture, forestry,

132,800

ET

Petroleum, mining Manufacturing Construction

fishing

1,212,600 139,200 92,600

52.4 6.0 4.0

Public utilities Trade Transp. and commun. Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

19,700 199,700 137,500 153,500 157,000 71,3005 2,315,900

0.9 8.6 5.9 6.6 6.8 3.15 100.0

575,000

38.1

934,000

d

— 1,509,000

— 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 900,000, sugarcane 460,000, oil palm fruit 90,000, bananas 88,000,

plantains 75,000, mangoes 25,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 23,700, cacao beans 77,000, coffee 1,700, rubber 1,350; livestock (number of live animals) 295,000 goats, 115,000 cattle, 99,000 sheep; roundwood 2,265,000 cu m, of which fuel-

wood 6096; fisheries production 58,448 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 20 kg; diamonds 50,000 carats®. Manufacturing

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lIncludes vacant seats. 2“Functional” national languages are Lingala and Monokutuba. 3Formerly pegged to the French franc and since Jan. 1, 2002, to the euro at a rate of €1 = CFAF 655.96. ^January 1st projection of the Congolese statistical office. “Import duties. Illegally transshipped diamonds from nearby countries (2003-04) 3 to 5 million carats. 72000. 8Figure represents commitments. ?Subscribers. 101996—97. 111998.

Internet resources for further information: * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm * Republique du Congo: Centre National de la Statistique http://www.cnsee.org

554

Britannica World Data lishing 95; fabricated metal products 74. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 8,210,000,000 (7,972,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (3,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 288,000 (1,541,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2005): total 1,903,068; activity rate of total population 44.6% (participation rates: ages 12-59, 60.8%; female 36.2%; unemployed 6.6968).

Costa Rica Official name: Repüblica de Costa Rica (Republic of Costa Rica). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Legislative Assembly [57]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: San José. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: Roman Catholicism. Monetary unit: Costa Rican colón

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

111.3 124.2

121.5

132.9 ins

149.3 m

169.9 age

189.3 whe

Household income and expenditure (2004-05). Average household size 3.7; average annual household income 4,225,680 (U.S.$9,214); sources of income: wages and salaries 67.9%, rent 11.0%, transfers 10.9%, self-employ-

(€); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = £518.56; 1 £ - €1,042.

ment 8.1%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 21.9%, housing and Area and population Provinces

area

2005! estimate

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Alajuela

Alajuela

3,766

9,753

804,475

Cartago Guanacaste Heredia

Cartago Liberia Heredia

1,207 3,915 1,026

3,125 10,141 2,657

481,221 296,579 396,237

Limén

3,547

9,188

389,017

Puntarenas

4,354

11,277

405,457

San José

1,915 19,730

4,959 51,100

1,496,898 4,269,884

Limén Puntarenas

San José TOTAL

energy 19.3%, transportation 14.8%, recreation and culture 7.9%, wearing apparel 6.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,666; remittances (2006) 520; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 593. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 470; remittances

population

(2006) 246.

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 4.496, in permanent crops 5.9%, in pasture 45.8%; overall forest area (2005) 46.8%.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices)!o

Demography Population (2007): 4,445,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 225.3, persons per sq km 87.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 60.6%; rural 39.4%. Sex distribution (20061): male 50.76%; female 49.24%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 28.4%; 15-29, 28.1%; 30-44, 21.5%; 45-59, 13.7%; 60-74, 5.9%; 75-84, 1.8%; 85 and over, 0.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,671,000; (2020) 5,362,000. Doubling time: 56 years. Ethnic composition (2000): white 77.0%; mestizo 17.0%; black/mulatto 3.0%; East Asian (mostly Chinese) 2.0%; Amerindian 1.0%. Religious affiliation (2004): Roman Catholic (practicing) c. 47%; Roman Catholic (nonpracticing) c. 25%; Evangelical Protestant c. 13%; nonreligious c. 10%; other c. 5%.

Major cities (20061): San José 344,7472 (urban agglomeration 1,085,0003); Limón 68,2154; Alajuela 49,3764; San Isidro Francisco 45,9724; Liberia 45,3654.

de El General

46,4904; San

2001 —1,547 13.3%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.2 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 38.496; outside of marriage 61.696. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 3.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.97. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2006) 6.0/(1998) 2.2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 77.0 years; female 81.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 105.0; communicable diseases 92.3; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 78.1; accidents and violence 46.0.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: £1,860,988,000,000 (taxes on goods and services 38.5%, social security contributions 27.2%, income tax 14.4%, import duties

5.0%, grants 3.7%). Expenditures: ¢1,951,392,000,000 (current expenditures

92.9%, of which wages 37.7%, transfers 25.8%, interest on debt 17.2%; devel-

opment expenditures 7.1%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; February 2006): U.S.$3,893,400,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$21,367,000,000 (U.S.$4,857 per capita).

2005 —2,489 14.8%

2006 -3,324 16.8%

cals and chemical products 11.0%; mineral fuels 10.5%; plastics 7.0%; fabri-

cated metal products 6.896). Major import sources: U.S. 40.1%; Japan 5.8%; Mexico 5.0%; Venezuela 4.9%; Ireland 4.5%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$7,150,690,000 (machinery and apparatus 29.8%; food products 24.8%, of which bananas 6.8%, pineapples 4.6%, coffee 3.7%; professional and scientific equipment 8.1%; textiles 7.5%; chemicals and chemical products 6.0%).Major export destinations: U.S. 40.2%; Hong Kong 6.8%; The Netherlands 6.3%; Guatemala 4.0%; Nicaragua 3.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): 278 km11!. Roads (2004): total length 21,953 mi, 35,330 km (paved 2496). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 620,992; trucks and km cargo 10,351,000.

Communications Medium

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

1,068

257

Televisions

Telephones Cellular Landline

in value @ 000,000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

753,382

8.0

281,809

148

12,347 1,895,002 407,312 261,120

04 20.0 43 2.8

4,232 259,565 125,337 21,136

02 13.6 6.6 1.4

815,033 1,684,867 1,205,148

8.6 17.8 12.7

115,931 459,563 146,345

6.1 24.1 7.7

344,121 1,580,203 509,6956 9,468,230

3.6 16.7 5.46 100.0

83,263 372,106 33,7817 1,903,068

44 19.6 1.87 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 3,615,582, bananas 2,220,000, pineapples 1,605,237, oil palm fruit 7780,000, oranges 326,400, cassava 300,000, cantaloupes/other melons 243,903, rice 183,245, green coffee 126,000, potatoes 74,881; livestock (number of live animals) 1,000,000 cattle, 550,000 pigs, 19,500,000 chickens; roundwood 4,636,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 74%; fisheries production 46,378 (from

aquaculture 52%). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone 920,000; gold 500 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$’000,000; 2003): food products 734; beverages 188; paints, soaps, and pharmaceuticals 169; plastic products 121; paper and paper products 96; bricks, tiles, and cement 95; printing and pub-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

units Medium PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

1,4444 1,351

32814 307

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

1,000

233

2004

47778

11518

2006 2006

1,214 5914

276 1414

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 5 and over having: no formal schooling 9.9%; incomplete primary education 23.3%; complete primary 24.5%; incomplete secondary 18.2%; complete secondary 8.5%; higher 12.7%; other/unknown 2.9%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 96.0%; males literate 95.9%; females literate 96.1%. Education (2002-03)

Primary (age 7-12) Higher

2005

units number

Voc., teacher tr.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Public administration Services Other TOTAL

2004 —1,852 12.6%

Imports (2005): U.S.$9,640,100,000 (machinery and apparatus 34.2%; chemi-

Secondary (age 13-17)

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate

2003 —1,561 11.3%

buses 220,456. Air transport (2005)12: passenger-km 2,284,000,000; metric ton-

Vital statistics

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities

2002 —1,924 15.5%

student/ schools!

teachers

students

teacher ratio

3,768

24,142

545,509

22.6

386

13,170

235,156

17.9

82

2,240

53,809

24.0

52

3,87416

77,283

te

Health (2004): physicians 6,600 (1 per 644 persons); hospital beds (2003) 5,908 (1 per 714 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 9.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,618 (vegetable products 8096, animal products 2096); 13696 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Paramilitary expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.496; per capita expenditure U.S.$24. The army was officially abolished in 1948. Paramilitary (police) forces had 8,400 members in March 2006.

iJuly 1. 2Population of San José canton. 32003 estimate. 4District population. 5General consolidated central and local government accounts. 9Taxes less subsidies and imputed bank service charges. "Includes 7,197 not adequately defined and 24,578 unemployed, not previously employed. 3Ages 12 and over. ?Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. 10Includes goods imported for reassembly and reexported. National rail service was not in regular service from 1995 through 2000. Limited service resumed in 2000. 12Lacsa (Costa Rican Airlines) only. 13Circulation of daily newspapers. 14Subscribers. 151999. 162001-02.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Costa Rica: Economic Indicators http://indicadoreseconomicos.becr.fi.cr/indicadoreseconomicos * National Institute of Statistics and the Census http://www.inec.go.cr

Nations of the World

Cóte d'Ivoire

555

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: République de Cóte d'Ivoire (Republic of Cóte d'Ivoire [Ivory Coast]!). Form of government: transitional regime2. 3 with one legislative house (National Assembly [223]). Chief of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister3. De facto capital: Abidjan. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

in value

% of total

CFAF '000,000,000

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

3,107,000

44.8

3,827,000

55.2

6,934,000

100.0

Agriculture Mining

1,895.9 116.4

23.2 1.4

Manufacturing

1,331.3

16.3

Public utilities Construction

190.4 248.9

23 3.0

Transp. and commun.

381.2

Trade

Public admin., defense

Finance, services

}

Other TOTAL

4.7

1,1414

14.0

22714

278

601.99 8,178.5

7.49 100.010

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 10.4%, in permanent crops 11.3%, in pasture 40.9%; overall forest area (2005) 32.7%.

1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

Foreign trade Area and population

area.

population.

Regions

sq km

2002 estimate

Agnebi Bafing Bas-Sassandra Denguélé Dix-huit Montagnes Fromager Haut-Sassandra Lacs Lagunes Marahoué

9,080 8,720 25,800 20,600 16,600 6,900 15,200 8,940 14,200 8,500

720,900 178,400 443,200 277,000 1,125,800 679,900 1,186,600 597,500 4,210,200 651,700

Regions Moyen-Cavally Moyen-Comoé N zi-Comoé Savanes Sud-Bandama Sud-Comoé Vallée du Bandama Worodougou Zanzan TOTAL

cares...

population:

sq km

2002 estimate

14,150 6,900 19,560 40,323 10,650 6,250 28,530 21,900 38,000 320,803

443,200 488,200 909,800 1,215,100 826,300 536,500 1,335,500 400,200 839,000 17,065,000

Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF '000,000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

41,058 23.6%

31,120 24.0%

41,965 36.5%

41,486 28.3%

41,388 23.4%

41,263 19.1%

Imports (2005): CFAF 2,687,000,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 40.1%, crude and refined petroleum 32.3%, food products 17.0%). Major import sources (2004): France 24.3%; Nigeria 19.2%; U.K. 4.0%; China 4.0%; Italy 3.8%. Exports (2005): CFAF 3,950,000,000,000 (cocoa beans and products 27.5%, crude petroleum and petroleum products 26.9%, wood and wood products 3.8%, coffee 2.1%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 11.6%; The Netherlands 10.3%; France 9.5%; Italy 5.5%; Belgium 4.7%; Germany 4.7%.

Demography Population (2007): 19,262,000.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (1999): route length (2004) 660 km; passenger-km

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 155.5, persons per sq km 60.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 45.0%; rural 55.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.82%; female 49.18%.

93,100,000;

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 41.7%; 15-29, 29.4%; 30-44, 14.7%; 45-59, 9.1%; 60-74, 4.3%; 75-84, 0.796; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 20,375,000; (2020) 24,315,000. Ethnolinguistic composition (1998)4: Akan 42.1%;Mande 26.5%; other 31.4%. Religious affiliation (2005): traditional beliefs c. 37%; Christian c. 32%, of which Roman Catholic c. 17%, Protestant c. 8%, independent Christian c. 7%; Muslim c. 28%; other c. 3%.

Major cities (2005): Abidjan (agglomeration) 3,576,000; Bouaké 573,700; Daloa 215,100; Yamoussoukro (2003) 185,600; Korhogo (2003) 115,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 36.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 16.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 4.76. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 46.7 years; female 48.6 years. Adult population (ages 15—49) living with HIV (2005): 7.1965 (world avg. 1.096). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS-related c. 299; malaria c. 153; lower respiratory infections c. 132; diarrheal diseases c. 102;

perinatal conditions c. 92.

metric ton-km

Communications Medium

yams 3,000,000, oil palm fruit 1,882,000, cassava 1,500,000, plantains 1,350,000, cacao beans 1,330,000, rice 1,150,000, sugarcane 1,100,000, corn (maize) 910,000, taro 370,000, seed cotton 327,100, bananas 222,000, coffee 160,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 150,000, natural rubber 135,000, cashew nuts 90,000; livestock (number of live animals) 1,523,000 sheep, 1,500,000 cattle; roundwood 10,047,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 87%; fisheries production

(2004): total length

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

880

52

Cellular

2006

4,06514

22014

Landline

2006

261

14

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2004 2005 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

262 8313 300 1.214

16 4.713 16 0.0714

Education and health Educational attainment (1998-99)15. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 62.396; primary education 19.496; secondary 14.396; higher 3.396; unknown 0.796. Literacy (2003): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 50.9%; males 57.9%; females 43.6%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Higher'8

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Roads

821,400; cargo unloaded and loaded 16,699 metric tons.

Primary (age 6-11)

Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 1,566,000,000,000 (tax revenue 79.996; nontax revenue 14.196; grants 6.096). Expenditures: CFAF 1,536,600,000,000 (current expenditure 78.4%; interest on public debt 11.5%; remainder 10.1%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$9,007,000,000.

537,600,000.

80,000 km (paved 8%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 113,900; trucks and buses 54,900. Air transport (2002)12: passenger arrivals and departures

Secondary (age 12-18)

National economy

cargo

7,59918

147165 2

teachers

students

teacher ratio

48,308

2,046,165

42.4

1,181

42,500

37.6

23,1847

703,743

28.617

Health: physicians (2004) 2,081 (1 per 8,143 persons); hospital beds (2001) 5,981 (1 per 2,660 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 1194. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,268 (vegetable products 9596, animal products 596); 12396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 17,050 (army 38.1%, navy 5.3%, air force 4.1%, presidential guard 7.9%, gendarmerie!9 44.6%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$11.20

55,866 (from aquaculture 2%). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 1,638 kg; diamonds 300,000 caratsé. Manufacturing (value added in CFAF ’000,000,000; 1997): food 156.6, of which cocoa and chocolate 72.4, vegetable oils 62.7; chemicals 60.2; wood products 55.9; refined petroleum 46.0; textiles 37.9.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 5,370,000,000 (2,973,800,000);

crude

petroleum

(barrels; 2004)

9,485,000

(26,400,000);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 3,248,000 (906,000); natural gas (cu

m; 2005) 2,200,000,000 ([2004] 1,000,000,000).

Population economically active (2003)7: total 6,544,000; activity rate of total population 37.296 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 65.596; female 28.996). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

2001 104.3

2002 107.5

2003 111.1

2004 112.7

2005 117.1

2006 120.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 8.0; expenditure (1996): food 32.2%, housing and energy 13.9%, hotels and restaurants 12.3%, transportation 9.6%, clothing 7.4%, household equipment 5.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2003) 50; remittances (2005) 160; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 225; official development assistance (2005) 23611. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2001) 192; remittances (2005) 592. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$17,052,000,000 (U.S.$902 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Cóte d'Ivoire is the official protocol version of the country name since 1986. ?Cóte d'Ivoire was split between a government-controlled south and a rebel-held north from September 2002 through March 2007. The peace accord signed between the warring factions in March 2007 enabled the creation of a power-sharing transitional government in April 2007. 3Both positions are transitional as of December 2007. ^Local population only (in 1998 foreigners constituted 26% of the population). At least 1 million foreigners have been forced to leave southern Cóte d'Ivoire from September 2002. Statistically derived midpoint of range. ^A UN embargo on rough diamond exports was in effect from November 2004 to November 2007. "Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. ?Weights of consumer price index components. ?Import duties and taxes. !°Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Figure represents commitments. Abidjan airport only. DCirculation. of four daily newspapers only. !4Subscribers. Based on sample survey of 4,572 persons (38% urban, 62% rural). 161996-97. 172000—01. 13Universities of Abobo-Adjamé and Cocody only. !?The gendarmerie or the national police force reinforces the army. 2°Peacekeeping troops (June 2007): UN 7,900, French 3,500; however, dismantling of the buffer zone occupied by the peacekeeping troops began in April 2007.

Internet resources for further information: * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm * Institut National de la Statistique http://www.ins.ci/accueil.htm

556

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$40,251,000,000 (U.S.$8,835 per capita).

Croatia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Republika Hrvatska (Republic of Croatia). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (House of Representatives [1531]). Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Zagreb. Official language: Croatian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: kuna (kn; plural kune); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ - kn 5.39; 1 £ = kn 10.83.

2005

Agriculture, forestry Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

area

population

Counties

sq km

2001 census

Bjelovar-Bilogora Dubrovnik-Neretva

2,640 1,781

133,084 122,870

2,813 3,626

206,344 141,787

Koprivnica-Krizevci Krapina-Zagorje

1,748 1,229

Lika-Senj Medimurje Osijek-Baranja

5,853 729 4,155

Pozega-Slavonia

Primorje-Gorski kotar Sibenik-Knin

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

13,176

}

5.8

45,587

19.9

12,493 19,206 34,164 34,176

5.5 8.4 14.9 14.9

37,886 32,3442 229,0314

165

271,000

15.0

9,000 277,000 28,000 130,000 97,000 309,000 105,000 106,000 232,000 236,0003 1,802,0004

14.12 100.0

0.5 15.4

1.6 7.2 5.4 17.1 58 5.9 12.9

13.13 100.04

Public debt (external, outstanding; December 2006): U.S.$8,350,000,000.

Area and population

Istria Karlovac

in value kn '000,000

1,823

Counties

area

population

sq km

2001 census

4,468 2,030

185,387 176,765

Split-Dalmatia Varazdin

4,540 1,262

463,676 184,769

124,467 142,432

Virovitica-Podravina Vukovar-Srijem

2,024 2,454

93,389 204,768

53,677 118,426 330,506

Zadar Zagreb city

3,646 3,060

162,045 309,696

85,831

3588

305,505

2,984

112,891

Sisak-Moslavina Slavonski Brod-Posavina

Zagreb

ea

eae

i

!

Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size (2001) 3.0; average annual income per household kn 69,180 (U.S.$11,629); sources: wages 51.0%, pensions 17.9%, self-employment 16.5%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 33.2%, housing and energy 13.6%, transportation 10.9%, clothing and footwear 7.7%, recreation and culture 6.2%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 7,460; remittances (2006) 1,234; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 1,528. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 751; remittances (2006) 274; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 267. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 26.1%, in permanent crops 2.2%, in pasture 27.8%; overall forest area (2005) 38.2%.

Foreign trade

,

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 4,440,000.

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 203.2, persons per sq km 78.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 56.5%; rural 43.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 48.17%; female 51.83%.

0.4%; Hungarian 0.4%; other 4.6%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Christian 92.6%, of which Roman Catholic 87.8%, 4.4%;

Muslim

1.3%;

nonreligious/atheist

5.2%;

2004 -8,565 34.8%

2005 -9,788 35.8%

2006 | —11,112 34.9%

petroleum 8.9%, food and live animals 7.2%). Major import sources: Italy 17.0%; Germany 15.5%; Russia 7.3%; Slovenia 7.1%; Austria 6.8%.

Exports (2002): U.S.$4,899,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 17.0%, ships and tankers 13.5%, clothing 7.9%, petroleum products 7.9%, food products 6.3%, pharmaceuticals 3.1%). Major export destinations: Italy 22.9%; Bosnia and Herzegovina 14.4%; Germany 11.2%; Austria 9.4%; Slovenia 7.5%.

other

Major cities (2001): Zagreb 691,724; Split 175,140; Rijeka 143,800; Osijek 90,411; Zadar 69,556.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.5 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 89.5%; outside of marriage 10.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 22.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.42. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.8/1.0. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.8 years; female 78.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 561.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 279.3; diseases of the respiratory system 65.2; accidents, violence, and poisoning 64.6; diseases of the digestive system 53.3.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: kn 95,236,000,000 (tax revenue 61.496, of which VAT 36.7%, excise taxes 12.1%; social security contributions 35.6%; nontax rev-

enue 2.8%; grants 0.2% ).Expenditures: kn 95,948,000,000 (social security and welfare 43.5%; compensation of employees 25.3%; interest payments 4.9%). Population economically active (2005): total 1,802,000; activity rate 40.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 58.3%; female 45.5%; unemployed [July

2005-June 2006] 12.790).

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index

2003 -7,908 38.5%

cals and chemical products 11.2%, road vehicles 10.0%, crude and refined

Population projection: (2010) 4,433,000; (2020) 4,374,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Croat 89.6%; Serb 4.5%; Bosniac 0.5%; Italian Orthodox

2002 —5,648 36.1%

Imports (2004): U.S.$16,589,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 21.4%, chemi-

Age breakdown (2004): under 15, 16.1%; 15-29, 20.2%; 30-44, 20.9%; 45-59, 20.7%; 60-74, 15.9%; 75-84, 5.3%; 85 and over, 0.9%.

Eastern 0.9%.

2001 —4,101 30.1%

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

104.8 106.5

106.5 111.8

106.7 118.5

110.7 125.5

1143 131.6

118.0 138.4

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): corn (maize) 2,100,000, sugar beets 1,000,000, wheat 850,000, grapes 350,000, potatoes 340,000, barley 180,000, soybeans 110,000, tomatoes 71,400, sunflower seed 65,000, apples 58,000, olives 33,000, tobacco leaves 10,200; livestock (number of live animals) 1,205,000 pigs, 796,000 sheep, 471,000 cattle; roundwood 4,018,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 23%; fisheries production

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 2,726 km; (2006) passenger-km 1,339,000,000; (2006) metric ton-km cargo 3,183,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 28,472 km (paved [2003] 85%). Vehicles (20075): passenger cars 1,435,781; trucks and buses 174,612. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 1,857,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,000,000.

Communications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

1,401

315

Telephones

units Medium PCs

Dailies

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

842

2004

3826

Cellular

2006

3,6507

8217

Internet users

2006

Landline

2006

1,832

402

Broadband

2006

1,576

2527

191

856 346

577

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no schooling or unknown 3.596; incomplete primary education 15.896; primary 21.7%; secondary 47.1%; postsecondary and higher 11.9%. Literacy (2003): population age 15 and over literate 98.5%; males 99.4%; females 97.8%. Education (2005-06)

Primary (age 7-14) Secondary (age 15-18) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2.140

30,131

387,952

129

683 110

21,835 9,486

189,661 132,952

8.7 14.0

Health (2005): physicians 8,216 (1 per 541 persons); hospital beds 24,000 (1 per 185 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 5.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,811 (vegetable products 78%, animal products 2296); 14096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 20,800 (army 67.596, navy 12.096, air force and air defense 11.1%, headquarters staff 9.4%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$138.

48,465 (from aquaculture 28%). Mining and quarrying (2004): ceramic clay 637,000; ornamental stone 1,000,000 sq m. Manufacturing (value added in

kn '000,000; 2004): food products and beverages 7,112; refined petroleum 4,005; chemicals and chemical products 2,774; bricks, cement, and ceramics

2,642; fabricated metals 2,623; printing and publishing 2,224. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 12,722,000,000 ([2004] 14,163,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) negligible (1,106,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 7,740,000 ([2004] 37,200,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 4,824,000 (4,218,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 2,198,000,000

(2,934,000,000).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lIncludes 5 seats representing Croatians abroad and 8 seats for minorities. ?Taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. *Unemployed. ^Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. January 1. ?Circulation. "Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Croatian Bureau of Statistics http://www.dzs.hr/ * Croatian National Bank http://www.hnb.hr/eindex.htm

Nations of the World

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$51,504,000,000 (U.S.$4,571 per capita).

Cuba

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repüblica de Cuba (Republic of Cuba). Form of government: unitary socialist republic with one legislative house (National Assembly of the People's Power [609]. Head of state and government: President. Capital: Havana. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Cuban peso (CUP); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = CUP 23.15}; 1£= CUP 46.541.

2006

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Finance, real estate Trade Pub. admin., social security Services Other TOTAL

Area and population Provinces Camagüey Ciego de Avila Cienfuegos

area? Capitals Camagüey

Ciudad de la Habana

— Bayamo Guantánamo

population 2006 estimate

sq mi

sq km

6,029

15,615

784,445

2,619 1,614

6,783 4,180

419,810 400,976

278

721

2,168,255

3,234 2,381

8,375 6,168

832,826 511,224

Ciego de Avila Cienfuegos

Granma Guantánamo

Holguin

Holguin

3,588

9,293

1,034,371

La Habana? Las Tunas Matanzas

Havana Las Tunas Matanzas

2,213 2,544 4,557

5,732 6,588 11,803

735,143 531,859 682,081

Pinar del Río

Pinar del Río

4,210

10,904

731,276

Sancti Spíritus Santiago de Cuba Villa Clara

Sancti Spíritus Santiago de Cuba Santa Clara

2,601 2,377 3,248

6,737 6,156 8,412

463,758 1,044,791 811,671

934

2,419

86,557

42,427

109,886

11,239,043

Special municipality Isla de la Juventud

Nueva Gerona

TOTAL

2004

in value CUP '0006

% of total values

1,597,700 459,000 4,956,900 605,500 3,042,000 3,458,600 2,534,200 10,588,100 1,470,800 14,694,800 657,000 44,064,600

3.6 1.0 11.2 1.4 6.9 78 58 24.0 3.3 33.3 1.5 100.08

labour force?

% of labour force?

982,400 27,600 573,100 62,600 236,700 278,200 104,000 610,300

21.2 0.6 12.3 1.3 51 6.0 2.2 13.1

1,486,800 — 4,641,700

224 — 100.08

}

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2002) 3.2. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,920; remittances (2003) 1,200; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) negligible; official development assistance (2005) 839. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 27.9%, in permanent crops 6.6%, in pasture 26.1%; overall forest area (2005) 24.7%.

Foreign trade!o Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 —3,167 48.6%

U.S.$ 000,000 % of total

Imports

2001 —3,178 48.9%

2002

(2001): U.S.$4,838,700,000

2003

(machinery

2004

2005 —4,528 48.7%

and transport equipment

25.5%, of which motor vehicles and parts 5.0%; food and live animals 15.7%,

of which cereals 6.5%; refined petroleum 13.1%; crude petroleum 6.6%). Major import sources (2004): Spain 15.4%; Venezuela 13.7%; U.S. 11.5%; China 8.0%; Canada 6.6%; Italy 6.5%.

Exports (2001): U.S.$1,660,600,000 (raw sugar 32.6%; nickel [all forms] 27.8%;

Demography

raw tobacco and tobacco products 15.8%; fresh and frozen fish 4.6%; medici-

nal and pharmaceutical products 2.4%). Major export destinations (2004): The

Population (2007): 11,238,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 264.9, persons per sq km 102.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 75.5%; rural 24.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.08%; female 49.92%.

Netherlands 23.5%; Canada 21.9%; China 8.3%; Russia 7.8%; Spain 6.6%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 19.2%; 15-29, 20.5%; 30-44, 27.6%; 45-59, 17.0%; 60-74, 10.8%; 75-84, 3.6%; 85 and over, 1.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 11,230,000; (2020) 11,221,000. Ethnic composition (1994): mixed 51.0%; white 37.0%; black 11.0%; other 1.0%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 4796; Protestant c. 596; nonreligious c. 2296; other c. 2696.4 Major cities (2002): Havana 2,201,610; Santiago de Cuba 423,392; Camagüey 301,574; Holguín 269,618; Santa Clara 210,220; Guantánamo 208,145.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 2.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.40. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 4.5/3 2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 75.1 years; female 79.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): malignant neoplasms (cancers) 162.7; ischemic heart disease 139.9; cerebrovascular disease 74.9; communicable diseases 61.8; accidents 41.6; suicide and violence 21.7.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003)11: length 2,651 mi, 4,226 km; (2001) passenger-km 1,766,600; metric ton-km cargo 806,900,000. Roads (1999): total length 37,815

mi, 60,858 km (paved 49%). Vehicles (1998): passenger cars 172,574; trucks and buses 185,495. Air transport (2003)12: passenger-km 2,044,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 40,933,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

3,000

267

Telephones Cellular Landline

2006 2006

15314 983

1414 101

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies Internet users Broadband

Budget (2006). Revenue: CUP 30,012,400,000 (tax revenue 73.696; nontax revenue 26.496). Expenditures: CUP 31,742,400,000 (current revenue 84.296, of which education 14.8%, social security contributions 11.2%, health 9.7%, housing and community services 7.2%; capital expenditure 15.8%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$12,000,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

raw sugar (2006) 1,300,000, tomatoes 802,600, plantains 770,000, cassava 675,800, rice 650,000, pumpkins, squash, and gourds 520,000, oranges 490,000, sweet potatoes 450,000, corn (maize) 362,500, tobacco leaves 34,500; livestock (number of live animals) 3,950,000 cattle, 2,361,000 sheep, 1,626,000 pigs, 27,440,000 chickens; roundwood 2,579,000 (2005) cu m, of which fuelwood

70%; fisheries production 52,387 (from aquaculture 43%). Mining and quarrying (2004): nickel (metal content) 71,944; cobalt (metal content) 4,055. Manufacturing (2006): cement 1,713,900; steel 257,200; cigarettes (2004) 12,800,000,000 units; colour televisions 157,500 units; beer 2,298,100 hecto-

litres; other alcoholic beverages (excluding wine) 294,700 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 16,468,500,000 ([2004] 13,270,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (13,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 24,500,000 (31,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

1,896,000 (5,104,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 704,000,000 (704,000,000).

Population economically active (2004): total 4,729,386; activity rate 42.1% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 52.3%; female 36.5%; unemployed [2006]

1.9%).

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

97.2 96.2

100.0 100.0

95.95 104.7

104.35 112.4

105.05 123.2

106.05 132.6

110.55

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

377

33

2004 2006 2006

40013 240 m

3618 21 ae

Education and health Educational attainment (2002): Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 14.1%; primary education 17.2%; secondary 26.6%; vocational/technical/teacher training 32.8%; university 9.3%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 96.9%; males 97.0%; females 96.8%. student/ schools

National economy

number

2005

Education (2006-07)

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

557

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

teachers

students

teacher ratio

9,064

91,000

967,200

10.6

1,969

96,100

975,400

10.1

fos

27,26715

244,25315

65

41,400

606,300

9.015

14.6

Health (2006): physicians 70,594 (1 per 160 persons); hospital beds (2004) 70,079 (1 per 160 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 5.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,547 (vegetable products 88%, animal products 12%); 183% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 49,000 (army 77.6%, navy 6.1%, air force 16.3%); U.S. military forces at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay (end of 2005) 950. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$151. ‘Domestic transactions only; the Cuban convertible peso (CUC) is used for international transactions—1 U.S.$ - CUC 0.93; 1 £ - CUC 1.86. ?Geographic areas: island of Cuba 40,369 sq mi (104,556 sq km); Isla de la Juventud 851 sq mi (2,204 sq km); numerous adjacent cays (administratively a part of provinces or the Isla de la Juventud) 1,207 sq mi (3,126 sq km). 3Province bordering Ciudad de la Habana on the east, south, and west. 4Up to 70% of the population also practice Santeria. ‘Estimated figures. At constant 1997 prices. 7Employed persons only. 8Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Figure represents commitments. Imports are f.o.b. in trading partners and ci.f. for balance of trade and commodities. 11Cuban Railways only; length of railways exclusively for the transport of sugar equals 4,811 mi (7,742 km). !#Cubana airline only. Circulation of Granma, the one nationwide daily. Subscribers. 1995-96.

Internet resources for further information: * Oficina Nacional de Estadisticas http://www.one.cu * Naciones Unidas en Cuba http://www.onu.org.cu

558

Britannica World Data

Cyprus

Foreign trade!o

Island of Cyprus

Imports (2005): £C 2,967,000,000 (consumer goods 33.0%; fuels and lubricants 16.2%; motor vehicles 10.2%; capital goods 9.1%). Major import sources:

Area: 3,572 sq mi, 9,251 sq km.

Exports (2005): £C 672,000,000 (reexports 49.1%; domestic exports 35.7%,

Greece 17.1%; Italy 10.1%; U.K. 8.8%; Germany 8.3%; Israel 7.0%.

Population (2007): 1,047,0001.

of which fresh vegetables, fruits, and nuts 8.1%, pharmaceuticals 7.5%; ships’

stores 15.2% ).Major export destinations: France 16.9%; U.K. 16.8%; Greece 11.4%; Germany 5.3%; U.A.E. 2.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Roads (2004): total length 12,059 km (paved c. 65%). Vehicles (20055): cars 335,634; trucks and buses 121,024. Air transport (2005)12: passenger-km 3,187,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 46,607,000.

Two de facto states currently exist on the island of Cyprus: the Republic of Cyprus (ROC), predominantly Greek in character, occupying the southern two-thirds of the island, which is the original and still the internationally recognized de jure government of the whole island; and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), proclaimed unilaterally Nov. 15, 1983, on territory originally secured for the Turkish Cypriot population by the July 20, 1974, intervention of Turkey. Only Turkey recognizes the TRNC, and the two ethnic communities have failed to reestablish a single state. Provision of separate data below does not imply recognition of either state’s claims but is necessitated by the lack of unified data.

Republic of Cyprus

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

276

384

2006 2006

7789,14 4089

9219.14 4839

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

date

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004 2004 2006 2006

249 7713 3579 509,14

309 10413 4229 599, 14

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 20 and over having: no formal schooling/incomplete primary education 10%; complete primary 20%; secondary 45%; higher education 25%. Health (2004): physicians 1,965 (1 per 375 persons); hospital beds 3,075 (1 per 240 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 4.6.

Official name: Kipriakí Dhimokratía (Greek); Kibris Cumhuriyeti (Turkish) (Republic of Cyprus). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with a unicameral legislature (House of Representatives [802]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Lefkosia (conventional Nicosia). Official languages: Greek; Turkish. Monetary unit: Cyprus pound (£C); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 £C = U'S.$2.33 = £1.16; using euro (€) from Jan. 1, 2008.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): 10,000 (national guard 100%); Greek troops

Demography Area’: 2,276 sq mi, 5,896 sq km.

Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Population (2007): 781,0004.

Age breakdown (20065): under 15, 18.4%; 15-29, 23.9%; 30-44, 21.8%; 45-59,

19.2%: 60-74, 11.7%; 75-84, 3.995; 85 and over, 1.1%.

Ethnic composition (2000): Greek Cypriot 91.8%; Armenian 3.3%; Arab 2.9%, of which Lebanese 2.5%; British 1.4%; other 0.6%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Greek Orthodox 94.8%; Roman Catholic 2.1%, of which Maronite 0.6%; Anglican 1.0%; Muslim 0.6%; other 1.5%. Urban areas (20055): Lefkosia 219,2006; Limassol 172,500; Larnaca 77,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.8 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005) 1.42. Life expectancy at birth (2004—05): male 77.0 years; female 81.7 years.

950. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP expenditure U.S.$241.

(2005): 1.4%; per capita

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Cyprus http://www.centralbank.gov.cy * Rep. of Cyprus Statistical Service http://www.mof.gov.cy/mof/cystat/ statistics.nsf/index_en/index_en?OpenDocument

Official name: Kuzey Kibris Türk Cumhuriyeti (Turkish) (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus). Capital: Lefkoşa (conventional Nicosia). Official language: Turkish. Monetary unit: new Turkish lira (YTL); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = YTL 1.30; 1 £ = YTL 2.61; 1 YTL = 1,000,000 (old) TL.

Population (2007): 266,000! (Lefkoga 49,23715; Magusa [Famagusta] 34,80315; Girne [Kyrenia] 24,122); Gtizelyurt [Morphou] 12,42515. Sex distribution (2006): male 53.99%; female 46.01%. Ethnic composition (2006): Turkish Cypriot/Turkish 96.8%; other 3.2%. Birth rate per 1,000 population (2004): 16.0 (world avg. 21.1). Death rate per 1,000 population (2004): 8.0 (world avg. 8.8). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2004) 1.90. Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: £C 3,273,700,000 (excises and import duties 41.4%, income tax 22.3%, social security contributions 19.9%). Expenditures: £C 3,459,300,000 (current expenditures 91.3%, development expenditures 8.7%). Gross national income (at current market prices 2006): U.S.$18,191,000,000 (U.S.$23,735 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

£C '000,000

value

force

force

Agriculture, fishing

221.9

2.9

16,500

24.6

0.3

800

0.2

Manufacturing Construction

668.5 624.4

8.6 8.1

40,000 40,200

10.9 10.9

Public utilities

162.9

24

2,700

0.8

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, insurance Pub. admin., defense

605.6 1,434.7 1,786.3 740.7

7.8 18.5 23.1 9.6

18,500 87,400 42,700 26,300

5.0 23.8 11.6 7.2

Services Other TOTAL

1,032.2 437.87 7,739.6

13.3 5.77 100.0

69,900 22,5008 367,500

19.0 6.18 100.0

Mining

45

Production. Agriculture/livestock (in '000 metric tons; 2005): potatoes 116.0, grapes 80.9, pork 55.6, chicken meat 34.5, olives 27.5. Manufacturing (value added in U.$.$7000,000; 2005): food products, beverages, and tobacco 281; cement, bricks, and ceramics 98; base metals and fabricated metal products

67; paper and paper products 56. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 4,338,000,000 (3,931,000,000). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2006) 2,240; remittances (2006) 154; foreign direct investment (FDI) (2001-05 avg.) 1,027. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 932; remittances (2006) 278; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 450. Land use as % of total land area (2003)9: in temporary crops 12.4%, in permanent crops 4.4%, in pasture 0.4%; overall forest area (2005) 18.9%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Agriculture and fishing

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Pub. admin. Finance, real estate

Services Other TOTAL

}

2003

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

TL '000,000,000

value

force

force 149

222,993

9.1

14,339

13,109 118,634 106,809 99,303 257,580 391,227 510,393

0.5 4.8 44 4.0 10.5 15.9 20.8

ik

193

1,177 6,438 16,591 1,444 8,396 10,803 18,605 2,404

262,48116 2,456,744

10.716 100.0

1.2 6.7

17.2 1.5 8.7 11.2 19.3 25

14828 1,37517 96,400

154

1.417 100.0

Budget (2004). Revenue: U.S.$885,187,000 (indirect taxes 21.4%, direct taxes 18.8%, foreign aid 13.9%, loans 11.8%). Expenditures:

U.S.$885,187,000

(wages 29.7%, social transfers 22.9%, investments 10.3%, defense 6.2%). Imports! (2004): U.S.$853,100,000 (machinery and transport equipment 35.7%, food 9.4%). Major import sources: Turkey 60.1%; U.K. 10.7%. Exports10 (2004): U.S.$62,000,000 (citrus fruits 32.496, clothing 18.996). Major export destinations: Turkey 46.3%; U.K. 21.8%. Health (2004): physicians 422 (1 per 573 persons); hospital beds 1,291 (1 per 186 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 10.0. Internet resource for further information: * Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus State Planning Organization http://www.devplan.org/Frame=eng.html 1Includes 150,000—160,000 "settlers" from Turkey; excludes 3,300 British military in the

Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) in the ROC and 850 UN peacekeeping troops. ?Iwentyfour seats reserved for Turkish Cypriots are not occupied. *Area includes 99 sq mi (256 sq km) of British military SBA and c. 107 sq mi (c. 278 sq km) of the UN Buffer Zone. 4Excludes British and UN military forces. ^January 1. *ROC only. "Import duties and VAT less imputed bank service charges. 3Includes 19,500 unemployed. ?Island of Cyprus. 10Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. Mainly cigarettes, vehicles, and consumer electronics. 12Cyprus Airways. Circulation of daily newspapers. 14Subscribers. 152006 census. 16Import duties. Unemployed.

Nations of the World — 559

Czech Republic

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Official name: Ceská Republika (Czech Republic). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [81]; Chamber of Deputies [200]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Prague. Official language: Czech. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: koruna (Ké); valuation

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

sq km

20061 estimate

Central Bohemia Hradec Králové

11,014 4,757

1,158,108 548,368

Karlovy Vary Liberec Moravia-Silesia

3,315 3,163 5,555

304,274 429,031 1,250,769

Olomouc Pardubice

5,139 4,519

639,161 506,024

Plzeň

7,560

551,528

Regions

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

104.7 108.7

106.6 116.5

106.7 124.3

109.7 132.5

111.7 139.7

114.6

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$134,001,000,000 (U.S.$13,152 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

in value Kč 000,000 Agriculture, forestry

Area and population population

2001

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$12,020,000,000.

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Ké 20.36; 1 £ = Kč 40.93.

area

2000

area

population

Regions

sq km

20061 estimate

South Bohemia South Moravia

10,056 7,067

627,766 1,130,358

Usti Vysočina Zlín

5,8335 6,925 3,965

823,173 510,767 590,142

496 78,866

1,181,610 10,251,079

Capital city

Prague (Praha) TOTAL

Demography Population (2007): 10,302,000.

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

189,000

S

77,137

29

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transportation and

39,711 689,880 176,982 112,798

15 25.9 6.6 42

49,000 1,296,000 459,000 77,000

communications

0.9 25.0 8.9 1.5

275,063

10.3

360,000

7.0

Trade, hotels

327,256

12.3

797,000

15.4

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

454,994 150,666

17.1 Er

385,000 333,000 819,000

7.4 6.4 15.8

ie 100.08

410,0002 5,174,000

7.92 100.03

Other TOTAL

asrar 2,662,204

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 4,631; remittances (2006) 1,058; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 6,438. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 2,405; remittances (2006) 2,645; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 490. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 39.6%, in permanent crops 3.1%, in pasture 12.6%; overall forest area (2005) 34.3%.

Foreign trade

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 338.3, persons per sq km 130.6. Urban-rural (2003): urban 74.3%; rural 25.7%. Sex distribution (2006): male 48.83%; female 51.17%. Age breakdown (20051): under 15, 14.996; 15-29, 22.196; 30-44, 21.396; 45-59, 22.0%; 60-74, 13.6%; 75-84, 5.2%; 85 and over, 0.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,380,000; (2020) 10,590,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Czech 90.4%; Moravian 3.7%; Slovak 1.9%; Polish 0.5%; German 0.4%; Silesian 0.1%; Rom (Gypsy) 0.1%; other 2.9%. Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 63.0%, of which Roman Catholic 40.4%, unaffiliated Christian 16.0%, Protestant (mostly Lutheran) 3.1%, independent Christian (mostly independent Catholic [Hussite Church of the Czech Republic]) 2.6%; atheist 5.0%; Jewish 0.1%; nonreligious 31.9%.

Major cities (20061): Prague 1,181,610; Brno 366,757; Ostrava 310,078; Plzeii 162,759; Olomouc 100,381; Liberec 97,950.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.3 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 68.3%; outside of marriage 31.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 0.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.28. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.1/3.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 72.9 years; female 79.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 538.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 276.1; accidents, poisoning, and violence 62.3; diseases of the respiratory system 59.0; diseases of the digestive system 47.1.

Balance of trade (current prices) Ké '000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

—120,825 5.1%

-116,685 4.3%

-71,323 2.8%

—69,793 2.5%

-22,940 0.7%

2005 | 439,025 1.1%

Imports (2004): Ké 1,746,671,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 31.196; chemicals and chemical products 10.4%; motor vehicles 9.8%; base metals 7.6%;

fabricated metals 4.5%). Major import sources: Germany 31.7%; Slovakia 5.4%; Italy 5.3%; China 5.2%; Poland 4.8%.

Exports (2004): Ké 1,723,731,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 34.1%, of which telecommunications equipment 6.6%, office machinery and computers 6.1%; motor vehicles 15.7%; fabricated metal products 6.6%; base met-

als 6.496). Major export destinations: Germany 36.2%; Slovakia 8.5%; Austria 6.0%; Poland 5.3%; United Kingdom 4.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads

(2004): route length 9,441 km; passenger-km

(2005)

6,667,000; metric ton-km cargo (2005) 14,866,000,000. Roads (2003): tota

length 127,672 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 3,958,708; trucks and buses 435,235. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 9,735,710,000; metric ton-km cargo 44,668,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

persons

Medium

date

in '000s

Televisions

2003

5,488

538

units Medium

date

PCs

Telephones Cellular

2006

12,1505

1,1905

Dailies Internet users

Landline

2006

3,541

345

Broadband

2004 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

5,100 1,8614 3,541 1,0875

500 1824 347 1065

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: Ké 1,279,628,000,000 (tax revenue 82.8%, of which social security contributions 32.5%, taxes on goods and services 26.8%, taxes on income and profits 22.4%; nontax revenue 4.5%; grants 2.5%; other

10.2%). Expenditures:

Ké 1,279,054,000,000

(social security and welfare

29.1%; health 14.5%; transportation and communications 9.8%; education

9.6%; defense 4.4%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cereals 7,668,000 (of which wheat 4,145,000, barley 2,195,000, corn [maize] 703,000), sugar beets 3,496,000, potatoes 1,013,000, rapeseed 769,400; livestock (number of live animals) 2,877,000 pigs, 1,397,000 cattle; roundwood 15,510,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 8%; fisheries production 24,697 (from

aquaculture 8396). Mining and quarrying (2004): kaolin 4,100,000; feldspar 400,000. Manufacturing (value added in Ké ’000,000; 2003): base and fabricated metals 93,380; food, beverages, and tobacco products 81,440; electrical

and optical equipment 70,800; transport equipment

64,144; nonelectrical

machinery and apparatus 57,837; glass, cement, and ceramics 46,589; rubber

and plastic products 37,035. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 84,333,000,000 (57,118,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2005) 13,248,000 ([2004] 9,860,000); lignite (metric tons; 2005) 48,780,000 ([2004] 48,430,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 2,074,000 (45,500,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 4,806,000 (6,578,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 202,000,000 ([2004] 10,969,000,000). Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 2.5; average annual money income per household Ké 295,011 (U.S.$11,479); sources of income: wages and salaries 66.7%, transfer payments 20.6%, self-employment 8.8%, other 3.9%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 21.3%, housing and energy 19.3%, transportation 11.0%, recreation and culture 10.9%, household furnishings 6.5%. Population economically active (2005): total 5,174,000; activity rate of total population 50.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.4%; female 44.1%; unemployed [2006] 7.196).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 0.2%; primary education 21.6%; secondary 68.7%; higher 9.5%. Literacy (2001): 99.8%. Education (2004-05)

student’ schools

teachers

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 15-18)

3,785 345

63,267 12,118

917,738 143,238

145 118

Voc., teacher tr.

1,305

32,620

418,639

12.8

200

17,954

304,721

17.0

Higher

students

teacher ratio

Health (2005): physicians 36,381 (1 per 282 persons); hospital beds 65,0226 (1 per 158 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 3.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,303 (vegetable products 75%, animal products 25%); 163% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 22,272 (army 74.8%, air force 25.2%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$216.

‘January 1. 2ZUnemployed. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 4Circulation of daily newspapers. “Subscribers. “Excludes beds at resorts with mineral springs.

Internet resources for further information: * Czech Statistical Office http://www.czso.cz * Czech National Bank http://www.cnb.cz/en/index.html

560

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$278,800,000,000 (U.S.$51,344 per capita).

Denmark!

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Kongeriget Danmark (Kingdom of Denmark). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Folketing [179]). Chief of state: Danish Monarch. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Copenhagen. Official language: Danish. Official religion: Evangelical Lutheran. Monetary unit: Danish krone (DKK; plural kroner); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ - DKK 5.48; 1£= DKK 11.02.

2005

(Midtjylland)

(Syddanmark)

989

2,561

1,633,565

5,040

13,053

1,219,741

3,097

8,020

576,802

4,707

12,191

1,185,840

Hillerød

Vejle

Zealand (Sjælland)

Sorø

TOTAL

20063 estimate

sq km

Ålborg

South Denmark

population

sq mi

7

(Nordjylland)

2,808

7,273

811,511

16,6404

43,098

5,427,459

Population (2007): 5,454,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 327.8, persons per sq km 126.5. Urban-rural (2004): urban 85.4%; rural 14.6%. Sex distribution (20073): male 49.51%; female 50.49%. Population projection: (2010) 5,503,000; (2020) 5,574,000. Ethnic composition (20073)5: Danish 91.9% ; Turkish 0.6%;German 0.5%; Iraqi 0.4%; Swedish 0.4%; Norwegian 0.3%; Bosnian 0.3%; other 5.6%.

Religious affiliation (2006): Evangelical Lutheran 83.0%; other Christian 1.3%; Muslim 3.7%; nonreligious 5.4%; atheist 1.5%; other 5.1%.

|

Major urban areas (20063): Greater Copenhagen 1,084,855; Arhus 228,764; Odense 152,060; Alborg 100,617; Frederiksberg 92,234.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.0 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 54.3%; outside of marriage 45.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 1.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.80. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 6.7/2.8. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 75.6 years; female 80.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 324.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 281.1; diseases of the respiratory system 96.6; mental disorders/diseases of the nervous system 71.1.

National economy Budget (2005)6. Revenue: DKK 882,940,000,000 (income/wealth taxes 54.4%; 821,539,000,000

31.0%;

other

14.6%).

(social protection 41.9%, education

Expenditures:

DKK

15.2%, health 13.4%,

economic affairs 6.6%, defense 2.9%). National debt (December 2006): U.S.$57,887,000,000. Population economically active (2005): total 2,876,1007; activity rate of total population 53.1768 (participation rates: ages 15—64, 80.2967; female 47.0967; unemployed [July 2005—June 2006] 5.0%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly earnings index

80,400

28

29 11.4

$i 442,300

a 15.4

Construction

73,881

48

192,500

6.7

Public utilities

28,537

1.8

15,200

0.5

119,093 173,433 315,502 82,205

TF 11.2 20.3 5.3

175,300 470,500 342,300 166,700

6.1 16.4 11.9 5.8

278,536 234,231 1,551,509

18.0 154 100.0

832,500 158,4009 2,876,100

28.9 5.59 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 4,493; remittances (2006) 869; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 3,067. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 5,690; remittances (2006) 1,792; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 3,830. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 53.496, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 9.1%; overall forest area (2005) 11.8%.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices) DKK '000,000 % of total

2001 457,687 7.3%

2002 458,044 7.0%

2003 459,571 7.5%

2004 452,275 6.1%

2005 454,616 5.7%

2006 439,978 3.8%

tobacco 8.6%; chemical products 6.6%; fuels 6.6%; clothing and footwear 4.3%). Major import sources: Germany 20.7%; Sweden 13.7%; The Netherlands 6.6%; U.K. 6.0%; China 4.8%.

Age breakdown (20073): under 15, 18.6%; 15-29, 17.3%; 30-44, 21.9%; 45-59, 20.296; 60-74, 15.0%; 75-84, 5.1%; 85 and over, 1.9%.

taxes

15

45,428 176,801

Imports (2005): DKK 452,304,000,000 (machinery and apparatus [including parts] 23.1%; transport equipment and parts 16.9%; food, beverages, and

Demography

import/production

force?

23,862

Services Other TOTAL

Viborg

North Jutland

% of labour

force?

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Capitals

Central Jutland

labour

value

Mining Manufacturing

area

Capital (Hovedstaden)

% of total

Agriculture, fishing

Area and population Regions?

in value DKK ’000,000

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.4 104.2

104.8 108.3

107.0 112.3

108.3 115.7

110.2 119.1

112.3 122.8

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 2.2; average annual disposable income per household (2003) DKK 270,176 (U.S.$41,010); sources of gross income (2003): wages and salaries 63.8%, transfers 24.6%, property income 6.8%, self-employment 3.9%; expenditure (2003): housing 22.5%, transportation and communications 15.7%, food 11.1%, recreation and entertainment 11.1%, energy 7.5%. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Exports (2005): DKK 506,920,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 26.4%; agricultural products 16.7%, of which swine meat 4.6%; mineral fuels and lubricants 10.3%; pharmaceuticals 7.6%; textiles and clothing 5.0%; furniture 3.2%). Major export destinations: Germany 17.3%; Sweden 13.3%; U.K. 9.0%; U.S. 6.5%; Norway 5.3%; The Netherlands 5.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (20053): route length 2,644 km; passenger-km 6,132,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,976,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 72,362 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (20073): passenger cars 2,020,013; trucks and buses 508,788. Air transport (2005)11: passenger-km 5,940,000,000; (2004) metric ton-km cargo 170,352,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

5,264

977

2006 2006

5,84118 3,098

1,07313 569

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

3,543 1,328!? 3,171 1,7281?

659 24612 582 3177?

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 25-69 having: completed lower secondary or not stated 30.396; completed upper secondary or vocational 43.9%; undergraduate 19.6%; graduate 6.2%. Literacy: 100%. Education (2005)

student/ schools

Primary/lower secondary (age 7-15) Upper secondary (age 16-18) Vocational

Higher

teachers

students

2,671 154

715,069 72,288

186

180,514

169

184,495

teacher ratio

Health: physicians (2002) 15,692 (1 per 342 persons); hospital beds (2004) 20,638 (1 per 262 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 4.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,494 (vegetable products 67%, animal products 33%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 21,180 (army 59.0%, air force 19.8%, navy 18.0%, other 3.2%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.8% 14; per capita expenditure U.S.$64014.

wheat 4,826,000, cow’s milk 4,600,000, barley 3,730,000, sugar beets 2,800,000, potatoes 1,600,000, rapeseed 358,400, oats 325,380; livestock (number of live animals) 13,466,000 pigs, 1,544,000 cattle; roundwood 2,285,000 cu m, of

which fuelwood 55%; fisheries production 949,625 metric tons (from aquaculture 4%). Mining and quarrying (2005): sand and gravel 29,000,000 cu m; chalk 1,950,000 metric tons. Manufacturing (value of sales in DKK ’000,000;

2005): food products 121,040; nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 66,050; computer and telecommunications equipment 49,078; fabricated metals 35,716; pharmaceuticals 35,046; printing and publishing 27,387. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 40,260,000,000 (68,616,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2006) none (9,436,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 129,000,000 ([2005] 59,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

7,948,000 (7,050,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 10,358,000,000 (4,918,000,000). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Data in this statistical presentation nearly always exclude the Faroe Islands and Greenland. ?New administrative scheme as of Jan. 1, 2007. January 1. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 5Based on native land. ^General government. 7De jure population only. 3Percentage of de jure population economically active based on total population. ?Includes 15,100 not adequately defined and 143,300 unemployed. 10Imports c.if., exports f.o.b. iiDanish share of Scandinavian Airlines System. l2Circulation. Subscribers. “Includes military pensions.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistics Denmark http://www.dst.dk/yearbook * StatBank Denmark http://www.statbank.dk

Nations of the World

Djibouti

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Jamhiriyah Tibütr (Arabic); République de Djibouti (French) (Republic of Djibouti). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [65]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Djibouti. Official languages: Arabic; French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Djibouti franc (FDJ); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Agriculture

area sq mi

population sq km

‘All Sabih (Ali-Sabieh)

‘All Sabih

850

Arta

Arta

700

1,800

2,775 1,800 2,750

7,200 4,700 7,100

75 8,950

200 23,200

Dikhil Obock Tadjoura (Tadjourah) City Djibouti TOTAL

Dikhil Obock Tadjoura —

2005 estimate

2,200

E 476,703

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 43.3%; 15-29, 28.0%; 30-44, 13.7%; 45-59, 9.2%; 60-74, 5.1%; 75 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 526,000; (2020) 627,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Somali 46.0%; Afar 35.4%; Arab 11.0%; mixed African and European 3.0%; French 1.6%; other/unspecified 3.0%. Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim (nearly all Sunni) 94.1%; Christian 4.5%,

Catholic 1.4%; nonreligious 1.3%; other

Major city and towns: Djibouti (2006) c. 325,0002; Dikhil (1991) 20,480; 'Al

Sabih (1991) 16,423; Tadjoura (1991) 7,309.

% of labour

forces

force

}

4,051

32

3,145 9,314

25 7.4

Public utilities

6,688

53

Transp. and commun.

30,061

24.0

Trade Finance, insurance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

18,518 14,961 22.052

148 11.9 177

16,3846 125,3767

13.16 100.07

}

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 39.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 19.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.31. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (1999): 8.9/2.8. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 41.9 years; female 44.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): communicable diseases 742; cardiovascular diseases 205; accidents, injuries, and violence 81; malig-

nant neoplasms (cancers) 62; respiratory diseases 22. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.1% (world avg. 1.0%).

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2003

2004

2005

—201.0 73.0%

—223.4 74.6%

237.8 75.1%

77.4

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: FDJ 46,710,000,000 (tax revenue 65.8%, of which indirect taxes 26.3%, direct taxes 24.8%, transit taxes, harbour dues and other

registration fees 14.7%; nontax revenue 17.596; grants 16.796). Expenditures: FDI 46,378,000,000 (current expenditures 74.7%; capital expenditures

25.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; February 2006): U.S.$474,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): vegetables 25,680, lemons and limes 1,800, dry beans 1,500, tomatoes 1,283,

pimento, allspice 317; livestock (number of live animals) 512,000 goats, 466,000 sheep, 297,000 cattle, 69,000 camels; roundwood, none; fisheries pro-

duction 260 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: mineral production limited to locally used construction materials such as basalt and evaporated salt (2005) 30,000. Manufacturing (2003): structural detail, n.a.; products of limited value include furniture, nonalcoholic beverages, meat and

hides, light electromechanical goods, and mineral water. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 303,000,000 (220,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (119,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (4,380,000); geothermal, wind, and solar resources are substantial but largely undeveloped. Population economically active (2003): total 299,0003; activity rate of total population 39.1965 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 69.0965; female 39.5965; unemployed [2006] c. 6096). 2002

2003

102.4

104.5

79,000

a0

349,000

100.0

Imports (1999): U.S.$152,700,0009 (9food and beverages 25.0965; machinery and electric appliances 12.5%; khat 12.2%; petroleum products 10.9%; transport equipment 10.3%).Major import sources (2004)8: Saudi Arabia 21.9%; India 18.7%; China 10.2%; Ethiopia 4.8%; France 4.7%.

Exports (2001): U.S.$10,200,0009 (9aircraft parts 24.5%; hides and skins of cattle, sheep, goats, and camels 20.6%; unspecified special transactions 8.8%;

leather 7.8%; live animals 6.9%).Major export destinations (2005)8: Somalia 66.4%; Ethiopia 21.5%; Yemen 3.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 62 mi, 100 km!0; (1999) passenger-km 81,000,000; (2002) metric ton-km cargo 201,000,000. Roads (2002): tota length 1,796 mi, 2,890 km (paved 13%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 15,700; trucks and buses 3,200. Air transport (2005): passenger arrivals and departures 219,119; metric tons of freight loaded and unloaded 10,973.

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

53

114

Telephones Cellular

2005

441?

9412

Landline

2005

11

23

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.4; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1999)4: food 36.296, housing and energy 18.1%, tobacco and related products 14.4%, transportation 8.8%, household furnishings 7.7%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$792,000,000 (U.S.$968 per capita).

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

19

41

Dailies Internet users

2005 2006

0 T3

o 23

Broadband

2005

0.041?

0.0912

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 68.0%; males literate 78.2%; females literate 58.6%. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

2001 101.8

270,000

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 7.1; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 17; official development assistance (2005) 79. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2.8; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.496, in permanent crops, negligible, in pasture 73.3%; overall forest area (2005) 0.2%.

Communications

Vital statistics

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

labour

value

Balance of trade (current prices)®

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 55.4, persons per sq km 21.4. Urban-rural (2005): urban 86.196; rural 13.996. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.19%; female 48.81%.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

% of total

Foreign trade

Demography Population (2007): 496,0001.

of which Orthodox 3.0%, Roman 0.1%.

in value FDJ '000,000

Manufacturing Construction

Area and population Capitals

2003

Mining

FDJ 177.72; 1 £ = FDJ 357.25.

Regions

561

Primary (age 6—11)

students

teacher ratio

1,28813

46,523

34.413

Secondary (age 12-18)

s

62313

23,947

30.613

Voc., teacher tr.

d

11213

2,336

12.913

1

96

1,746

18.2

Higher'4

82

teachers

Health: physicians (2004) 129 (1 per 3,619 persons); hospital beds (2000) 694 (1 per 621 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 102.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,674 (vegetable products 9096, animal products 1096); 15196 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 9,85015 (army 81.396, navy 2.096, air force 2.595, paramilitary 14.296). Foreign troops: French (January 2007) 2,700; U.S. and German military personnel at Camp Lemonier (November 2006) 1,729 and 320, respectively. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 4.096; per capita expenditure U.S.$52.

Estimate of the U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database. 2About ?/5 of country's residents live in the capital city. [Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 4Weights of consumer price index components for Djibouti city only. *FAO estimate. 5Indirect taxes. "Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 3Includes trade with Ethiopia (via rail). 9Excludes Ethiopian trade via rail. Djibouti portion of 492 mi (791 km) Chemins de Fer Djibouto-Ethiopien linking Djibouti city and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. iiCirculation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers. 132001-02. 142004—05. 5Excluding foreign troops.

Internet resources for further information: * Banque Centrale de Djibouti http://www.banque-centrale.dj * Ministére de l'Economie http://www.ministere-finances.dj

562

Britannica World Data

Dominica

T

| Atlantic |

Official name: Commonwealth of Dominica. Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (House of Assembly [311]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Roseau. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Eastern Caribbean dollar (EC$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ - EC$2.70; 1 £ = EC$5.43. Area and population

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

2001 101.5

2002 101.8

2003 103.3

2004 105.4

2005 107.7

2006 110.99

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2003) 3.0; income per household: n.a.; sources of income (2001)19: wages and salaries 68.2%, self-employment 24.4%, other 7.4%; expenditure (2001): food 32.9%, transportation and communications 19.4%, housing 11.2%, household furnishings 9.4%, clothing and footwear 8.2%, energy 5.9%. Y roduction (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): bananas 29,000, root crops 26,720 (of which taro 11,200, yams 8,000, yautia 4,550, sweet potatoes 1,850), grapefruit and pomelos 17,000, coconuts 11,500, oranges 7,200, plantains 5,700, sugarcane 4,400; livestock (number of live animals) 13,400 cattle, 9,700 goats, 7,600 sheep; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries pro-

area

duction 579 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying: pumice, imestone, and sand and gravel are quarried primarily for local consumption. Manufacturing (value of production in EC$'000; 2004): toilet and laundry

population 2001

Parishes

sq mi

sq km

census

St. Andrew St. David St. George St. John St. Joseph St. Luke St. Mark St. Patrick St. Paul St. Peter TOTAL

69.3 49.0 20.7 22.5 46.4 43 3.8 32.6 26.0 10.7 285.32

179.6 126.8 53.5 58.5 120.1 114 9.9 844 674 27.7 739.02

10,240 6,758 19,825 5,327 5,765 1,571 1,907 8,383 8,307 1,452 69,6253

soap 24,588; toothpaste 8,774; crude coconut oil (2001) 1,758; other products

include fruit juices, beer, garments, bottled spring water, and cardboard boxes. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 79,000,000 (79,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (35,000); natural gas, none (none). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 56; remittances (2005) 4; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 24; official development assistance (2005) 3712. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 10; remittances, n.a.

Foreign trade!3 Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 70,600. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 243.4, persons per sq km 94.1. Urban-rural (2003): urban 72.0%; rural 28.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.34%; female 49.66%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 26.1%; 15-29, 23.8%; 30-44, 27.4%; 45-59, 12.4%; 60-74, 7.0%; 75 and over, 3.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 71,000; (2020) 71,000. Doubling time: 82 years. Ethnic composition (2000): black 88.3%; mulatto 7.3%; black-Amerindian 1.7%; British expatriates 1.0%; Indo-Pakistani 1.0%; other 0.7%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Roman Catholic c. 61%; four largest Protestant groups (including Seventh-day Adventist, Pentecostal groups, and Methodist) c. 28%; nonreligious c. 6%; other c. 5%. Major towns (2004): Roseau 20,200; Berekua 4,000; Portsmouth 3,600; Marigot

2,900; Atkinson 2,5184.

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001 -71.3 44.5%

2002 -58.7 40.2%

2003 -70.8 46.3%

2004 -84.6 50.0%

2005 -102.2 54.2%

Imports (2004): U.S.$144,200,000 (machinery and apparatus 25.1%; food, beverages, and tobacco 19.1%; mineral fuels 11.1%; telecommunications equipment 7.3%). Major import sources (2003): Japan 21.6%; U.S. 15.1%; China 14.8%; Trinidad and Tobago 12.0%; South Korea 7.7%.

Exports (2004): U.S.$42,200,000 (agricultural exports 31.8%, of which bananas 17.2%; manufactured exports 61.8%, of which coconut-based soaps 26.4%;

reexports 4.0%). Major export destinations (2003): Japan 27.1%; U.K. 16.4%; Jamaica 15.1%; U.S. 6.6%; Antigua and Barbuda 6.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 485 mi, 780 km (paved 50%). Vehicles (1998): passenger cars 8,700; trucks and buses 3,400. Air transport (1997): passenger arrivals and departures 74,100; cargo unloaded 575 metric tons, cargo loaded 363 metric tons.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.3 (world avg. 20.3); (1991) within marriage 24.1%; outside of marriage 75.9%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.94. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (1999) 4.7/(1998) 0.9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 72.0 years; female 77.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 262.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 173.3; endocrine and metabolic diseases 61.6; diseases of the respiratory system 51.6; infectious and parasitic diseases 34.4.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: EC$325,000,000 (tax revenue 73.7%, of which taxes on international trade and transactions 29.8%, taxes on goods and services 25.3%;

2000 -75.6 40.8%

grants 18.6%;

nontax

revenue

7.3%;

development

revenue

0.4%). Expenditures: EC$315,300,000 (current expenditures 76.2%, of which wages 33.4%, transfers 14.7%, debt payment 13.6%; development expenditures and net lending 23.8%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$186,700,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$287,000,000 (U.S.$4,242 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

2001

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

EC$'000,000

value

forces

forces

119.4

14.7

5,218

18.7

Mining

Agriculture, fishing

5.5

0.7

164

0.6

Manufacturing Construction

524 5443

6.5 6.7

1,933 2,420

6.9 8.7

Public utilities Transportation and

41.2

5.1

410

1.5

communications Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate

82.8

10.2

1,558

5.6

105.4 96.4

13.0 11.9

5,120 1,144

18.4 4.1

16.0

6,801

24.4

13.96 100.08

3,0977 27,865

11.17 100.0

Services

11.3

Pub. admin., defense

129.5

Other TOTAL

112.76 810.7

1.4

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 7%, in permanent crops c. 2196, in pasture c. 396; overall forest area (2005) c. 6195. Population economically active (2001)5: total 27,865; activity rate of total population 40.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 64.7%; female 38.9%; unemployed [2002] c. 2596).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2000

16

220

2004 2004

4215 21

58915 295

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2005 2004

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

13 gs 26 3.315

182 014 372 4615

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: primary education 62%; secondary 31%; vocational/university 796. Literacy (1996): total population age 15 and over literate, 94.0%. Education (2002-03)

Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12-16) } Vocational Higher! 7

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

6316

550

10,460

19.0

od

7,455 406 eus

ded

UE

Health (2004): physicians 38 (1 per 1,824 persons); hospital beds (2002) 270 (1 per 257 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 13.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,083 (vegetable products 7896, animal products 2296); 16096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2003): nonel8. lIncludes 22 seats that are elective (including speaker if elected from outside of the House of Assembly) and 9 seats that are nonelective (including appointees of the president and the attorney general serving ex officio). 2Total area of Dominica per more recent survey is 290 sq mi (750 sq km). ?The total population including institutionalized persons equals 71,474. ^1991. 5Excludes institutionalized population. *Taxes less imputed banking service charges and subsidies. "Includes 3,054 unemployed and 43 unclassified by economic activity. 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ? Average of second and third quarters. 1?For employed labour force only. 11 Weights of consumer price index components. !2Figure represents commitments. !5Imports f.0.b. in balance of trade and c.if. in commodities and trading partners. 4Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 161997-98. !7Data not available for Dominican campus of Ross University School of Medicine. 18300-member police force includes a coast guard unit.

Internet resources for further information: * Eastern Caribbean Central Bank http://www.eccb-centralbank.org

Nations of the World

Dominican Republic

mals) 2,200,000 cattle, 47,500,000 chickens; roundwood 562,300 cu m, of which

fuelwood 99%; fisheries production 12,086 (from aquaculture 8%). Mining (2005): nickel (metal content) 47,000; marble 10,384 cu m; gold, none?2.

Official name: Repüblica Dominicana (Dominican Republic). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [32]; Chamber of Deputies [178]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Santo Domingo. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: nonel. Monetary unit: Dominican peso (RD$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = RD$3325; 1 £ - RD$66.84.

Manufacturing (2005): cement 2,779,000; refined sugar 139,203; beer 4,541,000 hectolitres; rum 499,000 hectolitres; cigarettes 165,015,000 packets of 20 units.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 13,760,000,000 (13,760,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (777,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (33,500,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,993,000 (5,151,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (5,305,000). Population economically active (2004): total 3,701,804; activity rate of tota population 43.1% (participation rates: ages 10 and over, 55.1%; female 38.7%; unemployed [2006] 16.2%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly earnings index

Area and population

Provinces Azua

area

population

sq km

2002 census

Provinces Peravia

2,532

208,857

Baoruco

1,283

91,480

Barahona Dajabón Duarte EI Seíbo (El Seybo) Elías Piña

1,739 1,021 1,605 1,786 1,424

179,239 62,046 283,805 89,261 63,879

Espaillat Hato Mayor Independencia La Altagracia La Romana

838 1,329 2,008 3,010 654

225,091 87,631 50,833 182,020 219,812

San Pedro de Macorís Sánchez Ramírez Santiago Santiago Rodríguez Santo Domingo

La Vega

2,286

385,101

Valverde

Maria Trinidad Sanchez Monsefior Nouel

1,271 992

135,727 167,618

National District

Monte Cristi

1,925

111,014

Santo Domingo (city)

Monte Plata Pedernales

2,633 2,077

180,376 21,207

TOTAL

Puerto Plata

Salcedo Samaná San Cristóbal San José de Ocoa San Juan

area

population

sq km

2002 census

998

169,865

1,857

312,706

440 854 1,265 650 3,571

96,356 91,875 532,880 62,368 241,105

1,255 1,196 2,836 1,112 1,296

301,744 151,179 908,250 59,629 1,817,754

823

158,293

104 48,6712.3

913,540 8,562,541

Demography Population (2007): 9,366,000. Urban-rural (2005): urban 66.8%; rural 33.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.18%; female 49.82%.

Age breakdown (2002): under 15, 33.5%; 15-29, 26.6%; 30-44, 20.2%; 45-59, 11.7%; 60-74, 5.9%; 75-84, 1.6%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 9,794,000; (2020) 11,236,000. Ethnic composition (2003)4: mulatto c. 73%; white c. 16%; black c. 11%. Religious affiliation (2004): Roman Catholic 64.4%; other Christian 11.4%; nonreligious 22.5%; other 1.7%. Major urban centres (2002): Santo Domingo 1,887,5865; Santiago 507,418; San Pedro de Macorís 193,713; La Romana 191,303; San Cristóbal 137,422.

Vital statistics

202.1, of which ischemic heart disease 84.4; HIV/AIDS-related 98.9; malig-

nant neoplasms (cancers) 76.6.

taxes on goods and services 49.0%, import duties 24.0%, income taxes 18.8%;

nontax revenue 5.896). Expenditures: RD$161,612,000,000 (current expenditures 75.796; development expenditures 24.396). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$6,093,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$29,890,000,000 (U.S.$3,109 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Pub. admin., defense Finance, real estate

Services Other TOTAL

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

904,000 113,300

11.4 1.4

477,820 5,895

12.0 0.1

1,059,200 823,400

13.4 10.4

486,728 213,378

12.2 53

137,100

Tu

26,194

0.7

1,519,700 1,529,400 581,100 568,700

19.2 19.3 7.4 7.2

238,491 899,065 147,545

6.0 22.5 S

563,500 117,7007 7,890,1009

7.1 1.57 100.0

781259 715,8378 3,992,21010

i 17.98 100.0

Household income and expenditure (1997-98). Average household size (2002) 3.9; average annual household income! RD$130,394 (U.S.$8,745); sources of income: wages and salaries 32.1%, self-employment 31.0%, nonmonetary income 22.8%, transfers 12.0%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 33.2%, transportation 16.0%, housing 9.3%, clothing/footwear 7.9%.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

sugarcane 4,950,000, rice 566,000, bananas 500,000, plantains 195,000, tomatoes 175,000, avocados 140,000, coffee 49,054; livestock (number of live ani-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

92.8 93.1

100.0 100.0

108.9 106.1

114.6 107.9

146.0 127.4

221.2 141.0

230.4 ves

(2005) 26.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 22.7%, in permanent crops 10.396, in pasture 43.496; overall forest area (2005) 28.496.

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-677 6.0%

-1,072 9.4%

+375 3.5%

+568 5.0%

-1,221 9.0%

-2,305 16.2%

Imports (2006): U.S.$8,745,000,000 (consumer goods 50.7%, of which refined petroleum 21.0%, food products 5.8%; capital goods 15.4%; crude petroleum 10.9%). Major import sources (2005): U.S. 50.0%; Colombia 6.2%; Mexico 5.8%. Exports (2006): U.S.$6,440,000,000 (reexports of free zones 70.0%, of which assembled clothing 24.8%, electronics 10.3%, jewelry 9.8%; ferronickel 11.0%; fuels 5.6%; raw sugar 1.6%). Major export destinations (2005): U.S.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004)4: route length 382 mi, 615 km. Roads (2002): tota length 12,244 mi, 19,705 km (paved 51%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 561,300; trucks and buses 284,700. Air transport: (1999) passenger-km 4,900,000; (2003) metric ton-km cargo 200,000. Communications

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

1,950

209

Cellular

2006

4,60616

51116

Internet users

2006

897

99

Broadband

Medium

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

206 28315 2,000 6716

22 3015 222 7.116

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and older having: no formal education 1.7%; incomplete/complete primary education 53.1%; secondary 25.9%; undergraduate 15.9%; graduate 1.0%; unknown/

other 2.4%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 84.7%. Education (2002-03)

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: RD$157,585,000,000 (tax revenue 94.296, of which

Manufacturing Construction

2000

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006) 3,792; remittances (2006) 2,911; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 853. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 352; remittances

Landline

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 23.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.4 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.83. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2001): 2.8/1.0. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 71.0 years; female 74.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases

Agriculture Mining

1999

78.9%; The Netherlands 2.4%; Mexico 1.9%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 498.4, persons per sq km 192.4.

in value RD$'0006

563

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 613)

35,867

1374624

38.3

Secondary (age 14517) } Voc., teacher tr.

24,723 s

658,164 :

26.6Š

Higher

11,111

286,957

258

Health: physicians (2005) 12,9661? (1 per 730 persons); hospital beds (2005) 9,640 (1 per 982 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 29.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,673 (vegetable products 84%, animal products 16%); 139% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 24,500 (army 61.2%, navy 16.3%, air force 22.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$20. Roman Catholicism is the state religion per concordat with Vatican City. "Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Mainland total is 48,512 sq km and offshore islands total is 159 sq km. ‘Significantly excludes data for Haitians. About 10% of the population of the Dominican Republic is a mix of legally and illegally resident Haitians. 52002 census population for national district region (combined population of Santo Domingo province and the national district) is 2,731,294. 6At prices of 1970. "Data for free-zone sector for reexport (significantly ready-made garments but also electronics, tobacco products and jewelry). SUnemployed. ?Reported total; summed total equals RD$7,917,100,000.

1oReported

total; summed

total equals 3,992,212.

Includes

non-

monetary income. !2The mining of gold was suspended in 1999 and had not resumed in 2006. Includes free zones. !^Includes 149 mi (240 km) of track that is privately owned and serves the sugar industry only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !Subscribers. T'Public sector only.

Internet resources for further information: * Banco Central de la Repüblica Dominicana http://www.bancentral.gov.do * Oficina Nacional de Estadística http://www.one.gov.do

564

Britannica World Data

ee

epis MEE RENE

Official name: Repüblika Demokrátika Timor Lorosa'e (Tetum); Repüblica

EE

Indian

Democrática de Timor-Leste

—

Ocean

(Portuguese) (Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste)1. Form of government: republic with one legislative body (National Parliament

3

E

gs

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$847,000,000 (U.S.$761 per capita).

ET Nh

fe

=

ES1

[65].

Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Dili. Official languages: Tetum; Portuguese?. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$); valuation

Aileu Ainaro

Dili Ermera Lautem

sq mi

population 2004 census3

sq km

Aileu

285

737

37,967

Ainaro

310

804

52,480

Pante Macassar Baucau Maliana Suai

314 581 531 464

814 1,506 1,376 1,203

57,616 100,748 83,579 53,063

Dili

142

367

175,730

297 701

768 1,813

103,322 56,293

Liquica

212

549

54,973

688 511

1,782 1,323

36,897 45,081

1,877 14,919

65,449 923,198

Ermera Los Palos

Liquica

labour force

% of labour force

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun.

107.1 2.8 12.5 3.3 31.9 31.8

31.6 0.8 a37 1.0 9.4 9.4

340,000

81.3

Finance, insurance

29.4

8.7

254

Other TOTAL

Ambeno (Ocussi) exclave Baucau (Baukau) Bobonaro Cova Lima

% of total value

Pub. admin., defense

area

2003

in value U.S.$'000,00010

Services

Area and population Capitals

2004

Trade, hotels

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

Districts

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

75

21

0.6

92.7

27.3

= 339.0

i 100.0

78,000

418,000

187

100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourismlt, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 19; official development assistance (2005) 185. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 8.2%, in permanent crops 4.6%, in pasture 10.1%; overall forest area (2005) 53.7%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)'2 U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—257 96.6%

—211 94.2%

—186 92.1%

—139 90.9%

-127 87.0%

—133 89.3%

Demography Population (2007): 1,155,000.

Imports (2004): U.S.$146,100,000 (mineral fuels and oils 25.2%; vehicles and vehicle parts 10.1%; electrical machinery and equipment 6.7%; cereals 5.6%). Major import sources: Indonesia 42.8%; Australia 17.1%; Singapore 11.2%; Vietnam 3.6%; Portugal 3.0%. Exports (2004): U.S.$6,972,00012 (coffee 86.1%; unspecified 13.9%). Major export destinations: Australia 41.7%; Japan 22.8%; Portugal 13.0%; U.S. 4.1%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 200.5, persons per sq km 77.4. Urban-rural (2005): urban 7.896; rural 92.296. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.8696; female 49.1496. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 36.3%; 15-29, 28.9%; 30-44, 18.4%; 45-59,

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2005): total length 3,107 mi, 5,000 km (paved 50%13). Vehicles (1998): passenger cars 3,156; trucks and buses 7,140.

Manatuto Manufahi

Manatuto Same

Viqueque TOTAL

Viqueque

725 5,760^

11.2%; 60-74, 4.4%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,271,000; (2020) 1,749,000. Doubling time: 33 years. Ethnic composition (1999): East Timorese c. 80%; other (nearly all Indonesian, and particularly West Timorese) c. 20%. Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 98965; Protestant c. 1965; Muslim c. 1969. Major urban areas (2004): Dili 151,026; Los Palos (Lospalos) 12,612; Same

Communications Medium

date

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units per 1,000

in '000s

persons

200214 2005 1996

units

number

gos

i

m 6.6

ru 8.0

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2004 2004

ivi 0.615 1.0 abe

Sus 0.715 14

9,966; Pante Macassar 9,754; Maliana 9,721.

Education and health

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 27.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.53. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (1997-98): 0.4/0.1. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 64.0 years; female 68.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): communicable diseases 308; cardiovascular diseases 181; accidents 87; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 59; respiratory diseases 41.

National economy

Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education 54.3%, some primary education 14.4%, complete primary 6.2%, lower secondary 10.4%, upper secondary and higher 14.7%. Literacy (2005): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 49%; males literate 54%; females literate 45%. Education (2003)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-12) Lower secondary (age 13-15) Upper secondary (age 16-18) Higher! 7

1

teachers

students

4,080

183,60016

1,103 E 123

38,180 € 6,349

teacher ratio

45.016 34.6 E 51.6

Budget (2005-06). Revenue: U.S.$485,000,000 (oil and gas revenue 93.1%, of which taxes 74.8%, royalties 15.5%; domestic revenue 6.9% ). Expenditures: U.S.$93,000,000 (current expenditure 71.3%; capital expenditure 16.9%; previous year spending 11.8%). Public debt (external, outstanding): n.a. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

Health: physicians (2002) 47 (1 per 17,355 persons); hospital beds (1999) 560 (1 per 1,277 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 45.9. Food (2005): n.a.

corn (maize) 80,000, rice 65,000, cassava 41,500, sweet potatoes 26,000, cof-

ing personnel were withdrawn in May 2005, and 600 police personnel were reintroduced in August 2006. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2003): 1.396; per capita expenditure U.S.$5.

fee 14,000, coconuts 14,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 4,000, candlenut (2001)

1,063, spices 425; livestock (number of live animals) 346,000 pigs, 171,000 cattle, 110,000 buffalo, 20,000 beehives, 2,200,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a.;

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 1,250 (army 100%); UN peacekeep-

sandalwood exports were formerly more significant; fisheries production 350 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): commercial quantities of marble are exported. Manufacturing (2001): principally the production of textiles, garments, handicrafts, bottled water, and processed coffee.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 300,000,000 (300,000,000); coal, n.a. (n.a.); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 990,000 (negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 6,700,000 (57,000); natural gas, n.a. (n.a.). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.7; average annual income per household, n.a.7; sources of income, n.a.; expenditure,

n.a.

Population economically active (2001): total 232,0008; activity rate of total population 28968 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 57968; female, n.a.; unemployed C. 5096).

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001 103.6

2002 108.5

2003 116.1

2004 119.8

2005 122.0

2006 127.79

1Per U.S. Board on Geographic Names: conventional short-form name is East Timor, conventional long-form name is Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. @Indonesian and English are “working” languages. *Revised final. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. “Some vestiges of traditional beliefs are also practiced in conjunction with Roman Catholicism. ¿Most Protestants and Muslims left East Timor after 1999. 7Minimum annual wage (1999) U.S.$276; average public administration wage (2003) U.S.$1,500. SEstimated figure. "Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. !°Figures do not include value added from petroleum (part of the GNI but not GDP), which in 2004 equaled

U.S.$168,000,000.

“In

1998

there

were

580

beds

available

for tourists.

12Fxcludes revenues associated with the development of petroleum/natural gas fields shared with Australia. 155796 of paved roads were in poor or damaged condition in late 1999; gravel roads were not usable for most vehicles. Locally produced television service commenced in May 2002. !5Circulation of Timor Post. ©Rounded figures. 172002.

Internet resources for further information: * Banking and Payments Authority of Timor-Leste http://www.bancocentral.tl/en

Nations of the World — 565

Ecuador

47.0%, self-employment 25.6%, transfer payments 15.7%, rent 11.7%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 23.8%, housing and energy 19.1%,

Official name: Repüblica del Ecuador (Republic of Ecuador). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Congress [100]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Quito. Official language: Spanish1. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$)2; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

transportation and communications

clothing 8.1%. Public debt (external, outstanding; December 2006): U.S.$10,215,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$36,796,000,000 (U.S.$2,787 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Pacific Ocean

in value U.S.$'000,000

1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

area. ..population.

population.

sq km

2001 census

sq km

Morona-Santiago Napo Orellana

33,930 25 690 ?

115,412 79,139 86,493

Galápagos Sierra Azuay

8,010

18,640

8,125

599,546

Pastaza Sucumbios

29,774 18,327

61,779 128,995

Bolivar Cañar

3,940 3,122

169,370 206,981

Zamora-Chinchipe Costa

23,111

76,601

Carchi Chimborazo

3,605 6,569

152,939 403,632

Amazonica

El Oro

Regions Provinces

area.

2001 census

Insular

5,850

525,763

Cotopaxi

6,072

349,540

Esmeraldas

15,239

385,223

Imbabura

4,559

344,044

Guayas? Los Ríos Manabi

20,503 7,175 18,879

3,309,034 650,178 1,186,025

11,026 12,915 3,335

404,835 2,388,817 441,034

Loja Pichincha+ Tungurahua NON-DELIMITED AREAS

TOTAL

2,289

72,588

272,045

12,156,608

2,281 5,342

6.8 15.9

Other mining Manufacturing

127 3,2467

Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

labour force

% of labour force

324,600

Ta

0.4 9.6

10:700 537,200

03 12.7

2,319

6.9

258,700

6.1

520

1.5

18,800

0.4

5,132 4,792 3,366 1,576

15.3 14.2 10.0 4.7

280,100 1,289,800 251,600 168,200

6.6 30.5 6.0 4.0

2,373 2,551 33,625

7A 7.6 100.0

752,100 333,6008 4,225,400

17.8 7.98 100.0

}

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006) 497; remittances (2006) 2,916; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,447; official development assistance (2005) 2719. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006) 466; remittances (2005) 38. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 4.7%, in permanent crops 4.3%, in pasture 17.2%; overall forest area (2005) 39.2%.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —258 2.7%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 13,341,000.

% of total value

Agriculture Crude petroleum, nat. gas

Public utilities

Area and population Regions Provinces

12.9%, restaurants and hotels 10.4%,

2002 -917 8.3%

2003 -6 0.05%

2004 +198 1.3

2005 +551 2.8%

2006 +1,456 6.1%

Imports (2004): U.S.$7,861,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 24.3%; road

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 127.0, persons per sq km 49.0.

vehicles 10.6%; mineral fuels and lubricants 10.2%; food and live animals

Urban-rural (2005): urban 62.8%; rural 37.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.15%; female 49.85%.

7A%;

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 32.6%; 15-29, 27.4%; 30-44, 19.5%; 45-59, 12.1%; 60-74, 6.1%; 75-84, 1.8%; 85 and over, 0.5%. Doubling time: 41 years.

Population projection: (2010) 13,775,000; (2020) 15,376,000. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo 42.0%; Amerindian 40.8%; white 10.6%;

iron and steel 6.1%). Major import sources

(2004): U.S. 16.8%;

Colombia 14.1%; China 9.0%; Venezuela 7.1%; Brazil 6.5%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$12,658,000,000 (crude petroleum 54.8%; bananas and plantains 9.6%; refined petroleum 4.8%; shrimp 4.6%; cut flowers 3.5%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 53.6%; Peru 8.2%; Colombia 5.6%; Chile 4.4%; Italy 3.3%.

black 5.0%; other 1.6%.

Transport and communications

t. 1595.

Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 965 km; passenger-km (2004) 3,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2004) 2,000. Roads (2004): total length 43,197 km (paved 15%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 413,432; trucks and buses 310,009. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 867,100,000; metric ton-km cargo

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic (practicing) c. 35%; Roman Catholic (non-practicing) c. 50%; other (significantly Evangelical Protestant) Major cities (2003): Guayaquil 2,387,0005; Quito 1,514,0005; Cuenca 303,994; Machala 217,266; Santo Domingo de los Colorados 211,689; Portoviejo 194.916.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.70. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.0/0.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.7 years; female 77.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 94.0; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 51.9; accidents and violence 44.6; diabetes mellitus 21.1; pneumonia and influenza 20.8.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: U.S.$6,895,000,000 (nonpetroleum revenue 75.1%, of which value-added tax 32.3%, income tax 15.5%, customs duties 9.0%; petro-

leum export revenue 24.9%). Expenditures: U.S.$7,011,000,000 (current expenditure 76.2%; capital expenditure 23.8%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): bananas 5,878,000, sugarcane 5,657,000, oil palm fruit 1,930,000, rice 1,375,500, plantains 1,012,700, corn (maize) 750,700, cocoa beans 105,652, cof-

fee 84,146, pyrethrum and dried flowers (2004) 105; livestock (live animals)

4,971,000 cattle, 1,281,000 pigs, 1,053,000 sheep, 104,217,000 chickens; roundwood 6,638,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 82%; fisheries production 486,023

(from aquaculture 16%). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone 5,160,000; gold 5,300 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): refined petroleum 1,794; food products 870; beverages 845; plastics 341; printing and publishing 233; bricks, cement, and ceramics 213. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 11,702,000,000 (13,344,000,000); crude

petroleum (barrels; 2006) 197,000,000 (55,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 6,594,000 (5,777,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 352,000,000

(352,000,000).

Population economically active (2005): total 4,225,400; activity rate of total population 47.9% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.6%; female 41.5%; unemployed [March 2006-February 2007] 10.1%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

137.7

154.9

167.1

171.7

175.9

181.2

Household income and expenditure (2003)6. Average household size 4.2; average annual income per household U.$.$8,161; sources of income: wages

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

5,400,000.

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

3,208

253

Cellular

2006

8,48512

63212

Internet users

Landline

2006

1,754

131

Broadband

Medium

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2005 2005 2006 2005

Education and health Educational attainment (1995). Percentage of population ing: no formal schooling/incomplete primary education mary/incomplete secondary 47.2%; complete secondary Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate females 91.0%. Education (2004)

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

866 90111 1,549 271?

age 25 18.8%; 16.1%; 92.5%;

2.012

and over havcomplete prihigher 17.9%. males 94.0%;

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6-11)

86,012

1,989,665

23.1

Secondary (age 12-17) }

74,685 $

996,535 li

13.3

Higher

115

student/ schools

Vocational

65 6811

115,55413

Health: physicians (2004) 21,625 (1 per 603 persons); hospital beds (2004) 21,200 (1 per 615 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 23.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,770 (vegetable products 83%, animal products 17%); 152% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 46,500 (army 79.6%, navy 11.8%, air force 8.6%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$66. 1Quechua and Shuar are also official languages for the indigenous peoples. 2From 2000. Includes Santa Elena province created in October 2007. ‘Includes Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas province created in October 2007. 52005 population of urban agglomeration. 5Based on a survey of urban households only. "Excludes refined petroleum equaling U.S.$1,592,000,000. SUnemployed. ?Figure represents commitments. !^Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and cif. for commodities and trading partners. Circulation. !2Subscribers. 32000.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos http://www.inec.gov.ec/default.asp * Banco Central del Ecuador http://www.bce.fin.ec

566

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$111,348,000,000 (U.S.$1,501 per capita).

Egypt

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Jumhüriah Misr al- Arabiyah (Arab Republic of Egypt). Form of government: republic with two legislative houses (Advisory Council [2641]; People’s Assembly

2005-069

Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Cairo. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Egyptian pound (LE); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

1 US.$ = LE 5.65; 1 £ = LE 11.37.

Regions Governorates Frontier Al-Bahr al-Ahmar Janüb Sina Matrüh Shamal Sin& Al-Wadi al-Jadid Lower Egypt Al-Buhayrah Ad-Dagqahliyah Dumyat Al-Gharbryah Al-Isma'iliyah (Ismailia) Kafr ash-Shaykh Al-Minüfryah Al-Qalyübryah Ash-Sharqiyah

population

sq km

2006 census?

203,685 33,140 212,112 27,574 376,505

288,233 149,335 322,341 339,752 187,256

10,130 3,471 589 1,942

4,737,129 4,985,187 1,092,316 4,010,298

1,442 3,437 1,532 1,001 4,180

942,832 2,618,111 3,270,404 4,237,003 5,340,058

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

81,766.2

144

168,527.3

524

23,763.0 11,037.8 59,891.810 82,380.6 60,350.6 56,930.1 16,497.5 — 581,144.9

44 1.9 10.310 14.2 10.4 9.8 28 — 100.0

5,401,300 32,000 1,976,900 1,341,000 228,700 1,145,300 2,452,600 547,100 2,025,100 2,957,300 2,252,00011 20,359,300

265 0.2 9.7 6.6 14 5.6 12.0 2.7 9.9 14.5 11411 100.03

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2006): U.S.$28,000,000,000. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.9%, in permanent crops 0.5%, in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) 0.1%.

Area and population area

in value LE '000,000

Agriculture Mining (petroleum) Manufacturing } Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

[454]).

2003

Regions Governorates Upper Egypt Aswan Asyut Bani Suwayf Al-Fayyum Al-Jizah Al-Minya Qina Sawhaj Urban Bur Sa'id (Port Said) Al-Iskandariyah (Alexandria) Al-Qahirah (Cairo) As-Suways (Suez) Al-Uqsur (Luxor) TOTAL

area

population

sq km

2006 census?

679 1,553 1,322 1,827 85,153 2,262 1,851 1,547

1,184,432 3,441,597 2,290,527 2,512,792 6,272,571 4,179,309 3,001,494 3,746,377

72

570,768

2,679 214 17,840 55 997,7393

4,110,015 7,786,640 510,935 451,318 72,579,0304

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 6,851; remittances (2005-06) 5,034; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,785; official development assistance (2005) 98712. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,629; remittances (2005) 57.

Foreign trade!3 Balance of trade (current prices) 2000-01 —9,363 39.8%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001-02 -7,516 34.5%

2002-03 —6,615 28.7%

2003-04 —7,834 27.3%

2004-05 —10,359 27.2%

2005-06 11,986 24.5%

Imports (2005-06): U.S.$30,441,000,000 (petroleum 17.6%; machinery and apparatus 10.9%; food products 9.7%; metal products 7.3%; chemicals and chemical products 6.0%). Major import sources (2004): free zones 11.3%; U.S. 10.3%; Germany 6.6%; China 5.1%; Italy 4.9%; Saudi Arabia 3.8%.

Exports (2005-06): U.S.$18,455,100,000 (petroleum 55.4%, of which crude petroleum 17.4%; finished goods 28.0%; semi-manufactured goods 6.4%; raw cotton 0.8%). Major export destinations (2004): Italy 12.5%; bunkers, ships’ stores 9.8%; U.S. 7.4%; free zones 5.7%; Spain 5.5%; The Netherlands 5.1%.

Demography Population (2007): 73,358,0005. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 190.4, persons per sq km 73.5. Urban-rural (2006): urban 42.695; rural 57.496. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.1196; female 48.8996.

Transport and communications

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 33.0%; 15-29, 28.0%; 30-44, 19.8%; 45-59, 12.3%; 60-74, 5.7%; 75 and over, 1.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 77,308,000; (2020) 89,983,000. Doubling time: 37 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Egyptian Arab 84.1%; Sudanese Arab 5.5%; Arabized Berber 2.0%; Bedouin 2.0%; Rom (Gypsy) 1.6%; other 4.8%. Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim 84.4966; Christian 15.1%, of which Orthodox 13.6%, Protestant 0.8%,Roman Catholic 0.3%; nonreligious 0.5%. Major cities (000; 2006): Cairo 7,787 (11,1287); Alexandria 4,110; Al-Jizah 2,950; Shubra al-Khaymah 8718; Port Said 4708; Suez 4188.

Transport. Railroads (2005): length 9,525 km; passenger-km 54,853,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,234,000,000. Roads (2004): length 92,370 km (paved 81%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 1,847,000; trucks and buses 650,000. Inland water (2006): Suez Canal, number of transits 18,664; metric ton cargo 742,708,000. Air transport (2005)14: passenger-km 10,048,000,000; metric tonkm cargo 287,561,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

17,500

253

2006 2006

18,0016 10,808

23916 143

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,800 3,577175 6,000 20616

40 5115 80 2.916

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 25.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 19.1 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 8.0/0.9. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.83. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 69.2 years; female 73.6 years.

National economy Budget (2003-04). Revenue: LE 116,490,000,000 (income and profits taxes 28.3%, sales taxes 19.4%, customs duties 13.0%,Suez Canal fees 4.4%, petro-

leum revenue 3.5%).Expenditures: LE 159,600,000,000 (current expenditure 76.6%; capital expenditure 23.4%). Population economically active (2005): total 22,310,000; activity rate 31.3% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2001] 46.9%; female 23.3%; unemployed

[2006] 9.3%).

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

_2001 102.3

2002 105.1

2003 109.8

2004 122.2

2005 128.1

2006 137.9

Production (000; metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 16,335, wheat 8,185, corn (maize) 7,698, tomatoes 7,600, rice 6,125, potatoes 2,500, oranges 1,789, grapes 1,300, dates 1,170, eggplants 1,000, seed cotton 820, figs 170; livestock (7000; number of live animals) 5,150 sheep, 4,500 cattle, 3,920 buffalo, 120 camels; roundwood 17,060,000 cu m, of

which fuelwood 8096; fisheries production 889,302 (from aquaculture 6196). Mining and quarrying (2005): phosphate rock 2,730; iron ore 2,600; salt 1,400; gypsum 1,000; kaolin 260. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$7000,000; 2002): chemicals (all forms) 2,823; food products 1,016; textiles and wearing apparel 618; bricks, cement, ceramics 466; paper products 160. Energy production (consumption): electricity ((000,000 kW-hr; 2004-05) 101,300 ([2004] 100,600); coal (000 metric tons; 2004) 33 (1,850); crude petroleum (’000 barrels; 2004) 253,000 (240,000); petroleum products ("000 metric tons; 2004) 32,600 (28,000); natural gas (000,000 cu m; 2003) 33,000 (29,400). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2006) 4.2; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure: n.a.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education and health Educational attainment (2006). Percentage of population ages 10 and over having no formal schooling 42.9%; incomplete primary 19.4%; complete primary 24.9%; secondary 3.2%; higher 9.6%. Literacy (2001): total population age 15 and over literate 56.1%; males 67.2%; females 44.8%. Education (2002-03) Primary (age 6-15)17, 18 Secondary (age 16-18)17 Vocational Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

24,198 1,942 1,959 293

533,831 91,458 151,792 s

11,433,939 1,249,706 2,214,152 1,239,441

21.4 13.7 14.6 sd

Health (2006): physicians 161,000 (1 per 451 persons); hospital beds (2007) 185,000 (1 per 393 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 20.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,274 (vegetable products 92%, animal products 895); 17296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 468,500 (army 72.696, navy 3.996, air force [including air defense] 23.596). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$37. 1Has limited legislative authority. ?Preliminary. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. “Excludes an estimated 3,901,396 Egyptians living abroad. *De facto population. ‘Nearly all Sunni; ShiT make up less than 1% of population. 72005 urban agglomeration. 81996. ?At factor cost. !°Transportation includes earnings from traffic on the Suez Canal. Including 2,240,700 unemployed not previously employed. l7Figure represents commitments. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 4EgyptAir only. 1Circulation of daily newspapers. !6Subscribers. 17Data exclude 1,090,022 primary and 278,134 secondary students in the Al-Azhar education system. !8Includes preparatory; excludes an estimated 55,602 (primarily female) students in public one-classroom schools.

Internet resources for further information: * Egypt State Information Service http://www.sis.gov.eg * Central Bank of Egypt http://www.cbe.org.eg

Nations of the World

EI Salvador

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Official name: Repüblica de El Salvador (Republic of El Salvador). Form of government: republic with one legislative house (Legislative Assembly [84]). Chief of state and government: President. Capital: San Salvador. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none}. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$)2; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Consumer price index Monthly earnings indexe

.Ssqmi.

Ahuachapán Cabafias Chalatenango

Ahuachapán Sensuntepeque Chalatenango

479 426 779

Cuscatlan

Cojutepeque

La Unión Morazán San Miguel San Salvador San Vicente Santa Ana Sonsonate Usulutan

population

_sqkm_

2006 estimate

1,240 1,104 2,017

361,953 157,709 203,964

292

756

214,459

638 473

1,653 1,224

804,134 323,348

La Unión

801

2,074

305,301

San Francisco San Miguel San Salvador San Vicente Santa Ana Sonsonate Usulutan

559 802 342 457 781 473 822

1,447 2,077 886 1,184 2,023 1,226 2,130

180,065 546,022 2,233,696 172,923 618,653 518,522 349,908

8,124

21,041

6,990,657

Nueva San Salvador Zacatecoluca

TOTAL

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 844.0, persons per sq km 325.9. Urban-rural (2005): urban 59.8%; rural 40.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.17%; female 50.83%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 34.0%; 15-29, 28.8%; 30-44, 19.1%; 45-59, 10.5%; 60-74, 5.6%; 75-84, 1.6%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 7,142,000; (2020) 8,077,000. Doubling time: 59 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo 88.3%; Amerindian 9.1%, of which Pipil 4.0%; white 1.6%; other/unknown 1.0%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 71%; independent Christian c. 11%; Protestant c. 10%; Jehovah’s Witness c. 2%; other c. 6%.

Major cities (2005): San Salvador 507,700 (urban agglomeration 2,232,300);

178,600.

294,6004; Mejicanos

188,7004; San Miguel 183,200; Santa Ana

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 16.3 (world avg. 20.3); (1998) within marriage 27.2%; outside of marriage 72.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 4.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 11.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.12. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 3.6/0.7. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 67.9 years; female 75.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001): diseases of the circulatory system 88.3; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 49.4; accidents 47.4; diseases of the respiratory system 45.0; homicide and suicide 43.1.

National economy Budget. Revenue (2005): U.S.$2,307,500,000 (VAT 47.8%, individual income taxes 29.0%, import duties 7.8%, nontax revenue 5.5%, other 9.9%). Expenditures: U.S.$2,484,600,000 (education 18.6%, defense and public secu-

rity 11.4%, public health and welfare 9.8%, public works 6.3%, other 53.9%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$4,760,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 4,405,000, corn (maize) 727,607, sorghum 141,400, coffee 88,636, plantains 78,000, dry beans 65,000, yautia 52,000, lemons and limes 41,123, tobacco 1,100; livestock (number of live animals) 1,256,517 cattle, 355,991 pigs, 13,437 chickens; roundwood 4,855,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 86%;

fisheries production 43,317 (from aquaculture 5%). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone 1,161,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): food products 875; textiles and wearing apparel 262; chemicals and chemical products 262; refined petroleum 234; beverages 217; printing and publishing 167. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 5,293,000,000 (5,204,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (7,100,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 989,000 (1,851,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.2; average income per household (2004) U.S.$5,016; expenditure (June 2005)5: food, beverages, and tobacco 36.4%, housing and energy 16.8%, transportation and communications 10.2%, household furnishings 8.4%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 31.9%, in permanent crops 12.1%, in pasture 38.3%; overall forest area (2005) 14.4%. Population economically active (2004): total 2,710,237; activity rate of total population 40.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 63.2%; female 39.6%; unemployed [2005] 7.2%).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

103.8 97.8

105.7 102.0

107.9 102.4

112.7 98.9

118.0

122.8 des

2005

in value U.S.$'000,000

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

1,390 80 3,550 670 270 1,540 3,020 2,580 1,060 1,170 5007 15,8249

8.8 0.5 22.4 4.2 LT 9.7 19.1 16.3 6.7 7.4 3.27 100.0

518,016 2,514 418,875 146,811 7,315 120,868 764,873 122,790 100,265 388,749 201,5568 2,792,632

18.5 0.1 15.0 53 0.3 4.3 27.4 4.4 3.6 13.9 7.28 100.0

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Finance, real estate Public admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 543; remittances (2006) 3,316; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 357; official development assistance (2005) 23410. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 347; remittances (2005) 24.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$ 000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—2,163 27.4%

—2,190 26.8%

—2,626 29.6%

—2,974 31.1%

—3,448 33.7%

—4,114 36.9%

Imports (2004): U.S.$6,268,754,000 (imports for reexport 22.0%; machinery and apparatus 12.3%; food 11.3%; petroleum [all forms] 10.2%; chemicals and chemical products 9.6%). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 40.5%;

Demography Population (2007): 6,857,0003.

Soyapango

2002

2004

area

La Libertad La Paz

2001

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population

Capitals

2000

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$15,553,000,000 (U.S.$2,300 per capita).

1 U.S.$ - £0.50.

Departments

567

Guatemala 8.0%; Costa Rica 2.9%; Honduras 2.3%; Japan 2.0%.

Exports (2004): U.S.$3,295,258,000 (reexports [mostly clothing] 55.2%; yarn, fabrics, made-up articles 6.8%; chemicals and chemical products 4.8%; cof-

fee 3.8%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 57.1%; Guatemala 13.0%; Honduras 8.0%; Nicaragua 4.8%; Costa Rica 3.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2007)12: length 562 km. Roads (2002): total length 11,458 km (paved 23%). Vehicles (2000): passenger cars 148,000; trucks and buses 250,800. Air transport (2005)13: passenger-km 8,117,465,000; metric ton-km cargo 37,883,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

1,560

233

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

3,85215 1,037

55115 148

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

350

51

2004

25014

3714

2005 2005

637 4215

93 6.215

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population over age 25 having: no formal schooling 22.0%; primary education: grades 1-3 19.1%, grades 4-6 19.9%; secondary: grades 7-9 13.9%, grades 10-12 14.6%; higher 10.5%. Literacy (2004): total population age 10 and over literate 84.5%; males literate 87.0%; females literate 82.3%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-18) Higher

5,09016 FN

teachers

students

26,20916 — 987,676 "m 7,831

462,501 113,366

teacher ratio

46.316 uum 15.5

Health (2003): physicians 4,100 (1 per 1,620 persons); hospital beds 4,625 (1 per 1,436 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 10.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,680 (vegetable products 89%, animal products 11%); 149% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 15,500 (army 89.4%, navy 4.5%, air force 6.1%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$16. 1Roman Catholicism, although not official, enjoys special recognition in the constitution. 2The U.S. dollar was legal tender in El Salvador from Jan. 1, 2001 (along with the colón) at a pegged rate of 1 U.S.$ = @8.75; the colén was hardly used by mid-2004. Estimate of World Population Prospects (2006 revision). De facto May 2007 census results (excluding El Salvadorans abroad) equal 6.7 million. ‘Within San Salvador urban agglomeration. >Weights of consumer price index components. ‘Manufacturing only. "Import duties and VAT less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. *Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !°Figure represents commitments. !!Imports cif, exports f.0.b. (including assembled components for reexport). 2Rail service was suspended in 2005. 1?TACA International Airlines only. “Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 162000.

Internet resources for further information: * Banco Central de Reserva de El Salvador http://www.bcr.gob.sv * Dirección General de Estadística y Censos http://www.digestyc.gob.sv

568

Britannica World Data

Equatorial Guinea

4,000, cacao beans 3,000; livestock (number of live animals) 37,600 sheep, 9,000 goats, 6,100 pigs, 5,050 cattle; roundwood 866,000 cu m, of which fuel-

Official name: República de Guinea Ecuatorial (Spanish); République du Guinée Equatoriale (French) (Republic of Equatorial Guinea). Form of government: republic with one legislative house (House of Representatives of the People [100]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Malabo. Official languages: Spanish; French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ - CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.431,

wood 52%; fisheries production (2004) 3,500 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: gold (2005) 200 kg. Manufacturing (2004): methanol 1,027,300; processed timber 31,200 cu m. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 83,000,000 (51,000,000); coal, none (none); crude

petroleum (barrels; 2005) 153,000,000 ([2004] negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (47,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 2,300,000,000

([2004] 480,000,000).

Population economically active (1997): total 177,000; activity rate of total population 40.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 74.7%; female 35.4%; unemployed [1998] 30%). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 95.5

ea Insular Annobén Bioko Norte

Bioko Sur Continental Centro-Sur

Kie-Ntem Litoral? Wele-Nzas

Population. sq km

2001 census

2,034 17

265,470 5,008

776

231,428

479 10,045?

1,241 26,017

29,034 749,529

Evinayong

3,834

9,931

125,856

Ebebiyin Bata

1,522 2,573

3,943 6,665

167,279 298,414

Capitals

sq mi 785? T

Palé Malabo

300

Luba

Mongomo

2,115

TOTAL

5,478

10,831?

2002 117.0

2003 125.6

2004 130.9

2005 139.0

tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)

157,980

28,051

2001 108.8

Household income and expenditure. Average household size, n.a.; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2000)7: food and beverages 60.4%, clothing 14.7%, household furnishings 8.6%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 4.6%, in permanent crops 3.6%, in pasture 3.7%; overall forest area (2005) 58.2%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 5; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,245; official development assistance (2005) 39. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000):

Area and population Regions Provinces

2000 100.0

1,014,999^

CFAF '000,000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 507,0005.

2002

2003

31,122.0 61.4%

4909.8 38.8%

2004

2005

+1,600.1 49.2%

+2,651.7 54.4%

Imports (2005): CFAF 1,112,500,000,000 (for petroleum sector 55.8%; for public sector 33.0%; petroleum products 4.5%). Major import sources (2005):

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 46.8, persons per sq km 18.1. Urban-rural (2006): urban 50.996; rural 49.196. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.82%; female 51.18%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 42.4%; 15-29, 26.2%; 30-44, 15.5%; 45-59, 9.5%; 60-74, 5.0%; 75-84, 1.2%; 85 and over 0.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 545,0005; (2020) 693,0005. Doubling time: 30 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Fang 56.6%; migrant labourers from Nigeria 12.5%, of which Yoruba 8.0%, Igbo 4.0%; Bubi 10.0%; Seke 2.9%; Spaniard 2.8%; other 15.2%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 79.9%;Sunni Muslim 4.1%; independent Christian 3.7%; Protestant 3.2%; traditional beliefs 2.1%; nonreli-

gious/atheist 4.9%; other 2.1%. Major cities (2003): Malabo 92,900; Bata 66,800; Mbini 11,600; Ebebiyin 9,100;

Luba 6,800.

U.S. 26.8%; Côte d'Ivoire 21.4%; Spain 13.6%; France 8.8%; U.K. 7.8%; Italy 4.4%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 3,764,200,000,000 (crude petroleum 92.1%; methanol 6.9%; timber 0.7%). Major export destinations (2003): U.S. 33.2%; Spain 25.4% China 14.2%; Canada 12.7%; Italy 6.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 1,790 mi, 2,880 km (paved 13%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 8,380; trucks and buses 6,618. Air transport (2006): n.a.8. Communications Medium

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

55

116

Televisions

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 39.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 15.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 23.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 5.50. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 49.2 years; female 51.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 812.5, of which HIV/AIDS

274.3, malaria 178.4, diarrheal diseases

94.9, respiratory infections 89.5; diseases of the circulatory system 197.5; accidents, poisoning, and violence 124.3. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.2% (world avg. 1.0%).

Telephones Cellular Landline

Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 1,528,825,000,000 (oil revenue 94.3%, of which profit sharing 32.1%, royalties 30.1%; non-oil revenue 5.6%, of which tax revenue 3.8%, nontax revenue 1.8%; grants 0.1%). Expenditures: CFAF 697,948,000,000 (capital expenditure 63.9%; current expenditure 22.8%; net

lending 13.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$4,760,000,000. Gross domestic income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$3,023,000,0004

(U.S.$2,3004 per capita).

2005 2005

9710 10

19310 20

units Medium PCs

Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

7.0

2005 2006 2006

0? 8.0 —

3.3

0? 16 —

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2006): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 87.0%; males literate 93.4%; females literate 80.5%. Education (2001-02)

Primary (age 6-11)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

895

2.190

78,390

358

Secondary (age 12-17)

59

1,228

19,748

16.1

Voc., teacher tr.

"ss

1,425

es

Higher

National economy

units number

1,00311

Health: physicians (2004) 101 (1 per 5,020 persons); hospital beds (1998) 907 (1 per 472 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 96.5.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 1,320 (army 83.3%, navy 9.1%, air force 7.6%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$14.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

2003

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF '000,000

value

force

force

141,000

69.1

Agriculture, fishing Forestry Crude petroleum Manufacturing Construction

47,760 23,770 2,055,409 110,766 26,567

2.0 1.0 86.0 4.6 1.1

Public utilities Transportation and

10,255

0.4

4,144 21,112 5,896 34,128 12,463

0.2 0.9 0.3 1.4 0.

communications Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

Other TOTAL

37,2579 2,389,528?

1.68 100.0

63,000

309

204,000

100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): roots and tubers 105,000 (of which cassava 45,000, sweet potatoes 36,000), oil palm fruit 35,000, plantains 31,000, bananas 20,000, coconuts 6,000, coffee

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Formerly pegged to the French franc and since Jan. 1, 2002, to the euro at the rate of CFAF 655.96 = €1. *Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. *Includes three islets in Corisco Bay. ‘World Development Indicators 2007. 5Estimate of the UN World Population Prospects (2006 revision). Import duties. 7Weights of consumer price index components. 3In March 2006 the EU banned most airlines based in Equatorial Guinea from flying into the EU. °Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 11999-2000.

Internet resources for further information: * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm * Ministerio de Planificación, Desarrollo Económico, e Inversiones Püblicas http://www.dgecnstat-ge.org

Nations of the World

leum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (239,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure (1996-97). Average household size (2004) 5.0; average annual disposable income per household: Nfa 10,967 (U.S.

Eritrea diterransan St

Official name: State of Eritrea. Form of government: transitional regime! with one interim legislative body ("Transitional National Assembly [150]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Asmara. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: nakfa (Nfa); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Nfa 15.37; 1 £= Nfa 30.90.

$1,707); sources of income®: wages and salaries 34.0%, transfers 29.3%, rent

19.8%, self-employment 16.9%; expenditure®: food 36.2%, housing 30.2%, clothing and footwear 9.3%, energy 6.8%, household furnishings 4.6%, transportation and communications 4.1%. Population economically active (2000)7: 1,451,000; activity rate of total population 40.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 75.4%; female 41.5%; unemployed, n.a.). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index 83.4

Area and population Regions

area?

Capitals

Anseba

sq mi

Keren

Debub Debub-Keih-Bahri (Southern Red Sea)

Mendefera

Gash-Barka Maekel

Barentu Asmara (Asmera)

Assab (Aseb)

population 2002 estimate?

sq km

8,960

23,200

580,700

3,090

8,000

1,018,000

10,660

27,600

274,800

12,820 500

33,200 1,300

747,200 727,800

Massawa

10,730

27,800

569,000

TOTAL

46,760

121,100

3,917,500

Population projection*: (2010) 5,278,000; (2020) 6,590,000. Doubling time: 28 years. Ethnolinguistic composition (2004): Tigrinya (Tigray) 50.0%; Tigré 31.4%; Afar 5.0%; Saho 5.0%; Beja 2.5%; Bilen 2.1%; other 4.0%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Muslim (virtually all Sunni) c. 50%; Christian c. 48%, of which Eritrean Orthodox c. 40%, Roman Catholic c. 5%, Protestant c. 296; traditional beliefs c. 296. Major cities (2003): Asmara 435,000; Keren 57,000; Assab 28,000; Mendefera 25,000; Massawa 25,000; Afabet 25,000; Teseney 25,000.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 34.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 24.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.08. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 57.4 years; female 60.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic 168.0, diarrheal diseases 64.8, malaria

61.4; diseases of the circulatory system 104.9; accidents, poisoning, and violence 74.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 42.8.

National economy Budget (2002). Revenue: Nfa 3,409,800,000 (tax revenue 45.196, of which import duties 18.1%, sales tax 10.8%, corporate tax 9.9%; grants 32.8%; non-

0.9%).

Expenditures:

Nfa

6,138,200,000 (defense 34.3%, health 9.6%, humanitarian assistance 7.9%, education 7.6%, transportation, construction, and communications 6.5%,

debt service 5.7%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$723,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,360,000,000 (U.S.$290 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product 2003

in value

.US$00 Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing

94,299 70,794

Mining Public utilities

% of total

value

13.7 10.2

7,80

in

Construction Transp. and commun.

69,042 80,367

10.0 11.6

Trade Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

125,480

18.2

183,345

26.5

59,906 691,124

8.7 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sorghum 114,300, roots and tubers 102,500, pulses 35,200, sesame seeds 18,500, potatoes 17,500, millet 17,400, barley 9,200, chickpeas 3,500; livestock (number of live animals) 2,100,000 sheep, 1,950,000 cattle, 1,700,000 goats, 75,000 camels; roundwood 2,449,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 99.996;

fisheries production 4,027 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): granite 350,280, basalt 184,027, coral 91,348. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$7000,000; 2004): beverages 31; tobacco products 8; furniture

7; bricks, cement, and ceramics 6; food products 4. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 283,000,000 (283,000,000); crude petro-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2005

100.0

114.6

134.08

164.88

194.88

224.08

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

—499 89.9%

—481 90.2%

—309 89.2%

—404 91.4%

—486 82.4%

—426 97.0%

Exports (2003): U.S.$6,600,000 (food and live animals 36.4%, of which fresh fish 22.7%; leather 10.6%; corals and shells 9.1%). Major export destinations (2005): Italy 15.1%; France 11.8%; U.S. 9.5%; Germany 8.6%; Taiwan 7.4%; India 7.0%; Ireland 6.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 190 mi, 306 km. Roads (2004): tota length 2,485 mi, 4,000 km (paved 20%). Vehicles (1996): automobiles 5,940; trucks and buses, n.a. Air transport (2001)10: passenger arrivals 39,266, passenger departures 46,448; freight loaded 202 metric tons, freight unloaded 1,548 metric tons.

Communications

Vital statistics

revenue

2004

31.4%; U.S. 11.9%; Belarus 5.9%; France 5.1%; Germany 4.6%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 44.0%; 15-29, 27.9%; 30-44, 14.3%; 45-59, 8.2%; 60-74, 4.5%; 75 and over, 1.1%.

extraordinary

2003

Imports (2003): U.S.$432,800,000 (food and live animals 40.596, of which cereals [all forms] 25.596; machinery and apparatus 14.896; road vehicles 7.396; chemicals and chemical products 6.196). Major import sources (2005): Italy

Density (2007)5: persons per sq mi 125.5, persons per sq km 48.6. Urban-rural (2006): urban 21.3%; rural 78.7%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.84%; female 50.16%.

21.2%;

2002

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 4,907,0004.

tax revenue

2001

Foreign trade?

U.S.$000,000 % of total

diseases 459.1, of which HIV/AIDS

2000

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 66; remittances (2003) 150; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 11; official development assistance (2005) 355. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances (2000) 1. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 5.6%, in permanent crops 0.03%, in pasture 69.0%; overall forest area (2005) 15.4%.

Semien-Keih-Bahri (Northern Red Sea)

569

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

250

58

2006 2006

6212 38

1412 8.2

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

35 4911 100 mice

7.5 1011 22 E

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal education 66.4%, incomplete primary education 16.6%, complete primary 1.3%, incomplete secondary 5.8%, complete secondary 5.7%, higher 3.0%, unknown 1.2%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 61.4%; males 72.3%; females 50.7%. Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-11) Secondary (age 12-17)

69514 19614

teachers

students

teacher ratio

7,642 4,058

377,512 215,080

49.4 53.0

Voc., teacher tr.15

1214

168

1,864

11.1

Higherté

se

429

4,612

10.8

Health: physicians (2004) 215 (1 per 20,791 persons); hospital beds (2000) 3,126 (1 per 1,187 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 46.3. Food (2003): daily per capita caloric intake 1,519 (vegetable 94%, animal products 6%); 88% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 201,750 (army 99.1%, navy 0.7%, air force 0.2%). UN peacekeeping force along Eritrean-Ethiopian border (July 2007) 1,470 troops. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2003): 24.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$49.

1New constitution ratified in May 1997 was not implemented in May 2007. Approximate figures. The published total area is 46,774 sq mi (121,144 sq km); water area is 7,776 sq mi (20,140 sq km). 3Unofficial figures. “Estimate of the U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (April 2005 release). ‘Based on land area only. Data taken from a 1996-97 survey of the 12 largest urban centres in the country. 7Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 8Estimated inflation rate. ?Imports cif; exports f.o.b. 10Asmara airport only. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. Based on household survey of 14,201 persons. 142001-02. 15Excludes teacher training programs, which had 47 teachers and 922 students in 2001-02. 162003-04.

Internet resources for further information: * United Nations Development Programme: Eritrea http://www.er.undp.org * Eritrea Demographic and Health Survey 2002 http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs

570

Britannica World Data

Estonia

(U.S.$3,272); sources of income: wages and salaries 66.1%, transfers 25.6%, self-employment 3.3%; expenditure: food and beverages 28.3%, transportation and communications 16.8%, housing 15.0%, recreation and culture 7.6%. Public debt (external, outstanding; 20052): U.S.$435,000,000.

Official name: Besti Vabariik (Republic of Estonia). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with a single legislative body (Riigikogu! [101]. Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Tallinn. Official language: Estonian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: kroon (KR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = KR 11.52;

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$15,183,000,000 (U.S.$11,331 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Harju Hiiu Ida-Viru Járva Jõgeva Lääne Lääne-Viru

Párnu Põlva Rapla Saare

Tartu Valga Viljandi Vóru TOTAL

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Manufacturing

Public utilities

area

Construction Trade, restaurants Transp. and commun. Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

population

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

20062 estimate

Tallinn Kárdla Jõhvi Paide

1,672 395 1,299 1,013

4,332 1,023 3,364 2,623

521,313 10,222 172,775 38,041

Jõgeva Haapsalu Rakvere

1,005 920 1,338

2,604 2,383 3,465

37,305 27,853 66,186

Pámu Põlva Rapla

1,856 836 1,151

4,806 2,165 2,980

89,017 31,547 36,869

Kuressaare

1,128

2,922

Tartu Valga Viljandi Vóru

% of total

Agriculture, fishing, forestry

Area and population Counties

in value KR '000,000

Mining

1£= KR 23.15.

1,156 789 1,321 890 16,7693, 4

Services Other TOTAL

5,683

28

32,200

1,711

0.8

5,900

0.9

30,044

147

139,500

21.1

6,037

3.0

12,500

1.9

14,305 30,040 21,654 41,720 9,174

7.0 14.7 10.6 20.4 45

48,700 102,700 54,600 53,300 37,200

7.4 15.6 8.3 8.1 5.6

18,861 25,3276 204,556

9.2 12.46 100.08

121,000 52,2007 659,6008

18.3 7.97 100.0

Foreign trade?

148,969 34,661 56,370 38,480 1,344,684

Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 -17,220 13.0%

KR '000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 1,338,000. Density (2006)5: persons per sq mi 81.8, persons per sq km 31.6. Urban-rural (20062): urban 69.3%; rural 30.7%. Sex distribution (20062): male 46.06%; female 53.94%. Age breakdown (20062): under 15, 15.196; 15-29, 22.796; 30-44, 20.596; 45-59, 20.296; 60-74, 14.7%; 75-84, 5.7%; 85 and over, 1.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,327,000; (2020) 1,284,000. Ethnic composition (20062): Estonian 68.6%; Russian 25.7%; Ukrainian 2.1%; Belarusian 1.2%; Finnish 0.8%; other 1.6%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 63.5%, of which unaffiliated Christian 25.6%, Protestant (mostly Lutheran) 17.2%, Orthodox 16.5%, independent Christian 3.3%; nonreligious 25.1%; atheist 10.9%; other 0.5%. Major cities (20072): Tallinn 396,852; Tartu 101,965; Narva 66,712; Kohtla-Jarve

45,399; Párnu 44,074.

2002 -22,481 16.5%

2003 -26800 17.6%

2004 -31,150 17.3%

2005 -80770 13.7%

2006 —45,778 16.1%

Imports (2006): KR 165,298,500,000 (mineral fuels 16.1%, electrical machinery and equipment 15.9%, vehicles and transport equipment 12.1%, chemicals and chemical products 6.5%, textiles and apparel 5.1%). Major import sources: Finland 18.2%; Russia Lithuania 6.596; Latvia 5.796.

13.1%;

Germany

12.4%;

Sweden

9.0%;

Exports (2006): KR 119,519,700,000 (electrical machinery and equipment 19.4%, mineral fuels 15.9%, wood and paper products 11.6%, vehicles and transport equipment 6.7%, textiles and apparel 5.2%). Major export destinations: Finland 18.2%; Sweden 12.3%; Latvia 8.7%; Russia 7.9%; Germany 5.0%; Lithuania 4.8%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 958 km; passenger-km

(2005)

246,951,000; metric ton-km cargo (2005) 10,629,398,000. Roads (2004): total

length 56,856 km (paved 24%). Vehicles (20062): passenger cars 493,800; trucks and buses 91,400. Air transport (2006)10: passenger-km 1,132,997,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,796,200.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.0 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 41.596; outside of marriage 58.596. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 22.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.50. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.2/2.8. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 67.3 years; female 78.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 685.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 258.5; accidents, poisoning, and violence 123.2; diseases of the digestive system 51.3.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: KR 54,836,300,000 (tax revenue 82.3%, of which

Communications Medium

date

Televisions

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2003

686

507

Telephones Cellular Landline

2006 2006

1,65912 542

1,25212 409

17.5%;

undergraduate

12.3%;

KR _ 52,429,100,000

Education (2003-04)

90.9%,

of which

social benefits

29.6%; capital expenditure 7.8%; other 1.3%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): barley 366,700, wheat 263,400, potatoes 209,800, oats 84,200, rapeseed 83,100, strawberries 2,320; livestock (number of live animals) 340,100 pigs, 249,800 cattle; roundwood 6,800,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 19%; fisheries produc-

tion 100,136 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): oil shale 11,500,000; peat 800,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$’000,000; 2004): food products 163; fabricated metal products 150; wood products

(excluding furniture) 138; furniture 106; textiles 105; printing and publishing 102; cement, bricks, and ceramics 99. Energy production (consumption):

electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 10,184,000,000 (7,494,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) none (58,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 13,993,000 (15,503,000);

crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (862,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) none (997,000,000). Population economically active (2005): total 659,600; activity rate of total population 48.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 69.6%; female 50.1%; unemployed [2006] 5.9%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

105.8 112.3

109.5 1252

111.0 137.0

114.4 148.5

119.0

124.3 ds

Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size (2004) 2.5; average annual disposable income per household member KR 41,176 © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Medium PCs Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

650

483

2004

25711

19211

2006 2006

760 22812

574 17012

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling/incomplete primary education 6.7%; complete primary/lower secondary 31.6%; complete secondary 29.2%; higher vocational

Literacy (2003): virtually 100%.

(current expenditure

units

Dailies

social security contributions 28.3%, VAT 20.6%, personal income taxes 17.4%, excise taxes 9.6%; nontax revenue 11.8%; grants 5.9%).Expenditures:

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

49

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 948; remittances (2006) 402; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 1,129. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 448; remittances (2006) 75; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 272. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 12.9%, in permanent crops 0.4%, in pasture 6.3%; overall forest area (2005) 53.9%.

35,076

2,993 2,044 3,422 2,305 43,4313, 4

2005

Vocational

Higher

degree

0.4%;

unknown

2.3%.

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-17)

advanced

teachers

students

7,70213 10,36113

148,800 42,100

78

1,89813

29,915

36

6,57414

67,800

303 238

teacher ratio

Health: physicians (20042) 4,277 (1 per 316 persons); hospital beds (2004) 7,850 (1 per 172 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 5.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,744 (vegetable products 72%, animal products 2896); 14096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 4,934 (army 89.496, navy 6.795, air force 3.9%). Military expenditure as a percentage of GDP (2005): 1.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$152. 1Official legislation bans translation of parliament’s name. ?January 1. ?Total includes 1,596 sq mi (4,133 sq km) of Baltic Sea Islands and the areas of small inland lakes. “The total area of Estonia including the Estonian portion of Lake Peipus (590 sq mi [1,529 sq km]), Lake Võrtsjärv, and Muuga harbour is 17,462 sq mi (45,227 sq km). “Based on land area of 16,367 sq mi (42,390 sq km). ‘Net taxes. 7Unemployed. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 7Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. !°Estonian Air. Circulation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers. 132001-02. 142002-03.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistical Office of Estonia http://www.stat.ee * Bank of Estonia http://www.bankofestonia.info

Nations of the World — 571

Ethiopia

kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): food products 157; beverages 118; bricks, cement, and ceramics 69; textiles 35; tobacco products

29. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 2,547,000,000 (2,547,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (5,600,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 3,000 (1,624,000); natural gas, none (none). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 11.196, in permanent crops 0.796, in pasture 20.096; overall forest area (2005) 11.996. Population economically active (2005): total 32,158,392; activity rate of total population 50.9% (participation rates: ages 10 and over, 78.4%; female [1999] 45.5%; unemployed 5.0% ).

Official name: Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Form of government: federal republic with two legislative houses (House of the Federation [112]; House of People's Representatives [547]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Addis Ababa. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: birr (Br); valuation

Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Br 9.08; 1 £= Br 18.25. Area and population

area

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

2006 estimate?

Afar Amara (Amhara) Binshangul

Aysaita Bahir Dar

37,339 60,603

96,708 156,960

1,389,000 19,120,000

Asosa

19,401

50,248

625,000

9,795 144 136,538

25,369 374 353,632

247,000 196,000 26,553,000

Gumuz

Gambela Harer Zuriya Oromiya

Gambela Harer (Harar) Addis Ababa

2002 93.3

2003 109.8

2004 113.4

2005 126.6

Foreign trade

Southem Nations,

Balance of trade (current prices)

Nationalities and Peoples'

Awasa

43,524

112,727

14,902,000

Sumale (Somali) Tigray

Jijiga Mekele

107,820 19,415

279,252 50,286

4,329,000 4,335,000

211 396 435,186

546 1,025 1,127,127

2,973,000 398,000 75,067,000

Cities Addis Ababa Dire Dawa TOTAL

2001 91.8

Household income and expenditure (1999-2000). Average household size (2004) 5.3; sources of income!9: self-employment 70.9% (of which agriculture-based 57.6%), wages and salaries 10.9%, salvaging 6.6%, rent 3.9%, other 7.7%; expenditure! food and beverages 52.8%, housing and energy 14.4%, household operations 13.9%, clothing and footwear 7.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 168; remittances (2006) 172; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 364; official development assistance (2005) 1,937. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 77; remittances (2006) 14.

population

Regional states

99.3

2000 100.0

a ve

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Imports

2001-02

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

—1,243 57.9%

—1,374 58.7%

—1,987 62.3%

—2,815 63.2%

(2003-04):

U.S.$2,587,400,000

([2002] machinery

and apparatus

20.296, chemicals and chemical products 12.896, road vehicles 12.096, refined

petroleum 11.796, iron and steel 6.4%). Major import sources (2004—05): Saudi Arabia 17.0%; China 11.2%; U.S. 10.5%; India 6.1%; Italy 4.2%.

Demography Population (2007): 76,512,0003. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 175.8, persons per sq km 67.9. Urban-rural (2006): urban 16.2%; rural 83.8%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.88%; female 50.12%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 43.7%; 15-29, 28.1%; 30-44, 15.3%; 45-59, 8.5%; 60-74, 3.7%; 75 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 81,754,0005; (2020) 99,279,0005. Ethnolinguistic composition (2000)4: Oromo 35.8%; Amharic 31.0%; Tigrinya 6.1%; Gurage 4.9%; Sidamo 3.8%; Welaita 2.1%; Somali 1.4%; other 14.9%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim

33.7%;

Ethiopian

Orthodox

Protestant 16.3%; traditional beliefs 10.4%; other 6.2%. Major cities (2006): Addis Ababa 2,973,000; Dire Dawa 228,623; Gonder 194,773; Dese 169,104.

33.4%;

281,750; Nazret

Exports (2003-04): U.S.$600,700,000 (coffee 37.2%, khat 14.7%, sesame seeds 13.8%, nonmonetary gold 8.1%, leather 7.5%). Major export destinations (2004-05): Germany 15.1%; Djibouti 13.4%; Japan 7.8%; Saudi Arabia 5.9%; USS. 5.5%; Italy 5.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003): length 781 km!!; (1998-99) passenger-km 151,000,00012; (1998-99) metric ton-km cargo 90,000,000!2. Roads (2004): total length 36,469 km (paved 19%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 71,311; trucks and buses 65,557. Air transport (2005)13: passenger-km 5,418,376; metric ton-km cargo 132,601,000.

Communications Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 38.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.9 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.22. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 47.9 years; female 50.2 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 0.9-3.5% (world avg.

1.0%).

National economy Budget (2004-05). Revenue: Br 20,032,000,000 (tax revenue 61.2%, of which import duties 28.7%, income and profits tax 17.8%, sales tax 9.3%; grants 22.8%; nontax revenue 16.0%). Expenditures: Br 24,551,000,000 (current expenditure 53.1%, of which defense 11.9%, education 11.8%; capital expenditure 46.9%, of which economic development 31.6%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$5,897,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$13,278,000,000 (U.S.$164 per capita).

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

2004-05

19955

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Br '000,0006

value

force

force

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction

35,948 408

47.9 05

21,605,317 16,540

87.8 0.1

3,939 3,729

5.2 5.0

384,955 61,232

1.6 0.2

0.1

Public utilities

1,789

2.4

17,066

Transp. and commun.

3,973

5.3

103,154

0.4

10,208

13.6

935,937

3.8

6,679 3,433

8.9 4.6

19,451

0.1

1,282,224

91

210,1847 24,606,060

0.97 100.09

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services

4.020

Other TOTAL

— 75,0358

66

— 100.0

}

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): roots and tubers 4,831,205 (of which sweet potatoes 408,796), corn (maize) 3,342,892, wheat 2,306,862, sorghum 2,200,241, barley 1,398,395, dry broad beans 601,668, potatoes 449,996, coffee 330,000, sesame seeds 148,861, pimento and allspice 116,000; leading producer of beeswax, honey, cut flowers, and khat; livestock (number of live animals) 38,500,000 cattle, 17,000,000 sheep, 9,626,000 goats, 5,625,000 horses, mules, and asses, (2004) 468,390 camels, (1998) 3,037 civets; roundwood 97,409,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 97%; fish-

eries production 9,450 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): rock salt 200,000; tantalum 45,000 kg; niobium 7,100 kg; gold 3,900

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

units

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

547

7.9

2006 2006

86715 725

1115 9.1

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

113 8314 164 mice

Er 1414 22 -

2004 2005 2005 2005

Education and health Educational attainment (2000)4. Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 63.8%; incomplete primary education 21.6%; primary 2.6%; incomplete secondary 8.1%; secondary 2.5%; post-secondary 1.4%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 46.3%; males 53.3%; females 39.3%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools'é

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

units number

X teachers

students

teacher ratio

8,269,663 2,053,593

66.6 50.0

11,490 410

124,202 41,075

62

4,035

87,158

21.6

6

4,803

172,111

35.8

Health (2004-05): physicians 1,077 (1 per 66,236 persons); hospital beds 13,851 (1 per 5,150 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 93.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,582 (vegetable products 94%, animal products 626); 9296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 182,500 (army 98.696, air force 1.496); UN peacekeeping personnel along Ethiopian-Eritrean border (July 2007): 1,470 troops. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.996; per capita expenditure U.S.$5. lAmharie is the “working” language. ?Official projection based on 1994 census. 3Estimate of the U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (September 2004 update). 4Based on the national Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey, comprising 14,072 households. 5For ages 10 and up. At 1999-2000 factor cost. 7First-time job seekers. 8Sum total; reported total is Br 74,506,000,000. ?Detail does not add to total

given because of rounding. Based on the national Household Income and Expenditure Survey, comprising 17,332 households. “Length of Ethiopian segment of Addis Ababa-Djibouti railroad, which in 2007 was in poor condition. !2Includes Djibouti part of Addis Ababa-Djibouti railroad. Ethiopian Airlines only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !5Subscribers. 161999-2000.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia http://www.csa.gov.et * National Bank of Ethiopia http://www.nbe.gov.et

572

Britannica World Data Population economically active (2006): total 29,400; activity rate of total population c. 61% (participation rates: ages 16-74, 85.8%; female 44.8%; unemployed 2.7%).

Faroe Islands! Official name: Føroyar (Faroese); Færøerne (Danish) (Faroe Islands). Political status: self-governing region of the Danish realm with a single legislative body (Lagting [32]). Chief of state: Danish Monarch represented by High Commissioner. Head of home government: Prime Minister. Capital: Tórshavn (Thorshavn). Official languages: Faroese; Danish. Official religion: Faroese Lutheran2. Monetary unit: Danish krone3 (DKK); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = DKK 5.48; 1£ = DKK 11.02.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly wage index

Eysturoy Nordhoy (Northern) Sandoy Streymoy Sudhuroy Vágar TOTAL

Runavík Klaksvík Skopun Tórshavn Tvøroyri Sørvágur

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

95.8 95.5

100.0 100.0

107.6 104.4

108.1 110.5

109.5 116.6

110.2 122.0

114.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) c. 25; remittances (2003) 44; foreign direct investment (FDI) n.a. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances (2003) 5; FDI, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.1%, in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture c. 9395; overall forest area (2005) 0.196. area

Largest Municipalities

2000

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004): U.S.$155,000,0008. Household income and expenditure. Average household size: n.a.; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1998)9: food and beverages 25.1%, transportation and communications 17.7%, housing 12.5%, recreation 11.9%, energy 7.7%.

Area and population Regions^

1999

population

sqmi

sq km

20075 estimate

110 93 48 151 64 73 5408

286 241 125 392 167 188 1,399

10,810 5,980 1,464 22,188 4,940 2,968 48,350

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) DKK '000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

+123 1.5%

+339 4.2%

-952 10.8%

-70 0.9%

-900 11.1%

-905 10.8%

Imports (2006): DKK 4,649,488,600 (goods for household consumption 27.7%; fuels, lubricants, and electric current 18.5%; machinery and apparatus 10.8%;

goods for the construction industry 9.7%; road vehicles 7.9%).Major import sources (2005): Denmark 26.7%; Sweden 17.4%; Spain 6.7%; Germany 6.6%; Finland 5.4%; United Kingdom 4.7%. Exports (2006): DKK 3,744,957,600 (chilled and frozen fish 64.9%; salted fish

Demography Population (2007): 48,400. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 89.6, persons per sq km 34.6. Urban-rural (2003): urban 38.8%; rural 61.2%. Sex distribution (20075): male 51.99%; female 48.01%.

12.8%; dried fish 12.7%; smoked, canned, and other conserved fish 3.5%).

Age breakdown (20075): under 15, 22.496; 15-29, 19.396; 30-44, 20.696; 45-59,

18.9%: 60-74, 12.2%: 75-84, 4.9%: 85 and over, 1.796.

Population projection: (2010) 49,000; (2020) 49,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Faroese 97.0%; Danish 2.5%; other Scandinavian 0.4%; other 0.1%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant c. 9196, of which Lutheran c. 7996, Plymouth Brethren c. 10%; other (mostly nonreligious) c. 9%. Major municipalities (20065): Tórshavn 19,314; Klaksvík 4,889; Runavik 3,642; Tvøroyri 1,814.

Major export destinations (2005): United Kingdom 28.6%; Denmark 14.4%; Spain 9.7%; France and Monaco 8.2%; Norway 5.9%; Germany 5.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2006): total length 288 mi, 464 km (paved, n.a.). Vehicles (20075): passenger cars 19,110; trucks, vans, and buses 4,452. Air transport (2005): passenger arrivals 89,190, passenger departures 89,101. Communications Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.7 (world avg. 20.3); (1998) within marriage 62.0%; outside of marriage 38.0%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2004): 1.80. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.7/1.3. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 75.9 years; female 82.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 316.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 245.9; diseases of the respiratory system 82.6; accidents 33.1; diabetes mellitus 31.0. National economy Budget (2003). Revenue: DKK 5,737,000,000 (tax revenue 78.6%, of which income taxes 47.6%, VAT 18.5%; transfers from the Danish government 14.8%; other 6.6%). Expenditures: DKK 5,329,000,000 (social welfare 34.7%, education 15.3%, health 14.5%, debt service 4.0%, agriculture, fish-

ing, and hunting 2.8%).

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2003): U.S.$1,472,000,000

(U.S.$30,680 per capita).

Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2000

47

1,022

Telephones

units Medium

date

PCs

2006

Landline

2006

5011 23

1,04011

478

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

ms

2003

1810

37510

Internet users

2005

32

645

Broadband

2006

1011

20811

Dailies

Cellular

number

i

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy: n.a. Education (2001-02)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 15-17) Voc., teacher tr. Higher!3

teachers

38 23 11

1

students

teacher ratio

5,579 2,019 19

2,19512

173

ES 94

Health (2005): physicians 57 (1 per 849 persons); hospital beds 295 (1 per 164 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 6.4. Food: n.a.

Military Defense responsibility lies with Denmark.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2001

2005

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

DKK ’000,000

value

force

force

57 497 1,865

0.7 5.8 21.7

53 67 4,845

0.2 0.3 19.7

290

3.4

1,649

6.7

471

55.

1,676

6.8

Public utilities

186

22

145

0.6

Transp. and commun.

711

8.3

1,822

7.4

Trade, hotels

959

11.2

3,436

14.0

1,205 1,800

14.0 20.9

1,511 8,481

6.2 34.6

305 250 8,5986

3.5 2.9 100.05

735 121 24,541

3.0 05 100.0

Agriculture Mining Fishing/fish processing Manufacturing (excluding fish-related) Construction

Finance and real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): potatoes 1,500, other vegetables, grass, hay, and silage are produced; livestock (number of live animals) 68,100 sheep, 2,000 cattle; roundwood, n.a.;

fisheries production 588,715 (including blue whiting 267,447, pollock 75,971, cod 35,755, and capelin 19,752; from aquaculture 4% [including salmon 15,549]). Mining and quarrying: negligible?. Manufacturing (value added in DKK ’000,000; 1999): processed fish 393; all other manufacturing 351; important products include handicrafts and woolen textiles and clothing. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 259,000,000 ([2004] 290,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (215,000); natural gas, none (none).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1English-language alternative spelling is Faeroe Islands. ?Formally independent of the national Danish Lutheran church from July 2007. *The local currency, the Faroese króna (plural krónur), is equivalent to the Danish krone. Banknotes used are Faroese or Danish; coins are Danish. ^Represents the 5 main islands (with associated islets) and the northeasternmost (Northern) islands. Actual local administration is based on 34 municipalities. ‘January 1. 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "The maritime boundary demarcation agreement between the Shetland Islands (U.K.) and the Faroes in 1999 has allowed for the still unsuccessful exploration for deep-sea petroleum as of mid-2007. 8Includes Denmark. ?Weights of consumer price index. 10Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 121996-97. 13University of the Faroe Islands.

Internet resources for further information: ¢ Faroe Islands in Figures http://www.hagstova.fo * Governmental Bank of the Faroe Islands http:/Aandsbank.fo + Danmarks Statistik http://www.dst.dk/HomeUK.aspx

Nations of the World — 573

Fiji

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Republic of the Fiji Islands!. Form of government: military regime?. Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Suva. Official languages: 3. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Fiji dollar (F$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ - F$1.63; 1 £ - F$3.29. Area and population Divisions Provinces Central

Naitasiri Namosi Rewa Serua Tailevu Eastern Kadavu Lau Lomaiviti Northern Bua Cakaudrove Macuata Westem Ba Nadroga Ra

in value F$'000 Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

area

Capitals Suva — — — — — Levuka — — — Labasa — — — Lautoka — — —

population

sq mi

sq km

340,843

643 220 105 320 369

1,666 570 272 830 955

532

1,379

1,087

2,816

774

2,004

1,017 921 518

2,634 2,385 1,341

158,793 6,901 101,143 18,420 55,586 36,979 10,048 10,516 16,415 130,607 13,855 46,266 70,486 317,376 228,537 58,623 30,216

185 188 159

478 487 411

—

—

18 7,0554

46 18,2724

2,095 827,900

F$'000,000 % of total

18.8 -4.37 100.04

44.6 0.8 9.8 3.6 0.7 5.6 10.8 2.6 5.3 9.7 6.58 100.0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-584 19.3%

-758 24.1%

-941 27.0%

—1,029 30.8%

—1,536 39.3%

—1,945 45.3%

Singapore 29.9%; Australia 24.5%; New Zealand 18.096; Japan 4.296; U.S. 3.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 854,000; (2020) 888,000. Doubling time: 41 years. Ethnic composition (2007): Fijian 57.3%; Indian 37.6%; other 5.1%. Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant (mostly Methodist) c. 35%; Hindu c. 33%; independent Christian c. 11%, Roman Catholic c. 8%; Muslim c. 7%;

(2007): Suva 86,178

(urban agglomeration,

219,759);

Lautoka 52,742; Nausori 46,8116; Nadi 42,712.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 22.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.73. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2002): 9.2/n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 67.3 years; female 72.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001): diseases of the circulatory system 330.0; diseases of the respiratory system 50.2; infectious and parasitic diseases 45.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 38.0; accidents and violence 31.7.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: F$1,218,332,000 (customs duties and port dues 59.4%, income taxes 28.9%, fees and royalties 4.7%, other 7.0%). Expenditures: F$1,231,556,000 (department expenditures 70.7%, charges on public debt 26.3%, other 3.0%). Public debt (external, outstanding; September 2005): U.S.$96,200,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 2,952,000, coconuts 140,000, taro 38,000, cassava 33,000, rice 15,200,

bananas 6,500, ginger 4,000, yaqona (kava) 2,300; livestock (number of live animals) 310,000 cattle, 260,000 goats, 140,000 pigs; roundwood 509,000 cu m,

of which fuelwood 7%; fisheries production 41,596 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 3,800 kg; silver 1,500 kg. Manufacturing (value added in F$'000,000; 2001): food products 94.6; textiles and clothing 92.4; beverages and tobacco 88.3; chemicals and chemical products 43.0. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 540,000,000 (540,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (13,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (321,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2000): total 341,700; activity rate of total population 42.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [1996] 60.6%; female 32.2%; unemployed [2002] 14.1%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

104.3 104.3

105.1 105.2

109.5 109.5

1125 se

115.2 ips

118.1 x

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$2,929,000,000

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

BO? ele -185,3137 4,296,7084

132,676 2,507 29,043 10,639 2,107 16,722 32,175 7,812 15,854 28,766 19,4698 297,770

Imports (2006): F$3,119,920,000 (mineral products 33.496, machinery and apparatus 14.996, transport equipment 7.1%, chemicals and chemical products 5.396, textiles and clothing 5.096). Major import sources (2005):

13.6%; 60-74, 6.1%; 75 and over, 0.9%.

(U.S.$3,515 per capita).

}

143 0.8 13.2 5.3 2.6 17.4 20.0 124

% of labour force

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 118.9, persons per sq km 45.9. Urban-rural (2007): urban 50.9%; rural 49.1%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.17%; female 49.83%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 31.1%; 15-29, 28.6%; 30-44, 19.7%; 45-59,

Consumer price index Earnings index

614,981 35,098 565,133 227,930 113,148 742,257 857,787 518,474

labour force

Foreign trade!!. 12

Demography Population (2007): 839,0005.

other c. 6%. Major urban areas

% of total value

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2007) 4.7; average annual income per household (2002)9 F$15,757 (U.S.$12,784); sources of income (2002)9: wages and salaries 64.3%, transfers 8.4%, self-employment 7.296; expenditure (2002)9: food, beverages, and tobacco 31.2%, housing and energy 18.5%, transportation and communications 17.9%, education 4.5%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 431; remittances (2006) 216; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 36; official development assistance (2005) 4319, Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 106; remittances (2005) 40. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 10.9%, in permanent crops 4.7%, in pasture 9.6%; overall forest area (2005) 54.7%.

2007 preliminary

Fijian dependency Rotuma TOTAL

1996

Exports

(2006): F$1,175,206,000

(reexports

[mostly petroleum products]

29.4%, sugar 18.3%, fish 8.3%, clothing 8.1%, mineral water 7.4%, gold

3.4%). Major export destinations (2005): Australia 20.4%; Singapore 20.3%; US. 15.5%; U.K. 15.1%; New Zealand 5.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003)!5; length 371 mi, 597 km. Roads (1999): tota length 2,140 mi, 3,440 km (paved 49%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 76,273; trucks and buses 42,311. Air transport (2004-05)14: passenger-km 2,360,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 92,108,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

98

118

Telephones Cellular Landline

2005 2005

20516 113

24216 133

units Medium

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004

44

52

2001 2006 2006

4915 80 (MGA); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

population

in value FMG '000,000,000 Manufacturing

[127].

Regions®

2005

Regions®

population

Atsinanana Betsiboka Boeny Bongolava Diana Haute Masiatra Ihorombe Itasy

Regions®

population

1,014,223 Melaky 216,201 Menabe 496,835 Sava 299,044 Sofia 447,155 . Vakinankaratra 990,626 Vatovavy 170,867 Fitovinany 588,696 TOTAL

160,528 358,622 741,269 860,353 1,455,618 1,018,675 15,692,033

Demography Area: 226,662 sq mi, 587,051 sq km.

Population (2007): 19,683,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 86.8, persons per sq km 33.5. Urban-rural (2006): urban 27.3%; rural 72.7%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.72%; female 50.28%.

Foreign trade!> Balance of trade SDR ’000,00014 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

311.6 0.8%

-36.4 4.6%

-1359 9.2%

-303.2 19.0%

-385.9 25.4%

-371.7 21.9%

Imports (2005): SDR 1,132,100,00014 (petroleum [all forms] 22.9%, machinery and apparatus 16.5%, consumer goods 14.8%, other [mostly imports for EPZ15] 45.8%). Major import sources (2004): France 16.8%; China 11.3%; Hong Kong 6.5%; Iran 6.3%; South Africa 5.5%. Exports (2005): SDR 564,920,00014 (EPZI5 exports [mostly textiles and clothing] 49.5%, vanilla 4.9%, shellfish 3.9%, cloves 2.3%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 35.5%; France 30.5%; Germany 7.0%; Mauritius 4.6%; Italy 3.4%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 44.1%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 15.7%; 45-59, 8.4%; 60-74, 3.7%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 21,299,000; (2020) 27,005,000. Doubling time: 23 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Malagasy 95.9%, of which Merina 24.0%, Betsimisaraka 13.4%, Betsileo 11.3%, Tsimihety 7.0%, Sakalava 5.9%; Makua 1.1%; French 0.6%; Comorian 0.5%; Reunionese 0.4%; other 1.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: route length (2003) 560 mi, 901 km16; (2000) passengerkm 24,471,000; (2000) metric ton-km cargo 27,200,000. Roads (1999): total length 30,968 mi, 49,827 km (paved 12%). Vehicles (1998): passenger cars 64,000; trucks and buses 9,100. Air transport (2005)!?: passenger-km 1,177,875,000; metric ton-km cargo 15,365,000.

Religious affiliation (2005): traditional beliefs c. 42%; Protestant (significantly Lutheran) c. 27%; Roman Catholic c. 20%; Sunni Muslim c. 296; other c. 996. Major cities (2001): Antananarivo 1,403,449; Toamasina 179,045; Antsirabe 160,356; Fianarantsoa 144,225; Mahajanga 135,660.

Communications Medium Televisions

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2002

410

25

Telephones

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 38.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 30.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.29. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 59.9 years; female 63.7 years.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: MGA 1,653,000,000,000 (tax revenue 53.7%, of which import duties 26.9%, VAT 10.5%; grants 40.6%; nontax revenue 5.7%). Expenditures: MGA 2,045,000,000,000 (current expenditure 50.2%; capital

expenditure 49.8%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): paddy rice 3,400,000, sugarcane 2,446,000, cassava 2,144,000, sweet potatoes 526,200, bananas 302,600, corn (maize) 293,500, potatoes 281,400, mangoes 211,200, taro 200,000, coffee 60,650, peanuts (groundnuts) 38,050, cloves (whole and stem) 19,860, vanilla 1,240; livestock (number of live animals; 2006) 9,687,300 cattle, 1,600,000 pigs, 3,000,000 geese; roundwood 11,238,000

cu m, of which fuelwood 98%; fisheries production 144,900 (from aquaculture 6%). Mining and quarrying (2005): chromite ore 105,000; graphite 15,000; sapphires 4,700 kg?; rubies 920 kg?; gold 5 kg (illegally smuggled, c. 2,000 kg). Manufacturing (value in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): beverages 107; wearing apparel 57; fabricated metal products 35; food products 29. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 990,000,000 (990,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (10,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) none ([2004] 3,480,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 321,000 (602,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2005): total 9,844,100; activity rate of total population 52.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 88.1%; female 49.696; unemployed 2.8%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 106.9

2002 124.0

2003 122.5

2004 139.4

2005 165.2

2006 183.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 62; remittances (2005) 3; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 59; official development assistance (2005) 929. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 25; remittances (2005) 8. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2003-04) 4.6; expenditure (2000)9: food, beverages, and tobacco 50.1%, housing and energy 18.2%, transportation 8.0%, clothing 7.0%, household furnishings (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$5,414,000,000

(U.S.$283 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Cellular Landline

units Medium PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

1,04619 130

5519 6.8

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

102

55

2005

14118

7.618

2006 2006

110 EM

5.8 sos

Education and health Educational attainment (2003-04)20, Percentage of population age 25-59 (male) and 25-49 (female) having: no formal schooling 20.4%; incomplete primary education 33.6%; complete primary 13.2%; incomplete secondary 23.0%; complete secondary 6.4%; higher 3.4%. Literacy (2006): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 70.7%; males 76.5%; females 65.3%. Education (2002-03)

student/ schools

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,178,000,000.

4.6%. Gross national income

date

units number

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

19,96121 Dr

622

teachers

students

teacher ratio

55,309 19,471

2,856,480 436,211

51.6 22.4

d

1,857

12,691 22

32,593

D

17.6

Health (2004): physicians 1,861 (1 per 9,998 persons); hospital beds 9,303 (1 per 2,000 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 58.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,046 (vegetable products 91%, animal products 9%); 136% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 13,500 (army 92.6%, navy 3.7%, air force 3.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$3.

1République de Madagascar (French); Republic of Madagascar (English); Repoblikan’i Madagasikara (Malagasy, the national language). ?Per decision announced in 2000 by High Constitutional Court. 3Per confirmation of referendum results in April 2007 by the High Constitutional Court. ‘Malagasy is the national language per article 4 of the 1992 constitution. ?The ariary (MGA), the precolonial currency of Madagascar, officially replaced the Malagasy franc (FMG) in August 2003 at a rate of 1 MGA = FMG 5. 5Created in 2004; replaced 6 provinces in 2007. 7Legal export volume. 3The discovery of offshore and on-land petroleum was announced in September 2005. Weights of consumer price index components. !°Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank charges. Unemployed. !?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 13Imports are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. for commodities and trading partners. MSDRs (Special Drawing Rights) are reserve assets created by the IMF and used by governments to settle their international indebtedness. !5Export-processing zones. 16Railroad infrastructure was either inoperable or in poor condition in June 2003. !7Air Madagascar. !8Circulation of daily newspapers. 1?Subscribers. 2°Based on demographic survey of 6,629 persons (5,029 females, 1,600 males). ?12003-04. ?21998—99.

Internet resources for further information: * Institut National de la Statistique http://www.cite.mg * Ministere de l'Economie des Finances et du Budget http://www.mefb.gov.mg

Nations of the World

Malawi

Household income and expenditure (2004-05)6. Average household size 4.5; average annual household income MK 50,904 (U.S.$467); expenditure: food 55.696, housing and energy 20.696, transportation and communications 6.696, clothing and footwear 4.396. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,194,000,000 (U.S.$162 per capita).

Official name: Republic of Malawi. Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [193]. Head of state and government: President. Capital: Lilongwel. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Malawian kwacha (MK); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

1 U.S.$ - MK 139.92; 1£= MK 281.26.

Arga:

population

Regions

Districts/Cities/ Municipality

sq km

2006 estimate?

Districts/Cities/ Municipality

Central Dedza Dowa Kasungu Lilongwe (rural) Lilongwe (city) Mchinji Nkhotakota Ntcheu Ntchisi Salima Northern Chitipa Karonga Likoma Mzimba Mzuzu (city) Nkhata Bay Rumphi

35,592 3,624 3,041 7,878 6.159 ? 3,356 4,259 3,424 1,655 2,196 26,931 4,288 3,355 18 10.430 ; 4,071 4,769

5,369,810 624,028 496,954 629,278 1,165,636 706,322 424,588 292,556 475,917 223,223 331,308 1,508,659 163,271 243,666 10,664 600,377 142,128 195,545 153,008

Southem Balaka Blantyre (rural) Blantyre (city) Chikwawa Chiradzulu Machinga Mangochi Mulanje Mwanza Nsanje Phalombe Thyolo Zomba (rural) Zomba (municipality) TOTAL LAND AREA INLAND WATER TOTAL

}

}

}

area

population

sq km

2006 estimate?

31,753 2,193 2012 f 4,755 767 3,771 6,273 2,056 2,295 1,942 1,394 1,715

|

5,879,414 314,733 368,879 744,734 450,609 290,780 433,264 755,039 539,753 173,384 234,218 300,451 574,384 591,991

2,580

107,195 94,276 24,208

118,484

12,757,883

Density (2007)3: persons per sq mi 373.7, persons per sq km 144.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 17.2%; rural 82.8%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.65%; female 50.35%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 47.3%; 15-29, 27.6%; 30-44, 12.9%; 45-59, 7.5%; 60-74, 3.8%; 75-84, 0.896; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 14,613,000; (2020) 18,313,000. Doubling time: 29 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Chewa 34.7%; Maravi 12.2%; Ngoni 9.0%; Yao 79%; Tambuka 7.9%; Lomwe 7.7%; Ngonde 3.5%; other 17.1%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant/independent Christian c. 55%; Roman Catholic c. 20%; Muslim c. 20%; traditional beliefs c. 3%; other c. 2%. Major cities (2006)?: Blantyre 744,734; Lilongwe 706,322; Mzuzu 142,128;

Zomba 107,195; Karonga (1998) 27,811.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 42.4 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 23.7 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.82. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 42.8 years; female 41.9 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 14.1%4 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS-related c. 729; lower respiratory infections 244; cardiovascular diseases c. 175; malaria c. 169; diarrheal diseases c. 164.

% of total

labour

% of labour

value?

force

force

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing

92,774 3,816 29,771

32.4 1.3 10.4

Construction

14,253

5.0

73,402

1.6

5,749

2.0

7,319

0.2

18,309

6.4

32,623

0.7

53,210

18.6

257,389

5.7

Finance, real estate

40,868

14.3

13,957

0.3

Public administration Services Other TOTAL

18,725 28,272 —19,6148 286,133

6.5 9.9 6.98 100.010

2.2 1.9 1.19 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 23; remittances (2005) 1.0; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 9.2; official development assistance (2005) 575. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 47; remittances (2005) 1.0.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —3,225 5.0%

MK '000,000 % of total

2002 —13,895 18.0%

2003 -24,400 22.4%

2004 -33,880 23.7%

2005 -59,369 33.2%

2006 -67,027 33.5%

Imports (2003): MK 70,500,000,000 (chemicals and chemical products 16.6%; machinery and apparatus 15.4%; refined petroleum products 11.3%; road vehicles 10.5%; food 7.9%). Major import sources (2004): South Africa cotton 4.296; reexports 4.096). Major export destinations (2004): South Africa 13.4%; U.S. 12.2%; Germany 11.9%; Egypt 8.6%; U.K. 6.8%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 495 mi, 797 km; passenger-km 29,523,000; metric ton-km cargo 26,055,000. Roads (2003): total length 9,600 mi, 15,451 km (paved 45%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 22,500; trucks and buses 57,600. Air transport (2005)12: passenger-km 201,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,364,000.

Communications

VAT 16.7%, income tax 11.7%, excises 7.3%, import tax 6.4%; grants 38.7%;

nontax revenue 8.4%). Expenditures: MK 110,943,700,000 (current expenditure 76.3%; capital expenditure 21.0%; other 2.7%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): 2,075,000,

potatoes

1,800,000,

corn

(maize)

1,600,000, plantains 247,600, peanuts (groundnuts) 145,000, dry beans 80,000, pigeon peas 79,000, tobacco leaves 69,500, bananas 54,160, seed cotton 53,500, tea 38,390, coffee 1,500; livestock (number of live animals) 1,900,000 goats, 750,000 cattle, 456,300 pigs; roundwood (2005) 5,661,000 cu m, of which fuel-

wood 91%; fisheries production (2005) 59,595 (from aquaculture 1%).Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 28,000; gemstones (including rubies and sapphires) 1,400 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2001): food products 62; beverages 28; chemicals and chemical products 11; wearing apparel 7. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 1,270,000,000 (1,262,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 70,000 (57,000);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (275,000). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 26.096, in permanent crops 1.5%, in pasture 19.7%; overall forest area (2005) 36.2%. Population economically active (2003)5: total 5,707,000; activity rate 46.3% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 88.095; female 49.796; unemployed, n.a.). 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

122.7

140.8

154.3

171.9

198.4

226.1

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

65

5.2

Telephones Cellular

2005

53214

Landline

2005

103

4114 7.9

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

25

1.9

Dailies Internet users

2005 2006

2213 60

tpa 4.5

Broadband

2005

0.414

0.0314

Education and health Educational attainment (2004)15. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal education/unknown 33.5%; incomplete primary education 24.2%; complete primary 27.9%; secondary and university 14.4%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 64.3%; males literate 77.1%; females literate 51.9%. Education (2003)

Voc., teacher tr.17

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

101,433 85,996 50,3629 4,509,290

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2006): U.S.$496,600,000.

Budget (2005). Revenue: MK 103,298,600,000 (tax revenue 52.9%, of which

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

83.6 0.1 2.6

Trade, hotels

Primary (age 6—13)!6 Secondary (age 14—18)

cassava

3,765,827 2,499 118,483

Transp. and commun.

National economy

2,100,000,

in value

40.4%; India 7.9%; Tanzania 4.9%; Zambia 4.4%; U.S. 3.6%. Exports (2004): MK 52,627,000,000 (tobacco 42.3%; sugar 15.0%; tea 9.8%;

Demography Population (2007): 13,603,000.

sugarcane

1998

MK ’000,0007

Public utilities

Area and population Regions

635

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

4,905

43,952 7,076

3,166,786 131,100

72.1 18.5

ce

224

2,525

11.3

654

4,757

7.3

6

Health: physicians (2004) 266 (1 per 46,644 persons); hospital beds (1998) 14,087 (1 per 735 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 93.7.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2.231 (vegetable products 9796, animal products 396); 12596 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 5,300 (army 10096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$1.

‘Judiciary meets in Blantyre. *Official projections based on 1998 census. ?Based on land area. ‘Statistically derived midpoint of range. Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. "Based on the Malawi Integrated Household Survey 2004-05, comprising 10,777 households. "At factor cost. 8Less imputed bank service charges. Unemployed. !°Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !!Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and cif. in commodities and trading partners. !¢Air Malawi only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !4Subscribers. Based on the Malawi Demographic and Household Survey 2004, comprising 13,664 households. 162004. 17199596.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistical Office of Malawi http://www.nso.malawi.net * Reserve Bank of Malawi http://www.rbm.mw

636

Britannica World Data

Malaysia

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$141,751,000,000 (U.S.$5,428 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Malaysia. Form of government: federal constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [701]; House of Representatives [219]). Chief of state: Paramount Ruler. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Kuala Lumpur?. Administrative centre: Putrajaya’. Official language: Malay. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: ringgit (RM); valuation

2005

area Capitals

sq mi

sq km

2005 estimate

Kota Kinabalu Kuching

28,426 48,050

73,622 124,450

2,931,700 2,312,600

Johor Bahru

7,331

18,987

3,101,200

Alor Setar

3,639

9,425

1,848,100

Kelantan

Kota Baharu

5,799

15,020

1,505,600

638

1,652

713,000

2,570 13,886

6,657 35,965

946,300 1,427,000

8,110

21,005

2,256,400

307 398 3,062 5,002

795 1,030 7,930 12,955

224,500 1,468,800 4,736,1004 1,016,500

—

94

243

— —

35 19 127,366

91 49 329,876

Negeri Sembilan Pahang

Perak Perlis Pulau Pinang Selangor Terengganu

Melaka Seremban Kuantan

Ipoh Kangar George Town Shah Alam Kuala Terengganu

Kuala Lumpur

force

42,904 75,178 151,422

8.7 15.2 30.6

1,476,400 34,700 2,024,700

14.3 0.3 19.6

15,205

34

890,500

8.6

Public utilities

14,504

29

57,400

0.6

Transp. and commun.

32,061

6.5

530,100

5.1

Trade, hotels

65,245

13.2

2,304,300

22.3

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

53,210 34,643

10.7 7.0

688,200 681,200

6.6 6.6

29,539 —18,6707 495,2395

6.0 -3.87 100.05

1,299,100 367,0008 10,353,600

12.5 3.58 100.0

al gross income per household (2002) RM 36,132 (U.S.$9,508); expenditure (2003): food and nonalcoholic beverages 26.0%, housing and energy 22.1%, transportation 20.8%, restaurants and hotels 6.1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 8,846; remittances (2006) 1,492; foreign direct investment (FDI; 200105 avg.) 2,964; official development assistance (2005) 7989. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 3,711; remittances (2006) 5,527; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 1,715. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 5.5%, in permanent crops 17.6%, in pasture 0.9%; overall forest area (2005) 63.6%.

Foreign trade10 Balance of trade (current prices) 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

454,055 8.8%

454,340 8.2%

481,347 11.4%

480,664 9.2%

499,778 10.3%

4108,193 10.1%

Federal Territories Labuan Putrajaya TOTAL

% of labour

force

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$22,449,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.6; annu-

population

Kedah Melaka

labour

value

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

Johor

% of total

Construction

1 £= RM 7.05.

Regions States East Malaysia Sabah Sarawak West Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia)

in value RM ’000,000

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = RM 3.51;

2004

RM '000,000 % of total

1,556,200

83,500 4, 26,127,7005

Imports (2004): RM 400,076,800,000 (microcircuits, transistors, and valves 25.7%; computers/office machines 5.9%; petroleum products 5.3%; telecom-

munications equipment 3.696). Major import sources (2006): Japan 13.2%;

Demography Population (2007): 26,572,000.

U.S. 12.5%; China 12.1%; Singapore 11.7%; Thailand 5.5%; Taiwan 5.5%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 208.6, persons per sq km 80.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 67.3%; rural 32.7%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.75%; female 49.25%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 32.4%; 15-29, 26.2%; 30-44, 20.6%; 45-59,

Exports (2006): RM 588,965,000,000 (semiconductors/office machines 37.6%; crude and refined petroleum 8.8%; telecommunications equipment 5.9%; natural gas 4.0%; palm oil 3.7%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 18.8%; Singapore 15.4%; Japan 8.9%; China 7.2%; Thailand 5.3%.

13.8%; 60-74, 5.6%; 75-84, 1.2%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Transport and communications

23.5%; Indian 7.0%; other citizen 1.2%; noncitizen 6.8%.

Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 1,949 km; passenger-km 1,152,139,00011; metric ton-km cargo 1,016,730,00011. Roads (2004): total length 77,695 km (paved 76%). Vehicles (200512): passenger cars 5,987,421; trucks and buses 827,215. Air transport (2006)13: passenger-km 41,100,000,000; metric

Population projection: (2010) 27,920,000; (2020) 32,020,000. Ethnic composition (2005): Malay 50.5%; other indigenous 11.0%; Chinese Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim 60.4%; Buddhist 19.2%; Christian 9.1%; Hindu 6.3%; Chinese folk religionist 2.6%; animist 0.8%; other 1.6%. Major cities (2000)6: Kuala Lumpur 1,297,526; Ipoh 566,211; Klang 563,173;

Petaling Jaya 438,084; Johor Bahru 384,613; Putrajaya (2006) 55,000.

ton-km cargo 2,598,000,000.

Communications

Vital statistics

Medium

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.5 (world avg. 8.6). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 6.3/n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.07. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 71.8 years; female 76.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 149; infectious and parasitic diseases 101; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 83; accidents and violence 43; chronic respiratory diseases 40.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: RM 105,856,000,000 (income tax revenue 71.2%, o which taxes on companies 19.4%, taxes on petroleum 15.9%, personal income

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

5,480

222

2006 2006

19,46415 4,342

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

101.4

103.2

104.4

105.9

109.1

113.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): oil palm fruit 75,650,000, rice 2,154,000, natural rubber 1,283,600, coconuts 573,194, bananas 534,406, pineapples 340,000, coffee 40,000, pepper 19,000; livestock (number of live animals) 2,168,000 pigs, 185,000,000 chickens; roundwood 28,237,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 11%; fisheries production

(2005) 1,390,000 (from aquaculture 13%). Mining and quarrying (2004): iron ore 663,732; tin (metal content) 2,745; gold 4,221 kg. Manufacturing (value

added in RM ’000,000; 2004): electrical machinery/electronics 39,790; chem-

ical products 16,468; petroleum and coal products 16,183; transport equipment 7,053; fabricated metals 5,405. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 82,282,000,000 (81,759,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2005) 792.000 ([2004] 13,275,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 250,500,000 ([2004] 200,800,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 20,450,000 (21,244,000); natural gas (cu m; May 2006- April 2007) 60,360,000,000 ([2004]

30,045,000,000).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

73115 163

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

5,600 2,43514 11,292 89715

218 9314 424 3415

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: no formal schooling/unknown 8.4%; primary education 28.7%; lower secondary 20.7%; upper secondary 31.1%; higher 11.1%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 94.4%; males 95.6%; females 93.2%. Education (2005)

taxes 9.4%, excises 7.9%; nontax revenue 28.8%). Expenditures: RM 128,-

755,000,000 (current expenditure 76.3%; development expenditure 23.7%). Population economically active (2004): total 10,353,600; activity rate 40.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2000] 65.5%; female 47.3%; unemployed [April 2006-March 2007] 3.2%).

units number

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-19) Voc., teacher tr.16 Higher'®

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

7,596 1,928 151 38

186,514 126,081 12,678 25,692

3,045,975 2,121,118 127,367 396,302

16.3 16.8 10.0 15.4

Health (2004): physicians 18,246 (1 per 1,402 persons); hospital beds 47,822 (1 per 535 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 6.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,035 (vegetable products 8496, animal products 1696); 16496 of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 109,000 (army 73.4%, navy 12.8%, air force 13.8%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$119. lIncludes 44 appointees of the Paramount Ruler; the remaining 26 are indirectly elected. ?Location of the first royal palace and both houses of parliament. ?Location of the second royal palace, the prime minister's office, and the supreme court. ^Selangor includes Putrajaya. 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Preliminary. 7Net of import duties less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. ?Figure represents commitments. Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. 11 Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore. l2January 1. Malaysia Airlines. !4Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 162004.

Internet resources for further information: * Department of Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.my * Central Bank of Malaysia http://www.bnm.gov.my

Nations of the World

Maldives

637

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: Dhivehi Raajjeyge Jumhooriyyaa (Republic of Maldives). Form of government: republic! with one legislative house (Majlis? [423]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Male. Official language: Divehi. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: rufiyaa (Rf); valuation

| Arabian

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Hf '000,00013

value

force

force

713

8.7

12,624

9.8

45

0.6

339

0.3

Manufacturing

637

7.8

19,259

149

Public utilities

313

3.8

1,229

1.0

292 1,262

3.6 155

5,930 7,098

4.6 5.5

326 2,689

4.0 33.0

23,801 sie

18.5 es

1,056 1,007

12.9 12.3

1,738 15,949

1.3 12.4

1.8 —4.014 100.0

17,302 23,56715 128,836

13.4 18.315 100.0

Agriculture, fishing

Sea

Mining Construction Transp. and commun.

Trade Tourism (resorts) Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Rf 12.80; 1£=Rf 25.73.

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population4

2006

146 -32714 8,15816

Public debt (external, outstanding; December 2006): U.S.$267,300,000.

ra».

population

Administrative atolls

sq km

2006 censuse

Administrative atolls

North Thiladhunmathi South Thiladhunmathi

13.48 16.52

13,495 16,237

North Nilandhe South Nilandhe

1.46 1.61

3,765 4,967

9.62 7.50 4.99 3.73

11,940 10,015 14,756 9,578

Kolhumadulu Hadhdhunmathi North Huvadhu South Huvadhu

3.69 14.14 4.39 6.02

8,493 11,990 8,262 11,013

1.16 4.29

9,190 15,441

Gnaviyani Addu

4.20 9.41

7,636 18,026

Imports (2006): U.S.$644,700,000 (consumer goods 34.2%, of which food products 15.2%; petroleum products 19.6%; construction-related goods 13.1%;

2.59

8,379

Male

2.24

103.693

2.49

4,710

transport equipment 8.2%). Major import sources: Singapore 23.9%; U.A.E. 21.1%; India 9.4%; Malaysia 6.6%; Sri Lanka 6.1%.

North South North South

Miladhunmadulu Miladhunmadulu Maalhosmadulu Maalhosmadulu

Faadhippolhu Male

North Ari

South Ari

Felidhu

Mulakatholhu

2.86

0.42

5,776

zasa

{population

sq km

2006 censuse

Capital island

1,608 — ora

116.817

208,968

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—283.3 56.2%

—259.3 49.5%

—318.8 51.2%

—460.8 56.0%

—583.3 64.3%

—701.3 60.9%

Lanka 12.8%; U.K. 9.7%; France 5.1%.

Density (2007)8: persons per sq mi 6,763, persons per sq km 2,611. Urban-rural (2006): urban 34.7%; rural 65.3%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.66%; female 49.34%.

Transport and communications

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 31.1%; 15-29, 33.2%; 30-44, 18.3%; 45-59, 9.2%; 60-74, 5.2%; 75-84, 1.1%; 85 and over, 0.2%; unknown 1.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 321,000; (2020) 380,000. Doubling time: 46 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Maldivian 98.5%; Sinhalese 0.7%; other 0.8%. Religious affiliation: virtually 100% Sunni Muslim9. Major islets (2006): Male (capital island) 103,693; Hithadhoo 9,465; Fuvammulah 7,636; Kulhudhuffushi 6,998; Thinadhoo 4,442.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 3.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 15.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.72. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 16.7/6.0. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.7 years; female 72.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): communicable diseases 251; ischemic heart diseases 91; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 54; cerebrovascular diseases 49; accidents, violence, and suicide 44.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: Rf 6,548,800,000 (nontax revenue 41.3%, of which resort lease rent 19.2%; tax revenue 32.2%, of which import duties 23.2%;

grants 25.9%; other 0.6%). Expenditures: Rf 8,644,700,000 (community programs 25.7%; economic services 18.0%; general administration 17.6%; edu-

cation 13.6%; police/security 10.4%; health 8.9%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): vegetables 27,000, coconuts 15,827, fruits 9,000, bananas 3,930, nuts 2,000; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production 185,980, of which skipjack 132,100, yel-

lowfin tuna 24,600 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: coral for construction materials. Manufacturing:

details, n.a.; however, major indus-

tries include boat building and repairing, coir yarn and mat weaving, coconut and fish processing, lacquerwork, garment manufacturing, and handicrafts. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 160,000,000 (160,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (236,000). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 287; remittances (2006) 2; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 13; official development assistance (2005) 67. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 70; remittances (2006) 84. Population economically active (2006): total 128,836; activity rate of total population 43.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 65.8%; female 41.3%; unemployed 14.4% 10), 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.7

104.9

103.6

101.8

103.1

105.9

Household income and expenditure (2002-03)12. Average household size (2006) 6.5; average annual income per household Rf 188,743 (U.S.$14,746); sources of income: self-employment 34.5%, wages and salaries 31.5%, rent 13.4%; expenditure: housing and energy 35.8%, food, beverages, and tobacco 29.9%, transportation and communications 7.8%, health 5.2%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 13%, in permanent crops c. 30%, in pasture c. 3%; overall forest area (2005) c. 3%. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$870,000,000 (U.S.$2,897 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Balance of trade (current prices)

Exports (2006): U.S.$225,200,000 (domestic exports 60.0%, of which chilled or frozen tuna 44.8%, dried fish 5.6%, canned fish 5.1%; reexports [mostly jet fuel] 40.096). Major export destinations!?: Thailand 26.196; Japan 15.096; Sri

Demography Population (2007): 305,000.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index"! 100.0

Foreign trade!7, 18

Transport. Railroads: none. Roads: total length, n.a. Vehicles: passenger cars (2007) 3,393; trucks and buses (2005) 1,573. Air transport (2005)20: passenger arrivals 773,845, passenger departures 761,922; cargo unloaded 17,336 metric tons, cargo loaded 10,923 metric tons.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

41

144

Telephones Cellular

2006

26322

Landline

2006

33

87622 110

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons 152

2005

45

Dailies Internet users

2005 2005

get 20

25?! 68

Broadband

2006

4.722

1622

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Population age 25 and over 71,937; percentage with university education 0.4%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 97.4%; males literate 97.4%; females literate 97.3%. Education (2003)

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 11-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher??

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

231 106

2,216 1,530

66,169 26,967

29.9 17.6

38

1,328

34.9

138

6,898

50.0

As

1

Health (2005): physicians 380 (1 per 775 persons); hospital beds 765 (1 per 384 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 12.1. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,327 (vegetable products 80%, animal products 20%); 181% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): n.a.; the national security service (paramilitary police force) includes an air element and coast guard. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 5.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$169.

1A “presidential system” of government was approved by referendum in August 2007. Implementation of new constitution expected in November 2007. 2Also known or translated as People’s Majlis, Citizens’ Council, or Citizens’ Assembly. *Excludes eight nonelective seats. ‘Maldives is divided into 20 administrative districts corresponding to atoll groups; arrangement shown here is from north to south. Total area figures are pre-December 2004 (or pre-Indian Ocean tsunami). [For 196 inhabited administrative islets only. ‘Includes the population of non-administrative islets within administrative districts (including both residents and foreigners working on resort islets [pop. 8,540] or industrial/other islets [pop. 2,327]). 7Total area of all 1,192 islets (including 88 resort islets and 34 industrial/other islets) is 298 sq km (115 sq mi). $Based on areas of inhabited islands only. ?The only non-Sunni are Shri members of the Indian trading community and non-Muslim workers who serve alcohol on the resort islands. !°Includes workers not actively seeking employment. !Male (capital island) only. 2Data taken from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2002-08, comprising 834 households in both Male and outer atolls. 3At 1995 prices. 14Less imputed bank service charges. Includes 18,605 unemployed. !*Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Imports ci.f.; exports f.o.b. 8Exports include reexports unless otherwise footnoted. 1*7Domestic exports only. 2°Male airport. 2!Circulation of 2 daily newspapers. 22Subscribers. Maldives College of Higher Education.

Internet resources for further information: * Ministry of Planning and National Development http://www.planning.gov.mv * Maldives Monetary Authority http://www.mma.gov.mv

638

Britannica World Data Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.0; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure:

Mali

n.a. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$5,704,000,000 (U.S.$477 per capita).

Official name: République du Mali (Republic of Mali). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [147]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bamako. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Area and population Regions

area

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

1998 census

Gao

65,858

170,572

495,178

Kayes

Kayes

46,233

119,743

1,424,657

Kidal

Kidal

58,467

151,430

65,524

Koulikoro

Koulikoro

37,007

95,848

1,620,811

Mopti Ségou Sikasso Tombouctou

Mopti Ségou Sikasso Tombouctou (Timbuktu)

30,509 25,028 27,135

79,017 64,821 70,280

1,405,370 1,652,594 1,839,747

191,743

496,611

496,312

Bamako

% of labour

forces

force

1,001,900 269,500

36.5 9.8

984,600 11,400

37.9 0.4

97

252

482,077

1,248,574

Manufacturing

153,700

5.6

272,500

10.5

Construction Public utilities

166,100 43,200

64 1.6

102,100 5,100

3.9 0.2

Transp. and commun.

128,400

4.7

55,300

24

Trade, hotels

424,200

15.5

675,700

26.0

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

166,000 =

6.0 Az

8,400 39,900

0.3 15

169,600 220,2005 2,742,800

6.2 8.05 100.0

214,000 229,2008 2,598,200

8.2 8.86 100.07

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF ’000,000,000 % of total

1,178,977

10,179,170!

2001 -7.0 0.7%

2002 +113.4 10.2%

2003 -35.2 3.2%

2004 -61.5 5.6%

2005 -70.1 5.5%

2006 -81.2 6.4%

Imports (2005): CFAF 669,000,000,000 (petroleum products 32.5%, machinery and apparatus 24.1%, food products 21.2%). Major import sources (2004): African countries 49.3%, of which Senegal 9.8%, Côte d'Ivoire 7.6%; France

Demography Population (2007): 11,995,000.

14.5%; Germany 4.0%. Exports (2005): CFAF 598,900,000,000 (gold 65.0%, raw cotton and cotton products 24.2%). Major export destinations (2004): China 31.6%; Thailand 6.9%; Italy 6.9%; Germany 5.1%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 24.9, persons per sq km 9.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 30.5%; rural 69.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.67%; female 50.33%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 48.1%; 15-29, 27.7%; 30-44, 12.9%; 45-59, 6.4%; 60-74, 4.1%; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 13,025,000; (2020) 17,505,000. Doubling time: 21 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Bambara 30.6%; Senufo 10.5%; Fula Macina

(Niafunke) 9.6%; Soninke 7.4%; Tuareg 7.0%; Maninka 6.6%; Songhai 6.3%; Dogon 4.3%; Bobo 3.5%; other 14.2%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim (nearly all Sunni) c. 90%; Christian (mostly Roman Catholic) c. 5%; traditional beliefs/nonreligious c. 5%. Major cities (1998): Bamako (2005) 1,368,0002; Sikasso 113,803; Ségou 90,898; Mopti 79,840; Koutiala 74,153; Kayes 67,262.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 49.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 33.0 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 7.42. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 47.2 years; female 51.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 1,487, of which HIV/AIDS 97; diseases of the circulatory system 135;

accidents and injuries 120; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 54; chronic respiratory diseases 36.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 453 mi, 729 km; passenger-km (2002) 196,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2002) 188,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 11,625 mi, 18,709 km (paved 18%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 18,900; trucks and buses 31,700. Air transport: n.a.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

date

Budget (2006). Revenue: CFAF 694,300,000,000 (tax revenue 66.1%, grants 23.496, nontax revenue 4.396, other 6.296). Expenditures: CFAF 795,100,000,000 (current expenditure 56.8%; capital expenditure 43.2%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$2,843,000,000.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 148; remittances (2006) 177; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 152; official development assistance (2005) 691. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 77; remittances (2006) 70. Population economically active (2004): total 2,598,2003; activity rate of total population c. 2396 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 51.196; female 42.596; officially unemployed 8.896). 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

105.2

110.5

109.0

105.6

112.4

1144

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004

400

36

2006

1,5139

1299

2006

83

59

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

45 348 70 2.99

4.1 3.18 50 0.29

Education and health Educational attainment (2001)10. Population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling/unknown 82.196; incomplete primary education 7.796; complete primary 2.096; secondary 6.596; higher 1.796. Literacy (2005): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 29.5%; males literate 40.0%; females literate 19.4%. Education (2005-06) Primary!! (age 6—14) Secondary (age 15-17)

National economy

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

labour

value

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 3.9%, in permanent crops, 0.03%, in pasture 28.4%; overall forest area (2005) 10.3%.

District Bamako

% of total

Services Other TOTAL

population

Gao

TOTAL

in value CFAF ’000,000

Agriculture, fishing Mining

CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

2004

Vocational

Higher'2, 13

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

8,079 121

39,109 1,904

1,990,765 47,279

50.9 248

119

51,604

s.

1

32,609

Health: physicians (2004) 1,053 (1 per 10,566 persons); hospital beds (2001) 1,664 (1 per 6,203 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 107.5.

Food (2005): n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 7,350 (army 10096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.3%; per capita expenditure U.S.$10.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): millet 1,157,810, rice 945,823, corn (maize) 634,464, sorghum 629,127, seed

cotton (2006) 476,200, peanuts (groundnuts) 279,503, cowpeas 94,642, karite

nuts 85,000; livestock (number of live animals) 12,050,000 goats, 8,370,000 sheep, 7,700,000 cattle, 720,000 asses, 472,000 camels; roundwood 5,440,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 92%; fisheries production 101,008 (from aquacul-

ture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2005): salt 6,000; gold 44,230 kg4. Manufacturing (2002): beef and veal (2001) 215,000; mutton and lamb meat (2001) 66,000; raw sugar (2003) 34,000; cement 18,125; soft drinks 197,700

hectolitres; cigarettes [1999] 51,400 cartons. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 455,000,000 (455,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (184,000); natural gas, none (none).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Excludes 772,006 Malians living abroad. @Population of urban agglomeration. 3Per 2004 Malian labour force survey; the 2004 population economically active estimate of the ILO Employment Trends Unit is 5,322,000. ^Excludes artisanal production of c. 2,000 kg. *Import taxes. 5Includes 227,500 unemployed. "Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Circulation of 2 out of 4 daily newspapers. ?Subscribers. Based on the Mali Demographic and Health Survey 2001, comprising 64.116 people in 12,331 households. HIncludes lower secondary. 122004—05. University of Bamako only.

Internet resources for further information: * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm * Direction Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Informatique http://www.dnsi.gov.ml

Nations of the World

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$5,899,000,000 (U.S.$14,575 per capita).

Malta

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repubblikka ta' Malta (Maltese); Republic of Malta (English). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (House of Representatives [65]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Valletta. Official languages: Maltese; English. Official religion: Roman Catholicism. Monetary unit: Maltese lira (Lm; plural liri); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2002 in value Lm ‘000 Agriculture

Islands Statistical districts?

Largest localities

Comino

—

Rabat

Malta Northern District Northern Harbour South Eastern District Southern Harbour Western District

Mosta Birkirkara Zejtun Zabbar Rabat

TOTAL

sq km

1.1

28

2005 final census

25.9

67.1

94.94

245.74

28.5 9.3 19.4 10.1 28.0

Z3 24.0 50.2 26.2 725

57,167 119,332 59,371 81,047 57,038

121.9

315.6

404,962

23

2,200

1.3

19.4

26,500 700

16.1 0.4

Construction

48,315

91.0073

24

88,704

5.3

11,500

7.0

155,319

9.3

35,400

21.5

132,182

7.9

15,500

9.4

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

464,3499 170,235 255,57510 1,680,444

27.69 10.1 15.210 100.0

14,400 29,900 12,700! 164,400

8.8 18.2 734 100.012

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —345.7 16.4%

2002 —266.4 12.2%

2003 —351.3 15.9%

2004 407.6 18.3%

2005 493.9 23.1%

2006 —500.2 21.1%

Imports (2004): Lm 1,316,900,000 (machinery and transport equipment 47.4%, food 9.2%, chemicals and chemical products 8.4%, mineral fuels 8.0%). Major import sources: Italy 17.9%; France 17.7%; U.K. 9.6%; Germany 9.1%; Singapore 6.9%.

Age breakdown (20055): under 15, 17.2%; 15-29, 21.7%; 30-44, 19.7%; 45-59, 22.396; 60-74, 13.5%; 75-84, 4.5%; 85 and over, 1.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 417,000; (2020) 432,000. Ethnic composition (2005): Maltese 97.0%; other European 23.7%, of which British 1.2%; other 0.7%.

Catholic c. 9596, of which practicing c.

63%; other Christian c. 0.596; Muslim c. 0.796; nonreligious/atheist c. 296;

other c. 1.896. . Major localities (2005): Birkirkara 21,858; Mosta 18,735; Qormi 16,559; Zabbar 14,671; Valletta 6,300 (urban agglomeration 81,047).

Exports (2004): Lm 909,300,000 (machinery and transport equipment [mostly electronic microcircuits] 63.9%, basic manufactures 18.8%, refined petroleum 4.4%). Major export destinations: Singapore 15.2%; U.S. 11.6%; France 10.9%; U.K. 10.0%; Germany 8.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 1,400 mi, 2,254 km (paved 88%). Vehicles (200514): passenger cars 207,055; trucks and buses 45,054. Air transport (2006)15: passenger-km 2,376,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 11,000,000.

Vital statistics

Communications

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.4 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 80.096; outside of marriage 20.096. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 1.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.37. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.9/6. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 77.7 years; female 81.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 335.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 185.6; diseases of the respiratory system 88.0; accidents, poisonings, and violence 31.4; endocrine and metabolic diseases 26.3; diseases of the digestive system 26.3.

Medium

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: Lm 1,032,046,000 (social security 21.5%; income tax 19.0%; grants and loans 17.1%; value-added tax 16.396). Expenditures: Lm 985,552,000 (recurrent expenditures 76.7%, of which social security 22.4%,

education 5.2%; capital expenditure 13.3%; public debt service 9.0%).

Public debt (2006): U.S.$731,600,0007.

7,286, cabbages 3,456, grapes 2,694; livestock (number of live animals) 73,025

pigs, 19,742 cattle, 14,642 sheep; roundwood (2005) negligible; fisheries production (2005) 2,171 (from aquaculture 34%). Mining and quarrying (2006): limestone 1,200,000 cu m, small quantities of salt. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): telecommunications equipment and electronics 171; food products 78; printing and publishing 59; rubber products 37. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 2,216,000,000 (2,216,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (799,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2006): total 164,400; activity rate of total population 40.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 59.1%; female 32.1%; unemployed [March 2007] 6.8%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.9 104.5

105.2 1114

106.6 121.3

109.5

112.8 fas

115.88 E

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 2.9; average annual income per household (2000) Lm 7,945 (U.S.$18,155); sources of income (1993): wages and salaries 63.8%, professional and unincorporated enterprises 19.3%, rents, dividends, and interest 16.9%; expenditure (2000): food and beverages 36.6%, transportation and communications 23.4%, recreation, entertainment, and education 9.4%, household furnishings and opera-

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

222

553

2006 2006

34717 202

86017 502

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2005 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

67 6816 127 4217

166 16916 315 10417

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 2.4%; special education for disabled 0.3%; primary education 25.9%; secondary 45.3%; some postsecondary 16.5%; undergraduate or professional qualification 7.2%; graduate 2.4%. Literacy (2005): total population age 10 and over literate 92.8%; males literate 91.7%; females literate 93.9%. Education (2004-05)

student/

Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-17)

Production (metric tons except where noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): potatoes 22,000, melons 17,680, tomatoes 15,910, wheat 9,500, onions

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

7.4

3,400

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 31%, in permanent crops c. 396, in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) c. 196.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 3,355, persons per sq km 1,296. Urban-rural (2005): urban 95.3%; rural 4.7%. Sex distribution (20055): male 49.59%; female 50.41%.

tions 7.6%.

12,200

8

(2006) 32; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 101.

Demography Population (2007): 409,000.

Consumer price index Earnings index

29

s

Finance, real estate

Lm '000,000 % of total

Religious affiliation (2004): Roman

% of labour force

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 754; remittances (2006) 34; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 326. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 268; remittances

population

sq mi

labour force

39,297

Trade, hotels

area

% of total value

326,468

Transp. and commun.

Area and population

2006

Manufacturing Mining Public utilities

1 U.S.$ = Lm 0.32; 1 £ = Lm 0.64.1

Gozo

639

Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

90

1,919

29,596

15.4

}

28,204 ne

2

2,904

825

4,386

TES

10,367

12.6

Health (2002): physicians 1,084 (1 per 365 persons); hospital beds 1,932 (1 per 205 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 6.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,762 (vegetable products 74%, animal products 26%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 2,237 (armed forces includes air and marine elements). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7% 18; per capita expenditure U.S.$10118,

1Malta is to adopt the euro on Jan. 1, 2008. ?Actual local administration in 2006 was based on 68 local councils grouped into 3 regions. ?Four people lived on Comino as of Jan. 1, 2004. ^Detail does not add to total given because statistical district data are based on older survey. 5Per final census. (Divorce was illegal in mid-2007. 7Governmentguaranteed debt. Average of first three quarters. 7Pub. admin., defense includes Public utilities. JXIndirect taxes less subsidies. HIncludes 11,925 unemployed. 2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. “Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. June 30. Air Malta only. !¢Circulation for 3 out of 4 daily newspapers. !"Subscribers. i$Excludes expenditure on military pensions.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistics Office http://www.nso.gov.mt * Central Bank of Malta http://www.centralbankmalta.com

640

Britannica World Data

ty 2.2%; expenditure (2003)8: food 35.9%, housing and energy 17.1%, transportation 13.7%, education and communication 6.6%, wearing apparel 4.3%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$191,000,000 (U.S.$3,295 per capita).

Marshall Islands Official name: Majol (Marshallese); Republic of the Marshall Islands (English). Form of government: unitary republic with one legislative house! (Nitijela

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2001

[33]).

Head of state and government: President. Capital: Majuro?. Official languages: Marshallese (Kajin-Majol); English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: U.S. dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Agriculture, tishing Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, insurance, real estate Public administration

1U.S.$ - £0.50.

Services area. . population

Atolls/Islands?

sq km

1999 census

Ailinglaplap Ailuk Arno Aur Bikini Ebon Enewetak Jabat Jaluit Kili Kwajalein Lae Lib Likiep

14.69 5.36 12.95 5.62 6.01 5.75 5.85 0.57 11.34 0.93 16.39 1.45 0.93 10.26

1,959 514 2,069 537 13 902 853 95 1,669 774 10,903 322 147 527

aa Atolls/Islands? Majuro Maloelap Mejit Mili Namorik Namu Rongelap Ujae Ujelang Utirik Wotho Wotje Other atolls TOTAL

population. 1999 census

sq km 9.71 9.82 1.86 15.93 2.77 6.27 7.95 1.86 1.74 2.43 4.33 8.18 10.46 181.434,5

23,682 856 416 1,032 772 903 19 440 0 433 145 866 0 50,848

Demography Population (2007): 56,600. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 808.0, persons per sq km 312.0.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 66.196; rural 33.996. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.0296; female 48.9896.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 38.1%; 15-29, 30.8%; 30-44, 16.5%; 45-59, 10.396; 60-74, 3.4%; 75-84, 0.8%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 58,000; (2020) 61,000. Doubling time: 25 years. Ethnic composition (nationality; 2000): Marshallese 88.5%; U.S. white 6.5%; other Pacific Islanders and East Asians 5.0%. Religious affiliation (1999): Protestant 85.0%, of which United Church of Christ 54.8%, Assemblies of God 25.8%; Roman 2.1%; nonreligious 1.5%; other/unknown 3.0%.

Catholic 8.4%; Mormon

Major towns (1999): Majuro2 (2004) 20,800; Ebeye (in Kwajalein Atoll) 9,345; Laura (in Majuro Atoll) 2,256; Ajeltake (in Majuro Atoll) 1,170; Enewetak 823.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 33.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 28.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.84. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 68.3 years; female 72.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003-04; registered deaths only): sepsis/septicemia 83.7; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 41.9; myocardial

% of total value

10,296.1

10.4

952

291.4 4,489.5 3,402.2 11,314.1 5,044.8

0.3 45 3.4 11.4 54

— 43 252 499 531

16,937.3

174

1,808

19.7

15,458.2

15.6

910436

ole

393 2,630

43 28.7

1,128 9,1615

12.3 100.0

}

896.710 99,173.85

Budget (2005). Revenue: U.S.$83,900,000 (U.S. government grants 63.9%; tax revenue 26.4%, of which income tax 11.7%, import duties 9.3%; nontax rev-

enue 9.7%). Expenditures: U.S.$86,900,000 (current expenditure 80.2%, capital expenditure 19.8% ). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004-05): U.S.$100,800,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2002-03): breadfruit 4,536, coconuts 885, bananas 161, pandanus 114, taro 108; livestock (number of live animals) 12,900 pigs, 86,000 chickens; round-

wood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 56,664, of which skipjack (2004) 36,810 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: for local construction only. Manufacturing (2005): copra 5,194; coconut oil and processed (chilled or frozen) fish are important products; the manufacture of handicrafts and personal items (clothing, mats, boats, etc.) by individuals is also significant. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 81,000,000 (81,000,000); coal, none (none); petroleum products, n.a. (n.a.). Population economically active (1999): total 14,677; activity rate of total population 28.9% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 52.1%; female 34.1%; unemployed [2004] 33.6%). Price and earnings indexes (2001 = 100) 2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.3 100.3

98.5 99.3

100.6 105.5

105.1

109.6 Mt

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2006)6 7.9; average annual income per household (2005)6 U.S.$17,482; sources of income (2002)?: wages and salaries 89.3%, rent and investments 2.4%, social securi-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

% of labour force? 10.4

— 0.5

2.8 5.4 58

924

0.910 100.0

10.1

(U.$.$'000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.12. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 6%, in permanent crops c. 4496, in pasture c. 2296; overall forest area (2005) n.a.

Foreign trade!5 Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

-74.4 80.9%

—69.4 77.6%

-590.2 72.296

—63.3 69.0%

-57.4 64.6%

69.3 67.7%

Imports (2000): U.S.$68,200,000 (mineral fuels and lubricants 43.6%; machinery and transport equipment 16.9%; food, beverages, and tobacco 10.9%). Major import sources (2003): U.S. 54.1%; Australia 13.4%; Japan 4.9%; New Zealand 3.4%; Hong Kong 3.3%. Exports (2005): U.S.$16,400,000 (reexports of diesel fuel 80.996; crude coconut oll 15.496; remainder 3.796). Major export destinations (2000): U.S. c. 7196.

Transport and communications Transport. Roads (2002): only Majuro and Kwajalein have paved roads (40.0 mi, 64.5 km). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 1,694; trucks and buses 602. Air transport (2005)14: passenger-km 36,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 327,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

E

dis

2004 2004

0.615 45

1215 82

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004 2005 2006 2005

5.0 0 22 ése

92 0 36 ses

Education and health Educational attainment (2006)6. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 2.1%; elementary education 28.0%; secondary 55.8%; some higher 7.9%; undergraduate degree 5.1%; advanced degree 1.1%. Literacy (2000): total population age 15 and over literate 92.0%; males literate 92.0%; females literate 92.0%. Education (2003-04)

Primary (age 6-14)

National economy

labour force?

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004—05) 5.5; remittances (2005) 0.4; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 125; official development assistance (2005) 5211. Disbursements for

infarction 27.3; pneumonia 25.5; suicide 23.7.

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

in value U.S.$'000

Other TOTAL

Area and population

2004

Secondary (age 15-18) Voc., teacher tr.16 Higher!”

schools

teachers

students

student/ teacher ratio

100

759

10,991

145

16 1 1

207 bo xU

3,196 27 250

15.4 E

Health (2004): physicians 33 (1 per 1,744 persons); hospital beds 140 (1 per 411 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 28.3.

Military The United States provides for the defense of the Republic of the Marshall Islands under the 1984 and 2003 compacts of free association!8. 1In addition, the Council of Iroij, a 12-member body of tribal chiefs, serves in an advi-

sory capacity. 2Local name Djarrit [Rita] ——three small Majuro, Ebeye, Wotje, and only; excludes lagoon area given because of rounding. 9,491 respondents

of town is DUD (an acronym for Delap [Woja], Uliga, and islands now merged by landfill). 3Four districts centred at Jaluit make up the local government structure. ^Land area of 11,673 sq km (4,507 sq mi). 5Detail does not add to total $Based on the 2006 RMI Community Survey, comprising

in 1,205 households.

7Based

on the 2002 Household

Income

and

Expenditure Survey, comprising 5,074 respondents in 657 households. Weights of consumer price index components. ?Employed only. !°Import duties less imputed bank service charges. HFigure represents commitments. !¢@Labour income of Marshallese at Kwajalein (2003-04) U.S.$17,600,000. Imports f.0.b. in balance of trade; c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. “Air Marshall Islands only. “Subscribers. !¢Fisheries and Nautical Training Center only. "University of the South Pacific Marshall Islands campus only. 18The U.S. Army’s premier ballistic missile test site is at Kwajalein; number of troops at site, n.a.

Internet resources for further information: * Secretariat of the Pacific Community: PRISM http://www.spc.int/prism/ * Republic of the Marshall Islands: Documents http://marshall.wetserver.net/index.jsp

Nations of the World

Martinique

|

| Atlantic | Ocean |

Official name: Département de la Martinique (Department of Martinique). Political status: overseas department (France) with two legislative houses (General Council [45]; Regional Council [41]). Chief of state: President of France. Heads of government: Prefect (for France); President of the General Council (for Martinique); President of the Regional Council (for Martinique). Capital: Fort-de-France. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

La Trinité Le Marin Saint-Pierre

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0

102.1

104.2

106.4

108.6

111.2

113.9

20051, 4 % of total value

labour force

% of labour force

307,835

5.6

8,922

5.9

Manufacturing

40,884

212,490

0.8

4,998

3.8

Construction

391,642

7.2

6,044

4.0

67,017

1.2

1,163

0.8

341,724

6.2

5,939

3.9

19,693

13.0

Agriculture, fishing

Mining

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants,

hotels

sq mi

sq km

1999 census

171

La Trinité

131

338

85,006

Le Marin Saint-Pierre

158 81

409 210

106,818 23,464

436

1,128

381,427

947,777

17.3

Finance, real estate, insurance

1,447,214

26.4

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

610,731 1,370,843 —264,4305 5,473,7267

11.2 25.0 —4.85 100.0

}

8,003

5.3

22,390 36,247 38,0206 151,419

148 23.9 25.16 100.0

Foreign trade’

166,139

Balance of trade (current prices) 1999 —1,355 72.2%

€'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 401,000.

2000 —1,448 71.1%

2001 -1,576 71.8%

2002 —1,530 70.2%

2003 —1,574 69.8%

2004 —1,661 73.5%

2005 —1,862 70.4%

Imports (2002): €1,855,000,000 (products for agricultural industry and food 18.5%, automobiles 12.2%, mineral fuels 9.7%, chemicals and chemical prod-

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 919.7, persons per sq km 355.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 98.0%; rural 2.0%. Sex distribution (20051): male 47.01%; female 52.99%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 21.4%; 15-29, 19.4%; 30-44, 23.7%; 45-59,

18.4%: 60-74, 11.1%;75-84, 4.3%; 85 and over, 1.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 405,000; (2020) 408,000. Ethnic composition (2000): mixed race (black/white/Asian) 93.4%; French (metropolitan and Martinique white) 3.0%; East Indian 1.9%; other 1.7%. Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 86.0%; Protestant 5.6% (mostly Seventh-day Adventist); other Christian 5.4%; other 3.0%. Major communes (2003): Fort-de-France 96,400; Le Lamentin Scheelcher 21,400; Le Robert (1999) 21,201; Sainte-Marie 20,600.

3.9

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 9%, in permanent crops c. 1096, in pasture c. 1096; overall forest area (2005) c. 4496.

population

66

TOTAL

2002

in value €000

area

Fort-de-France

2001

2001

Area and population

Fort-de-France

Consumer price index

2000

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

1 £ = €1.48.

Capitals

Price index (2000 = 100)

Gross national income (2003): U.S.$5,780,000,000 (U.S.$14,730 per capita).

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

Arrondissements

641

36,400;

19.1%; French Guiana 4.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 1,308 mi, 2,105 km (paved [1988] 75%). Vehicles (1998): passenger cars 147,589; trucks and buses 35,615. Air transport (2004): passengers 1,614,876; cargo 13,003 metric tons.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 13.3 (world avg. 20.3); (1997) within marriage 31.8%; outside of marriage 68.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.90. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2004) 3.6/(2003) 1.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 75.9 years; female 82.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 2342, of which cerebrovascular diseases 86.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 164.8; accidents, poisoning, and violence 55.7; infectious and parasitic diseases 52.3; diabetes mellitus 36.1.

National economy

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

66

169

2004 2001

29510 172

74510 417

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

82 30? 130 eee

207 759 326 ane

Education and health Educational attainment (1999). Percentage of population age 20 and over having: unknown, or no formal education through lower secondary education 63.6%; vocational 16.7%; upper secondary 9.2%; incomplete higher 5.0%; complete higher 5.5%. Literacy (2005): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 98.0%; males literate 97.6%; females literate 98.3%.

Budget (2004). Revenue?: €599,000,000 (current revenue 75.3%, of which tax revenue 46.1%, aid from France 25.7%; capital revenue 24.7%). Expenditures: €599,000,000 (current expenditure 70.8%, of which transfers 51.1%, wages and salaries 13.2%; capital expenditure 29.2%). Public debt (1994): U.S.$186,700,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): bananas 300,000, sugarcane 211,000, roots and tubers 29,500 (of which 7,003, sweet potatoes 765), plantains 18,030, tomatoes 7,730, lettuce cucumbers and gherkins 3,823, melons 2,713, coconuts 1,083; livestock ber of live animals) 25,000 cattle, 20,000 pigs, 18,000 sheep, 13,500

ucts 7.9%). Major import sources: France 64.5%; Venezuela 5.9%; Netherlands Antilles 3.8%; Germany 3.3%; Italy 2.7%. Exports (2002): €325,000,000 (agricultural products [significantly bananas 42.8%, refined petroleum 20.0%, processed foods and beverages [significantly rum] 19.1%). Major export destinations: France 68.9%; Guadeloupe

yams 6,780, (numgoats;

roundwood (2005) 12,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 83%; fisheries production (2005) 5,592 (from aquaculture 2%). Mining and quarrying (2005): salt

200,000, pumice 130,000. Manufacturing (2004): cement 224,090; sugar 4,140; rum 81,091 hectolitres; other products include clothing, fabricated metals, and

yawls and sails. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004)

Education (2004-05) schools!!

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Vocational

Higher

teachers

students

273

1,971"

49,615

77

2,02411

38,568

14

89612

12,095

3,19011

student/ teacher ratio

12,00013

Health (2005): physicians 9861 (1 per 403 persons); hospital beds 2,0361 (1 per 195 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 7.3. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel (August 2005): 1,250 French troops (including troops stationed in Guadeloupe, excluding gendarmerie).

1,190,000,000 (1,190,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels;

2004) none (4,400,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 820,000 (605,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004-05) 2.6; average annual disposable income per household (2001) €32,859 (U.S.$36,720); sources of income (2000): wages and salaries 54.7%, inheritance or endowment 14.0%, self-employment 12.7%, other 18.6%; expenditure (1993): food and beverages 32.1%, transportation and communications 20.7%, housing and energy 10.6%, household durable goods 9.4%, clothing and footwear 8.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 280; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI) n.a. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI, na. Population economically active (2003): total 183,0003; activity rate of total population 46.7%3 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.4%3; female 49.7%3;

unemployed [2005] 21.8%). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1January 1. ?In 2006, aid from the French government made up an estimated 30.8% of Martinique's revenue. 3Estimate of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 4Salaried employees only. *Unattributed charges. ‘Unemployed. 7Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 3Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. ?Circeulation of daily newspapers. J^Subscribers. 112002—03. 121995—96. 1*Total enrollment of the University of the Antilles and French Guiana at 7 sites.

Internet resources for further information: * INSEE: Martinique http://www.insee.fr/fr/insee regions/martinique/home/home page.asp * Martinique Chamber of Commerce and Industry http://www.martinique.cci.fr

642

Britannica World Data

Mauritania

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Official name: Al-Tumhüriyah al-Islamiyah al-Miritaniyah (Arabic) (Islamic Republic of Mauritania). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [561]; National Assembly

Consumer price index Hourly earnings index?

[95]).

area

Kaédi Sélibaby Néma *Ayoün el-'Atroüs Akjoujt Tidjikdja Zouérate Rosso. Nouakchott

TOTAL

2005 estimate?

sq mi

sq km

14,100 83,100 13,000

36,600 215,300 33,800

271,300 71,500 270,300

8,600

22,300

104,000

5,8300 4,000 70,600 20,600 18,100 36,800

13,600 10,300 182,700 53,400 46,800 95,200

268,700 195,900 320,300 238,200 10,300 79,700

114.4 103.8

126.3 124.4

141.6 193.7

150.4

97,600 25,800

252,900 66,800

49,200 282,800

400

1,000

743,500

398,000

1,030,700

2,905,700

labour force

% of labour force

Agriculture, livestock, fishing

112,075

157

314,306

48.2

Crude petroleum

158,626

22.2

vum

30,156

at 46

15,562 17,916

2.4 28

91,212

}

12.8

23,952

3A

Construction Transp. and commun.

39,638 27,461

5.5 3.8

Finance Services Pub. admin., defense

$5,591 66,005 71,296

se 9.2 10.0

55,7989 714,694

5,769

16.7

55,95810 651,767

8.610 100.0

2011 98,720

}

03 n

2004 -4838 35.5%

2005 -783.3 39.3%

2006 +199.6 7.9%

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 433 mi, 697 km; (2000) passengerkm, negligible; (2000) metric ton-km cargo 7,766,000,000. Roads (2005): total length 5,682 mi, 9,144 km (paved 30%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 12,200; trucks and buses 18,200. Air transport (2002)!!: passenger-km 45,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,000,000.

Communications Medium

Major cities (2005): Nouakchott 743,500; Nouadhibou 94,700; Rosso (2000)

48,922; Boghé (2000) 37,531; Adel Bagrou (2000) 36,007.

date

Televisions

units

National economy

Cellular Landline

units

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2003

123

44

Telephones

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 41.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.2 (world avg. 8.6). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.86. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 50.9 years; female 55.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases 178; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 71; diseases of the respiratory system 44; diseases of the digestive system 26.

Medium

date

PCs

2006 2006

1,06013 34

34813 11

Internet users Broadband

Budget (2005). Revenue: UM 131,300,000,000 (tax revenue 57.9%, of which revenue

34.3%, of which fishing royalties 26.9%; grants 7.8%). Expenditures: UM (current expenditure 76.2%, of which goods and services

36.5%, wages and salaries 13.5%, defense 10.7%; capital expenditure 23.8%). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.5%, in permanent crops 0.01%, in pasture 38.3%; overall forest area (2005) 0.3%. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sorghum 83,800, rice 70,462, dates 22,000, corn (maize) 17,285, peas (2005) 11,738, cowpeas (2005) 7,500; livestock (number of live animals?) 7,363,000 sheep, (2005) 5,600,000 goats, 1,651,000 camels, 1,389,000 cattle; roundwood (2005) 1,629,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 99.6%; fisheries production 491,877, of which octopuses 19,023 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (gross weight; 2006-07): iron ore 11,439,000; gypsum (2005) 39,000; copper 5,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 1997): food, beverages, and tobacco products 5.2; machinery, transport equipment, and fabricated metals 3.8; bricks, tiles, and cement 1.6. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006-07) 404,000,000 (290,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (7,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07)6 9,600,000 ([2004] 8,830,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2006-07) none (431,000). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 11; remittances (2006) 2; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 109; official development assistance (2005) 190. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (1999) 55; remittances, n.a. Population economically active (2006): total 1,238,000; activity rate of total population 39.2% (participation rates: over age 15, 68.8%; female 40.4%; unemployed [2005] 32.5%).

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

42

14

1996

1.012

0.412

2006 2006

100 0.718

33 0.219

Dailies

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 6 and over having: no formal schooling 43.996; no formal schooling but literate 2.596; Islamic schooling 18.496; primary education 23.296; lower secondary 5.396; upper secondary 4.6%; higher technical 0.4%; higher 1.7%. Literacy (2006): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 51.2%; males literate 59.5%; females literate 43.4%. Education (2004-05)

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

108,532

Exports (2006): U.S.$1,366,600,000 (petroleum 47.0%; iron ore 34.2%; fish 14.7%). Major export destinations: China 26.3%; Italy 11.8%; France 10.2%; Belgium 6.8%; Spain 6.7%; Japan 5.4%.

Christian 0.3%; other 0.1%.

import taxes 8.2%; nontax

04

Imports (2006): U.S.$1,167,000,000 (petroleum exploration equipment 37.2%; petroleum products 19.5%).Major import sources: France 11.9%; China 8.2%; US. 6.8%; Belgium 6.7%; Italy 5.9%; Spain 4.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 3,363,000; (2020) 4,153,000. Doubling time: 24 years. Ethnic composition (2003)4: black African-Arab-Berber (Black Moor) 40%; Arab-Berber (White Moor) 30%; black African (mostly Wolof, Tukulor, Soninke, and Fulani) 30%. Religious affiliation (2000): Sunni Muslim 99.1%; traditional beliefs 0.5%;

17.0%,

0.9

2,837

7.89 100.0

Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 2002 2003 U.S.$'000,000 —110.0 -905 | -2238 96 of total 13.496 13.0% 26.0%

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 45.6%; 15-29, 27.2%; 30-44, 15.6%; 45-59, 8.0%; 60-74, 3.1%; 75 and over, 0.5%.

taxes

2000

Foreign trade

Urban-rural (2006): urban 65.5%; rural 34.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.50%; female 50.50%.

166,100,000,000

108.8 103.8

Public debt (external, outstanding; 20075): U.S.$2,300,000,000.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 7.8, persons per sq km 3.0.

corporate

104.7 103.8

Other TOTAL

Demography Population (2007): 3,124,000.

20.3%,

100.0 100.0

Trade

population

Capital District

VAT

2006

% of total value

Public utilities

Nouadhibou

Nouakchott

2005

UM '000,000

Manufacturing

Kiffa Atar Aleg

Tiris Zemmour Trarza

2004

Mining

Capitals

Gorgol Guidimaka Hodh ech-Chargui Hodh el-Gharbi Inchiri Tagant

2003

in value

Area and population

Dakhlet Nouadhibou

2002

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

1 U.S.$ = UM 258.41; 1£=UM 519.44.

El- Acába Adrar Brakna

2001

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004): 5.8; expenditure (2002-03)8: food and beverages 53.1%, housing and energy 13.7%, transportation and communications 12.1%, household furnishings 6.3%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,830,000,000 (U.S.$930 per capita).

Head of state and government: President assisted by the Prime Minister. Capital: Nouakchott. Official language: Arabic?. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: ouguiya (UM); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Regions

2000

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

teachers

2,73214 — 11,2525 17916

students

465,97015

teacher ratio

41.415

2,995

89,540

d

195

3,256

29.9 16.7

m

356

8,758

24.6

Health (2006): physicians (2005) 477 (1 per 6,212 persons); hospital beds 1,826 (1 per 1,667 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 69.5. Food (2003): daily per capita caloric intake 2,786 (vegetable products 8296, animal products 1896); 12196 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 15,870 (army 94.596, navy 3.996, air force 1.696). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.696; per capita expenditure U.S.$24. lIncludes 3 representatives from abroad designated by the 53 elected senators. "Ihe 1991 constitution names Arabic as the official language and the following as national languages: Arabic, Fulani, Soninke, and Wolof. *Mid-year official projection based on 2000 census. 4Estimated figures. SJanuary 1. ‘Offshore crude petroleum production began in February 2006. 7Minimum wage; private sector. SWeights of consumer price index components. ?Indirect taxes. !1Not adequately defined. !1Includes 4/11 of the traffic of the defunct (from 2002) Air Afrique. !¢Circulation of daily newspapers. I3Subscribers. 142002—03. 152005—06. 162003-04.

Internet resources for further information: * Office National de Statistique http://www.ons.mr * Central Bank of Mauritania http://www.bcm.mr

Nations of the World

Mauritius

electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 2,165,000,000

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Daily earnings index?

Mau Rs 30.75; 1 £ = Mau Rs 61.81. Area and population

area Administrative centres

Mauritius Black River

Tamarin

Flacq

Centre de Flacq

Grand Port

Mahébourg

Moka Pamplemousses

population

sq mi

sq km

2006 estimate

720

1,8653

1,215,600

100

259

70,400

115

298

136,100

100

260

113,200

89 69

231 179

79,800 132,600

78 17 57 95

203 43 148 245

377,600 130,300 106,000 69,600

Moka Pamplemousses

Plaines Wilhems Port Louis Rivière du Rempart Savanne

coal (metric tons;

2004) none (289,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (791,000). Population economically active (2004): total 549,600; activity rate of total population 44.5% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 59.2%; female 35.0%; unemployed [2006] 8.996).

Official name: Republic of Mauritius. Form of government: republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [701]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Port Louis. Official language: English?. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Mauritian rupee (Mau Re; plural Mau Rs); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Islands Districts/Dependencies

(2,165,000,000);

643

Rose Hill Port Louis Poudre d'Or Souillac

Mauritian dependencies Agalega^ Cargados Carajos Shoals (Saint Brandon)^

“iss

27

—

0.4

1

Rodrigues

Port Mathurin

40

104

37,100

2,040

1,252,989

TOTAL

70

7883

2895 05

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

105.4 105.0

112.2 109.9

116.6 122.7

122.1 130.4

128.1 136.9

139.5

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.9; annual income per household (2001-02) Mau Rs 170,784 (U.S.$5,780); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2001-02): food and nonalcoholic beverages 31.9%, transportation 12.7%, housing and energy 9.4%, alcohol and tobacco 9.176. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 871; remittances (2006) 215; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 21; official development assistance (2005) 4710. Disbursements for (U.S.$000,000): tourism (2005) 275; remittances (2006) 11; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 17. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 49%, in permanent crops c. 3%, in pasture c. 3%; overall forest area (2005) c. 18%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) Mau Rs’000,000 % of total

2001 —10,479 9.9%

2002 —10,715 9.9%

2003 —12,920 10.9%

2004 -21,482 16.4%

2005 -30,063 19.2%

2006 —41,441 21.8%

Imports (2005): Mau Rs 93,282,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 22.9%; food and live animals 14.8%; refined petroleum 14.4%; fabrics and yarn 8.0%;

transport equipment 5.1%).Major import sources: China 9.8%; South Africa 8.6%; France 7.5%; India 6.9%; Bahrain 5.5%; Finland 4.8%.

Exports (2005): Mau Rs 63,219,000,000 (domestic exports 66.6%, of which clothing 30.9%, sugar 16.7%, fish and fish preparations 5.0%; reexports 26.9%, of which machinery and transport equipment 14.5%; ships’ stores and bunkers 6.5%). Major export destinations: U.K. 29.9%; France 13.3%; U.S.

Demography Population (2007): 1,263,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,603, persons per sq km 619.1. Urban-rural (2006): urban 42.1%; rural 57.9%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.43%; female 50.57%.

9.096; U.A.E. 8.0%; Madagascar 5.3%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 23.9%; 15-29, 24.9%; 30-44, 23.4%; 45-59, 18.0%; 60-74, 7.2%; 75-84, 2.1%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,292,000; (2020) 1,375,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Indo-Pakistani 67.0%; Creole (mixed Caucasian, Indo-Pakistani, and African) 27.4%; Chinese 3.0%; other 2.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (200612): total length 1,255 mi, 2,020 km (paved 9896). Vehicles (200612): passenger cars 84,818; trucks and buses 38,596. Air transport (2005)13: passenger-km 6,274,000,000; metric ton-km

Religious affiliation (2000)6: Hindu 49.6%; Christian 32.2%, of which Roman

cargo 211,716,000.

Catholic 23.6%; Muslim 16.6%; Buddhist 0.4%; other 1.2%. Major urban areas (2006): Port Louis 148,878; Beau Bassin-Rose Hill 109,182; Vacoas-Phoenix 106,255; Curepipe 83,375; Quatre Bornes 80,325.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.73. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 9.2/1.1. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 68.9 years; female 75.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006): diseases of the circulatory system 262.6; endocrine,

nutritional, and metabolic

disorders

168.7;

malignant neoplasms (cancers) 74.9.

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

260

209

Telephones Cellular

2006

T7215

61515

Landline

2006

357

285

Primary (age 5-12) Secondary (age 12—20)

48,875,000,000

Higher

interest

14.0%; police/defense 8.8%; health 8.6%).

on debt 15.0%; education

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$731,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,460,000,000 (U.S.$5,160 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

Mau Rs '000,000

value

force?

force?

9,988

4.9

Mining

48,100

9.3

101

0.1

300

0.1

36,313 10,109

17.6 4.9

121,000 48,400

23.5 9.4

0.6

Public utilities

3,591

1.7

3,000

Transp. and commun.

22,427

10.9

36,900

FA

Trade, hotels

37,587

18.3

110,600

21.4

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

37,865 12,199

18.4 5.9

30,500 39,600

5.9 7.7

21,442 14,2029 205,824

10.4 6.98 100.0

77,400 — 515,800

15.0 — 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 4,984,000, tomatoes 12,840, potatoes 12,780, bananas 11,580, tea 1,390; livestock (number of live animals) 28,000 cattle, chickens, n.a.; roundwood 12,500 cu m, of which fuelwood 4096; fisheries production 10,448 (from

aquaculture 496). Mining (2005): basalt, n.a; marine salt 7,900. Manufacturing (value added in Mau Rs '000,000; 2004): apparel 10,734; food products 3,887; beverages and tobacco 2,224; textiles 1,551; nonmetallic mineral

products 1,418; chemical products 1,181. Energy production (consumption):

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Medium

date

PCs

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

210

169

Dailies Internet users

2004 2005

6014 300

4814 241

Broadband

2006

2215

1715

85.1%; males literate 88.7%; females literate 81.6%.

which taxes on goods and services 47.8%, taxes on trade 18.3%, corporate income tax 12.0%; nontax revenue/grants 9.8%). Expenditures: Mau Rs

Manufacturing Construction

units number

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal education 12.3%; primary 44.1%; lower secondary 23.2%; upper secondary/some higher 17.3%; complete higher 2.6%; unknown 0.5%. Literacy (2000): percentage of total population age 12 and over literate Education (2006)

Agriculture

per 1,000

Medium

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: Mau Rs 39,220,000,000 (tax revenue 90.2%, of (social security 21.1%;

units number

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

290 189

4,183 7,079

121,387 114,657

29.0 16.2

16,773

Ses

z

Health (2006): physicians 1,400 (1 per 895 persons); hospital beds 3,727 (1 per 336 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 14.1. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,945 (vegetable products 85%, animal products 15%); 154% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): none; a 2,000-person paramilitary force includes a coast guard unit. Paramilitary expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$9.

lIncludes 8 “bonus” seats designated by the electoral commission to balance the representation of ethnic communities. *French is not official but may be used to address the speaker of the National Assembly. *Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 4Administered directly from Port Louis. ^As of 2000 census. ^Includes Rodrigues; Rodrigues is 9196. Roman Catholic. "Estimate of employed workers only (including foreigners). Taxes less subsidies and imputed bank service charges. ?September. Figure represents commitments. “Imports cif; exports f.o.b. January 1. Air Mauritius only. M4Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistical Office http://www.gov.mu/portal/sites/ncb/cso/index.htm * Bank of Mauritius http://bom.intnet.mu

644

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2002): U.S.$444,000,000 (U.S.$2,780 per capita).

Mayotte

Structure of value added!? and labour force

Official name: Collectivité Départementale de Mayotte! (Departmental Collectivity of Mayotte). Political status: overseas dependency of France? with one legislative house (General Council [19]). Chief of state: President of France. Head of government: President of the

2004

in value €'o00

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

1,100 i

0.5 ae

3,229 aids

7.2 ae

1,105

25

40,800 35,000 14,600 52,000 16,900

18:6 16.8 7.0 25.0 84

519 5,614 2,007 5,435 145

55,900

26.9

13,460

30.2

13,04414 44,558

29.314 100.0

Agriculture, forestry,

and fishing Mining Manufacturing Public utilities

}

Construction Transp. and commun.

General Council}.

Trade Finance, insurance

Capital: Mamoudzou. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

UD. admin;;idefénse

Services Other TOTAL

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

1£= €148.

}

—8,200 208,100

Islands Communes

area Capitals

population 2002 census

sq mi

sq km

Acoua Bandraboua Bandrele Boueni

4.9 12.5 14.1 5.4

12.6 32.4 36.5 14.1

4,605 7,501 5,537 5,151

Chiconi Chirongui

3.2 10.9

8.3 28.3

6,167 5,696

Dembeni

Dembeni

15.0

38.8

7,825

Kani-Keli Koungou

Kani-Keli Koungou

7.9 11.0

20.5 28.4

4,336 15,383

Grande Terre Acoua Bandraboua Bandrele Boueni

Chiconi Chirongui

Mamoudzou

Mamoudzou

16.2

41.9

45,485

M'tsangamouji

M'tsangamouji

8.4

21.8

5,8382

5:3

13.7

7,068

M'tzamboro

M'tzamboro

Ouangani Sada Tsingoni Petite Terre Dzaoudzi-

Ouangani Sada Tsingoni

73 43 13.4

19.0 11.2 34.8

5,569 6,963 7,779

Labattoir Pamandzi

Dzaoudzi Pamandzi

2.6 1.7

6.7 4.3

12,308 7,510

TOTAL

12.2 0.3

144.14

373.34

160,2655

nent crops, n.a., in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area 14.796.

Foreign trade!5 Balance of trade (current prices) € 000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-171.5 95.6%

-175.5 93.3%

—180.3 95.3%

—198.9 96.2%

-213.0 95.3%

-227.7 95.3%

Imports (2005): €218,200,000 (food products 25.5%; machinery and apparatus 16.7%; transport equipment 14.0%; chemicals and chemical products 8.9%). Major import sources: France 49.3%; Seychelles 9.0%; China 4.2%; South Africa 2.9%; Brazil 2.8%; unspecified 20.7%.

Exports (2005): €5,200,000 (transport equipment and parts 27.0%; machinery and apparatus 23.1%; food products 19.4%, of which fish 10.7%; ylang-ylang 8.8%). Major export destinations: France 42.6%; Comoros 36.1%; Réunion 14.9%; Madagascar 3.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2006): total length 144 mi, 232 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 2,279; trucks and buses 1,453. Air transport (2005): passenger arrivals and departures 200,389; cargo unloaded

Demography Population (2007): 194,000.

and loaded 1,395 metric tons.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,346, persons per sq km 519.7. Urban-rural: n.a. Sex distribution (2006): male 52.2796; female 47.7396. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 45.9%; 15-29, 24.6%; 30-44, 18.1%; 45-59,

Communications

8.4%; 60-74, 2.5%; 75-84, 0.4%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 216,000; (2020) 292,000. Doubling time: 21 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Comorian® 92.3%; Swahili 3.2%; white (French) 1.8%; Makua 1.0%; other 1.7%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Sunni Muslim 96.5%; Christian, principally Roman Catholic, 2.2%; other 1.3%.

12,308.

-3.9 100.0

1.2 12.6 45

Public debt (1997): U.S.$74,600,000. Land use as 96 of total land area (2005): in temporary crops, n.a., in perma-

Area and population

Major communes

2002

(2002): Mamoudzou

45,485; Koungou

15,383; Dzaoudzi

Vital statistics

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

we

2004 2002

4816 10

units Medium

oa

date

National economy Budget (2005)7. Revenue: €269,400,000 (current revenue 81.0%, of which taxes including customs duties 44.8%; development revenue 19.0%). Expenditures: €252,000,000 (current expenditure 78.9%, development expenditure 21.1%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): ylang-ylang 8,057 kg8, vanilla, none’, bananas, coconuts, and mangoes are

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

cea 0 ges

sia 0 m

PCs 2005 Dailies 2005 Internet users — 2005 Broadband 2005

2776 63

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education 37.6%; participating in formal education 17.8%; primary education 20.8%; lower secondary 13.4%; upper secondary 6.3%; higher 4.1%. Literacy (1997): 86.1%. Education (2005-06)

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 41.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 33.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.79. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 59.6; female 64.0.

number

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

teachers

students

122

2,308

31,764

13.8

16

1.419

14,620

dod

8

—

á

—

teacher ratio

6,247

m

—

—

Health (2006): physicians 120 (1 per 1,587 persons); hospital beds 245 (1 per 780 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 61.2.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): n.a.; a detachment of the French Foreign Legion and French naval personnel is stationed at Dzaoudzi.

also cultivated; livestock (number of live animals; 2003) 22,800 goats, 17,200

cattle; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 2,050 (from aquaculture 8%). Mining and quarrying: negligible. Manufacturing: mostly processing of agricultural products, housing construction materials, printing and publishing, and textiles/clothing. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k Whr; 2006) n.a. (151,000,000); petroleum products, none (n.a.). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2002) 4.3; average annual income per household: n.a.; expenditure (1995)?: food and beverages 38.8%, transport and communications 13.1%, clothing and footwear 10.7%, household furnishings 9.8%, housing 7.1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 18; remittances, n.a.; official development assistance (2005) 20810, Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, na. Population economically active (2002): total 44,558; activity rate of total population 27.8% (participation rates: ages 15-60, 50.0%; female 38.6%; unem-

ployed [2006] 25.6%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly earnings index!!.'?

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

100.3 108.0

103.2 119.9

104.3 129.5

104.9 138.6

106.7 152.6

108.1 sag

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

l1Mahoré or Maore in Shimaoré, the local Swahili-based language. ?Final status of Mayotte has not yet been determined; it is claimed by Comoros as an integral part of that country. "From April 2004 executive authority in Mayotte is with the President of the General Council; the position of prefect (France's representative in Mayotte) is expected to be phased out in the near future. ^Revised area as of 2002 census equals 144.5 sq mi (374.2 sq km). ‘Including illegal residents (mostly Comorians from adjacent islands but also Malagasy and continental Africans). ‘About ¥/3 of all Comorians (a mixture of Bantu, Arab, and Malagasy peoples) are recent arrivals from other nearby Comorian islands. 7Mayotte is largely dependent on French aid. 8Export production only. Weights of consumer price index components. Figure represents commitments. liMinimum wage. December 31. For 518 larger enterprises only. MUnemployed. 15Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 16Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * IEDOM: Agence de Mayotte http://www.iedom.fr/dom/mayotte/publications.asp * INSEE: Mayotte http://www.insee.fr/fr/insee regions/reunion/zoom/Mayotte

Nations of the World

Social indicators

Mexico

Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 8.4%; incomplete primary education 14.3%; complete primary 17.6%; incomplete/complete secondary 25.2%; vocational/professional 31.3%; advanced university (masters or doctorate degree) 0.7%; other/unknown 2.5%. Access to services (2005). Proportion of dwellings having: electricity 96.6%; piped water supply 87.8%; piped sewage 84.8%.

Official name: Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States). Form of government: federal republic with two legislative houses (Senate [128]; Chamber of Deputies [500]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Mexico City. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Mexican peso (Mex$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Distribution of income (2000) percentage of household income by decile

1 U.S.$ - Mex$11.03; 1£- Mex$22.17.

area States

Capitals

Aguascalientes

Baja California Baja California Sur Campeche Chiapas Chihuahua Coahuila de Zaragoza Colima Durango Guanajuato Guerrero Hidalgo Jalisco México Michoacan de Ocampo Morelos Nayarit Nuevo León Oaxaca Puebla Querétaro de Arteaga Quintana Roo San Luis Potosi Sinaloa Sonora Tabasco Tamaulipas Tlaxcala Veracruz-Llave Yucatán Zacatecas

Federal District Distrito Federal CONTINENTAL AREA LAND

sq mi

population 2005 census

sq km

Aguascalientes

2,112

5,471

1,065,416

Mexicali La Paz Campeche Tuxtla Gutiérrez Chihuahua Saltillo Colima Durango Guanajuato Chilpancingo Pachuca Guadalajara Toluca Morelia Cuernavaca Tepic Monterrey Oaxaca Puebla Querétaro Chetumal San Luis Potosi Culiacán Herrnosillo Villahermosa Ciudad Victoria Tlaxcala Jalapa (Xalapa) Mérida Zacatecas

26,997 28,369 19,619 28,653 94,571 57,908 2,004 47,560 11,773 24,819 8,036 31,211 8,245 23,138 1,911 10,417 25,067 36,275 13,090 4,420 19,387 24,351 22,521 70,291 9,756 30,650 1,551 27,683 14,827 28,283

69,921 73,475 50,812 74,211 244,938 149,982 5,191 123,181 30,491 64,281 20,813 80,836 21,355 59,928 4,950 26,979 64,924 93,952 33,902 11,449 50,212 63,068 58,328 182,052 25,267 79,384 4,016 71,699 38,402 73,252

2,844,469 512,170 754,730 4,293,459 3,241,444 2,495,200 567,996 1,509,117 4,893,812 3,115,202 2,345,514 6,752,113 14,007,495 3,966,073 1,612,899 949,684 4,199,292 3,506,821 5,383,133 1,598,139 1,135,309 2,410,414 2,608,442 2,394,861 1,989,969 3,024,238 1,068,207 7,110,214 1,818,948 1,367,692

—

571 756,066! 736,950 19,116 1,980 758,450?

WATER INSULAR AREA? TOTAL

1,479 1,958,201! 1,908,690 49,511 5,127 1,964,375?

8

9

0.4

1.5

24

3.4

47

6.2

8.1

11.0

16.7

in value Agriculture, fishing

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services

}

Other TOTAL

10 (highest) 45.6

2006 % of total value

labour force

% of labour force

267,704

38

6,033,000

13.8

100,704 1,257,054 380,234 92,699 725,500 1,449,270 904,356

1.4 18.1 55 1.3 10.4 20.8 13.0

164,100 7,078,700 3,452,500 186,300 2,001,400 12,109,800 2,287,900 2,032,100

0.4 16.2 7.9 0.4 4.6 27.8 5.3 4.7

1,687,4005 43,575,500

3.96 100.0

1.864:912

26.8

-78,3755 6,964,0597

—1.15 100.0

6,542,300

150

Budget (2004). Revenue: Mex$1,774,200,000,000 (tax revenue 43.496, of which income tax 19.596; nontax revenue 28.296; revenue from PEMEX state oi

8,720,916

company 10.9%; other 17.5%). Expenditures: Mex$1,797,500,000,000 (current expenditure 58.3%; capital expenditure 15.2%; extra-budgetary expenditure 26.5%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$108,786,000,000.

103,263,388

Manufacturing (2000)

Protestant 3.2%, independent Christian 2.7%, unaffiliated Christian 1.4%,

other Christian (mostly Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness) 2.0%; Muslim 0.3%; nonreligious 3.1%; other 0.3%. Major cities/urban agglomerations (2005): Mexico City 8,463,906 (19,411,000); Guadalajara

1,600,894

(3,968,000);

Puebla

1,399,519

(1,824,000); Juárez 1,301,452 (1,540,000); Tijuana 1,286,187 (1,649,000); León Netzahualcóyotl

1,133,070 (3,596,000); Zapopan 1,026,492.

1,136,300;

Monterrey

Households. 'Total households (2000) 21,954,733; distribution by size (2000): 1 person 6.0%, 2 persons 12.3%, 3 persons 17.2%, 4 persons 21.8%, 5 persons 17.7%, 6 persons 10.9%, 7 or more persons 14.1%. Migration. Legal Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. in 2004: 173,664; total

number of illegal Mexican immigrants in U.S. (March 2006) c. 6,500,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 19.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.45 Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.6/0.7. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 72.4 years; female 77.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulametabolic,

and nutritional

disorders

77.8;

malignant neoplasms (cancers) 63.7; accidents and violence 50.9; diseases of the digestive system 45.7; diseases of the respiratory system 41.5.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

7

Mex$'000,000

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 96.3%, of which Roman Catholic 87.0%,

107.4; endocrine,

6

2004

detribalized 10.5%; Mexican white 15.0%; Arab 1.0%; Mexican black 0.5%; Spaniard 0.3%; U.S. white 0.2%; other 0.7%.

tory system

5

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Population projection: (2010) 110,293,000; (2020) 120,559,000. Doubling time: 49 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo 64.3%; Amerindian 18.0%, of which

Ciudad

4

National economy Gross national income (2006): U.S.$816,892,000,000 (U.S.$7,775 per capita).

11.8%; 60-74, 5.9%; 75-84, 1.7%; 85 and over, 0.5%; unknown 2.7%.

(1,481,000);

3

religious population (1995-97): percentage of adult population attending church services at least once per week 46%. Social deviance (2000). Offense rate per 100,000 population for: murder 14.1; rape 13.3; major assault 185.0; automobile theft 162.0. Incidence per 100,000 in general population of: alcoholism 7.6; suicide (2001) 3.1.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 140.8, persons per sq km 54.4. Urban-rural (2005): urban 76.0%; rural 24.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.66%; female 51.34%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 30.7%; 15-29, 26.3%; 30-44, 20.4%; 45-59,

1,137,465

2

tor only, less than 20%; both formal and informal sectors, c. 17%. Practicing

Demography Population (2007): 106,535,000.

1,687,549;

1

Material well-being. Percentage of households possessing (2005): television 91.0%, refrigerator 79.0%, washing machine 62.7%, computer 19.6%. Quality of working life. Average workweek (2004): 43.5 hours4. Annual rate per 100,000 insured workers for (2004): injury 2,922; death 11. Labour stoppages (2001): 35, involving 23,234 workers. Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (July 2006): 58.6%. Trade union membership in total workforce (2000): formal sec-

Area and population

Ecatepec

645

Manufacturing Transport equipment Food Chemicals and chemical products Beverages Nonmetallic mineral products Electrical machinery Iron and steel Nonelectrical machinery

Paper and paper products Rubber and plastic Metal products Automobile parts

Tobacco Nonferrous metals

no. of enterprises?

no. of employees (000)

yearly wages asa % of avg. of all wages

value added (U.S.$ 000,000)

266,033 e 91,894

1,476,309 105,429 247,869

100.0 105.4 91.5

60,760 9,439 8,883

7,321

131,530

165.7

8,726

bee 24,397 ts 401 n

110,074 46,520 132,335 34,591 49,374

92.9 99.4 93.0 135.3 105.1

5,422 3,580 3,484 2,891 2,254

15,022

51,860

91.9

2,243

85,470 60,180 49,737

103.8 83.2 102.4

2,031 1,691 1,585

4,337

169.3

1,104

19,627

95.1

1,093

T

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 50,600,000, corn (maize) 21,760,000, sorghum 5,487,000, oranges 3,980,000, wheat 3,336,000, tomatoes 2,878,000, bananas 2,197,000, guavas and mangoes 2,050,000, lemons and limes 1,866,000, chilies and green peppers 1,681,000, potatoes 1,543,000, dry beans 1,375,000, green onions 1,151,000, avocados 1,137,000, papayas 805,700, blue agave c. 778,000, pineap-

ples 627,800, grapefruit and pomelos 379,700, coffee (green) 287,600, nuts 176,200, safflower seeds 72,370, vanilla 306; livestock (number of live animals) 28,648,787 cattle, 15,370,386 pigs, 8,897,182 goats, 7,484,118 sheep, 6,540,000 asses, mules, and hinnies, 6,260,000 horses, 289,663,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 44,646,877 cu m, of which fuelwood 86%; fisheries pro-

duction (2005) 1,422,344 (from aquaculture 8%). Mining and quarrying (2005): fluorite 876,000 [world rank: 2]; bismuth 9709 [world rank: 2]; silver

2,894,161 kg? [world rank: 2]; celestite 110,833 [world rank: 3]; lead 134,3889

[world rank: 5]; cadmium 1,6279 [world rank: 5]; gypsum 6,251,969 [world

rank: 6]; zinc 476,307? [world rank: 6]; sulfur 1,590,000; copper 429,0429; iron ore 7,012,0009; gold 30,356 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2000): motor vehicles and parts 10,718; food products 8,883; paints, soaps, pharmaceuticals 7,044; beverages 5,422; bricks, cement, ceramics 3,580; iron and steel 2,891; paper and paper products 2,243; basic chemicals 1,682; fabricated metal products 1,518.

646

Britannica World Data

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 42; average annual income per household (2004) Mex$28,177 (U.S.$2,497); sources of income (2004): wages and salaries 53.7%, nonmonetary income 19.0%, self-employment 14.0%, transfers 9.6%, other 3.7%; expenditure (2000): food, beverages, and tobacco

29.9%, transportation

and communications

17.8%, education 17.3%, housing (includes household furnishings) 16.5%, clothing and footwear 5.8%. Trade and service enterprises (1998)

Exports (2005): U.S.$213,711,200,000 (non-maquiladora sector 54.7%, of which road vehicles and parts 14.8%, crude petroleum 13.3%, machinery and apparatus 7.4%; maquiladora sector 45.3%, of which electrical machinery, apparatus, and electronics 19.1%, nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 8.5%, textiles and clothing 3.0%). Major export destinations: U.S. 85.7%; Canada 2.0%; Spain 1.4%; Germany

U.K. 0.6%.

imports

yearly wage as a % of avg. of all wages

SITC group

annual income (Mex$'000,000)8

1,497,828 110,180 1,387,648

3,790,764 864,569 2,926,195

565,728,373 249,597,035 316,131,338

536,900

1,192,597

108,507,889

768,799

1,234,656

65,305,180

41,236

164,493

47,888,576

related products, n.e.s. 06 Basic manufactures

24,697 4,345

254,497 53,610

48,769,283 32,517,091

07 Machinery and transport

711,843

2,766,750

200,001,682

130,475 9,967

652,148 62,767

53,533,318 11,858,406

9,913

151,445

8,960,922

112,293 20,622

252,950 247,086

7,263,560 10,815,238

79,748

203,348

7,497,794

4,855

65,608

9,845,129

20,973 248,245

65,936 937,780

3,065,672 83,259,134

live animals 01 Beverages and tobacco 02 Crude materials, excluding fuels 03 Mineral fuels, lubricants, and related materials

Services® Professional services Transp. and travel agencies

Lodging Automotive repair Educational services (private)

U.S.$000,000

%

8,705 12

54 12

7,026 2,024

42 12

5,172

3.0

1,744

1.4

5,820

3.4

18,523

11.2

12

12

18

18

16,974 27,411

9.9 16.0

5,711 12,762

35 Y:

84,203

49.2

94,244

57.0

20,714

124

23,063

13.9

04 Animal and vegetable oils, fats, and waxes

05 Chemicals and

Supermarkets and grocery stores Gasoline stations

%

00 Food and

Food and tobacco speciality stores Automobile, tire, and auto parts dealers

exports

U.S.$000,000

no. of employees

(excluding food products)

0.7%; Japan 0.7%;

Trade by commodity group (2003)

no. of establishments Trade Wholesale Retail Boutiques

1.1%; Colombia

equipment

08 Miscellaneous manufactured articles 09 Goods not classified by kind

TOTAL

1,283

0.7

18

18

171,291

100.0

165,395

100.0

Medical and social assistance

Direction of trade (2005)

Amusement services (cinemas and theatres)

Recreation Other

imports Western

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 224,077,000,000 (223,118,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 1,735,000 (1,765,000); lignite

(metric tons; 2004) 8,147,000 (11,681,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 1,216,000,000

(743,000,000);

petroleum

products

(metric

tons;

2004)

66,539,000 (71,195,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 49,797,000,000 ([2004] 50.450,000,000). Population economically active (2006): total 43,575,500; activity rate of total population 41.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 63.0%; female 37.1%; unemployed 3.2%).

exports

U.S.$'000,000

%

137,680

62.2

198,708

93.0

118,262

53.4

183,052

85.7

13,255

6.0

11,426

5.3

6,163 28,371 25,963

2.8 12.8 11.7

4,230 9,462 9,166

2.0 44 43

296

0.1

4,760 1,471 1,134 2,155 343 438 213,711

22 0.7 05 1.0 0.2 0.2 100.0

Hemisphere

United States Latin America and the Caribbean

Canada Europe EU Other Europe

2,408

Asia Japan China Other Asia Africa Other TOTAL

U.S.$'000,000

1.4

53,426 13,023 17,631 22,772 570 1,222 221,2707

2447 5.9 8.0 10.3 0.3 0.6 100.0

%

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

106.4 106.7

111.7 108.7

116.8 110.2

122.3 110.5

127.1 110.2

131.8 110.6

Financial aggregates 2000 Exchange rate!?, Mex$ per: U.S. dollar 9.57 g 14.28 SDR 12.47 International reserves (U.S.$) Total (excl. gold; '000,000) 35,509 SDRs (000,000) 366 Reserve pos. in IMF (000,000) — Foreign exchange (000,000) 35,14: Gold (000,000 tine troy oz) 0.25 % world reserves 0.02 Interest and prices Treasury bill rate 15.24 Balance of payments

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

9.14 13.26 11.49

10.31 16.62 14.02

11.24 20.05 16.70

11.26 21.75 17.49

10.78 18.56 15.40

10.88 21.36 16.37

44,741 356

50,594 392

58,956 433

64141 465

74,054 445

76,271 482

— 44,384 0.23 0.02

308 49,805 0.23 0.02

782 57,740 0.17 0.02

898 62,778 0.14 0.02

594 73,015 0.11 0.01

340 75,448 0.09 0.01

11.31

7.09

6.23

6.82

9.20

749

-8,337

-9,617

-7,633

-5,780

-8,811

-7,587

-6,133

—174,458 —168,397 —168,679 —170,546 -196,810 -221,820 -256,131 166,121 158,780 161,046 164,766 187,999 214,233 249,997 —10,370

-8,090

-6492

-3,056

42,105

42,663

44,266

-18,707

-17,707

-14,125

-8,836

-6,706

—4,924

-1,867

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 11,803; remittances (2006) 24,732; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 19,268; official development assistance (2005) 30511. Disbursements for (U.$.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 7,600; remittances, n.a.;

FDI (2001-05 avg.) 3.430.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 13.096, in permanent crops 1.3%, in pasture 41.9%; overall forest area (2005) 33.7%.

27,864,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 177,048,000.

Communications

units number

Medium Televisions

units

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

29,400

282

Telephones Cellular

2006

57,01615

52615

Landline

2006

19,861

183

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2000 2005 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

14,000 9,85014 18,623 3,72815

131 9814 181 3615

Education and health Literacy (2000): total population age 15 and over literate (2005) 91.695; males Education (2001-02) Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 12-18) Voc., teacher tr.18 Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

99,230 39,691 6,610 4,183

609,654 536,579 63,674 216,804

14,843,400 8,600,700 883,000 2,147,100

24.3 16.0 13.9 9.9

Health (2005): physicians 134,157 (1 per 777 persons); hospital beds 76,420 (1 per 1,364 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 16.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,252 (vegetable products 80%, animal products 20%); 171% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 192,770 (army 74.7%, navy 19.2%, air force 6.196). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.49517; per capita expenditure U.S.$2917.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 16,567 mi, 26,662 km; passenger-km 73,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 55,113,000,000. Roads (2005): total length 221,081 mi, 355,796 km (paved 34%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 14,713,085; trucks and buses 7,158,105. Air transport (2005): passenger-km

literate 93.4%; females literate 89.5%.

(U.S.$'000,000)

Balance of visible trade, of which: Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments, current account

Transport and communications

2001 -9,617 2.9%

2002 -7,633 2.3%

2003 -5,780 1.7%

2004 -8,530 2.2%

2005 -7,559 1.7%

2006 —6,133 1.2%

Imports (2005): U.S.$221,269,800,000 (non-maquiladora sector 66.0%, of which machinery and apparatus 18.7%, transport and communications equip-

‘Continental area per more recent survey equals 756,470 sq mi (1,959.248 sq km). 2Uninhabited (nearly all Pacific) islands directly administered by federal government. 3Total area based on more recent survey figure for continental area. Hours actually worked. *Less imputed bank service charge. *Includes 1,377,700 unemployed. 7Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 31993. Metal content. 1°End of year. li*Figure represents commitments. !?Together categories 01 and 04 equal U.S.$1,009,000,000 and 0.6%. Together categories 04 and 09 equal U.S.$298,000,000

ment 11.9%, chemicals and chemical products 5.9%, processed food, beverages, and tobacco 3.6%, iron and steel 3.2%; maquiladora sector 34.0%, of

and 0.2%. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 161996-97. 17Excludes military pensions.

which electrical machinery, apparatus, and electronics 14.9%, nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 7.7%, rubber and plastic products 3.3%). Major

Internet resources for further information: * National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics http://www.inegi.gob.mx/inegi/default.asp * Banco de México http://www.banxico.org.mx/sitioIngles/index.html

import sources: U.S. 53.4%; China 8.0%; Japan 5.9%; Germany 3.9%; South Korea 3.0%; Canada 2.8%; Brazil 2.4%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nations of the World

Micronesia, Federated States of

fares) 16.5%, alcohol, tobacco, kava (sakau), and betel nut 8.596, energy 5.6%, clothing and footwear 2.9%. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$256,000,000 (U.S.$2,317 per capita).

Official name: Federated States of Micronesia. Form of government: federal nonparty republic in free association with the United States with one legislative house (Congress [14])!. Head of state and government: President. Capital: Palikir, on Pohnpei. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: U.S. dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Agriculture and fishing* Public utilities

Mining

Weno Tofol

Pohnpei (Ponape) Pohnpei Island Yap Yap Island TOTAL

Kolonia Colonia

‘population:

sq mi

sq km

2000 census

49.1

127.2

53,595

P 42.3 42.3

i 109.6 109.6

40,465 7,686 7,686

133.3 129.0 45.9 38.7 270.82

345.2 334.1 118.9 100.2 701.42

34,486 32,178 11,241 7,391 107,008

Demography Population (2007): 111,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 409.9, persons per sq km 158.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 22.5%; rural 77.5%. Sex distribution (2007): male 50.37%; female 49.63%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 37.1%; 15-29, 29.6%; 30-44, 17.2%; 45-59, 11.7%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75 and over, 0.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 113,000; (2020) 120,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Chuukese/Mortlockese 33.6%; Pohnpeian 24.9%; Yapese 10.6%; Kosraean 5.2%; U.S. white 4.5%; Asian 1.3%; other 19.9%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 50%; Protestant c. 47%; other c. 396.

Major towns (2000): Weno, in Chuuk state 13,802; Palikir, on Pohnpei 6,444; Nett, on Pohnpei 6,158; Kolonia, on Pohnpei 5,681; Colonia, on Yap 3,216.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 27.8 (world avg. 20.3); (2003) within marriage 78.996; outside of marriage 21.1%. Death rate per 1 000 population (2005): 6.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 21.6 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.97. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 67.3 years; female 68.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 116.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 57.1; diseases of the respiratory system 55.3; diseases of the endocrine system 54.4; infectious and parasitic diseases 40.0.

Budget (2004-05)1, 3. Revenue: U.S.$134,100,000 (external grants 63.096, tax nontax

revenue

15.3%,

of which

fishing access

revenue

9.8%). Expenditures: U.S.$146,900,000 (current expenditures 90.8%, capital expenditure 9.296).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$60,800,000. Population economically active (2000): total 37,414; activity rate of total population 35.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 60.7%; female 42.9%; unem-

ployed 22.0%).

15,216 360

40.7 1.0

1,164 a

34g 24 24 68 1.9 3.9

109.0

44.5

6,137

16.4

16.9 245.0

6.9 100.0

8,2396 37,414

22.06 100.0

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) 2000 -90.0 72.8%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001 -95.4 72.2%

2002 -89.8 75.7%

2003 -98.7 73.3%

2004 -118.7 80.9%

2005 —117.2 82.0%

Imports (2006): U.S.$137,993,000 (food and beverages 32.1%, mineral fuels 22.496, machinery and apparatus 10.696, transport equipment 6.096, chemicals and chemical products 5.996). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 39.7%; Japan 8.8%; South Korea 5.8%; Singapore 4.6%; Philippines 4.4%. Exports (2004): U.S.$14,003,000 (marine products [mostly fish] 73.5%, garment products 20.7%, betel nuts 2.5%, copra 1.2%, kava [sakau] 0.9%). Major export destinations (2004)8: Japan 21.4%; U.S. 20.9%; Guam 3.4%; Northern Marianas 1.0%; unspecified 53.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 149 mi, 240 km (paved 18%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 4,601; trucks and buses 3,770. Air transport (2004): passengers 17,473; freight 1,713,086 metric tons. Communications Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

28

26

2005 2005

149 12

1279 109

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

6.0 0 16 i

55 0 144 ss

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 12.3%; primary education 37.0%; some secondary 18.3%; secondary 12.9%; some college 18.4%. Literacy (2000): total population age 10 and over literate 72,140 (92.4%); males literate 36,528 (92.9%); females literate 35,612 (91.9%).

Elementary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-18) College’?

student’ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

140 24 1

1,389 447 97

24,310 8,149 2,705

17.5 18.2 27.9

Health (2005): physicians 62 (1 per 1,774 persons); hospital beds 365 (1 per 301 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 36.0. Food: daily per capita caloric intake, n.a.

Military External security is provided by the United States!.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Earnings index^

% of labour force

781 806 2,540 726 1,445

Education (2004-05)

National economy 21.7%,

}

1.3 1.0 44 22.5

labour force

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 17; remittances (2005) 6.0; foreign direct investment, n.a. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 5.7; remittances, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 6%, in permanent crops c. 46%, in pasture c. 16%; overall forest area c. 91%.

Medium

revenue

:

3.3 2.4 10.8 55.2

Public administration

area

Chuuk Islands Kosrae Kosrae Island

18.0 14

:

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance Services |

Area and population

Chuuk (Truk)

% of total value

44.0 34

Other TOTAL

Capitals

2000

in value U.S.$000,000

1 U.S.$ - £0.50.

States Major Islands

647

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

100.5 102.0

100.4 106.3

100.5 107.5

102.9 104.6

107.2 101.2

112.3

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): coconuts 40,000, cassava 11,800, sweet potatoes 3,000, bananas 2,000, betel

nuts 228, kava (sakau) n.a.; livestock (number of live animals) 32,000 pigs,

13,900 cattle; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production 29,336, of which (2004) skipjack tuna 22,998 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: quarrying of sand and aggregate for local construction only. Manufacturing: n.a.; however, copra and coconut oil, traditionally important products, are being displaced by garment production; the manufacture of handicrafts and personal items (clothing, mats, boats, etc.) by individuals is also important. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 74,400,000 (n.a.); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, none (n.a.); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 7.0; annual income per household (2000) U.S.$8,944 (median income: U.S.$4,618); sources of income (1994): wages and salaries 51.8%, operating surplus 23.0%, social security 2.1%; expenditure (1998): food 45.5%, services (includes taxi

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1The compact of free association (from 1986) between the United States and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) was renewed in 2003 for another 20 years. Terms of the new compact included an ongoing decrease in U.S. grants from 2007. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?For consolidated general government. “Fiscal year. “Includes subsistence farming and fishing. SUnemployed. "Imports ci.£; exports f.o.b. 5Value of fishing services (in 2004) for foreign licenses and transshipment fees was U.S.$14,794,000. ?Subscribers. !?Data refers to the five campuses of the College of Micronesia-FSM at the beginning of the fall academic term.

Internet resources for further information: * Division of Statistics http://www.spc.int/prism/country/FM/stats * Asian Development Bank: Key Indicators 2007 http://www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Key. Indicators/2007/pdf/FSM.pdf

648

Britannica World Data

Moldova

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 20048

Official name: Republica Moldova (Republic of Moldova). Form of government: unitary parliamentary republic with a single legislative body (Parliament [101]). Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister.

in value

Official language: Romanian}. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Moldovan leu (plural lei); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = 11.89 Moldovan lei; 1 £ = 23.90 Moldovan lei2.

Anenii-Noi Basarabeasca Briceni Cahul

Calarasi

= ta

ae

editerranean Sea

L

Lii.

% of labour

force

force

5,833 105

18.2 03

535,500 1,800

37.7 0.1

Manufacturing

4,602

14.4

131,800

9.3

Public utilities

524

1.6

25,800

1.8

Construction Transp. and commun.

1,314 3,692

4.1 11.6

51,600 71,000

3.6 5.0

Trade, hotels

3,392

10.6

182,900

12.9

abe as

E Uu

42,100 61,500

3.0 4.3

8,609 3,92111 31,992

26.9 12.311 100.0

213,000 105,30012 1,422,300

wages and salaries 41.2%, social benefits 15.3%, agricultural income 10.4%,

Districts

population

Districts

population

Stráseni Taraclia Telenesti Ungheni

88,900 43,154 70,126 110,545

Floresti Glodeni Hincesti laloveni

89,389 60,975 119,762 97,704

75,075

Leova

51,056

116,271

Nisporeni Ocnița

R

60,001 90,612

60,925

Orhei

Criuleni Donduseni Drochia

72,254 46,442 87,092

Rezina Riscani Singerei

48,105 69,454 87,153

Autonomous Gágáuzia

Dubásari (rural)

34,015

Soldanesti

42,227

Disputed Territory

Edineț

81,390

94,986

Transdniestria

Fálesti

90,320

64,924 56,510

Soroca

Stefan-Vodá

Municipalities Bălți

127,561 712218

Chisináu

70,594

Region

other 33.1%; expenditure (2001): food and drink 40.4%, housing 13.5%, util-

ities 10.5%, transportation 8.9%, clothing 7.6%, health 3.9%.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 128; remittances (2006) 1,182; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 138; official development assistance (2005) 17214. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 167; remittances (2006) 85. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 56.4%, in permanent crops 9.1%, in pasture 11.5%; overall forest area (2005) 10.0%.

155,646

(Stînga Nistrului) TOTAL

Foreign trade 555,347

Balance of trade (current prices)

3,938,6795

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—325 22.2%

—395 23.5%

613 27.9%

-788 28.5%

—1,190 35.0%

—1,642 34.6%

Imports (2004): U.S.$1,774,000,000 (mineral fuels 21.796; machinery and apparatus 13.5%; chemicals and chemical products 9.1%; textiles and wearing apparel 8.6%). Major import sources (2005): Ukraine 23.3%; Romania

Area: 13,067 sq mi, 33,843 sq km®.

Population (2007): 3,794,0007. Density (2007y7: persons per sq mi 290.3, persons per sq km 112.1. Urban-rural (2006)8: urban 40.996; rural 59.196. Sex distribution (2006)8: male 47.89%; female 52.11%.

15.8%; Russia 13.2%; Germany 7.6%; Italy 5.4%.

Age breakdown (2004)8: under 15, 19.1%; 15-29, 26.3%; 30-44, 20.9%; 45-59, 19.1%; 60 and over, 14.3%; unknown 0.3%.

Population projection’: (2010) 3,707,000; (2020) 3,580,000. Ethnic composition (2004)8. 9: Moldovan 75.8%; Ukrainian 8.4%; Russian 5.9%; Gagauz 4.4%; Rom (Gypsy) 2.2%; Bulgarian 1.9%; other 1.4%. Religious affiliation (2005): Moldovan Orthodox 31.8%; Bessarabian Orthodox

16.1%; Russian Orthodox 15.4%; Sunni Muslim 5.5%; Protestant 1.7%; Jewish 0.6%; nonreligious 19.9%; other 9.0%. Major cities (2006): Chisinau 593,800; Tiraspol 159,16319; Balti 122,700; Tighina

(2004) 97,02710; Rabnita (2004) 53,64810,

Exports (2004): U.S.$986,000,000 (processed food, beverages [significantly wine], and tobacco products 35.1%; textiles and wearing apparel 17.3%; vegetables, fruits, seeds, and nuts 12.2%). Major export destinations (2005): Russia 31.9%; Italy 12.2%; Romania 10.2%; Ukraine 9.1%; Belarus 6.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 1,154 km; passenger-km ric ton-km cargo 3,673,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 94%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 252,490; trucks and transport (2006): passenger-km 481,000,000; metric ton-km Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.5 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 76.1%; outside of marriage 23.9%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.81. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 7.4/4.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 64.6 years; female 72.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006)8: diseases of the circulatory system 671.4; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 151.7; diseases of the digestive system 122.5; accidents, poisoning, and violence 105.0.

National economy

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

1,300

327

Cellular

2006

1,35816

2006

1,018

32416 243

Medium

Landline

Budget (2004). Revenue: 11,324,000,000 Moldovan lei (tax revenue 84.3%, of which VAT 30.3%, social fund contributions 22.0%, excise taxes 8.0%, per-

sonal income tax 7.0%, profits tax 6.9%; nontax and extra budgetary revenue 14.6%; grants 1.1%). Expenditures: 11,092,000,000 Moldovan lei (current expenditures 95.5%, of which social fund expenditures 25.0%, education 15.2%, health 10.4%, interest payments 5.5%; capital expenditure 4.5%). Public debt (external, outstanding; end of 2006): U.S.$718,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): corn (maize) 1,322,000, sugar beets 1,177,000, wheat 691,500, grapes 466,100, sunflower seeds 379,900, potatoes 377,000, apples 202,800, tobacco leaves 4,850; livestock (number of live animals) 818,300 sheep, 460,678 pigs, 310,476 cattle; roundwood (2005) 56,800 cu m, of which fuelwood 52%; fisheries pro-

duction (2005) 5,001 (from aquaculture 89%). Mining and quarrying (2004): gypsum 491,000. Manufacturing (value of production in ’000,000 Moldovan

lei; 2004)8: alcoholic beverages 4,013, of which wine 3,098; food products 3,461, of which dairy products 624; nonmetallic mineral products 1,273, of

which glass products 536; tobacco products 410. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 3,617,000,000 (6,554,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (186,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (621,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (2,773,000,000). Population economically active (2005)8: total 1,422,300; activity rate of total de facto population 39.596 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 53.2%; female 51.596; unemployed [2006] 7.496). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

109.8 133.3

115.6 169.5

129.2 218.4

145.3 270.6

164.4 323.2

183.5 416.0

Gross national income (2006)8: U.S.$3,356,000,000 (U.S.$876 per capita).

471,000,000; met9,467 km (paved buses 77,534. Air cargo 1,300,000.

units number

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

348 7515 728 2216

83 1815 174 5.216

2005 2004 2006 2006

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 99.1%; males 99.6%; females 98.7%. Education (2004-05)

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

15.0 7.412 100.013

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.2; annual average income per household (2002) U.S.$1,200; sources of income (1994):

81,710 28,978 78,027 119,231

Consumer price index Earnings index

labour

value

Services Other TOTAL

d

Cantemir Cáuseni

Cimislia

% of total

Moldovan lei

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Population (2004 census?) population

'000,000

Agriculture Mining

Capital: Chisinau.

Districts

20058

Primary (age 7-13) Secondary (age 14-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

116 1,454

41.100 5

15,800 530,800

d

81

2,200

22,696

10.3

91

7,807

138,170

17.7

Health (2006): physicians8 12,674 (1 per 283 persons); hospital beds8 22,471 (1 per 160 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 12.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,295 (vegetable products 84%, animal products 16%); 167% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 6,750 (army 84.6%, air force 15.4%). Opposition forces (excluding Russian troops) in Transnistria (2006) c. 7,500; Russian troops in Transnistria (2006) c. 500. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.3%; per capita expenditure U.S.$6. lOfficially designated Moldovan per constitution. 2The Transdniestrian ruble is the official currency of Transdniestria. ?Population for the Disputed Territory (Transdniestria) is from a separate 2004 census. ‘Breakaway area from 1991 also known as Transnistria or Pridnestrovye. ‘Summed total of separate 2004 censuses and 273,000 Moldovans abroad (at 2004 census) equals 4,211,679. 6Of which Transdniestria 1,607 sq mi, 4,163 sq km. "Includes Transdniestria; excludes Moldovans

abroad. 8Excludes

"Transdniestria. ?Transdniestria ethnic composition (2004): Moldovan 31.9%; Russian 30.4%; Ukrainian 28.8%; other 8.9%. !°Within Transdniestria. “Import and production taxes less imputed bank service charges. Includes unemployed. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. “Figure represents commitments. i5Circulation of daily newspapers. i6Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Department for Statistics and Sociology http://www.statistica.md * National Bank of Moldova http://www.bnm.org

Nations of the World

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 2.3; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2006) n.a., 2,555 hotel rooms, 313,070 overnight visitors; remittances (2006) n.a; foreign direct investment, n.a. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2006) n.a.; remittances (2006) n.a.; foreign direct investment, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2000): public gardens c. 20%.

Monaco Official name: Principauté de Monaco (Principality of Monaco). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative body (National Council [24]). Chief of state: Prince. Head of government!: Minister of State assisted by the Council of Government. Capital: ?. Official language: French. Official religion: Roman Catholicism. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) € 000,000 % of total

Area and population

area

Capitals?

population

sq mi

sq km

Fontvieille

=

0.13

0.33

La Condamine Monaco-Ville Monte-Carlo TOTAL

— — —

0.23 0.07 0.32 0.754

0.61 0.19 0.82 1.954

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

+9 1.1%

-79 8.3%

+188 18.4%

317 1.5%

-128 8.9%

-73 5.1%

Imports (2006): €752,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 36.0%, consumer goods 15.9%, food products 9.8%, automobiles 6.5%). Major import sources: China 27.3%; Italy 19.1%; Japan 10.2%; Belgium 6.7%; Germany 5.4%. Exports (2006): €679,000,000 (rubber and plastic products, glass, construction materials, organic chemicals, and paper and paper products 35.9%; products of automobile industry 13.6%; pharmaceuticals, perfumes, clothing, publishing 12.2%). Major export destinations: Germany 17.2%; Italy 10.3%; Spain

1 £ = €1.48.

Quarters

649

2000 census? 3,292

10.1%; U.K. 9.1%; Japan 4.2%; unspecified 23.4%.

12,187 1,034 15,507 32,020

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2001): length 1.1 mi, 1.7 km; passengers 2,171,100; cargo 3,357 tons. Roads (2001): total length 31 mi, 50 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (1997): passenger cars 21,120; trucks and buses 2,770. Air transport: 10. 11,

Demography Population (2007): 34,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 44,737, persons per sq km 17,259. Urban-rural (2005): urban 100%; rural 0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 47.65%; female 52.35%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 15.4%; 15-29, 13.9%; 30-44, 20.2%; 45-59,

31.3%: 60-74, 17.396; 75-84, 8.796; 85 and over, 3.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 35,000; (2020) 37,000. Doubling time: 80 years. Ethnic composition (2007): French 4796; Italian 1696; Monegasque 1695; other 2196.

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 93.296, of which Roman Catholic 89.396; Jewish 1.796; nonreligious and other 5.196.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

2004

25

758

2005 2005

1712 34

51012 1,019

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2005

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

ae 0 20 9.412

see 0 593 28212

Education and health Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6—10)

Vital statistics

units number

Secondary (age 11—17) Higher

teachers

students

teacher ratio

5

133

1,827

137

4 1

330 5313

3,095 65013

9.4 12.313

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 26.8 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 61.496, outside of marriage 38.696. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.70. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 4.8/2.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 74.7 years; female 83.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population: n.a.; however, principal causes are those of a developed country with an older population.

Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 17 and over having: primary/lower secondary education 24.7%; upper secondary 27.6%; vocational 12.7%; university 35.0%. Literacy: virtually 100%. Health (2002): physicians 156 (1 per 207 persons); hospital beds 521 ( per 62 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 5.4. Food: daily per capita caloric intake, n.a.; assuming consumption patterns similar to France (2005) 3,569 (vegetable products 6596, animal products 3596).

National economy

Military

Budget (2006). Revenue: €727,936,000 (taxes on commerce 51.8%5; state-run monopolies 11.4%; property taxes 8.7%; customs duties 3.7%).Expenditures: €789,132,000 (current expenditure 65.8%, capital expenditure 34.2%). Public debt: n.a. Production. Agriculture, forestry, fishing: some horticulture and greenhouse cultivation; no agriculture as such; roundwood (2006) n.a.; fisheries production (2005; metric tons) 2 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: none. Manufacturing (value of sales in €'000; 2006): chemicals, cosmetics, perfumery, and pharmaceuticals 361,392; plastic products 265,783; light electron-

Defense responsibility lies with France according to the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919.

ics and precision instruments 83,612; paper and card manufactures 38,677; tex-

tiles 36,941. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2001) n.a. (475,000,000 [imported from France]); coal, none (n.a.); crude petroleum, none (n.a.); natural gas, none (n.a.). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,165,000,000 (U.S.$35,725 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€000,000

value

forces

force

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

Mining and quarrying Public utilities

19,605

2.4

}

27

—

4 140

— 0.3 7.9 7.8 5.6 27.5 0.6 31.3 19.0 vus 100.0

16,990 113,000 45,969 52,473

19 13.7 5.6 6.4

Finance, real estate Services

108,000

194

13,887 8,453

Other TOTAL

470,000 825,0007

57.0 100.07

ex 44,426

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels

3,503 3,479 2,484 12,194

Public administration

255

Population economically active (2005): total 40,289; activity rate of total population 58.4% (participation rates: ages 17-64 [2000] 61.1%; female 41.4%; unemployed [2000] 3.696). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index? Earnings index?

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.7 104.5

103.6 108.4

105.8 112.8

108.0 116.1

110.0 119.3

111.8 122.7

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Under the authority of the prince. *The principality is a single administrative unit, and no separate area within it is distinguished as capital. "Final figures. 40.76 sq mi (1.97 sq km) per most recent survey. ?On hotels, banks, and the industrial sector. $Private sector only. "Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?The index is for France. ?Excludes trade with France; Monaco has participated in a customs union with France since 1963. !°Fixed-wing service is provided at Nice, France; helicopter service is available at Fontvieille. Charter service of Monacair (2004): passenger-km 414,000; metric ton-km cargo, none. 1?Subscribers. 132003-04.

Internet resources for further information: * La Principauté de Monaco http://www.gouv.mc * Monaco—Monte-Carlo http://www.monte-carlo.mc

650

Britannica World Data

Mongolia

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,916,000,000 (U.S.$1,120 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Mongol Uls (Mongolia). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (State Great Hural [76]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator). Official language: Khalkha Mongolian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: tugrik (Tug); valuation

2006

population

Provinces

sq km

20062 estimate

Arhangay Bayan-Olgiy Bayanhongor Bulgan Darhan-Uul

55,300 45,700 116,000 48,700 3,280

93,800 100,000 83,600 59,900 87,700

Dornod (Eastern) Dornogovi

123,600

73,400

(East Gobi) Dundgovi (Central Gobi)

109,500

53,300

74,700

49,600

82,500

80,100

141,400

60,400

5,540

12,200

80,300

70,800

Dzavhan

Govi-Altay Govi-Sümber

Hentiy

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force?

force?

Agriculture Mining

594.9 953.0

18.8 30.0

381,800 33,500

38.7 3.4

Manufacturing Construction

185.5 64.7

58 2.0

57,300 39,200

58 4.0

24

79.4

25

23,400

Transp. and commun.

345.7

10.9

42,200

43

Trade, hotels

627.8

19.8

162,100

16.4

Finance, real estate Public admin., defense

143.8 101.9

45 32

27,100 46,200

2.7 47

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population area!

in value Tug '000,000,000

Public utilities

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Tug 1,188; 1 £ = Tug 2,388.

Provinces Hovd Hóvsgól Omnégovi (South Gobi) Orhon

area!

population

sq km

20062 estimate

76,100 100,600

87,900 121,700

165,400 840

46,100 79,000

Ovérhangay Selenge

62,900 41,200

113,800 99,800

Sühbaatar Tév (Central) Uvs

82,300 74,000 69,600

56,000 87,400 80,600

Autonomous municipality Ulaanbaatar

TOTAL

4,700

965,300

1,564,160

2,562,400

2005

170.6 —95.05 3,172.47

54 -3.05 100.07

137,700 35,6008 986,100

14.0 3.68 100.0

Public debt (external; 2005): U.S.$1,267,000,000. Household income and expenditure: Average household size (20052) 4.2; annu-

al income per household (2005) Tug 1,629,600 (U.S.$1,350); sources of income (2005): wages 35.2%, self-employment 31.3%, transfer payments 10.6%, other 22.9%; expenditure (2005)8: food and nonalcoholic beverages 42.2%, housing and energy 10.5%, clothing and footwear 10.1%, transportation 9.5%, education 5.4%.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 201; remittances (2006) 177; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 106; official development assistance (2005) 1339. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 205; remittances (2006) 40. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.8%, in permanent crops, negligible, in pasture 82.5%; overall forest area (2005) 6.5%.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 2,609,000.

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—116.2 10.0%

—166.8 13.7%

—185.1 13.1%

-151.4 8.0%

119.4 5.3%

439.6 1.3%

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 4.3, persons per sq km 1.7.

Urban-rural (2006): urban 60.9%; rural 39.1%. Sex distribution (20052): male 49.60%; female 50.40%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 28.9%; 15-29, 32.3%; 30-44, 22.6%; 45-59, 10.3%; 60-74, 4.5%; 75-84, 1.1%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 2,687,000; (2020) 2,975,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Khalkha Mongol 81.5%; Kazakh 4.3%; Dérbed Mongol 2.8%; Bayad 2.1%; Buryat Mongol 1.7%; Dariganga Mongol 1.3%; Zakhchin 1.3%; Tuvan (Uriankhai) 1.1%; other 3.9%. Religious affiliation (2005): traditional beliefs (shamanism) c. 32%3; Buddhist

(Lamaism) c. 23963; Muslim c. 596; Christian c. 1%; nonreligious c. 30%; athe-

ist/other c. 996. Major cities (2000): Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator [20052]) 942,747; Erdenet 68,310; Darhan 65,791; Choybalsan 41,714; Ulaangom 26,319.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.3 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage (2001) 82.2%; outside of marriage (2001) 17.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.97. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 4.4/1.1. Life expectancy at birth (20052): male 61.6 years; female 67.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 230.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 121.6; accidents and violence 103.4; diseases of the digestive system 48.2; diseases of the respiratory system 30.3.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: Tug 1,360,400,000,000 (tax revenue 83.096, of which income taxes 35.096, taxes on goods and services 25.996; nontax revenue 16.6%; other 0.4%). Expenditures: Tug 1,237,000,000,000 (economic services 26.196; social security 20.8%; general administration 19.6%; education 15.6%;

health 8.096; defense/public order 3.796). Population economically active (20052): total 986,100; activity rate of total population 39.3% (participation rates: age 16-59, 63.7%; female 51.0%; unemployed [2006] 3.2%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 100.9

2002 106.2

2003 114.8

2004 118.9

2005 129.5

2006 136.1

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): hay 830,7002,

wheat

127,757,

potatoes

109,070,

vegetables

70,200,

raw

(greasy) wool 15,000; livestock (number of live animals) 13,267,000 goats, 12,884,500 sheep, 2,029,100 horses, 1,963,600 cattle, 254,200 camels; round-

wood (2005) 631,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 29%; fisheries production (2005) 366 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): fluorspar 367,000; copper (metal content) 126,547; molybdenum (metal content) 1,188; gold 24,120 kg^. Manufacturing (value of production in Tug '000,000; 2006): textiles 93,475; base metals 74,879; food products 71,428; beverages 51,623;

clothing and apparel 29,495; bricks, cement, and ceramics 20,226. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 3,303,000,000 (3,466,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 1,120,000 (1,120,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 5,745,000 (4,185,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 201,000 (n.a.); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (562,000); natural gas, none (none).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Imports (2006): U.S.$1,489,200,000 (mineral fuels 30.0% ,machinery and apparatus 18.2%, food and agricultural products 12.4%, transportation equipment 10.3%). Major import sources: Russia 36.6%; China 27.5%; Japan 6.8%; South Korea 5.6%; Kazakhstan 3.5%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$1,528,800,000 (copper concentrate 42.7%, gold 18.1%, refined copper 7.2%, combed goat down 5.3%, raw [greasy] cashmere 4.2%, molybdenum 3.2%). Major export destinations: China 68.1%; Canada 11.2%; U.S. 7.8%; Russia 2.9%; U.K. 2.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 1,810 km; passenger-km 1,287,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 10,513,000,000. Roads (2002): total length 49,250 km (paved 4%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 95,115; trucks and buses 41,234. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 835,800,000; metric ton-km cargo 86,400,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

220

88

2005 2005

55712 156

21114 59

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

340 5011 268 1.812

133 2011 105 0.712

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal education 11.6%; primary education 23.5%; secondary 46.1%; vocational secondary 11.2%; higher 7.6%. Literacy (2004): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 97.8%; males 98.0%; females 97.5%. Education (2005-06) Primary (age 6-12)

Secondary (age 13-16) Vocational (age 16-18) Higher

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

724

22,600

556,900

24.6

35 174

1,100 6,500

32,500 136,600

29.5 21.0

Health (20052): physicians 6,590 (1 per 384 persons); hospital beds 18,400 (1 per 138 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 19.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,954 (vegetable products 65%, animal products 35%); 105% of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 8,600 (army 87.2%, air force 9.3%, unspecified 3.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$12.

1Rounded figures. January 1. ?Buddhism in Mongolia has close connections with shamanic ideas and rituals. ^Excludes gold contained in copper concentrate. 5Less imputed bank service charge. (Unemployed. 7Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 5Weights of consumer price index components. ?Figure represents commitments. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistical Office of Mongolia http://www.nso.mn/eng/index.php * Bank of Mongolia http://www.mongolbank.mn

Nations of the World

Montenegro

651

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Republika Crna Gora (Republic of Montenegro). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (Parliament [81])1. Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Podgorica; Cetinje is the old royal capital. Official language: Montenegrin. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€2; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

148.7

8.3

15,432

6.0

26.0

1.5

1,710

0.7

148.7 54.2

8.3 3.0

21,893 5,239

8.5 2.0

2.2

Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities

85.8

48

5,551

Transp. and commun.

171.3

9.6

14,617

57

Trade, hotels

242.2

13.6

40,908

15.9

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

248.0 166.4

13.9 9.3

6,718 22,797

2.6 8.9

205.9 288.06 1,785.38

11.5 16.16 100.08

43,531 78,1727 256, 5698

Services Other TOTAL

17.0 30.57 100.0

Household income and expenditure (2006)9. Average household size 3.5; average annual income per household €5,328 (U.S.$6,684); sources of income: wages and salaries 62.5%, transfer payments 19.7%, agriculture 9.0%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 42.5%, housing and energy 12.5%,

1 £ = €1.48. Area and population

arsa

population,

sq km

2003 census

area

...populstion

Municipalities

sq km

2003 census

Andrijevica Bar Berane Bijelo Polje Budva Cetinje

283 598 717 924 122 910

5,785 40,037 35,068 50,284 15,909 18,482

Nikšić Plav Pljevlja Pluzine Podgorica Rozaje

2,065 486 1,346 854 1,441 432

75,282 13,805 35,806 4,272 169,132 22,693

Danilovgrad Herceg Novi

501 235

16,523 33,034

Savnik Tivat

553 46

2,947 13,630

Kolašin Kotor

897 335

9,949 22,947

Ulcinj Zabljak

255 445

20,290 4,204

Mojkovac

367

10,066

TOTAL

13,812

620,145

Municipalities

in value €'000,000

Demography Population (2007): 624,000.

transportation 8.7%, clothing and footwear 7.9%, communications

5.7%,

household furnishings 4.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2006) 340; remittances (2006) c. 100; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2002-05 avg.) 139; official development assistance (2005) 1,1083, 10, Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2006) n.a.; remittances (2006) n.a.; FDI (2006) 223.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) €000,000 % of total

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

401.6 39.7%

-359.3 39.9%

—416.4 31.5%

-505.9 36.8%

-905.6 46.8%

Imports (2005): €940,344,000 (machinery and transportation equipment 22.396,

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 117.0, persons per sq km 45.2. Urban-rural (2005)3: urban 52.296; rural 47.896. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.23%; female 50.77%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 19.6%; 15-29, 23.6%; 30-44, 19.8%; 45-59,

19.196; 60-74, 12.8%; 75-84, 4.3%; 85 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 624,000; (2020) 624,000. Ethnic composition (2003): Montenegrin 43.2%; Serb 32.0%; Bosniac/Muslim 11.8%; Albanian 5.0%; undeclared 4.0%; other 4.0%.

Religious affiliation (2003): Orthodox c. 70%; Muslim c. 21%; Roman Catholic c. 496; other c. 596.

Major cities (20064): Podgorica 173,000; Nik&ié 75,000; Bijelo Polje 50,000; Bar 41,000; Berane 35,000.

of which motor vehicles 6.196; mineral fuels and lubricants 15.696; food and

live animals 15.6%; household equipment 15.1%; chemicals and chemical products 8.7%; beverages and tobacco 3.6%). Major import sources: Serbia and Kosovo 34.8%; Italy 9.2%; Slovenia 7.1%; Croatia 7.0%; Greece 5.6%; Germany 4.9%.

Exports (2005): €434,458,000 (aluminum 42.9%; machinery and transportation equipment 11.7%; food and live animals 8.3%; beverages and tobacco 7.1%; wood and wood products 4.1%; chemicals and chemical products 2.7%; mineral fuels and lubricants 2.1%). Major export destinations: Serbia and Kosovo 36.8%; Italy 27.3%; Greece 9.1%; Slovenia 6.8%; Bosnia and Herzegovina

5.3%.

Transport and communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 11.8 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 79.1763, outside of marriage 20.9963. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.60. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.3/0.8. Life expectancy at birth (2004): male c. 71 years; female c. 75 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 496.0; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 164.9; diseases of the respiratory system 37.8; injuries, accidents, and violence 36.6, of which suicide

Transport. Railroads (2006): length 155 mi, 250 km; passenger-km 131,500,000; metric ton-km cargo 182,163,000. Roads (2006): total length 4,578 mi, 7,368 km (paved [2005] 58%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 118,930; trucks and buses, n.a. Air transport (2006): passengers 833,715; freight, n.a. Communications Medium Televisions? Telephones Cellular

Landline

date — 2000

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

3,000

2006

70312

2006

176

299

units Medium

date

PCs? Dailies

1,12612

Internet users

282

Broadband

2004 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

389 7311 266 2612

359 11811 426 4212

19.0; ill-defined conditions 203.2.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: €582,258,287 (tax revenue 85.8%, of which VAT 44.5%, income

9.7%; nontax

tax 12.5%, excise tax 12.4%, taxes on international trade

revenue

14.2%). Expenditures:

€579,780,129

(wages and

salaries 27.4%; transfers 20.7%; debt service 20.0%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; January 2007): U.S.$655,056,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): potatoes 126,000, grapes 50,000, tomatoes plums 13,000, corn (maize) 8,100, apples peaches 4,400, figs 4,000, cherries 2,000, (number of live animals) 254,898 sheep,

21,600, chilies and peppers 18,000, 5,000, onions 4,500, oranges 4,500, olives 1,800, tobacco 395; livestock 117,842 cattle, 10,697 pigs; round-

wood (2005)5 279,228 cu m, of which fuelwood 13%; fisheries production (2005) 1,236 (from aquaculture, n.a.). Mining and quarrying (2006): bauxite 659,370; sea salt 5,000. Manufacturing (gross value added in €'000; 2004): base metals and fabricated metal products (mostly of aluminum) 58,718; food products, beverages, and tobacco 56,846; paper products, publishing, and printing 6,647; wood

and

wood

products

4,612; transportation

equipment

4,504.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 2,952,000,000 ([2004] 19,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2005) n.a. (66,900); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 1,500,000 ([2005] 1,230,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) n.a. (164,000); petroleum products, n.a. (n.a.); natural gas, n.a. (n.a.). Land use as 96 of total land area (2005): in temporary crops 3.396, in permanent crops 1.196, in pasture 32.896; overall forest area 44.796. Population economically active (2005): total 256,569; activity rate 40.496 (participation rates: over age 15, 49.9%; female 44.2%; unemployed 30.396). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

100.0 100.0

100.3 147.6

99.1 162.0

98.8

98.5 m

98.5 ia

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,251,000,000 (U.S.$3,745 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education 3.2%; incomplete primary education 6.8%; complete primary 22.5%; secondary 55.0%; higher 12.5%. Literacy (2003): total population age 20 and over literate 97.3%; males literate 99.2%; females literate 95.5%. Education (2006-07)

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 15-18) Voc., teacher tr.1? Higher"?

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

455

4,876

75,179

15.4

47 21 5

2,245 dee 906

31,627 vul 12,903

144 ee) 14.2

Health (2005): physicians 1,257 (1 per 496 persons); hospital beds 4,065 (1 per 153 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 9.5. Food (2003)3: daily per capita caloric intake 2,703 (vegetable products 65%; animal products 35%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 7,300 (army 54.8%, navy 45.2% ). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2006): n.a.; per capita expenditure, n.a.

iNew constitution effective from Oct. 22, 2007. ?Montenegro uses the euro as its official currency, even though it is not a member of the EU. 3Data for Serbia and Montenegro. ‘January 1. State forests only. Taxes on products less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. "Includes 77,754 unemployed. 8Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Based on the 2006 Household Budget Survey. !oFigure represents commitments. !!Circulation of daily newspapers. !?Subscribers. 132005—06.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Montenegro http://www.cb-mn.org/indexE.htm * Statistical Office of the Republic of Montenegro http://www.monstat.cg.yu/EngPrva.htm

652

Britannica World Data

X

Fag

Morocco Official name: Al-Mamlakah al-Maghribīyah (Kingdom of Morocco). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (House of Councillors [2701]; House of Representatives [325]). Chief of state and head of government: King assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Rabat. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Moroccan dirham (DH); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Regions Chaouia-Ouardigha Doukkala-Abda

sq km

1,655,660 1,984,039

19,795

1,573,055

Fés-Boulemane Gharb-Chrarda-

Béni Hsen Semara?

. area Regions Meknés-Tafilalt Oriental Oued EddahabLagouira*

1,859,540

Rabat-Salé-

3,631,061

Zemmour-Zaér Sous-Massa-Draa

130,500

462,410

EI Haouz

76,300

31,160

256,152

3,102,652

sq km

2004 census

79,210 82,820

2,141,527 1,918,094

120,000

99,367

9,580 70,880

2,366,494 3,113,653

Tadla-Azilal Tangier-Tetouan Taza-Al HoceimaTaounate

TOTAL

population

17,125

1,450,519

11,570

2,470,372

24,155

1,807,113

710,8506

29,891,708

Area?: 274,461 sq mi, 710,850 sq km.

80,475

14.0

4,303,300

39.2

Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Public utilities

10,27119 84,52810 16,04510

1.810 14.710 2.810

1,224,700

114

Construction Transp. and commun. Pub. admin., defense

31,694 39,251 50,102

5.5 6.8 8.7

789,600 394,700 508,900

Ta 3.6 4.6

75,936

13.2

1,402,600

12.8

124,886

217

1,292,800

118

10.811 100.0

1,073,40012 10,990,000

9.812 100.013

62,0821! §75,27113

Foreign trade!+ Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —44,051 21.4%

DH '000,000 % of total

2002 —44,021 20.3%

2003 -52,183 23.7%

2004 -69,932 28.8%

2005 -85,936 31.3%

2006 -95,309 29.9%

Imports (2005): DH 180,294,000,000 (mineral fuels 21.8%, of which crude petroleum 13.3%, refined petroleum products 6.4%; machinery and apparatus 19.796; food, beverages, and tobacco 8.696). Major import sources: France 18.2%; Spain 11.0%; Saudi Arabia 6.8%; Italy 6.1%; China 5.2%.

Exports (2005)15: DH 94,358,000,000 (food, beverages, and tobacco products 19.8%, of which fisheries products 9.8%; garments 18.7%; phosphoric acid 8.1%; knitwear 7.2%; electronic transistors 5.8%). Major export destinations:

Transport and communications

Population (2007)?: 31,704,0007. Density (20072: persons per sq mi 115.5, persons per sq km 44.6. Urban-rural (2004): urban 55.1%; rural 44.9%. Sex distribution (2004): male 49.33%; female 50.67%. Age breakdown (2004): under 15, 31.2%; 15-29, 28.9%; 30-44, 20.1%; 45-59, 11.7%; 60-74, 6.0%; 75 and over, 2.0%; unknown 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 32,911,000; (2020) 36,923,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Amazigh (Berber) c. 45%, of which Arabized c. 24%; Arab c. 44%; Moors originally from Mauritania c. 10%; other c. 1%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Muslim more than 99% (including Sunni c. 97%; Shri c. 296); other less than 1%. Major cities (2004): Casablanca 2,933,684; Rabat 1,622,860; Marrakech 823,154; Agadir 678,596; Tangier 669,685.

Fés

946,815;

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.6 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.73. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 68.4 years; female 73.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 201, of which ischemic heart disease 100; infectious and parasitic diseases 120; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 41; accidents and injuries 40.

National economy Budget. Revenue (2005): DH 131,436,000,000 (VAT 24.896; income tax 17.3%;

corporate taxes 14.7%; excises 11.9%). Expenditures (2005): DH 151,693,000,000 (current expenditure 83.6%; capital expenditure 13.2%; other 3.2%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$13,113,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.3; expen-

diture (2001): food 41.3%, housing and energy 22.1%, health 7.6%. Population economically active (2006): total 10,990,000; activity rate 36.0% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 51.3%; female [2005] 27.5%; unemployed 9.7%). 2001 100.6

Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 1,907 km; passenger-km 2,645,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 5,563,000,000. Roads (200516): total length 56,987 km (paved 61%). Vehicles: passenger cars (2002) 1,326,108; trucks and buses (2000) 415,700. Air transport (2006)17: passenger-km 8,643,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 72,000,000.

Communications

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

103.4

104.6

106.2

107.2

110.8

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 6,300,000, sugar beets 2,252,000, potatoes 1,569,000, tomatoes 1,245,000, oranges 788,200, olives 750,000, clementines 454,000, almonds 83,000; livestock (number of live animals) 16,872,000 sheep, 5,331,600 goats, 2,721,700 cattle, 140,000,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 957,000 cu m, of

which fuelwood 4096; fisheries production (2005) 934,961, of which sardines 629,496 (from aquaculture, negligible)’. Mining and quarrying (2005): phos-

phate rock 27,254,0009; barite 475,700; zinc (metal content) 77,100; lead

(metal content) 42,200; silver (including smelter bullion) 196,000 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): food products 1,130; wearing apparel 733; tobacco products 595; bricks, pottery, and cement 568; basic chemicals 457. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 18,701,000,000 (16,968,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none ([2005] 5,938,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 246,000 (47,204,000); petroleum

products (metric tons; 2005) 6,352,000 (7,454,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004)

50,665,000 ([2005] 40,000,000).

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 19.0%, in permanent crops 2.0%, in pasture 47.1%; overall forest area (2005) 9.8%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$64,066,000,000 (U.S.$2,046 per capita).

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

5,010

164

Cellular

2006

16,00519

52119

2006

1,266

41

Medium

Landline

Vital statistics

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

force

France 31.3%; Spain 16.3%; U.K. 7.1%; Italy 4.3%; U.S. 3.6%.

Demography

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

% of labour

force

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 4,610; remittances (2006) 5,048; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,968. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 612; remittances (2006) 40.

1,615

La&youne-BojadorSakia El-Hamra^ Marrakech-Tensift-

labour

value

Finance, realestate }

8,805

Grand Casablanca Guelmim-Es

% of total

Services Other TOTAL

population

— 16,760 13,285

in value DH '000,000

Trade, hotels

Area and population2 2004 census

2006

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

1 US.$ = DH 8.24; 1 £ = DH 16.57.

.area

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005 2006 2006

740 41118 6,100 39119

24 1418 199 13!9

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal education through incomplete primary education 45.596; complete primary 40.8%; secondary 8.7%; higher 5.0%. Literacy (2005): total population over age 15 literate 53.5%; males 65.5%; females 41.5%. Education (2004-05) Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Vocational Higher

student/ schools?)

teachers

students

teacher ratio

6,565 1,664 69 68

147,730 92,133 5,082 18,593

4,070,182 1,764,785 114,698 343,599

27.6 19.2 22.6 18.5

Health (2004): physicians 16,775 (1 per 1,778 persons); hospital beds?! 26,136 (1 per 1,141 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 41.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,492 (vegetable products 93%, animal products 7%); 187% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 200,800 (army 89.6%, navy 3.9%, air force 6.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 4.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$77.

1All seats indirectly elected: 162 by regional councils; 108 by industry, agriculture, and trade unions. ?Includes Western Sahara, annexure of Morocco whose political status has been unresolved

since 1991; Western

Sahara area: 97,344 sq mi, 252,120 sq km;

Western Sahara population (2007 est.) 480,000. 3Roughly 5096 of the land area of Guelmim-Es Semara is located within Western Sahara. ^Roughly 9096 of the land area of Laáyoune-Bojador-Sakia El-Hamra is located within Western Sahara. ?The entire area of Oued Eddahab-Lagouira is located within Western Sahara. *Detail does not add to total given because of gross rounding of the Western Sahara areas of Morocco. 7In addition, roughly 150,000 Western Saharan refugees live in camps near Tindouf, Alg. SRoughly 60% of Morocco’s fisheries production comes from Atlantic waters off of Western Sahara. ?In 2001 roughly 7% of the total phosphate production of nearly 22,000,000

metric

tons came

from

Western

Sahara.

!°Public

utilities includes crude

petroleum and refined petroleum. Import taxes and duties less subsidies. !2Including 1,062,000 unemployed. !3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. MImports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. Cannabis is an important illegal export; estimated production (2004) 88,900 metric tons. January 1. !7Royal Air Maroc only. /8Circulation of daily newspapers. !°Subscribers. 2°1999-2000. 2!Public hospitals only.

Internet resources for further information: * Direction de la statistique http://www.statistic-hcp.ma * Bank al-Maghrib http://www.bkam.ma

Nations of the World

Mozambique

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,790,000,000 (U.S.$324 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repüblica de Mogambique (Republic of Mozambique). Form of government: multiparty republic with a single legislative house (Assembly of the Republic

2005

Head of state and government: President. Capital: Maputo. Official language: Portuguese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: (new) metical (MTn; plural meticais)!; valuation (Sept. 5,

2007) 1 U.S.$ = MTn 26.13;

area

population

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

2007 preliminary census

Cabo Delgado Gaza

Pemba Xai-Xai

31,902 29,231

82,625 75,709

1,632,809 1,219,013

Inhambane

Inhambane

26,492

68,615

1,267,035

Manica

Chimoio

23,807

61,661

1,418,927

Maputo Nampula

Maputo Nampula

9,944 31,508

25,756 81,606

1,259,713 4,076,642

Lichinga Beira Tete

49,828 26,262 38,890

129,055 68,018 100,724

1,178,117 1,654,163 1,832,339

Zambézia

Quelimane

40,544

105,008

3,892,854

City Maputo TOTAL

—

232 308,642?

602 799,379

Niassa Sofala Tete

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

31,065 1,416 20,118 10,090 9,350 25,835 7,331 36,336 5,176 10,383 2457 157,345

19.7 0.9 12.8 6.4 5.9 16.4 4.7 23.1 3.3 6.6 0.27 100.0

7,837,000

80.8

1,859,000

19.2

E 9,696,000

ais 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 130; remittances (2006) 80; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 258; official development assistance (2005) 1,286. Disbursements for (U.S.$000,000): tourism (2005) 176; remittances (2006) 26; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 5.5%, in permanent crops 0.3%, in pasture 56.1%; overall forest area (2005) 24.6%.

1 £= MTn 52.53. Area and population

2002

MT '000,000,000

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Finance, real estate Trade, hotels Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

[250]).

Provinces

653

Foreign trade® Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 -271 15.7%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002 —667 29.2%

2003 —604 22.4%

2004 —346 10.3%

2005 —497 12.5%

2006 —268 5.3%

Imports (2003): U.S.$1,753,000,000 (mineral fuels 16.5%; machinery and apparatus 16.2%; food products 12.3%, of which cereals 7.2%; transport equipment 9.0%). Major import sources (2004): South Africa 41.4%; The

1,099,102 20,530,714

Netherlands 11.0%; Portugal 3.3%; U.S. 2.4%; unspecified 36.8%.

Exports (2003): U.S.$1,044,000,000 (aluminum 54.4%; electricity 10.9%; prawns 7.3%; cotton 3.1%; tobacco 2.1%).Major export destinations (2004):

Demography Population (2007): 20,906,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 67.7, persons per sq km 26.2. Urban-rural (2006): urban 39.196; rural 60.996. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.05%; female 50.95%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 43.1%; 15-29, 26.8%; 30-44, 16.5%; 45-59, 9.0%; 60-74, 3.9%; 75 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 22,061,000; (2020) 26,480,000. Doubling time: 39 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Makuana 15.3%; Makua 14.5%; Tsonga 8.6%; Sena 8.0%; Lomwe 7.1%; Tswa 5.7%; Chwabo 5.5%; other 35.3%.

Religious affiliation (2005): traditional beliefs c. 4696; Christian c. 3796, of which Roman Catholic c. 1996, Protestant c. 1196; Muslim c. 996; other c. 896. Major cities (2004): Maputo 1,140,400 (metro area 1,744,300); Matola 520,500; Beira 487,100; Nampula 371,800; Chimoio 209,700.

The Netherlands 60.9%; South Africa 12.9%; Malawi 3.3%; Portugal 2.8%;

Spain 2.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2002): route length 1,940 mi, 3,123 km; (2003) passenger-km 167,000,000; (2003) metric ton-km cargo 1,362,000,000. Roads (1999): total length 18,890 mi, 30,400 km (paved 19%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 81,600; trucks and buses 76,000. Air transport (2006)9: passenger-km 462,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 5,000,000.

Communications Medium

date

Televisions

2003

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

391

20

Telephones

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 39.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.35. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 41.2 years; female 40.4 years. Adultpopulation (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 16.1963 (world avg. 1.096).

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: MT 26,891,000,000,000 (tax revenue 58.096, of which VAT 23.9%, personal income tax 9.0%, taxes on international trade 8.5%; grants 37.4%; nontax revenue 4.6%). Expenditures: MT 32,602,000,000,000 (current expenditures 58.3%; capital expenditures 38.5%; net lending 3.2%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,727,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): cassava 11,460,000, sugarcane 2,650,000, corn (maize) 1,300,000, sorghum 307,000, coconuts 265,800, rice 174,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 104,000, cashews 68,330, tobacco 12,000, tea 10,500; livestock (number of live animals) 1,320,000 cattle, 392,000 goats, 28,000,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 18,028,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 93%; fisheries production (2005) 43,695

(from aquaculture 3%). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 654,179; bauxite 9,518; tantalite 281,212 kg; garnet 2,172 kg; gold 63 kg4. Manufacturing (value added in MT ’000,000,000; 2003): aluminum 19,067; beverages 4,773; food products 2,577; tobacco 581; chemicals and chemical prod-

ucts 297. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 11,714,000,000 (10,579,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 38,000 (23,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (624,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 1,341,000,000 (3,152,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.2; income per household: n.a.; source of income (1992-93)5: wages and salaries 51.6%, self-employment 12.5%, barter 11.5%, private farming 7.7%; expenditure (1998)5: food, beverages, and tobacco 63.5%, firewood and furniture 17.0%,

transportation and communications 4.6%, clothing and footwear 4.6%, education and recreation 2.7%. Population economically active (2003)®: total 8,981,000; activity rate 47.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 84.4%; female 53.8%; unemployed, n.a.). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

109.0

127.4

2003 144.4

2004

2005

2006

162.7

174.7

197.5

Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2006 2006

2,339!! 67

116!! 3.3

2004

Internet users Broadband

2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

283

1610 178 ie

14

0.810 9.0 aay

Education and health Educational attainment (1997). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 78.4%; primary education 18.4%; secondary 2.0%; technical 0.4%; higher 0.2%; other/unknown 0.6%. Literacy (2005): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 50.4%; males literate 65.7%; females literate 35.6%. Education (2003) Primary (age 7-12)

Secondary (age 13-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher?

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

9,027

51,912

3,177,586

61.2

36

924

20,086

21.7

3

954

7,156

7.5

154

4112

160,093

38.9

Health: physicians (2003) 635 (1 per 30,525 persons); hospital beds (2003) 16,493 (1 per 1,175 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 112.1.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,287 (vegetable products 98%, animal products 2%); 121% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): c. 11,200 (army c. 89%, navy c. 2%, air force c. 996). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$3.

1The (new) metical (MTn) replaced the (old) metical (MT) on July 1, 2006, at a rate of 1 MTn - MT 1.000. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 3Statistically derived midpoint of range. 4Official figures; unofficial artisanal production is 360—480 kg per year. ?Weights of consumer price index components. Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 7Taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. $Imports are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. for commodities and trading partners. ?LAM (Linhas Aéreas de Mocambique) only. Circulation of daily newspapers. H1 Subscribers. 121997.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estatística http://www.ine.gov.mz * Banco de Mocambique http://www.bancomoc.mz

654

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$13,611,000,000 (U.S.$280 per capita).

Myanmar (Burma)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Pyidaungzu Myanma Naingngandaw (Union of Myanmar). Form of government: military regime. Head of state and government: Chairmanl. Capital: Naypyidaw?. Official language: Burmese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Myanmar kyat (K); valuation? (Sept. 5, 2007)

2004-05

Area and population Divisions Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) Magwe (Magway) Mandalay

Pegu (Bago) Sagaing

Tenasserim (Tanintharyi) Yangón States Chin Kachin Karen (Kayin) Kayah Mon

Rakhine (Arakan) Shan TOTAL

area

Mandalay

Pegu (Bago) Sagaing

Tavoy (Dawei) Yangón (Rangoon) Hakha Myitkyina Pa-an (Hpa-an) Loi-kaw

sq km

2000 estimate

13,567 17,305

35,138 44,820

6,779,000 4,548,000

14,295

37,024

6,574,000

15,214

39,404

5,099,000

36,535

94,625

5,488,000

16,735 3,927

43,343 10,171

1,356,000 5,560,000

13,907 34,379 11,731 4,530

36,019 89,041 30,383 11,733

480,000 1,272,000 1,489,000 266,000

4,748

12,297

2,502,000

14,200 60,155 261,228

36,778 155,801 676,577

Moulmein (Mawlamyine)

Sittwe (Akyab) Taunggyi

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force?

force?

4,390 57 1,050 357 $ 934 2,022 6 104 152 9,079

48.3 0.6 11.6 3.9 0.1 10.3 22.3 0.1 1.1 } dez 100.0

12,093,000 121,000 1,666,000 400,000 26,000 495,000 1,781,000

65.9 0.7 94 22 0.1 27 9.7

1,485,000 270,000

8.1 2125

18,337,000

100.0

population

sq mi

Capitals Bassein (Pathein) Magwe (Magway)

in value K ’000,000,000

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Finance Public administration Services, other TOTAL

1 U.S.$ = K 6.42; 1 £ = K 12.91.

1997-98

2,744,000 4,851,000 49,008,0004

Demography Population (2007): 47,374,0005. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 181.4, persons per sq km 70.0.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 30.6%; rural 69.4%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.48%; female 50.52%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 26.5%; 15-29, 29.2%; 30-44, 23.1%; 45-59, 13.5%; 60-74, 6.1%; 75-84, 1.4%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 48,511,000; (2020) 51,787,000. Doubling time: 84 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Burman 55.9%; Karen 9.5%; Shan 6.5%; Han Chinese 2.5%; Mon 2.3%; Yangbye 2.2%; Kachin 1.5%; other 19.6%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Buddhist c. 7495; Protestant c. 696; Muslim c. 396; Hindu c. 296; traditional beliefs c. 1196; other c. 496.

Major cities (2004): Yangón (Rangoon) 4,107,0006; Mandalay 924,0006; Moulmein (Mawlamyine) 405,800; Bassein (Pathein) 215,600; Pegu (Bago) 200,900.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.98. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 59.9 years; female 64.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic

Population economically active (2003)8: total 26,361,000; activity rate of total population 53.3% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 78.7%; female 44.9%; unemployed [2006] 10.2%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 121.4

2002 190.2

2003 259.8

2004 271.6

2005 297.0

2006 353.39

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 15.3%, in permanent crops 1.4%, in pasture 0.5%; overall forest area (2005) 49.0%.

Foreign tradet Balance of trade (current prices)!! 2001—02

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

2006-071?

—1,346 3.5%

45,045 14.5%

+721 2.6%

+5,359 19.1%

49,132 28.4%

311,941 27.9%

K '000,000 % of total

Imports (2006-0711 12): K 15,440,000,000 (mineral fuels 24.896, nonelectrical machinery and transport equipment 15.9%, base and fabricated metals 7.0%, synthetic fabrics 6.5%). Major import sources: Singapore 36.5%; China 24.4%; Thailand 10.3%; India 5.3%; Japan 4.9%.

Exports (2006-0711 12): K 27,381,000,000 (natural gas 42.6%; pulses [mostly beans] 11.1%; hardwood 10.0%, of which teak 6.0%; garments 5.3%; unspec-

ified [including gemstones] 22.3%). Major export destinations: Thailand 48.9%; India 13.7%; Hong Kong 8.2%; China 7.9%; Singapore 3.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 3,955 km; (2006) passenger-km 5,263,000,000; (2006) metric ton-km cargo 829,000,000. Roads (1999): total

length 27,966 km (paved 1196). Vehicles (200713): passenger cars 203,441; trucks and buses 74,037. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 124,697,000; metric ton-km cargo 245,000,000.

Communications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

373

8.1

Telephones Cellular

2006

21415

4.215

Landline

2005

504

9.3

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2004 Internet users — 2006 Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

400

8.6

50114 94

414 1.8

0.815

—1$

2006

diseases 477; cardiovascular diseases 258; injuries, accidents, and violence 92;

malignant neoplasms (cancers) 74; chronic respiratory diseases 57. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 1.3% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2002-03). Revenue: K 279,377,000,000 (nontax revenue 59.6%; rev-

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 89.7%; males literate 93.7%; females literate 86.2%.

enue from taxes 40.3%, of which taxes on goods and services 22.1%, taxes

Education (2004)

on individual income 16.3%; foreign grants 0.196). Expenditures: K 353,389,000,000 (economic affairs 31.4%, of which transport 18.4%; public services

Primary (age 5-9)

23.4%; defense 21.5%; education 14.6%; health 5.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$5,196,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): rice 25,364,000, sugarcane 7,187,000, fruits 1,752,000, dry beans (2006) 1,700,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 910,000, corn (maize) 820,000, onions 720,000, plantains 602,000, sesame seeds 570,000, pigeon peas 530,000, chick-

peas 172,010, garlic 103,813, allspice (pimento) 70,000; livestock (number of live animals) 12,123,000 cattle, 5,677,000 pigs, 81,518,000 chickens; roundwood 42,548,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 90%; fisheries production 1,743,-

000 (from aquaculture 2796). Mining and quarrying (2006): copper (metal content) 34,5006; jade 20,647,000 kg; rubies 1,685,000 carats; spinel 908,000

carats; sapphires 423,000 carats. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2003): tobacco products (2002) 1,320; nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 728; transportation equipment 483; fabricated metal products 254; food products, n.a.; cement (2006) 570,000 metric tons. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k W-hr; 2004) 6,437,000,000 (6,437,000,000); hard coal

(metric tons; 2004) 831,000 (117,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 182,000 (68,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 7,675,000 ([2004] 7,509,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 917,000 (1,808,000); natural gas (cu m;

2006) 12,502,000,000 ([2004] 1,650,000,000).

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2004) 84; remittances (2006) 117; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 245; official development assistance (2005) 145. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2004) 29; remittances (2006) 25. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.0; average annual income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1997): food and nonalcoholic beverages 70.4%, fuel and lighting 6.6%, transportation 3.3%, clothing and footwear 2.4%. © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Secondary (age: 10-15) } Voc., teacher tr. Higher17

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

36,0107

160,110

4,948,198

30.9

3,06816 — 78,144 * *

2,589,342 s f

83.1

587,300

36.8

958

15,947

Health (2004-05): physicians 17,564 (1 per 2,660 persons); hospital beds 34,654 (1 per 1,350 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 52.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,620 (vegetable products 95%, animal products 5%); 199% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 482,750 (army 72.5%, navy 2.8%, air force 2.5%, paramilitary [people’s militia and people’s police] 22.2%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 7.6%; per capita expenditure, n.a.

1Of State Peace and Development Council, assisted by Prime Minister. ?Site near Pyinmana was officially proclaimed as the new capital on March 27, 2006. ?The kyat is pegged to the Special Drawing Right of the International Monetary Fund at 1 SDR = K 851 and is not freely traded ee the unofficial (but tolerated) black market rate in May 2007 was about 1 U.S.$ = K 1,300. ‘Estimate from http:/Avww.citypopulation.de. ‘Estimate from U.S. Census Hon International Database (August 2006 update). 62005. 7Employed only. 8Estimates of ILO Employment Trends Unit. 9 Average of 2nd and 3rd quarters. !°Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. Fiscal year beginning April 1. 2Excludes March. January 1. Circulation of daily newspapers. !5Subscribers. 162002—08. 172001-02.

Internet resources for further information: * Key Indicators of Developing Asian and Pacific Countries http://www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Key Indicators/2007/default.asp * Central Statistical Organization http://www.csostat.gov. mm

Nations of the World

Namibia

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

Official name: Republic of Namibia. Form of government: republic with two legislative houses (National Council [26]; National Assembly [721]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Windhoek. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Namibian dollar (N$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Agriculture, fishing Diamond mining

Other mining

area sq mi

Katima Mulilo Walvis Bay

population 2001 census

sq km

5,609

14,528

79,826

24,548

63,579

107,663

Rehoboth

42,336

109,651

68,249

Karas Kavango

Keetmanshoop Rundu

62,245 18,712

161,215 48,463

69,329 202,694

Khomas

Windhoek

14,288

37,007

250,262

Kunene Ohangwena

Khorixas Oshikango

44,515 4,132

115,293 10,703

68,735 228,384

Omaheke

Gobabis

32,669

84,612

68,039

Omusati

Ongandjera

10,260

26,573

228,842

Oshakati Tsumeb Otjiwarongo

3,341 14,924 40,612 318,1932

8,653 38,653 105,185 824,116?

161,916 161,007 135,384 1,830,330

labour force

% of labour force

4,400 2,231

9.9 5.0

134,259

20.6

5,596 1,743

12.6 3.9

2.8 TA 13.2 12.6 24 18.6 8.48 100.0

1,463

Public utilities

1,250

Transp. and commun.

3,237

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Services Pub. admin., defense Other TOTAL

5,870 5,609 1,075 8,269 3,7238 44,4672

33

}

3,868

i

22,922 21,788

3.5 3.3

4,193

0.7 2.2 7:1 6.8 17.2 3.7 34.39 100.0

14,308

46,579 44,251 112,172 24,419 223,7269 652,4832

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 1.0%, in permanent crops 0.01%, in pasture 46.2%; overall forest area (2005) 9.3%.

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) N$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

1,711 8.0%

—2,183 8.8%

—3,481 15.5%

—1,829 7.2%

—1,688 6.0%

-1,114 2.6%

port equipment 16.0%; chemicals, rubber, and plastics 12.1%; food, bever-

Population (2007): 2,074,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 6.5, persons per sq km 2.5. Urban-rural (2006): urban 34.0%; rural 66.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.13%; female 49.87%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 38.2%; 15-29, 31.3%; 30-44, 15.6%; 45-59, 9.2%; 60-74, 4.5%; 75 and over 1.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 2,157,000; (2020) 2,428,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Ovambo 34.4%; mixed race (black/white) 14.5%; Kavango 9.1%; Afrikaner 8.1%; San (Bushmen) and Bergdama 7.0%; Herero 5.5%; Nama 4.4%; Kwambi 3.7%; German 2.8%; other 10.5%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Protestant

% of total value

Imports (2006): N$21,719,000,000 (refined petroleum products 18.3%; trans-

Demography

(mostly Lutheran)

49.3%; Roman

Catholic 17.7%; unaffiliated Christian 14.1%; independent Christian 10.8%; traditional beliefs 6.0%; other 2.1%.

Major urban locatities (2001): Windhoek 233,529; Rundu 44,413; Walvis Bay

South Africa 27.8%; U.K. 14.9%; Angola 13.8%; U.S. 11.0%; Spain 9.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: route length (2006) 1,480 mi, 2,382 km; (1995-96) passenger-km 48,300,000; (2003-04) metric ton-km 1,247,400. Roads (2004): total length 26,245 mi, 42,237 km (paved 13%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 82,580; trucks and buses 81,002. Air transport (2005)11: passenger-km Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 24.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.4 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.06. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 44.5 years; female 42.3 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 19.6% 3 (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2006-07). Revenue: N$16,209,000,000 (tax revenue 90.096, of which customs duties and excises 39.9%, income tax 28.9%, VAT

ages, and tobacco 11.5%; machinery and apparatus 9.8%). Major import sources (2004): South Africa 85.4%; U.K. 2.6%; Germany 1.9%; China 1.2%; Zimbabwe 0.8%. Exports (2006): N$20,605,000,000 (diamonds 33.0%; fish 18.2%; other minerals [mainly gold, zinc, copper, lead, and silver] 12.496; refined zinc 12.296; meat preparations [mostly beef] 7.896). Major export destinations (2004):

1,012,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 60,429,000.

42,015; Oshakati 28,255; Katima Mulilo 22,694.

19.7%; nontax

revenue and grants 10.0%). Expenditures: N$15,287,800,000 (current expenditure 82.0%, of which wages and salaries 40.2%; capital expenditure 18.0%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): roots and tubers 295,000, corn (maize) 60,853, millet 49,000, wheat 12,858, grapes 9,528, pulses 9,000, sorghum 6,000, seed cotton 5,100; livestock (number of live animals) 2,660,252 sheep, 2,383,960 cattle, 2,061,403 goats; round-

wood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 552,745 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): salt 573,248; fluorspar 84,211; zinc (metal content) 68,000; lead (metal content) 14,320; copper (metal content) 10,157; uranium oxide 3,711; amethyst 40,000 kg; silver 30,003 kg; gold 2,703 kg; gem

diamonds (2006) 2,080,000 carats. Manufacturing (value added in N$’000,000; 2006): food and food products 2,633 (of which fish processing 620, meat processing 101); other manufactures, which include fur products (from Karakul sheep), textiles, carved wood products, and refined metals 2,962. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 1,397,000,000 (2,819,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, none (n.a.); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure (2003-04). Average household size4 4.9; average annual income per household4 N$43,520 (U.S.$6,554); sources of income‘: wages and salaries 46.4%, farming 29.6%, transfer payments 10.2%, self-employment 7.1%; expenditure (2001)5: food and nonalcoholic beverages 29.6%, housing and energy 20.6%, transportation 14.8%, education Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 348; remittances (2006) 16; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 254; official development assistance (2005) 1196. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 108; remittances (2006) 17; foreign direct disinvestment (2001-05 avg.) -12. Population economically active (2006): total 656,000; activity rate of total population 32.0% (participation rates: over age 15, 54.0%; female 43.4%; officially unemployed 5.3%). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2006 145.9

2000

in value N$'000,000

Largest towns

7.696.

2005 138.9

2006

Hardap

Oshana Oshikoto Otjozondjupa TOTAL

2004 135.8

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population

Caprivi

2003 130.4

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,428,000,000 (U.S.$3,141 per capita).

Manufacturing Construction

Erongo

2002 121.7

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2004-05): U.S.$317,015,0007.

N$7.23; 1 £ = N$14.52.

Regions

2001 109.2

655

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

509

259

2005 2005

49512 139

24512 69

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004 2005

220 47

109 23

2005 2005

81 nee

40 on

Education and health Educational attainment (2000)13. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling/unknown 26.5%; incomplete primary education 25.5%; complete primary 8.0%; incomplete secondary 24.9%; complete secondary 11.4%; higher 3.7%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 85.0%; males literate 86.8%; females literate 83.5%. Education (2004-05)

student’ schools

Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-19) Higher

1,36214 11415 2415

teachers

students

teacher ratio

12491 6,403

403,412 148,104

33.1 23.1

89816

12,197

13.116

Health: physicians (2004) 598 (1 per 3,201 persons); hospital beds (2004-05) 6,8117 (1 per 283 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 48.1. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,996 (vegetable products 8096, animal products 2096); 10996 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 9,200 (army 97.895, navy 2.296). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$92.

1An additional 6 non-voting members may be appointed. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Statistically derived midpoint of range. ^Based on the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2003/04, comprising 10,920 households. [Weights of consumer price index components. *Figure represents commitments. 7Excludes government-guaranteed debt. Taxes less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. ?Includes 220,634 unemployed. !?Imports are f.o.b. in balance of trade and cif. for commodities and trading partners. Air Namibia only. !2Subscribers. 13Based on the Namibia Demographic and Health Survey 2000, comprising 6,392 households. 141998. 151994. 16200304. !?Public sector only.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Namibia http://www.bon.com.na * National Planning Commission http://www.npc.gov.na

656

Britannica World Data Population economically active (2002): 3,228010; activity rate of total population 32.6% (participation rates: over age 15, 76.7%; female 45.5%; unemployed 22.7%).

Nauru Official name: Naoero (Nauruant) (Republic of Nauru). Form of government: republic with one legislative house (Parliament [18]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: 2. Official language: nonel. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Australian dollar ($A); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = $A 1.21; 1 £ = $A 2.44.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Implicit GDP deflator 1000

2001 1072

2002

2003

2004

2005

113.9

117.7

122.4

126.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.1; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 1.0; official development assistance (2005) 1614. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops, n.a., in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) n.a.

Area and population area

Foreign trade!5

population 2002

Districts

sqmi

sq km

census?

Balance of trade (current prices)

Aiwo Anabar Anetan Anibare Baitsi Boe Buada Denigomodu Ewa Ijuw Meneng Nibok Uaboe Yaren TOTAL

0.4 0.6 0.4 1.2 0.5 0.2 1.0 0.3 0.5 0.4 1.2 0.6 0.3 0.6 82

14 1.5 1.0 3.1 12 0.5 2.6 0.9 12 Tel 3T 1.6 0.8 1.5 21.2

1,4514 378 498 232 443 731 673 2,2734 397 169 1,323 479 386 632 10,0655

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

-7.4 16.9%

—19.6 45.8%

-8.7 18.6%

3.7 9.9%

3.5 10.3%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Imports (2003): c. U.S.$20,000,000 (agricultural products 8.0%, of which food 6.5%; remainder 92.0%).Major import sources (2005): Australia 57.4%; U.S. 9.6%; Germany 8.0%; Indonesia 7.4%; Fiji 3.7%.

Exports (1999): c. U.S.$40,000,000 (phosphate, virtually 100% 13). Major export destinations (2005): South Africa 56.9%; India 15.7%; Canada 5.9%; South Korea 3.3%; Germany 2.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2001): length 3 mi, 5 km; passenger traffic, n.a.; metric ton-km cargo, n.a. Roads (2004): total length 25 mi, 40 km (paved 73%). Vehicles (1989): passenger cars, trucks, and buses 1,448. Air transport (2001):

Demography

passenger-mi 178,000,000, passenger-km 287,000,000; 19,860,000, metric ton-km cargo 29,000,000.

Population (2007): 10,200. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,244, persons per sq km 481.1.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 10096. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.1196; female 49.8996.

Communications

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 37.5%; 15-29, 29.5%; 30-44, 17.8%; 45-59, 11.8%; 60-74, 3.1%; 75 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,000; (2020) 11,000. Doubling time: 38 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Nauruan 48.0%; Kiribertese (Gilbertese) 19.3%;

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

short

ton-mi

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

0.8

77

2003 2003

1.316 1.6

13016 160

cargo

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005 2005 2005

E 0 a

ona 0 :

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Chinese 13.0%; Tuvaluan 6.9%; Australian white 6.2%; other 6.6%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant c. 49%, of which Congregational c. 29%; Roman Catholic c. 24%; Chinese folk-religionist c. 10%; other c. 17%.

Major cities: none; population of Yaren urban area (2007) 4,616.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 25.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.19. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (1995): 5.3/n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 59.2 years; female 66.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diabetes mellitus 159.0; diseases of the respiratory system 149.0; diseases of the circulatory system 119.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 79.5; accidents 79.5.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: $A 27,000,0006. Expenditures: $A 26,400,000. market

Education (2003)1°

student/ schools!7

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-17) Vocational

9 2 2

teachers 63 34 4

students

teacher ratio

1,375 645 31

21.8 19.0 7.8

Health (2004): physicians 5 (1 per 2,012 persons); hospital beds 60 (1 per 168 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 10.0. Food: n.a.

Military

Public debt (2005): U.S.$33,300,0007.

Gross national income (at current (U.S.$7,840 per capita).

Education and health Educational attainment (1992)10, Percentage of population age 5 and over having: primary education or less 77.4%; secondary education 12.9%; higher 4.1%; not stated 5.6%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 97%.

prices; 2006): U.S.$79,000,000

Total active duty personnel (2006): Nauru does not have any military establishment. The defense is assured by Australia, but no formal agreement exists.

Distribution of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

1997

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

$A '000,0008

value?

force, 10, 11

force’, 10, 11

Agriculture Mining (phosphate)

Public utilities

Manufacturing Construction Transportation and communications Trade, hotels Finance Services

Pub. admin.

Other TOTAL

5&1

7.0

a

24

3.3

paa

54

74

4.0 8.6

5.5 11.8

are 72.612

65.0. 100.0

ae 137 33 ota

T

E wm 6.4 1.6 ave

1,238

58.0

198 2,134

9.3 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): coconuts 1,600, vegetables 450, tropical fruit (including mangoes) 275; coffee, almonds, figs, and pandanus (screw pine) are also cultivated, but most foodstuffs and beverages (including water) are imported; livestock (number of live animals) 2,800 pigs, 5,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) none; fisheries production (2005) 39 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): phosphate rock (gross weight including basic slag and guano) 11,0001. Manufacturing: none; virtually all consumer manufactures are imported. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 32,000,000 (32,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (46,000); natural gas, none (none). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Nauruan is the national language; English is the language of business and government. ?No official capital; government offices are located in Yaren district. Preliminary. 4The 2,381 person population of the Nauru Phosphate Corporation settlement, which provides housing for foreign employees is distributed to Aiwo and Denigomodu by estimate. The majority of foreign mine workers were repatriated to Kiribati and Tuvalu in 2006. “Includes 193 short-term visitors. ‘Largely from fishing license fees. 7Official admission of near bankruptcy made by president of Nauru to UN General Assembly in October 2005. 8At factor cost. "Employed only. !°Nauruan only. !1Most non-Nauruans are phosphate industry contract workers. !2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Primary phosphate deposits were predicted to be exhausted by 2010. However, new mining techniques allowing for the extraction of “secondary” phosphate, which is lower grade and more difficult to reach, as well as the late 2005 discovery of substantial new deposits of primary phosphate, led by mid-2006 to significant new foreign investment, the refurbishing of phosphate mining and processing facilities, and the return to large-scale operations. “Figure represents commitments. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and trading partners and c.i.f. in commodities. !6Subscribers. 172004.

Internet resources for further information: * Nauru Bureau of Statistics http://www.spc.int/prism/country/nr/stats * Key Indicators of Developing Asian and Pacific Countries http://www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Key Indicators/2007/default.asp

Nations of the World

Nepal

Population economically active (2003)4: total 9,981,000; activity rate of tota population 38.3% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 66.3%; female 41.0%; unofficially unemployed [2004] c. 42%).

Official name: Nepal. Form of government: interim regime with interim legislature (House of Representatives [329])1. Chief of state and government: Prime Minister assisted by Council of Ministers. Capital: Kathmandu. Official language: Nepali. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Nepalese rupee (NRs); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

Western Mid-western Far-western

population

sq mi

sq km

2001 census

10,987 10,583

28,456 27,410

5,344,476 8,031,629

Pokhara

11,351

29,398

4,571,013

Birendranagar Dipayal

16,362 7,544

42,378 19,539

3,012,975 2,191,330

56,827

147,181

23,151,423

Dhankuta Kathmandu

TOTAL

2003

2004

2005

2006

102.7

105.9

112.0

115.2

123.2

132.6

beverages 59.0%, housing 9.5%, education 2.8%, other 28.7%.

area

Eastern Central

2002

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 131; remittances (2006) 1,211; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 7.0; official development assistance (2005) 428. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 163; remittances (2006) 65. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 16.5%, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 12.1%; overall forest area (2005) 25.4%.

Area and population Principal centres

2001

Household income and expenditure (2003-04). Average household size 5.3; income per household NRs 80,111 (U.S.$1,084); sources of income: selfemployment 47%, wages and salaries 28%, other 25%; expenditure: food and

NRs 65.57; 1 £ = NRs 131.80.

Development regions

657

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) NRs '000,000 % of total

2001-02 —60,444 39.2%

2002-03 —74,422 42.7%

Imports (2005-06): NRs 175,108,000,000 rics, yarns, and made-up articles] 24.3%; leum] 20.8%; machinery and transport chemical products 14.296). Major import

Demography Population (2007): 28,196,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 496.2, persons per sq km 191.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 15.8%; rural 84.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.56%; female 50.44%.

2003-04 —82,366 43.3%

2004-05 —90,768 43.6%

2005-06 —113,941 48.2%

(basic manufactures [including fabmineral fuels [mostly refined petroequipment 15.0%; chemicals and sources (2006): India c. 4896; China

c. 1396; U.A.E. c. 1296; Saudi Arabia c. 596; Kuwait c. 496.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 39.0%; 15-29, 27.9%; 30-44, 17.2%; 45-59, 10.2%; 60-74, 4.7%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 29,898,000; (2020) 35,868,000. Doubling time: 33 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Nepalese 55.8%; Maithili 10.8%; Bhojpuri 7.9%; Tharu 4.4%; Tamang 3.6% ; Newar 3.0%; Awadhi 2.7%; Magar 2.5%; Gurkha 1.7%; other 7.6%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Hindu 80.696; Buddhist 10.796; Muslim 4.2%; Kirat (local traditional belief) 3.6%; Christian 0.5%; other 0.4%. Major cities (2001): Kathmandu 671,846; Biratnagar 166,674; Lalitpur 162,991; Pokhara 156,312; Birganj 112,484.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 29.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.48. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 62.1 years; female 62.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 472; diseases of the circulatory system 203, of which ischemic heart disease 95; accidents and injuries 86; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 63. National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: NRs 86,800,000,000 (tax revenue 69.1%; grants 15.9%; nontax revenue 15.0%). Expenditures: NRs 97,900,000,000 (economic services 24.1%, education 19.5%, general public services 14.9%, defense

11.7%, health 5.9%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,217,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): rice 4,290,000, sugarcane 2,376,103, potatoes 1,738,840, corn (maize) 1,716,042, wheat 1,442,442, millet 289,838, ginger 154,200, mustard seed 141,989; livestock (number of live animals) 7,154,000 goats, 6,994,000 cattle, 4,081,000 buffalo; roundwood 13,952,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 91%; fisheries production 42,463 (from aquaculture 53%). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 263,701; marble 23,850 sq m; talc 5,832. Manufacturing

(value added in U.S.$7000,000; 2002): food products 83; textiles and wearing apparel 73; tobacco products 55; beverages 49; paints, soaps, and pharmaceuticals 42. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 2,401,000,000 (1,964,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2005) 9,298 (257,000); crude

petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (685,000); natural gas, none (none).

2000-01 —60,033 35.0%

(metric tons; 2004) none

Exports (2005-06): NRs 61,167,000,000 (agricultural products 14.596, of which vegetable ghee 6.6%; ready-made garments 12.2%; carpets 9.7%; jute goods 4.496; pashminas 3.096; unspecified 23.196). Major export destinations (2006): India c. 58%; U.S. c. 14%; Germany c. 6%; U.K. c. 3%; France c. 296.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 53 km; passengers carried (2002) 1,600,000; freight handled 22,000 metric tons. Roads (2004): total length 17,281 km (paved 31%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 66,395; trucks and buses 40,267. Air transport: passenger-km (2003) 652,000,000; metric ton-km

cargo, n.a.

Communications Medium

date

Televisions

2003

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

249

Medium

9.6

Telephones Cellular Landline

units

1,0427 596

PCs

387 22

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

132

49

2005

4869

2006 2005

249 22

date

Dailies 2006 2006

number

Internet users Broadband

186 9.0 m

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 6 and over having: no formal schooling 8.7%; primary education 41.9%; incomplete secondary 30.6%; complete secondary and higher 17.6%; unknown 1.2%. Literacy (2003-04): total population age 15 and over literate 48.0%; males literate 64.5%; females literate 33.8%. Education (2005) Primary (age 6-10) Secondary (age 11-15) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

32,747 13,510 a

110,1738 50,9138 3

4,502,697 1,961,973 132,777?

35.78 35.58 23.68

Health (2005-06): physicians 1,259 (1 per 21,737 persons); hospital beds 6,796 (1 per 4,027 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 59.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,503 (vegetable products 93%, animal products 7%); 138% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 69,000 (army 100.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$6.

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$7,476,000,000

(U.S.$270 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005-06

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

1998-99

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

NRs '000,000

value

force?

force?

7,203,000 8,000 552,000 344,000 26,000 135,000 522,000 51,000 70,000 544,000 8,000 9,463,000

76.1 0.1 58 3.7 0.3 1.4 5.5 0.5 0.7 58 0.1 100.0

212,827 2,669 41,768 56,558 12,508 55,919 56,139 64,937 }

36.5 0.5 7.2 9.7 24 9.6 9.6 131-1

54,50

94

25,0798 582,948

4.33 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lAn interim constitution was promulgated Jan. 15, 2007. In late December 2007 the interim legislature voted to abolish the monarchy, which had been suspended from January 2007; the formal endorsement of the abolishment is expected to occur in April 2008. 2Employed only; excludes 1,987,000 workers age 5-14. *Includes indirect taxes less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. “Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. “Imports c.i-f.; exports f.o.b. 5Circulation of daily newspapers. "Subscribers. 82002—03. ?2004—05.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Nepal http://www.nrb.org.np * Central Bureau of Statistics http://www.cbs.gov.np

658

Britannica World Data

Netherlands, The

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (Kingdom of The Netherlands). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with a parliament (States General) comprising two chambers (Senate [75]; House of Representatives

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€'000,000

value

forces, 7

forces, 7

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

10,410

1.9

234,000

3.0

Mining Manufacturing

16,960 63,087

3.2 11.8

8,000 1,021,000

0.1 13.1

Construction

26,278

4.9

483,000

6.2

7,948

15

44,000

0.6

Transp. and commun.

33,774

6.3

484,000

6.2

Trade, hotels

70,035

13.1

1,442,000

18.5

131,212 53,718

24.6 10.1

1,173,000 538,000

15:1 6.9

60,188 60,7148 534,324

11.3 11.48 100.09

2,035,000 323,000 7,784,000?

Public utilities

[150].

Chief of state: Monarch. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Amsterdam. Seat of government: The Hague. Official language: Dutchl. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

2005

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

26.1 42 100.0

Population economically active (2005): total 8,308,000; activity rate of total population c. 5196 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 75.196; female 45.196; unemployed [April 2005-March 2006] 6.396).

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

1£= €148.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Area and population Provinces

.

Capitals

Drenthe Flevoland Friesland Gelderland Groningen Limburg Noord-Brabant Noord-Holland Overijssel

Assen Lelystad Leeuwarden Arnhem Groningen Maastricht 's-Hertogenbosch Haarlem Zwolle

Utrecht Zeeland Zuid-Holland TOTAL

Utrecht Middelburg The Hague

8sre

population.

sq mi

sq km

2006? estimate

1,035 931 2,217 1,983 1,146 853 1,962 1,580 1,321

2,680 2,412 5,741 5,137 2,968 2,209 5,082 4,092 3,421

484,437 370,672 642,432 1,975,856 574,469 1,132,161 2,416,100 2,607,164 1,113,564

559 1,133 1,314 16,0343

1,449 2,934 3,403 41,5283

1,180,175 380,179 3,458,300 16,335,509

Consumer price index Hourly earnings index

€ 000,000 26 of total

2.2%; Surinamese

(20062): Amsterdam

1,465,405;

Rotterdam

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.3 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 62.9%; outside of marriage 37.1%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.3 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.72. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 4.4/1.9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 77.6 years; female 81.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 268.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 247.4; diseases of the respiratory system 87.7; alcohol and drug overdoses 39.4.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: €192,220,000,000 (social security contributions 35.7%, VAT 19.8%, income tax 15.3%, corporate taxes 7.8%, nontax revenue 7.5%). Expenditures: €200,270,000,000 (social security and welfare 41.9%, education 11.1%, health 10.4%, economic affairs 6.6%, defense 3.6%). National debt (2006): U.S.$322,400,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): potatoes 6,240,000, sugar beets 5,414,000, wheat 1,184,000, onions 853,000, tomatoes 675,000, carrots 541,000, cucumbers 440,000, apples 365,000, mushrooms 225,000, flowering bulbs and tubers 79,000 acres (32,000 hectares), of

which tulips 24,700 acres (10,000 hectares), cut flowers/plants under glass 12,400 acres (5,000 hectares); livestock (number of live animals) 11,356,000 pigs, 3,749,000 cattle, 1,376,000 sheep; roundwood (2005) 1,110,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 26%; fisheries production (2005) 617,383 (from aquaculture 11%). Manufacturing (value added in €'000,000; 2002): food, beverages, and tobacco 12,936; chemicals and chemical products 7,542; printing and pubmachinery 5,050; nonelectrical machinery

4,822; fabricated metal products 4,744. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 96,366,000,000 (95,556,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) negligible (13,551,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 15,500,000 ([2004] 361,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 65,801,000

(28,801,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 82,920,000,000 ([2004] 54,010,000,000).

Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size (2006) 2.3; disposable income per household €34,321 (U.S.$42,683); sources of income (1996): wages 48.4%, transfers 28.5%, self-employment 11.3%; expenditure: housing and energy 22.2%, transportation and communications 15.9%, food and beverages 13.6%, recreation and culture 10.1%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 26.7%, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 29.1%; overall forest area (2005) 10.8%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$670,483,000,000 (U.S.$40,940 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2006

100.0 100.0

104.2 103.9

107.6 107.7

109.9 110.6

111.2 112.3

113.1 113.3

114.4 115.3

2001 422,999 5.0%

2002 427,120 6.2%

2003 427,200 6.2%

2004 427,418 5.7%

2005 431,916 6.0%

2006 432,999 5.5%

6.3%. Exports (2005): €280,743,000,000 (chemicals and chemical products 17.0%; food 11.6%; mineral fuels 11.0%; computers and related equipment 10.6%). Major export destinations: Germany 23.6%; Belgium-Luxembourg 11.9%; U.K. 9.3%; France 9.2%; Italy 5.7%.

2.0%;

1,176,869; The Hague 990,463; Utrecht 577,389; Haarlem 405,430.

lishing 5,743; electric/electronic

2005

Germany 19.0%; Belgium-Luxembourg 10.7%; U.S. 8.0%; China 7.7%; U.K.

dition c. 20%; Muslim c. 6%; nonreligious/atheist c. 40%; other c. 4%.

agglomerations

2004

Imports (2005): €248,827,000,000 (mineral fuels 14.7%, of which crude petroleum 7.5%; chemicals and chemical products 13.1%; computers and related equipment 11.7%; food 7.6%; road vehicles 5.7%). Major import sources:

Religious affiliation (2004): Roman Catholic c. 30%; Reformed/Lutheran traurban

2003

Balance of trade (current prices)

Population projection: (2010) 16,454,000; (2020) 16,711,000. Ethnic composition (by place of origin [including 2nd generation]; 20062):

Major

2002

Foreign trade!?

Age breakdown (20062): under 15, 18.3%; 15-29, 18.1%; 30-44, 23.0%; 45-59, 21.3%; 60-74, 12.9%; 75-84, 4.9%; 85 and over, 1.5%. 2.4%; Turkish

2001

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 10,383; remittances (2006) 2,424; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 28,556. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 16,082; remittances (2006) 6,662; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 52,706.

Demography Population (2007): 16,371,000. Density (2007)4: persons per sq mi 1,255, persons per sq km 484.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 80.2%; rural 19.8%. Sex distribution (20072): male 49.45%; female 50.55%.

Netherlander 80.7%; Indonesian Moroccan 2.096; other 10.7965.

2000

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 2,797 km; passenger-km (2004) 14,097,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2001) 4,293,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 134,981 km (paved 90%). Vehicles (20072): passenger cars 7,230,178; trucks and buses 1,064,846. Air transport (2005): passenger-km 68,316,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,650,500,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

10,514

648

2005 2005

15,83412 7,600

97112 466

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

12,060 4,7121! 14,544 5,1921?

740 28911 889 31872

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population ages 15-64 having: primary education 9.5%; lower secondary 9.6%; upper secondary 10.7%; vocational 44.0%; higher 25.4%, of which university 9.2%; unknown 0.8%. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-12)

teachers

students

7,296

1,597,000

666

940,000

Vocational

136

481,000

Higher

117

563,000

Secondary (age 12-18)

teacher ratio

Health: physicians (2003) 50,854 (1 per 319 persons); hospital beds (2003) 81,125 (1 per 200 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 4.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,479 (vegetable products 70%, animal products 30%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 53,130 (army 43.6%, navy 22.8%, air force 20.8%, paramilitary!3 12.8%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$523. Frisian is officially recognized in Friesland but not legally codified by the national government. 2January 1. 3Total area per more recent survey equals 16,040 sq mi (41,543 sq km), of which land area equals 13,044 sq mi (33,783 sq km), inland water equals 1,380 sq mi (3,574 sq km), and coastal water equals 1,616 sq mi (4,186 sq km). Based on land area. “Includes Netherlander-EU country 5.0%. ‘Ages 15-64 only. 7Employed only. 8Taxes less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !?Imports c.i.£.; exports f.0.b. H1 Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 13Military constabulary.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistics Netherlands http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/default.htm * Netherlands Bank http://www.dnb.nl/dnb/home?lang-en

Nations of the World

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$3,341,000,000

Netherlands Antilles

(U.S.$17,691 per capita).

Official name: Nederlandse Antillen (Netherlands Antilles). Political status: nonmetropolitan territory of The Netherlands with one legislative house (Island Council of Curaçao [21])1. Chief of state: Dutch Monarch represented by Governor. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Willemstad. Official language: Dutch. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Netherlands Antillean guilder (NAf.); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = NAF. 1.79;

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Agriculture, forestry Mining

Area and population area

population

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

20052 estimate

Kralendijk Willemstad

111 171

288 444

10,638 135,822

5

13

1,434

20069

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

NAf. '000,000

value

force

force

|

34.3 g

06 j

629

09 g

Manufacturing Construction

311.2 285.3

5.5 5.0

3,764 3,538

5.4 5.1

Public utilities

263.7

4.7

912

1.3

Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate, insurance Pub. admin., defense

509.3 888.6

9.0 157

4,638 16,167

6.7 23.4

1,186.4 778.3

21.0 13.7

9,696 5,506

14.0 8.0

17.3 7.510 100.0

14,452 9,86411 69,166

20.9 14.311 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

1£= NAF. 3.60.

Island councils

659

981.9 425.910 5,665.012

Public debt (external outstanding; 2006): U.S.$459,200,000. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 10.0%, in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) 15%.

Foreign trade!?

Leeward Islands Bonaire Curacao

Balance of trade (current prices)

Windward Islands Saba Sint Eustatius, or Statia

The Bottom Oranjestad

8

21

2,584

Sint Maarten (Dutch part only)

Philipsburg

13

34

35,035

308

800

185,513

TOTAL

Demography

530.8%: 60-74, 10.3%: 75-84, 2.8%: 85 and over, 0.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 200,000; (2020) 208,000. Ethnic composition (2000): local black-other (Antillean Creole) 81.1%; Dutch 5.3%; Surinamese 2.9%; other (significantly West Indian black) 10.7%. Religious affiliation (2001): Roman Catholic 72.0%; Protestant 16.0%; Spiritist 0.9%; Buddhist 0.5%; Jewish 0.4%; Baha’ 0.3%; Hindu 0.2%; Muslim 0.2%;

other/unknown 9.5%. Major locates (2001)3: Willemstad 93,599; Kralendijk 3,179; Philipsburg 1,227; Oranjestad 1,003; The Bottom 462.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.99. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 4.0/2.9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 73.8 years; female 78.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (1993): infectious and parasitic diseases/diseases of the respiratory system 209.0; diseases of the circulatory system 180.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 117.7.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: NAf. 822,600,000 (tax revenue 78.9%, of which sales tax 40.0%, import duties 17.4%; grants 10.9%; nontax revenue 10.2%). Expenditures: NAf. 910,600,000 (current expenditures 99.8%, of which transfers 38.2%, wages 32.5%, interest payments 16.1%, goods and services 12.9%; development expenditures 0.296). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): ^ livestock (number of live animals) 13,500 goats, 9,000 sheep, 2,600 asses, 135,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production 2,422 (from aqua-

culture, none). Mining and quarrying (2003): salt 500,000, sulfur by-product (2002) 30,000. Manufacturing (2002): residual fuel oil 5,200,000; gas-diesel oils 2,620,000; asphalt 1,030,000; other manufactures include electronic parts,

cigarettes, textiles, rum, and Curagao liqueur. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 1,248,000,000 ([2004] 1,065,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (79,800,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 9,081,000 (2,176,000); natural gas, none (none). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005)5 988; remittances (2005) 5; foreign direct disinvestment (2001-05 avg.) -11. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005)¢ 109; remittances (2004) 52; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 5.0. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 2.8; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1996)7, 8: housing 19.9%, food 14.7%, household

furnishings 8.8%, recreation and education 8.2%, clothing and footwear 7:396:

Population economically active (2006): total 91,178; activity rate of total population 48.5% (participation rates [2001]: ages 15-64, 68.7%; female 49.0%; unemployed [2006] 13.2%).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001 101.6

2002 102.0

2003 103.6

2004 105.3

2005 109.2

2002

—845 17.4%

—410 7.8%

—569 14.3%

Imports (2002): U.S.$2,268,500,000 (crude petroleum 59.7%, refined petroleum 8.7%, food 6.4%, electrical machinery and apparatus 4.0%). Major import sources (2004): Venezuela 51.1%; United States 21.9%; The Netherlands 5.0%. Exports (2002): U.S.$1,699,200,000 (refined petroleum 94.7%, food 1.2%, furniture and parts 0.8%). Major export destinations (2004): United States

Transport and communications

Age breakdown (20072): under 15, 22.796; 15-29, 18.696; 30-44, 23.996; 45-59,

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001

20.4%; Panama 11.2%; Guatemala 8.8%; Haiti 7.1%; The Bahamas 5.6%.

Population (2007): 192,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 623.4, persons per sq km 240.0. Urban-rural (2003): urban 70.596; rural 29.596. Sex distribution (20072): male 46.5395; female 53.4796.

26.5%, transportation and communications

U.S.$ 000,000 % of total

2000

2006 112.4

Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2003): total length 373 mi, 600 km (paved 50%). Vehicles (20052): passenger cars 64,947; trucks and buses 15,335. Air transport (2001)14: passenger arrivals and departures 2,131,000; freight loaded and unloaded 18,900 metric tons.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

1999

71

390

2004 2004

20016 80

1,092168 437

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2006 2004 1999 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

E 6615

E 34915

2.0 ük

ti e

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 0.896; primary education 24.296; lower secondary 42.8%; upper secondary 16.8%; higher 11.4%; unknown 4.0%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 96.9%; males literate 96.9%; females literate 97.0%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6—12)

98

1,145

22,667

19.8

Secondary (age 12-17)

53

639

9,180

14.4

542

6,088

11.2

Voc., teacher tr.

zd

Higher17, 18

1

2,032

Health: physicians (2001) 333 (1 per 520 persons); hospital beds (2002) 1,264 (1 per 138 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 9.9. Food (2004): daily per capita caloric intake 2,464 (vegetable products 85%, animal products 15%); 128% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2005): more than 1,000 Dutch naval personnel are stationed in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba.

1The Netherlands Antilles is to be dissolved as of late 2008 or 2009. Curacao and Sint Maarten are to become separate overseas territories within The Netherlands with a status similar to Aruba. Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius will be directly integrated into The Netherlands. Curacao's island council has jurisdiction over the other island councils until the dissolution is finalized. ?Tanuary 1. *Populations of five administrative seats. ^Mostly tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, gherkins, melons, and lettuce grown on hydro-

ponic farms; aloes grown for export, divi-divi pods, and sour orange fruit are nonhydroponic crops. “Excludes Saba and Sint Eustatius. ‘Excludes Curacao, Saba, and Sint Eustatius. 7Curagao only. SWeights of consumer price index components. ?Curacao and Bonaire only. !°Taxes less subsidies. Includes 9,722 unemployed. !2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Imports c.if; exports f.o.b. “Curacao and Sint Maarten airports. Circulation of five Curacao daily newspapers only. i6Subscribers. V'University of the Netherlands Antilles only. 182006-07.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of the Netherlands Antilles http://www.centralbank.an * Central Bureau of Statistics http://www.cbs.an

660

Britannica World Data

New Caledonia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003

Official name: Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). Political status: overseas country (France) with one legislative house (Congress? [54]). Chief of state: President of France represented by High Commissioner. Head of government: President. Capital: Nouméa. Official language: none3. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFP franc (CFPF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

in value U.S.$'000,000 Agriculture, fishing

Area and population

area Capitals

Loyauté (Loyalty)

we

Lifou Maré Ouvéa Nord (Northern) Belep

Koné

New Caledonia (part) Sud (Southern) New Caledonia (part)

Nouméa

Pins TOTAL

population

sq mi

sq km

2004 census

765

1,981

22.080

466 248 51 3,305 27

1,207 642 132 8,561 70

10,320 7,401 4,359 44,474 930

3,278 3,102 3,043

8,491 8,033 7,881

43,544 164,235 162,395

59 7,172

152 18,575

1,840 230,789

Sod

98

1.6 1.0

221.7 203.7 230.0

6.1 5.6 6.4

6,645 7,054 3,887

9.0 9.6 5:3

822.8

227

12,273

16.6 9.8 13.7 30.5

sx 100.07

1,719.9

47.5

7,205 10,090 22,491

Other TOTAL

3,618.4

100.07

ay 73,737

FDI (2001-05 avg.) 8.0.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.3%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 13.1%; overall forest area (2005) 39.2%.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices)

Urban-rural (2005): urban 63.7%; rural 36.3%. Sex distribution (2004): male 50.47%; female 49.53%.

Age breakdown (2004): under 15, 28.0%; 15-29, 24.3%; 30-44, 23.4%; 45-59, 14.9%; 60-74, 7.2%; 75-84, 1.7%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 253,000; (2020) 288,000. Doubling time: 54 years. Ethnic composition (1996): Melanesian 45.3%, of which local (Kanak) 44.1%, Vanuatuan 1.2%; European 34.1%; Wallisian or Futunan 9.0%; Indonesian 2.6%; Tahitian 2.6%; Vietnamese 1.4%; other 5.0%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 54.2%; Protestant 14.0%; unaffiliated/other Christian 18.8%; Muslim 2.7%; nonreligious 5.8%; other 4.5%.

146,245);

Mont-Dore 24,1954; Dumbéa 18,6024; Paita 12,0624; Poindimié 4,824.

2001 —63,824 34.6%

2002 -64,764 34.2%

2003 -81,112 32.9%

2004 -58,203 22.8%

2005 -66,645 24.3%

2006 -72,918 22.2%

Imports (2005): CFPF 170,692,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 20.4%, mineral products [mostly coal and refined petroleum] 16.4%, transportation equipment 14.8%, food 13.4%, chemicals and chemical products 7.7%). Major import sources: EU 47.296, of which France 32.396; Singapore 15.096; Australia 9.2%; New Zealand 5.5%. Exports (2005): CFPF 104,047,000,000 (ferronickel 62.1%, nickel ore 15.3%,

nickel matte 13.1%, shrimp 2.3%). Major export destinations: EU 34.5%, of which France 16.0%; Japan 18.8%; South Korea 13.5%; Taiwan 12.2%; China

5.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 3,375 mi, 5,432 km (paved [1993] 52%). Vehicles: passenger cars (2005) 105,159; trucks and buses (1997) 23,000. Air transport (2006)10: passenger-km 1,432,076,000; metric tonkm cargo 20,181,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.7 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 32.096; outside of marriage 68.096. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.20. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2005) 4.0/(2004) 1.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.9 years; female 78.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): malignant neoplasms (cancers) 120.5; diseases of the circulatory system 110.5; accidents, poisonings, and violence 91.4; diseases of the respiratory system 49.0; diseases of the digestive system 13.9.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFPF 116,323,000,000 (tax revenue 71.4%, of which indirect taxes 35.8%, direct taxes 35.6%; nontax revenue 28.6%). ExpenCFPF

3.0

1,151 765

20.4%, transportation and communications 16.1%, recreation 4.8%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 33.7, persons per sq km 13.0.

ditures:

2,176

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 253; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 65. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 171; remittances, n.a.;

Population (2007): 242,000.

91,386 (urban agglomeration

% of labour forces

1.8

Finance Services Pub. admin., defense

CFPF '000,000 % of total

(2004): Nouméa

labour forces

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.6; average annual income per household (1991) CFPF 3,361,233 (U.S.$32,879)8; sources of income (1991): wages and salaries 68.2%, transfer payments 13.7%, other 18.1%; expenditure (1991): food and beverages 25.9%, housing

Demography

Major communes

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun.

% of total value

65.9

Trade, hotels

CFPF 87.76; 1 £ = CFPF 176.42.

Provinces Island(s)

Mining Public utilities

2006

108,085,000,000

expenditure 4.2%).

(current expenditure

95.8%;

development

Public debt (external, outstanding; 1998): U.S.$79,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): coconuts 16,350, yams 11,080, corn (maize) 5,669, toes 2,984, squash 2,743, potatoes 1,664, bananas livestock (number of live animals) 111,000 cattle, ens; roundwood 4,800 cu m, of which fuelwood,

cassava 3,077, sweet pota790, onions 655, taro 443; 27,000 pigs, 600,000 chicknone; fisheries production

5,848, of which tuna 2,450, shrimp 2,440 (from aquaculture 43%). Mining and quarrying (2006): nickel ore 6,150,000, of which nickel content 105,000; cobalt 1,100 (recovered). Manufacturing (metric tons; 2006): cement (2004) 114,762; ferronickel (metal content) 48,723; nickel matte (metal content) 13,655; other manufactures include beer, copra cake, and soap. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k W-hr; 2006) 1,873,000,000 ([2005] 1,826,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (281,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (580,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2004): total 96,406; activity rate of total population 41.8% (participation rates: over age 14, 57.1%; female [1996] 39.7%; registered unemployed [2005] 15.8%). Price and earnings indexes (December 2000 = 100) Consumer price index Earnings index*

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.3 105.7

104.2 128.9

105.3 128.9

106.2 133.3

107.5 141.8

109.1 148.2

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$4,743,000,000 (U.S.$19,935 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Communications Medium Televisions

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

115

498

PCs

2005

6

25

57312

Dailies Internet users

2005 2006

19!! 80

79!! 332

236

Broadband

2005

9.612

4112

Telephones Cellular

2005

13412

Landline

2005

55

Medium

date

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling through some primary education 38.1%; primary 9.5%; lower secondary 6.4%; upper secondary 11.8%; vocational 19.8%; higher 14.4%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 91.0%; males literate 92.0%; females literate 90.0%. Education (2005)

Primary (age 6-10) Secondary (age 11-17) } Vocational Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

287

1,883

37,245

19.8

93

2,727

31,987

11.7

4

111

2,926

26.4

Health: physicians (2004) 485 (1 per 476 persons); hospital beds (2004) 727 (1 per 317 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 5.7. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 1,540 French troops. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP: n.a. 1The Nouméa Accord granting New Caledonia limited autonomy was signed in May 1998; future referenda concerning possible independence are to be held between 2013 and 2018. ?Operates in association with 3 provincial assemblies. ?*Kanak languages and French have special recognition per Nouméa Accord. ^Within Nouméa urban agglomeration. “Based on minimum hourly wage. “Employed only. "Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. *Includes both monetary (9296) and nonmonetary income (896). ?Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 19Air Calédonie only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !2Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Ministére de l'Outre-Mer http://www.outre-mer.gouv.fr * Institut de la statistique et des études économiques Nouvelle-Calédonie http://www.isee.nc

Nations of the World

Household income and expenditure (2003-04). Average household size (2004) 2.6; annual income per household (2006)9 c. NZ$68,500 (c. U.S.$41,500); sources of income: wages and salaries 69.9%, transfer payments 12.8%, selfemployment 9.1%, other 8.2%; expenditure: housing 24.4%, food 16.1%, transportation 16.0%, household goods 12.6%, clothing 3.5%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$98,383,000,000 (U.S.$23,780 per capita).

New Zealand Official name: New Zealand (English); Aotearoa (Maori). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (House of Representatives [1211]). Chief of state: British Monarch, represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Wellington. Official languages: English; Maori. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: New Zealand dollar (NZ$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = NZ$1.43; 1 £ = NZ$2.88.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Mining

Public utilities

Islands Regional Councils North Island? Auckland Bay of Plenty Gisborne (district)^ Hawke's Bay ManawatuWanganui Northland Taranaki Waikato Wellington

population

sq km

2006 census

116,219 6,059 12,277 8,355 14,111

3,120,3035 1,321,074 264,180 48,681 151,755

22,206 13,789 7,257 24,025 8,140

225,696 154,392 104,697 393,171 456,654

area

population

sq km

2006 census

152,2298 44,638

1,022,316? 541,515

10,781 444 31,241 32,079 9,771 23,276 2,244 270,692

46,179 45,372 209,850 95,247 48,306 35,844 660 4,143,282?

Islands Regional Councils South Island?5 Canterbury Marlborough (district) Nelson (city)^ Otago Southland* Tasman (district)^ West Coast offshore islands? TOTAL

Demography Population (2007): 4,184,000.

19.4%: 60-74, 11.4%: 75-84, 4.3%: 85 and over, 13%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,290,000; (2020) 4,621,000. Doubling time: 87 years. Ethnic composition (2006): European 67.6%, of which NZ European 59.1%; Maori (local Polynesian) 14.6%; Asian 9.2%, of which Chinese 3.7%; other Pacific peoples (mostly other Polynesian) 6.9%; other 1.7%. Religious affiliation (2006): Christian 51.1%, of which Anglican 13.3%, Roman Catholic 12.2%, Presbyterian 9.2%, Methodist 2.9%, Maori (indigenous) Christian 1.6%; Hindu 1.6%; Buddhist 31.1%; unknown 12.9%; other 1.0%.

1.3%; Muslim

1.0%; nonreligious

Major urban agglomerations (2006): Auckland 1,208,091; Wellington 397,974; Christchurch 360,768; Hamilton 184,838; Napier 118,404.

National economy

7,190

6.8

148,000

6.9

4,000

0.2

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

3,800

ae

15,800 4,830 7,620 15,900

14.9 4.6 7.2 15.0

46,900

44.2

3,960 106,000

3.7 100.0

% of labour force

8,100

0.4

282,500 161,600 118,800 462,800 300,600 126,800 451,900 87,10010 2,152,200

13.1 $4 55 21.5 14.0 59 21.0 4.010 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 4,984; remittances (2006) 650; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 2,091. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2.657; remittances (2006) 865; foreign direct disinvestment (2001-05 avg.) —475. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 5.6%, in permanent crops 7.0%, in pasture 51.7%; overall forest area (2005) 31.0%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 43,058 4.9%

2002 +705 1.1%

2003 —1,420 2.4%

2004 —1,996 3.1%

2005 —4,044 6.2%

2006 —3,526 4.8%

Imports (2006): NZ$40,774,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 21.4%, mineral fuels 14.9%, vehicles 11.7%, aircraft 4.2%, plastics 3.8%). Major import sources: Australia 20.1%; China 12.2%; U.S. 12.1%; Japan 9.1%; Germany

4.4%. Exports (2006): NZ$34,619,000,000 (dairy products 20.6%, beef and sheep meat 12.1%, wood and paper [all forms] 9.4%, machinery and apparatus 8.6%, aluminum 4.3%, fish 3.7%, fruit 3.7%). Major export destinations: Australia 20.5%; U.S. 13.1%; Japan 10.3%; China 5.4%; U.K. 4.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003): route length 3,898 km; passenger-km, n.a.; metric ton-km cargo (1999-2000) 4,040,000,000. Roads (2003): total length 92,931 km (paved 6495). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 2,402,207; trucks and buses 444,909. Air transport (2005)!2: passenger-km 26,093,000,000; metric ton-km Communications

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

2,338

576

Cellular

2005

3,53014

2005

1,729

Medium

Landline

Primary (age 5—12)15 Secondary (age 13-17)

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cow’s milk 4,106,000, apples 524,000, potatoes 500,000, kiwifruit 318,000,

greasy wool 209,250, green onions 165,000, grapes 142,000; livestock (number of live animals) 39,928,000 sheep, 9,501,000 cattle; roundwood 19,143,000

cu m, of which fuelwood 0%; fisheries production 640,695 (from aquaculture 16%). Mining and quarrying (2004): limestone/marl 5,226,000; silver 43,003 kg; gold 10,583 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2005): food products 4,175; fabricated metals 1,350; printing and publishing 1,250; paper and paper products 1,175; wood products (excl. furniture) 1,125. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 40,034,000,000 ([2004] 41,813,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 2,527,000 (198,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 2,629,000 (3,576,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 5,900,000 ([2004] 37,856,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

5,067,000 (6,214,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 3,773,000,000 ([2004] 3,766,000,000).

Population economically active (2005): total 2,152,200; activity rate 52.596 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 77.0%; female 46.296; unemployed [2006] 3.896). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.6 103.0

105.4 106.6

107.2 110.5

109.7 114.2

113.0 116.4

116.8 e

Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,077 74613 3,200 57614

507 18213 788 13914

Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population ages 25-64 having: no formal schooling to incomplete secondary 24.5%; completed secondary 57.4%; completed undergraduate 18.196. Literacy: virtually 100.096.

individual income taxes 45.7%, taxes on goods and services 26.7%; nontax tection 35.0%; health 20.0%; education 17.9%; defense 3.0%).

87614 422

units number

Education and health

Education (2004)

revenue 8.0%; grants 0.2%). Expenditures: NZ$44,099,000,000 (social pro-

units number

Budget (2004-05). Revenue: NZ$51,489,000,000 (tax revenue 91.8%, of which

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

labour force

cargo 781,000,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006-07): 14.8 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 54.8%; outside of marriage 45.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006-07): 6.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006-07): 8.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006-07): 2.14. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.0/2.4. Life expectancy at birth (2004-06): male 77.9 years; female 81.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003): diseases of the circulatory system 276.4, of which ischemic heart disease 154.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 197.8; diseases of the respiratory system 58.8; accidents 31.0.

Consumer price index Hourly earnings index®

% of total value

}

NZ$'000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 40.0, persons per sq km 15.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 86.2%; rural 13.8%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.22%; female 50.78%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 21.1%; 15-29, 20.5%; 30-44, 22.0%; 45-59,

2005

in value U.S.$000,000 Agriculture

Area and population area

661

Voc., teacher tr.

Higherté

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2,271 352

28,414 19,180

489,464 264,522

17.2 13.8

24

4,714

128,621

27.3

8

6,562

138,583

21.1

Health: physicians (2003) 8,790 (1 per 455 persons); hospital beds (2002) 23,825 (1 per 165 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006-07) 5.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,394 (vegetable products 70%, animal products 30%).

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 8,660 (army 51.1%, air force 26.0%, navy 22.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$269. lIncludes seven elected seats allocated to Maoris. 2Includes nearby islands, islets or water areas that are within regional councils. *Reported (not summed) total. ^A unitary authority that is administered by a city council or district council with regional powers. ‘Includes Stewart Island (Rakiura). Stewart Island's area is 1,681 sq km. *Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Distant islands (including adjacent water areas) outside of regional councils. 8As of February. ?Gross income. !°Mostly unemployed. Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.if. in commodities and trading partners. !2Air New Zealand only. Circulation of daily newspapers. M4Subscribers. Includes composite schools that provide both primary and secondary education. !6Universities only; 2003.

Internet resources for further information: è Statistics New Zealand/Te Tari Tatau http://www.stats.govt.nz/default.htm

662

Britannica World Data

Nicaragua

Price index (2001 = 100) 2001 1000 Consumer price index

Official name: Repüblica de Nicaragua (Republic of Nicaragua). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [921]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Managua. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: córdoba (C$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$

Boaco Jinotepe Chinandega Juigalpa

in value C$'000 Agriculture, forestry

Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities

sq mi

population sq km

2005 census?

1,613 417 1,862 2,502

4,177 1,081 4,822 6,481

150,636 166,073 378,970 153,932

861

2,230

201,548

Granada Jinotega

402 3,561

1,040 9,222

168,186 331,335

León

León

1,984

5,138

355,779

Madriz Managua

Somoto Managua

659 1,338

1,708 3,465

132,459 1,262,978

Masaya Matagalpa

Masaya Matagalpa

236 2,627

611 6,804

289,988 469,172

Ocotal San Carlos

1,348 2,912

3,491 7,541

208,523 95,596

835

2,162

156,283

Estelí Granada Jinotega

Nueva Segovia Río San Juan

Rivas

Estelí

Rivas

Autonomous regions North Atlantic

12,782

33,106

314,130

10,525

27,260

306,510

TOTAL LAND AREA INLAND WATER

46,464 3,874

120,3404 10,034

TOTAL

50,3374

130,3734

South Atlantic

Puerto Cabezas

Bluefields

2005 129.9

2006 141.8

2006

area?

Boaco Carazo Chinandega Chontales

2004 118.5

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population Capitals

2003 109.3

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$5,233,000,000 (U.S.$946 per capita).

C$18.60; 1 £ = C$37.40.

Departments

2002 103.8

5,142,098

Demography Population (2007): 5,602,000. Density (2007)5: persons per sq mi 120.6, persons per sq km 46.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 55.996; rural 44.196. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.2996; female 50.7196. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 37.6%; 15-29, 29.9%; 30-44, 17.1%; 45-59, 9.3%; 60-74, 4.3%; 75-84, 1.3%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 5,826,000; (2020) 6,689,000. Doubling time: 33 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo (Spanish/Indian) 63.1%; white 14.0%; black 8.0%; multiple ethnicities 5.0%; other 9.9%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 58.5%; Protestant/independent Christian 23.2%, of which Evangelical 21.6%, Moravian 1.6%; nonreligious 15.7%; other 2.6%.

Major cities (2005)6: Managua 908,892; León 139,433; Chinandega 95,614; Masaya 92,598; Estelí 90,294.

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services

% of total value

% of labour force

16,063,000

17.2

609,100

27.6

1,059,400 15,089,600 5,249,600 2,692,600

14 16.2 5.6 2.9

6,700 289,200 100,700 6,500

0.3 13.1 4.6 0.3

5,364,600 12,118,500 11,238,200 10,761,400

58 13.0 124 11.6

89,000 481,100 70,000

4.0 21.8 3.2

887,000

199

6,450,600

Other TOTAL

labour force

69

7,047,30010 93,134,9004

7.610 100.0

114,50011 2,204,3004

5.211 100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$4,113,000,000.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 207; remittances (2006) 656; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 209; official development assistance (2005) 74112. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 90; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-03 avg.) 12.

Foreign trade!3 Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —1,028 46.6%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2002 —1,038 48.1%

2003 —1,116 48.0%

2004 —1,266 45.6%

2005 —1,520 47.0%

2006 —1,961 48.8%

Imports (2005): U.S.$2,595,100,000 (nondurable consumer goods 24.4%; mineral fuels 20.8%; capital goods for industry 11.0%; transport equipment 7.3%).Major import sources: U.S. 20.1%; Venezuela 11.9%; Costa Rica 8.9%; Mexico 8.3%; Guatemala 7.0%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$857,900,000 (coffee 14.5%; meat 13.9%; sugar 7.0%; shrimp 5.6%; gold 5.0%; chemical products 4.2%; lobster 3.9%). Major export destinations: U.S. 32.1%; El Salvador 14.3%; Honduras 7.9%; Costa Rica 6.1%; Mexico 5.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: 14. Roads (2004): total length 18,669 km (paved [2002] 11%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 94,998; trucks and buses 152,813. Air transport (2000): passenger-km 72,200,000; metric ton-km cargo (2003)

200,000.

Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Medium

date

Televisions Telephones

2003

648

Cellular

2006

1,83016

32716

Internet users

2006

248

44

Broadband

Landline

123

units PCs Dailies

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

220 9115 155 1916

43 1815 28 3.616

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 24.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 4.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.94. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2003) 3.9/(1999) 0.6. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 68.3 years; female 74.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002)7: diseases of the circulatory system 131.0; accidents, injuries, and violence 69.3; malignant neoplasms 60.6; communicable diseases 49.0; diabetes mellitus 28.1.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: C$12,250,700,000 (tax revenue 96.3%, of which sales tax 38.2%, import duties 27.8%, tax on income and profits 25.9%; nontax

revenue 3.7%). Expenditures: C$16,697,800,000 (current expenditure 58.4%, development expenditure 41.6%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 4,682,000, corn (maize) 504,100, rice 312,100, dry beans 197,100, cassava 105,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 104,400, oranges 72,000, sorghum 71,760, coffee 54,550, bananas 42,650; livestock (number of live animals) 3,500,000 cattle, 268,000 horses; roundwood (2005) 6,042,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 98%; fisheries production (2005) 29,500, of which lobster 8,800

(from aquaculture 29%). Mining and quarrying (2004-05): gold 123,600 troy

oz. Manufacturing (value added in C$’000,000; 20038): food 1,917; textiles and wearing apparel 969; beverages 713; wood products (including furniture) 503. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 2,822,000,000 (2,823,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (6,443,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 820,000 (1,308,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 4.9; expenditure (1999)?: food and beverages 41.8%, education 9.8%, housing 9.8%, transportation 8.5%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 15.9%, in permanent crops 1.9%, in pasture 39.7%; overall forest area (2005) 42.7%. Population economically active (2006): total 2,204,300; activity rate of total population 39.9% (participation rates: ages 10 and over [2005] 55.0%; female [2005] 35.296; officially unemployed 5.296).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling 20.1%; 1-3 years 16.6%; 4-6 years 27.0%; 7-9 years 16.1%; 10-12 years 10.5%; vocational 2.3%; incomplete university 2.6%;

complete university 4.4%; unknown 0.4%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 78.0%; males literate 78.1%; females literate 77.9%. Education (2002) schools

teachers

students

Primary (age 7-12)

8,251

21,0007

923,391

Secondary (age 13-18) Higher'8

1,249 108

5,97017 3,840

364,012 a

student/ teacher ratio ese 14.6

Health (2003): physicians 2,076 (1 per 2,538 persons); hospital beds 5,030 (1 per 1,047 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 26.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,542 (vegetable products 90%, animal products 1096); 14096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 14,000 (army 85.7%, navy 5.7%, air force 8.696). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$6.

lIncludes the runner-up in the 2006 presidential election and the immediate past president. 2Lakes and lagoons are excluded from the areas of departments and autonomous regions. [Unadjusted final figures. ‘Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ‘Based on land area. ‘Populations of urban area of municipios. "Estimates. 3At prices of 1994. ?Weights of consumer price index components. !°Taxes less imputed bank service charges. !!Unemployed. Figure represents commitments. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. 14Public railroad service ended in January 1994; private rail service (2004) 4 mi (6 km). l5Circulation of daily newspapers. !6Subscribers. 171996. 182000.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Nicaragua http://www.bcn.gob.ni/english * Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos http://www.inec.gob.ni

Nations of the World

Niger

124,331, rice 65,661, sesame seed 44,341, tobacco leaf 1,000; livestock (number of live animals) 7,700,000 goats, 4,900,000 sheep, 2,430,000 cattle, 580,000 asses, 439,000 camels, 106,000 horses; roundwood (2005) 9,217,477 cu m, of

Official name: République du Niger (Republic of Niger). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [113]). Head of state and government: President, assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Niamey. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

which fuelwood 96%; fisheries production (2005) 50,058 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2006): uranium 3,431; salt (2004) 2,000; gold 2,615 kg. Manufacturing (value added in CFAF ’000,000; 2002): textiles

1,876; food and food products 1,695; soaps and other chemical products 1,302;

furniture 1,111; printing and publishing 821. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 403,000,000 (461,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2006) 176,000 ([2005] 173,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (233,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2006): total 6,139,000; activity rate of tota population 42.6% (participation rates: over age 15, 83.5%; female 41.9%; registered unemployed [2001] 1.6%).

1 U.S.$ = CFAF 482.77; 1 £= CFAF 970.43.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

Area and population Regions

area

Capitals

population

sq mi

sq km

Agadez Diffa

242,117 56,763

627,080 147,017

367,236 395,730

Dosso

Dosso

12,255

31,740

1,719,341

Maradi Tahoua Tillabéri Zinder

Maradi Tahoua Tillabéri Zinder

15,143 41,080 35,336 56,437

39,219 106,397 91,521 146,170

2,552,696 2,252,391 2,157,380 2,375,154

City Niamey TOTAL

Niamey

155 459,286

402 1,189,546

808,313 12,628,241

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 47.9%; 15-29, 24.1%; 30-44, 14.7%; 45-59, 8.5%; 60-74, 3.6%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 15,791,000!; (2020) 22,222,0001. Doubling time: 23 years. Ethnolinguistic composition (2001): Hausa 55.4%; Zarma-Songhai-Dendi 21.0%; Tuareg 9.3%; Fulani (Peul) 8.5%; Kanuri 4.7%; other 1.1%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 90%, of which Sunni c. 8596, Shf'1c. 596; traditional beliefs c. 996; other c. 196.

Major cities (2001): Niamey 707,951 (urban agglomeration [2005] 850,000); Zinder 170,575; Maradi 148,017; Agadez 78,289; Tahoua 73,002; Arlit 69,435.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 50.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 29.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 7.46. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): n.a./n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 43.8 years; female 43.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases (significantly malaria, meningitis, pneumonia, and diarrhea) 1,697; diseases of the circulatory system 121, of which cerebrovascular disease 41, ischemic heart disease 38; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 50; diseases of the respiratory system 34.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: CFAF 365,000,000,000 (taxes 55.8%, of which import duties 26.2%; external aid and grants 32.3%; nontax revenue 11.9%). Expenditures: CFAF 359,600,000,000 (capital expenditures 50.8%; current expenditures 46.3%, of which wages and salaries 18.9%, debt service 3.0%;

other 2.9%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2006): U.S.$1,800,000,000.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 34; remittances (2006) 60; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 14; official development assistance (2005) 515. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 32; remittances (2006) 25; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 1.0.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$3,361,000,000 (U.S.$245 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2002

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF ’000,000

value

force?

force?

795,400

43.0

2,767,000

40,400

22

10,000

0.3

Manufacturing Construction

100,200 44,100

5.4 2.4

112,000 20,000

3.2 0.6

Public utilities

21,900

1.2

3,000

0.1

Transp. and commun.

131,700

743

21,000

0.6

273,000

14.7

346,000

9.9

140,100 x 162,000

7.6 E 8.8

2,000 ms

0.1 Sum

141,2003

1,850,1004

76

100.0

}

195,000

36

3,476,000

100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): millet 3,200,000, sorghum 800,000, cowpeas 690,584, onions 322,000, sugarcane 220,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 139,304, cassava 127,419, tomatoes

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2006

104.0

106.7

105.0

105.3

113.5

113.5

2001 —119,100 33.4%

Imports erages 12.8%; 5.196).

2002 —157,600 40.1%

2003 —171,100 42.4%

2004 —200,300 43.5%

2005 -197,500 37.7%

(2005): CFAF 361,037,000,000 (live animals, food products, and bev33.4%; mineral fuels 14.8%; mechanical apparatus and machinery transportation equipment 7.5%; chemicals and chemical products Major import sources: France 16.896; Cóte d'Ivoire 9.3%; Nigeria

5.9%; China 5.4%; Togo 5.2%.

Exports (2005): CFAF 163,508,000,000 (uranium 48.0%; gold 22.6%; onions 6.896; cattle 6.395; other live animals 5.596). Major export destinations: France 34.4%; Nigeria 14.4%; Japan 13.2%; Ghana 4.2%; Spain 3.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2005): total length 11,447 mi, 18,423 km (paved 2196). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 21,360; trucks and buses, n.a. Air transport (2005)7: passenger arrivals 50,002, passenger departures 59,824; cargo unloaded 3,085 metric tons, cargo loaded 140 metric tons. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

150

13

2006 2005

3249 24

259 1.9

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2006 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

10 5.08 40 0.29

0.8 0.38 3.1 0.029

Education and health Educational attainment (2006)4. 10, Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling/unknown 86.296; incomplete primary education 6.9%; complete primary 1.0%; incomplete secondary 3.7%; complete secondary 0.4%; higher 0.9%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 28.7%; males literate 42.9%; females literate 15.1%. Education (2004-05) Primary (age 7-12)

Secondary (age 13-19)

student/ schools

teachers

8,301

24,091

1,064,056

305

3,700

students

teacher ratio

116,998

44.2

31.6

Voc., teacher tr.

T

278

4,953

17.8

Higher11

2

339

7,990

23.6

Health (2005): physicians 452 (1 per 27,599 persons); hospital beds 1,865 (1 per 6,689 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 118.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,060 (vegetable products 95%, animal products 5%); 114% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 5,300 (army 98.1%, air force 1.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 1.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$3.

79.6

Trade, hotels

TOTAL

2005

Balance of trade (current prices)

Urban-rural (2006): urban 16.6%; rural 83.4%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.69%; female 49.31%.

Other

2004

Foreign trade®

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 31.0, persons per sq km 12.0.

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

2003

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 11.4%, in permanent crops 0.01%, in pasture 18.9%; overall forest area (2005) 1.0%.

Demography Population (2007): 14,226,0001.

Mining and quarrying

2002

footwear 5.3%, health 4.6%.

CFAF '000,000 % of total

2006

2001

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.2; income per household: n.a.; expenditure (2005)5: food, beverages, and tobacco products 53.7%, housing and rent 10.3%, transportation 9.9%, clothing and

2005 estimate

Agadez Diffa

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

663

1Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2006 revision). Excluding nomadic population. SImport taxes and duties. ‘Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 5Niamey only. *Imports ci.f; exports f.o.b. 7Niamey airport. 8Circulation of Le Sahel Quotidien only. *Subscribers. !9Based on a 2006 demographic and health survey of 14,945 persons age 25 and over. University of Niamey and the Islamic University of Niger at Say.

Internet resources for further information: * Institut National de la Statistique http://www.stat-niger.org * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm

664

Britannica World Data

Nigeria

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Federal Republic of Nigeria. Form of government: federal republic with two legislatures (Senate [109]; House of Representatives [360]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Abuja. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Nigerian naira ($); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

A

d

lati

roa and population . area

Abia

Adamawa Akwa Ibom ana Bayelsa Benue Borno Cross River Delta

sq km

6320

Kebbi

3,218,332 2,384,212 3,257,208 2,353,870 3,934,899

Rivers Sokoto Taraba Yobe Zamfara

oce

EEN

KE R

kano Katsina

20181 24,192

9.383 682 5,792,578

,066,

:

area

population

sq km

census!

2006 States

17,802 6,353 7,161 18,768 5,530 í

28,438,560

59.2

39.0

67,142

0.1

Services Other TOTAL

Edo Ekiti Enugu Gombe Imo aduna

32.8

5,682

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Kogi Kwara Arm Niger Ogun Ondo Osun Oyo

2473,501

4,773

Trade, hotels

3,168,101 3,920,208 As 1.703.358 4219244 4,151,193 2,888,9662 4,098,391

5670

force

4138 216

2.88 TS

836,234 267,150

1.7 0.6

29

Public utilities

36,917 7,081 uis 10.773 340590 70,898 20,1562 17,698

Ebonyi

% of labour

force

Transp. and commun.

'

2,833,999

labour

value

Manufacturing Construction

.population

census!

% of total

Agriculture, fishing

2006 States

in value #'000,000,000

Mining

1 U.S.$ = N126.21; 1 £ = N253.70.

36,800

Siena

podes

ederal

ce

Territory Abuja TOTAL

3,238,628

29,833 36,825 UE 76.363 16,762 14,606 9,251 28,454

3,278,487 2,371,089 DU 3.050.249 3,728,098 3,441,024 3,423,535 5,591,589

11,077 25,973 54,473 45,502 39,762

5,185,400 3,696,999 2,300,736 2,321,501 3,259,846

30913

3.178.712

er

2004

0.2

421,808

0.9

425

29

411,080

0.9

1,914

134

186,017

0.4

844 115

58 0.8

334,923 5,038,670

OF 10.5

161 — 14,572

14 — 100.0

9,050,250 2,941,566 47,993,400

18.9 6.1 100.0

Population economically active (2003)9: total 45,165,000; activity rate 35.996 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 65.9%; female 35.1%; officially unemployed

[December 2005] 11.996). "m

Ke

Price index (2000 - 100)

2000.1

Consumer price index

r200-

100.0

2002 Mace Uo

1189

134.2

200A A 2005

153.0

176.0

20E

207.4

2245

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 18; remittances (2006) 3,329; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 2,204; official development assistance (2005) 5,98910. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,109; remittances (2006) 18; FDI (2001-05 avg ) 179 5 $ : à Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 33.5%, in per-

manent crops 3.2%, in pasture 43.0%; overall forest area (2005) 12.2%. Forei deii oreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)

Capita

7,315 923,768?

1,405,201 140,003,5422

2001 45,675 19.7%

U.S.$000,000 96 of total

2002 47,560 33.4%

2003 49,034 29.4%

2004 416,984 37.5%

2005 427,736 40.1%

2006 423,307 34.8%

Imports (2003): U.S.$14,892,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 25.6%; minDemography

Population (2007): 144,077,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 404.0, persons per sq km 156.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 48.2%; rural 51.8%. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.22%; female 48.78%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 44.4%; 15-29, 27.7%; 30-44, 15.0%; 45-59, 8.3%; 60-74, 3.8%; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 154,111,000; (2020) 187,973,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Yoruba 17.5%; Hausa 17.2%; Igbo (Ibo) 13.3%;

Fulani 10.7%; Ibibio 4.1%; Kanuri 3.6%; Egba 2.9%; Tiv 2.6%; Igbira 1.1%; Nupe 1.0%; Edo 1.0%; Ijo 0.8%; detribalized 0.9%; other 23.3%.

Religious affiliation (2003): Muslim 50.5%; Christian 48.2%, of which Protestant 15.0%, Roman Catholic 13.7%, other (mostly independent Christian) 19.5%; other 1.3%.

Major urban agglomerations (2005): Lagos 9,013,5343; Kano 2,993,000; Ibadan 2,437,000; Kaduna 1,375,000; Benin City 1,055,000; Port Harcourt 972,000; Ogbomosho 941,000; Maiduguri 854,000; Zaria 847,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 41.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 24.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 5.58. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 46.7 years; female 47.3 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.9%4 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): HIV/AIDS c. 258; respiratory infections c. 182; malaria c. 181; cardiovascular diseases c. 167.

eral fuels 16.0%; food 14.0%; chemical products 10.3%; ships and boats

6.496). Major import sources (2003): U.S. 15.6%; U.K. 9.5%; Germany 7.3%; China 7.2%; Italy 4.3%; unspecified 15.0%. Exports (2006): U.S.$45,116,000,000 (crude petroleum 95.9%). Major export destinations (2005): U.S. c. 5296; Spain c. 896; Brazil c. 696; France c. 396; Cóte d'Ivoire c. 396.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 3,505 km; passenger-km 75,170,000; metric ton-km cargo, n.a. Roads (2005): total length 34,403 km (paved 649612). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 2,176,000. Air transport (2006)13: passengerkm 969,900,000; metric ton-km cargo, n.a.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

8,393

64

2006 2006

32,3225 1,688

22915 12

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2000 2006 2005

1,200 2,77014 8,000 0.515

8.7 2314 57 —15

Education and health Educational attainment (2003)6. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling/unknown 50.496; primary education 20.496; secondary 20.1%; higher 9.1%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 76.3%; males literate 84.2%; females literate 68.4%. Education (2005)

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: N5,621,000,000,000 (oil and gas revenue 84.7%, of which crude oil export proceeds 34.5%, oil profits tax 23.3%, crude oil sales to domestic refineries 13.7%; non-oil revenue 15.3%). Expenditures: 284,234,000,000,0005 (state and local governments 46.395, current expenditure

44.496, capital expenditure 8.196, other 1.296). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$20,342,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): cassava 41,565,000, yams 34,000,000, sorghum 9,178,000, millet 7,168,000, corn (maize) 5,957,000, taro 5,068,000, rice 3,567,000, citrus fruits 3,546,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 3,478,000, cowpeas 2,815,000, plantains 2,591,000, okra 730,000, cocoa beans 441,000, karite nuts 414,000, melonseeds 346,000; livestock 28,000,000 goats, 15,875,000 cattle; roundwood 70,692,260 cu m, of

which fuelwood 87%; fisheries production 579,500 (from aquaculture 10% ). Mining and quarrying (2005): granite 2,000,000; marble 149,000. Manufacturing (value added in $000,000; 2005): refined petroleum 29,037; cement 8,502; other unspecified (particularly food, beverages, and textiles) 375,167. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 20,636,000,000 ([2004] 20,224,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 3,000 (3,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 814,000,000 ([2004] 38,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 4,363,000,000 (9,985,000,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004)

22,388,000,000 (9,668,000,000).

Household income and expenditure. Avg. household size (2003)6: 4.9; expenditures (2003)7: food 63.8%, housing/energy 18.1%, transportation 4.2%. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$116,374,000,000 (U.S.$800 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher!e

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

50,741 10,913 80

594,816 156,636 23,535

20,688,772 6,174,522 724,856

34.8 39.4 30.8

Health (2005): physicians 42,563 (1 per 3,234 persons); hospital per 1,609 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,731 (vegetable animal products 496); 14996 of FAO recommended minimum

beds 85,523 (1 112.5. products 96%, requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 85,000 (army 78.8%, navy 9.4%, air force 11.8%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$5. lPreliminary figures. ?Includes the population (32,385) and area (270 sq mi [700 sq km]) of Bakassi Peninsula, which was formally ceded by Nigeria to Cameroon in August 2006. Expect full implementation of the transfer by 2008. 52006. 4^Statistically derived midpoint of range. ?Consolidated expenditure. ‘Based on the 2003 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey of 35,173 people, about two-thirds of whom live in rural areas. 7Weights of consumer price index components. $Manufacturing includes petroleum refining. ?Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 1°Figure represents commitments. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 12Excludes paved sections in bad condition. 13Virgin Nigeria Airways only. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. l6Universities only.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bureau of Statistics http://www.nigerianstat.gov.ng/index.php

Nations of the World

Northern Mariana Islands

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

Official name: Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Political status: self-governing commonwealth in association with the United States, having two legislative houses (Senate [9]; House of Representatives [20])1. Chief of state: President of the United States. Head of government: Governor. Seat of government: on Saipan?. Official languages: Chamorro, Carolinian, and English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

2002 99.4

2003 98.4

2004 99.3

2005 99.8

2006 104.9

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2000) 3.7; average income per household (2000) U.S.$37,015; sources of income (1994): wages 83.9%, interest and rental 7.2%, self-employment 7.2%, transfer payments 1.7%; expenditure (2003)!2: transportation 33.5%, housing and energy 27.7%, food 19.0%, education and communications 5.7%, recreation 2.4%,

medical care 2.4%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2002) 225; remittances (2006) 102; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) n.a. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2000): in temporary crops c. 13%, in permanent crops c. 4%, in pasture c. 11%; overall forest area (2005) c. 72%.

Foreign trade

Area and population

area

population

Municipal councils

Major villages

sq mi

sq km

2000 census

Northern Islands? Rota (island) Saipan (island)

ota Songsong San Antonio

55.3 32.8 46.5

143.2 85.0 120.4

6 3,283 62,392

Tinian^

San Jose

41.9

108.5

3,540

176.55

457.15

TOTAL

2001 99.2

665

69,221

Balance of trade (current prices) 2002 2003

2004

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Imports (1997): U.S.$836,200,000 (clothing and accessories 37.0%, foodstuffs 9.6%, petroleum and petroleum products 8.2%, transport equipment and parts 5.0%, construction materials 4.2%). Major import sources: Guam 35.6%, Hong Kong 24.0%, Japan 14.1%, South Korea 9.6%, United States 7.6%.

Exports (2004): U.S.$811,000,00015 (garments and accessories 99.5% 14; remainder 0.596). Major export destinations: nearly all to the United States.

Demography Population (2007): 84,5006. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 478.8, persons per sq km 184.9.

Urban-rural (2002): urban 90.096; rural 10.096. Sex distribution (2006): male 44.9795; female 55.0396.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 25.7%; 15-29, 29.5%; 30-44, 26.2%; 45-59, 14.9%; 60-74, 3.2%; 75 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 96,0006; (2020) 119,000. Doubling time: 40 years. Ethnic composition (2000)7: Filipino 26.296; Chinese 22.196; Chamorro 21.396;

Carolinian 3.896; other Asian 7.596; other Pacific Islander 6.696; white 1.896;

multiethnic and other 10.796. Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 88.996, of which Roman Catholic 72.796, independent Christian 7.0%, Protestant 6.8%; Buddhist 5.3%; other 5.8%.

Major villages (2000) 8: San Antonio 4,741; Garapan 3,588; Susupe 2,083; Capital Hill 1,498; Songsong (on Rota) 1,411; San Jose (on Tinian) 1,361.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 19.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.27. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 73.3 years; female 78.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (1998): heart diseases 51; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 40; cerebrovascular disease 22; perinatal conditions 20; accidents 18.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: U.S.$192,030,000 (tax revenue 82.4%, of which personal and corporate income taxes 50.9%, excise tax 12.7%; nontax revenue 17.695). Expenditures: U.S.$195,600,000 (2001; health 20.4%, education

20.1%, general government 15.0%, social services 12.0%, public safety 9.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding): n.a. Gross domestic product (2005): U.S.$1,000,000,000 (U.S.$13,350 per capita). Structure of labour force

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2003): total length c. 225 mi, c. 360 km (paved, nearly 10096). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 11,983; trucks and buses 4,858. Air transport (1999)15: aircraft landings 23,853; boarding passengers 562,364. Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

1999

4.1

59

2004 2006

2017 31

26617 363

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

ave 1316 M

oa 16916 E

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: primary education 14.1%; some secondary 17.5%; completed secondary 35.8%; some postsecondary 12.0%; completed undergraduate or higher 20.6%. Literacy (2000): c. 100%. Education (2002-03) Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher18

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

39

717

12,880

18.0

1

504

2,383

47

Health (2004): physicians 4019 (1 per 1,956 persons); hospital beds 861? (1 per 885 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 7.1. Food: n.a.

Military The United States is responsible for military defense; headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command are in Hawaii.

20039

labour force

% of labour force

Agriculture, forestry,

and fishing Mining and quarrying Manufacturing (garments) Manufacturing (other) Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, insurance, and real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

Other TOTAL

148 104 14,518 543 439 101

0.4 0.3 37.0 14 1.1 0.3

1,208 7,855 1,121 3,394 6,841

3.1 20.0 29 8.7 17.4

2,90710

7.4

39,179!!

100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2002): bananas 98, cucumbers 97, sweet potatoes 78, cabbages 76, taro 73, eggplant 45, yams 45; livestock (number of live animals) 2,242 pigs, 1,319 cattle, 14,190

chickens; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 196 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: negligible amount of quarrying for building material. Manufacturing (value of sales in U.S.$’000,000; 2002): garments (2006) 492; bricks, tiles, and cement 12; printing and related activities 5; food

products 3. Energy production (consumption): electricity, n.a. (n.a.); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, n.a. (n.a.); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2003): total 39,1799; activity rate of total population 61.8% (participation rates: ages 16 and over, 81.8%; female 59.1%; unemployed 4.6%). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Residents elect a nonvoting representative to U.S. Congress. ?Executive and legislative branches meet at Capital Hill; the judiciary meets at Susupe. ?Comprises the islands of Agrihan, Pagan, and Alamagan, as well as seven other uninhabited islands; the Northern

Islands are administered as part of Saipan municipal council because of the forced removal of the population owing to volcanic activity. “(Comprises Tinian island and Aguijan island. 5Area measured at high tide; at low tide, total dry land area is 184.0 square mi (476.6 square km). 5Estimate of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (2006 release). "Includes aliens. All villages are unincorporated census-designated places. ?Saipan only. !?Includes 1,116 not adequately defined and 1,791 unemployed. Of which ethnic Chamorro 13.896, other (significantly Filipino and Chinese) 86.296. 12Weights of consumer price index components. To U.S. only. Garment exports in 2006 totaled $486,500,000 and were projected to decrease in 2007. Saipan International Airport only. /6Circulation of daily newspapers. !7Subscribers. !8Northern Marianas College; 2000-01. 9Saipan Commonwealth Health Center only.

Internet resources for further information: « CNMI: Central Statistics Division http://www.commerce.gov.mp

666

Britannica World Data

Norway

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$335,314,000,000 (U.S.$71,822 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Kongeriket Norge (Kingdom of Norway). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Parliament [169]. Chief of state: King. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Oslo. Official language: Norwegian. Official religion: Evangelical Lutheran. Monetary unit: Norwegian krone (pl. kroner; NOK); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = NOK 5.83; 1 £ = NOK 11.71.

2005

area!

population

Mainland counties

sq km

2007? estimate

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

natural gas Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities

Mainland counties

4,918

509,177

9,157 14,910 48,618 27,397

104,759 247,655 72,665 188,692

Ser-Trendelag

Hordaland Mere og Romedal Nord-Trendelag Nordland Oppland Oslo

15,460 15,121 22,412 38,456 25,192 454

456,711 245,385 129,069 235,436 183,037 548,617

Overseas Arctic territories Jan Mayen

4,182

262,523

Svalbard

9,378 18,623

404,566 106,194

SUBTOTAL TOTAL

Telemark Troms Vest-Agder Vestfold SUBTOTAL

population

sq km

20072 estimate

18,848

278,836

15,299 25,877 7,276 2,224

166,170 154,136 163,702 223,804

323,802?

1.4

77,000

34

3,537

0.2

4,000

0.2

445,261 164,955 75,685

23.4 8.7 4.0

31,000 271,000 167,000

13 114 6.8

0.7

39,916

24

16,000

132,237

6.9

156,000

6.4

Trade, hotels Finance

164,307 147,975

8.6 7.8

421,000 311,000

17.2 12.7

Pub. admin., defense

area!

26,839

Transp. and commun.

76,111

Services Other TOTAL

Akershus

Østfold

% of total

Agriculture, fishing

Aust-Agder Buskerud Finnmark Hedmark

Rogaland Sogn og Fjordane

in value NOK '000,000

Mining Crude petroleum and

Area and population

2006

4.0

448,520 178,4999 1,903,842

23.5 9.49 100.0

143,000

5.8

764,000 85,00010 2,446,000

31.2 3.510 100.0

Public debt (2003): U.S.$79,880,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2001) 2.3; average annual net income per household (2004) NOK 359,300 (U.S.$53,302); sources of income (2004): wages and salaries 63.3%, transfers 22.1%, selfemployment 6.0%; expenditure (2003-05): housing 20.7%, transportation 18.1%, recreation and culture 12.3%, food 10.5%.

4,681,134

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices)

3774

5

61,0208, 4 61,397 385,199

5 — 4,681,134

2001 +235,907 28.5%

NOK '000,000 % of total

Imports (2005): NOK

2002 +196,702 26.2%

2003 +197,741 26.1%

2004 +226,591 26.0%

2005 +311,199 30.3%

2006 +4366,501 31.1%

357,750,300,000 (machinery and transport equipment

43.2%, of which road vehicles 9.7%, ships 1.6%; metals and metal products

Demography

10.4%; food products 6.0%; petroleum products 4.3%; chemicals and chemical products 4.3%). Major import sources (2004): Sweden 15.7%; Germany

Population (2007): 4,702,000. Density (2007)6: persons per sq mi 37.1, persons per sq km 14.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 77.4%; rural 22.6%. Sex distribution (20052): male 49.59%; female 50.41%.

13.6%; Denmark 7.3%; UK. 6.5%; U.S. 4.9%.

Age breakdown (20072): under 15, 19.496; 15-29, 18.796; 30-44, 22.096; 45-59, 19.7%; 60-74, 12.696; 75-84, 5.496; 85 and over, 2.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,817,000; (2020) 5,113,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Norwegian 93.8%; Vietnamese 2.496; Swedish 0.5%; Punjabi 0.4%; Urdu 0.3%; U.S. white 0.3%; Lapp 0.3%; other 2.0%.

Religious affiliation (20042): Evangelical Lutheran

85.7%;

other Christian

4.5%; Muslim 1.8%; other/nonreligious 8.0%.

Major cities (20072)7: Oslo 548,617 (urban agglomeration 839,423); Bergen 236,590; Trondheim 154,530; Stavanger 115,087; Barum 105,574.

Exports (2005): NOK 668,949,200,000 (crude petroleum 43.3%; natural gas 15.4%; metals and metal products 8.1%; machinery and transport equipment 74%; fish 4.7%). Major export destinations (2004): U.K. 22.6%; Germany 13.2%; The Netherlands 10.2%; France 8.8%; U.S. 7.7%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (20062): route length 4,087 km; (2005) passenger-km 2,723,000,000; (2001) metric ton-km cargo 2,449,000,000. Roads (20062): total

length 92,864 km (paved [2002] 7896). Vehicles (20062): passenger cars 2,028,909; trucks and buses 431,257. Air transport (2004)!2: passenger-km 13,229,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 177,522,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.6 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 48.2%; outside of marriage 51.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 3.7 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.84. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 4.7/2.3. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 78.1 years; female 82.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): circulatory diseases 345.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 228.5; respiratory diseases 76.1; violence 55.7.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: NOK 1,066,860,000,000 (tax on income 41.1%, social security 16.2%, value-added taxes 14.8%). Expenditures: NOK 763,318,000,000 (social security and welfare 40.5%, health 17.2%, education 14.0%, general public service 9.796).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): barley 619,000, wheat 410,000, oats 359,000, potatoes 350,000; livestock (number of live animals) 2,417,000 sheep, 920,300 cattle; roundwood 9,667,000 cu m, of which industrial roundwood 88%, fuelwood 12%; fisheries production

3,049,570 (from aquaculture 21%); aquatic plants production 148,322 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2004): ilmenite concentrate 860,000, iron ore (metal content) 408,000, cobalt (refined metal) 4,670. Manu-

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular

Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

7,110

1,557

2006

5,04114

2006

2,055

units Medium

date

PCs

1,08614

Dailies Internet users

443

Broadband

2004 2004 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,630 2,40513 3,400 99114

578 52413 736 21514

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 16 and over having: primary and lower secondary education 21.5%; higher secondary 55.0%; higher 21.3%; unknown 2.2%. Literacy (2000): virtually 100% literate. Education (2003-04)

Primary (age 7-12)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

3,209

65,376

617,577

462

26,618

218,089

82

70

15,866

209,759

13.2

10.0

Secondary (age 13-18) and vocational

Higher

Health (2006): physicians 15,443 (1 per 302 persons); hospital beds 16,303 (1 per 286 persons); infant mortality rate 3.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,447 (vegetable products 69%, animal products 31%).

facturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2001): food products 2,353; ships and oil platforms 1,543; nonelectrical machinery 1,257; publishing 1,092; base non-

ferrous metals 940; fabricated metal products 898. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 138,073,000,000 (126,029,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 2,900,0008 (1,360,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 1,019,000,000 ([2004] 108,270,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

19,001,000 (10,022,000); natural gas (cu m: 2005) 87,563,000,000 ([2004] 5,107,000,000).

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 3,278; remittances (2005) 429; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 2,427. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 9,753; remittances (2005) 953; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 12,085. Population economically active (2006): total 2,446,000; activity rate of total population 52.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 80.8%; female 47.1%; unemployed 3.4%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

103.0 104.5

104.3 110.0

106.9 115.2

107.4 120.0

109.1 124.1

111.6 128.8

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 25,800 (army 57.0%, navy 20.6%, air force 19.4%, other 3.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$1,058.

1Excludes areas of the uninhabited overseas Antarctic territories of Bouvet Island (58 sq km) and Peter I Island (249 sq km). January 1. ?Includes area of freshwater lakes. ‘Includes area of glaciers. ?Persons on Jan Mayen and Svalbard are normally registered as residents on the mainland. The population of Jan Mayen on Jan. 1, 2004, was 18; the population of Svalbard on Jan. 1, 2005, was 2,400, including Norwegian settlements 1,645, Russian settlement 747, Polish settlement 8. 5Population density calculat-

ed with reference to 328,657 sq km area free of mainland freshwater lakes (19,522 sq km), Svalbard freshwater lakes (395 sq km), Svalbard glaciers (36,500 sq km), and Jan Mayen glaciers (125 sq km). 7Population of municipalities. Production is in Svalbard. ?Includes taxes less imputed bank service charges and statistical discrepancy. "Includes 84,000 unemployed. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. SAS (Norwegian part), Braathens, Norwegian, and Widerøe only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !^Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistics Norway http://www.ssb.no/english

Nations of the World

667

Oman

aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): marble 140,000; gypsum 60,000; chromite (gross weight) 19,000; gold 280 kg. Manufacturing

Official name: Saltanat ‘Umān (Sultanate of Oman). Form of government: monarchy with two advisory bodies (State Council [701]; Consultative Council

(value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2004): petroleum products 1,168; cement, bricks, and ceramics 232; food products 152; chemicals and chemical products 84; fabricated metals 54; furniture 44; beverages 34. Energy production

(consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 12,648,000,000 (12,023,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 269,000,000 ([2004] 27,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) 4,306,000 ([2004] 3,300,000); natural gas (cu m;

[84]).

2004) 18,096,000,000 (8,019,000,000).

Head of state and government: Sultan. Capital: Muscat. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: rial Omani (RO); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Population economically active (2003)5: total 736,624; activity rate of total population 31.596 (participation rates: over age 15, n.a.; female 15.496; unemployed [2004] 1596). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

1 RO - U.S.$2.60 — £1.29. Area and population

Regions

area?

Capitals

Al-Batinah Ad-Dakhillyah Ash-Sharqiyah Al-Wusta Az-Zahirah Governorates Masqat

population sq km

Ar-Rustaq; Suhar Nizwa; Sama'il Ibra; Sur Hayma’ Al-Buraymi; ‘Ibri

4,850 12,300 14,200 30,750 17,000

12,500 31,900 36,800 79,700 44,000

688,172 280,687 330,860 24,867 223,473

Muscat (Masqat)

1,350

3,500

695,432

Musandam

Khasab

700

1,800

30,637

Zufar (Dhofar) TOTAL

Salalah

38,350 119,500

99,300 309,500

234,709 2,508,837

2001 +2,216 35.2%

2002 42,129 32.9%

2003 432,447 31.4%

2004 432,118 25.9%

2005 34,100 39.9%

2006 434,495 37.1%

Imports (2005): RO 3,394,000,000 (motor vehicles and parts 26.6%; electrical machinery and equipment 21.6%; base and fabricated metals 11.3%; food and live animals 7.9%;chemicals and chemical products 6.4% ). Major import sources:

Urban-rural (2005): urban 71.5%; rural 28.5%. Sex distribution (2004): male 56.34%; female 43.66%.

V.AE. 26.5%; Japan 15.7%; Germany 6.9%; U.S. 6.2%; India 4.5%.

Age breakdown (2003): under 15, 33.9%; 15-29, 32.2%; 30-44, 20.8%; 45-59, 8.9%; 60-74, 3.2%; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 2,767,000; (2020) 3,339,000. Doubling time: 32 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Omani Arab 48.1%; Indo-Pakistani 31.7%, of which Balochi 15.0%, Bengali 4.4%, Tamil 2.5%; other Arab 7.2%; Persian

2.8%; Zanzibari (blacks originally from Zanzibar) 2.5%; other 7.7%. Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 89%, of which Ibadiyah c. 75%, Sunni c. 896, Shri c. 696; Hindu c. 596; Christian c. 596; other c. 196. Major cities (2005)3: As-Sib 242,3634; Matrah 173,4834; Salalah 171,074; Bawshar 168,0254; Suhar 110,917; Muscat 26,668 (urban agglomeration

695,435).

Exports (2005): RO 7,186,900,000 (domestic exports 91.9%, of which crude and refined petroleum 71.8%, natural gas 12.4%, food and live animals 1.8%,

base and fabricated [mostly copper] metals 1.3%; reexports 8.1%, of which motor vehicles and parts 6.1%). Major export destinations: China 22.7%; Thailand 11.9%; Japan 11.6%; South Korea 11.1%; U.A.E. 7.1%; Taiwan

4.396.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (200511): total length 24,927 mi, 40,116 km (paved 3796). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 324,085; trucks and buses 116,438. Air transport (2006)12: passenger-km 1,749,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 11,000,000.

Vital statistics

Communications

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 24.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.3 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 5.84. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 73.2 years; female 75.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 126, of which ischemic heart disease 63; infectious and parasitic diseases 39; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 37; accidents and injuries 35; diabetes mellitus 17.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: RO 5,027,200,000 (oil revenue 64.2%; natural gas revenue 12.2%; tax revenue 7.2%; other 16.4%). Expenditures: RO 4,936,100,000 (current expenditure 71.5%, of which defense 31.4%, educa-

tion 11.3%, social security and welfare 6.8%, health 4.0%, interest payments 1.1%; capital expenditure 24.3%; other 4.2%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$842,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$28,710,000,000 (U.S.$11,275 per capita). 2006

2003

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

RO '000,000

value

forces

forces

171.9 6,638.76

1.3 48.46

1,421.76 349.5

10.46 25

237

Public utilities

0.2

}

58,114

7.9

20,115

2

59,492 118,257

8.1 16.0

0.5 3.8 14.8 3.4 22.1 18.7 2.0 100.0

151.3

14

4,045

857.8 1,582.1 801.3 858.9

6.3 11.5 5.8 6.3

27,674 109,157 25,200 162,742

1,064.7 —211.97 13,709.7

7.8 -1.57 100.08

137,420 14,408 736,624

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2003) 6.8; expenditure (2000)9: food and nonalcoholic beverages 29.9%, transportation and communications 22.2%, housing 15.3%, clothing and footwear 7.2%, energy 6.0%.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): dates 258,700, tomatoes 40,440, watermelons (2005) 27,000, bananas 25,960, mangoes 6,882, potatoes 5,391, papayas 5,026, tobacco leaves 1,270; livestock (number of live animals) 1,598,250 goats, 358,050 sheep, 307,580 cattle, 119,650 camels; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 150,744 (from

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

1,557

633

Cellular

2006

1,81814

69614

2006

278

Medium

Landline

107

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2006

130 10813 319 15214

51 4513 122 6014

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling (illiterate) 15.9%; no formal schooling (literate) 22.3%; primary 35.3%; secondary 17.0%; higher technical 3.3%; higher undergraduate 5.2%; higher graduate 0.7%; other 0.3%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 75.8%; males literate 83.0%; females literate 67.2%.

Education (2004—05)!5 Primary (age 6-15) Secondary (age 16-17) Voc., teacher tr.!6

Higher17

Structure of gross national product and labour force

Services Other TOTAL

2006 105.0

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 21.7, persons per sq km 8.4.

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

2005 101.7

Foreign trade!

Population (2007): 2,595,000.

Other mining

2004 99.8

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.1%, in permanent crops 0.1%, in pasture 3.2%; overall forest area (2005) 0.01%.

Demography

Manufacturing Construction

2003 99.1

(2006) 2,257; FDI (2008-05 avg.) 149.

RO ‘000,000 % of total

Agriculture, fishing Oil and natural gas

2002 98.9

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$°000,000): tourism (2005) 481; remittances (2006) 39; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 304. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 643; remittances

2005 estimate

sq mi

2001 99.2

|

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Mod

27,825

443,393

15.9

6,729

129,471

19.2

34

1,608

23,286

14.5

1

955

12,855

13.5

3

Health (2005): physicians 4,093 (1 per 602 persons); hospital beds 5,178 (1 per 476 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 10.3.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 41,700 (army 60.0%, navy 10.196, air force 9.8%, royal household/foreign troops 20.1%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 11.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$1,516.

1All seats are nonelective. 2Approximate; no comprehensive survey of surface area has ever been carried out in Oman. 3Populations of districts (2nd-order administrative subdivisions). ^Within Muscat urban agglomeration. [Employed only; includes 424,178 expatriate workers and 312,446 Omani workers. 5Manufacturing includes petroleum products; Oil and natural gas excludes petroleum products. 7Import taxes less imputed bank service charges. 8Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Weights of consumer price index components. !?Imports are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. for commodities and trading partners. January 1. /2Data for Oman Air only. Circulation of daily newspapers. !4Subscribers. Excludes private schools. !¢Includes the College of Sharia and Jurisprudence. "Sultan Qaboos University.

Internet resources for further information: * Ministry of National Economy http://www.moneoman.gov.om/index.asp * Central Bank of Oman http://www.cbo-oman.org

668

Britannica World Data

Pakistan

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006-07

Official name: Islam-i Jamhuriya-e Pakistan (Islamic Republic of Pakistan). Form of government: military-backed constitutional regime with two legislative houses (Senate [100]; National Assembly [342]). Chiefs of state and government: President! assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Islamabad. Official language: Urdu. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Pakistani rupee (PKR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

North-West Frontier

Punjab Sind (Sindh)

Federal Capital Area Islamabad TOTAL

.Sqkm

Quetta

2003 estimate?

134,051

347,190

7,450,000

Peshawar

28,773

74,521

20,170,000

Lahore Karachi

79,284 54,407

205,345 140,914

82,710,000 34,240,000

10,509

27,220

3,420,000

350 307,374

906 796,096

1,040,000 149,030,000

1,608 256

18.5 2.9

20,364,000 43,000

40.7 0.1

Manufacturing Construction

1,598 206

18.3 2.4

6,499,000 2,880,000

13.0 5.7

308,000

0.6

144

1.7

Transp. and commun.

1,057

124

2,697,000

5.4

Trade Finance

1,519 637

17.4 7.8

6,886,000 518,000

13.8 1.0

466

54

736 4806 8,707

8.5 5.56 100.0

6799.000 3,121,0007 50,055,000

TS 6.27 100.0

}

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 26.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.2 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.28. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 63.9 years; female 63.8 years. Major cause of death per 100,000 population (2003): childhood diseases 126.7; infectious and parasitic diseases 104.0; diseases of the circulatory system 96.4; diseases of the respiratory system 67.0; accidents and violence 42.6.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: PKR 1,022,704,000,000 (tax revenue 70.0%, of which sales tax 28.0%, income/corporate profits 21.1%, customs 13.3%; non-

tax revenue 25.9%; other 4.1%). Expenditures: PKR 1,072,225,000 (general

public service 61.4%, of which debt servicing 28.4%; defense 22.4%; economic affairs 9.8%; education 1.9%; health 1.2%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 47,244,000, wheat 21,612,000, buffalo milk 19,700,000, cow’s milk 9,082,000, rice 8,321,000, seed cotton 6,337,000, corn (maize) 3,110,000, potatoes 2,025,000, onions 1,765,000, mangoes 1,674,000, chickpeas 868,000; livestock (number of live animals) 56,700,000 goats, 26,300,000 buffalo, 24,900,000 sheep, 24,200,000 cattle; roundwood 29,270,000 cu m, of which

fuelwood 91%; fisheries production 515,095 (from aquaculture 16%). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 14,857,000; rock salt 1,648,000; gypsum 552,496; kaolin 37,732. Manufacturing (value of production in PKR

*000,000,000; 2000-01): textiles 321; food products 189; refined petroleum and

coke 94; industrial chemicals 71; ginning and baling of fibre 56; transport equipment 47; pharmaceuticals 47. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 85,699,000,000 (85,699,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 4,587,000 (7,894,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 24,000,000 ([2004] 85,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 10,031,000 (14,748,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 38,089,000,000 ([2004] 32,162,000,000). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 28.096, in permanent crops 0.8%, in pasture 6.5%; overall forest area (2005) 2.5%. Population economically active (2006): total 50,055,0005; activity rate of total population 32.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 54.2%; female 20.1%; officially unemployed 6.2%). 2005 128.5

2004-05

2005-06

2006-07

—360 1.9%

—444 2.0%

—1,208 4.6%

—4,352 13.1%

—8,236 20.1%

-9,728 22.3%

ton fabric 13.7%, knitwear 12.4%, bedding 8.2%, ready-made garments 6.5%;

Major urban agglomerations (2005): Karachi 11,608,000; Lahore 6,289,000; Faisalabad 2,494,000; Rawalpindi 1,770,000; Multan 1,452,000; Gujranwala 1,440,000; Hyderabad 1,392,000; Peshawar 1,240,000.

2004 117.8

2003-04

Exports (2006-07): U.S.$16,924,000,000 (textiles 59.2%, of which woven cot-

Population projection: (2010) 167,765,000; (2020) 200,370,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Punjabi 52.6%; Pashtun 13.2%; Sindhi 11.7%; Urdu-speaking muhajirs 7.5%; Balochi 4.3%; other 10.7%. Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim 96.1%4; Christian 2.5%; Hindu 1.2%; others (including Ahmadiyah) 0.2%.

2003 109.6

2002-03

U.A.E. 11.7%; China 8.7%; Kuwait 6.7%; Japan 5.5%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 37.2%; 15-29, 29.9%; 30-44, 16.8%; 45-59, 10.2%; 60-74, 4.7%; 75-84, 1.0%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

2002 106.5

2001-02

Imports (2006-07): U.S.$26,652,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 19.1%; chemicals and chemical products 15.0%; refined petroleum 14.9%; crude petroleum 12.7%; food 9.1%). Major import sources: Saudi Arabia 12.2%;

Population (2007)3: 159,060,000. Density (2007)2. 3: persons per sq mi 517.5, persons per sq km 199.8. Urban-rural (2006)3: urban 34.596; rural 65.596. Sex distribution (2005): male 51.4496; female 48.5695.

2006 138.7

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$149,784,000,000 (U.S.$930 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Agriculture Mining

6.8; income per household PKR 86,102 (U.S.$1,416); sources of income: selfemployment 41.3%, wages and salaries 33.5%, transfer payments 11.6%, other 13.6%; expenditure: food 48.3%, housing 13.2%, clothing 6.6%.

Demography

2001 103.1

forces

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 181; remittances (2006-07 avg.) 5,491; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,008; official development assistance (2005) 199178. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,275; remittances (2006) 3.0. Household income and expenditure (2001-02). Average household size (2005)

population

sami

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

% of labour

forces

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$29,490,000,000.

Capitals

2

labour

value

Pub. admin., defense

area?

Federally Administered Tribal Areas

% of total

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

Balochistan

in value PKR ’000,000,000.

Public utilities

1 US.$ = PKR 60.76; 1£= PKR 122.42.

Provinces

2006

cotton yarn 6.4%; rice 6.7%; petroleum products 5.2%). Major export destinations: U.S. 22.7%; U.A.E. 7.5%; U.K. 5.9%; Hong Kong 4.4%; Germany

4.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004-05): 24,238,000,000; metric ton-km cargo length 161,057 mi, 259,197 km (paved 1,559,824; trucks and buses 507,945.

length 11,515 km; passenger-km 5,013,540,000. Roads (2006-07): total 67%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars Air transport (2006)9: passenger-km

15,110,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 426,991,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

12,223

82

units Medium

date

PCs

2006

34,50711

22011

Dailies Internet users

2006

5,240

33

Broadband

2005 2003 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

803 6,24610 12,000

5711

5.2 4210 76 0.411

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2005-06): total population age 10 and over literate 54%; males literate 65%; females literate 42%. Education (2005-06) Primary (age 5-9) Secondary (age 10-14) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

157,600 62,300

444,000 673,000

25,226,000 7,499,000

56.8 114

643

8,264

181,000

21.9

1,700

56,591

1,475,831

26.1

Health (2005): physicians (200612) 122,798 (1 per 1,263 persons); hospital beds 101,490 (1 per 1,517 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 76.7. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,422 (vegetable products 8196, animal products 19%); 137% of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 619,00013 (army 88.8%, navy 3.9%, air force 7.3%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$29. ‘Military leader (from October 1999) who was sworn in as president in June 2001. 2Excludes 33,136 sq mi (85,823 sq km) area of Pakistani-administered Jammu and Kashmir (comprising both Azad Kashmir [AK; 5,134 sq mi (13,297 sq km)] and the Northern Areas [NA; 27,991 sq mi (72,496 sq km)]). 3Excludes Afghan refugees and the populations of AK (2007; 3,527,000) and NA (2007; 1,096,000). ‘Mostly Sunni, with Shi constituting about 17% of total population. [Excludes armed forces. Indirect taxes less subsidies. "Includes 18,000 inadequately defined and 3,103,000 unemployed. 8Figure represents commitments. ?Pakistan International Airlines only. i?Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. !2January 1. Excludes c. 302,000 in paramilitary (mostly national guard and frontier corps).

Internet resources for further information: * Economic Survey, Ministry of Finance http://www.finance.gov.pk/survey/home.htm * Statistics Division: Government of Pakistan http://www.statpak.gov.pk * State Bank of Pakistan http://www.sbp.org.pk

Nations of the World

Palau

Price index (2000 = 100)

Official name: Belu'u er a Belau (Palauan); Republic of Palau (English). Form of government: nonparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [9]; House of Delegates [16]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Melekeok!. Official languages?: Palauan; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: U.S. dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Consumer price index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0

98.2

97.0

97.9

102.7

106.7

111.5

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$162,000,000 (U.S.$8,011 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value U.S.$'000

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

Agriculture

1,606

1.1

451

4.4

Fisheries Mining Manufacturing Public utilities

2,928 249 547 4,582

2.0 02 0.4 3.2

310 m 259 6

3.0 ds 25 $

153

1,365

13.4

Construction

1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

22,105

Transportation and communications

Area and population area

population 2005

States

669

Sd

Aimeliik Airai Angaur Hatohobei Kayangel Koror Melekeok Ngaraard Ngarchelong Ngardmau Ngaremlengui

Ngatpang

Ngchesar Ngiwal Peleliu Sonsorol

Other Rock Islands TOTAL

rsqKmo

gensis

20 17 3 1 1 7 al 14 4 18 25

52 44 8 3 3 18 28 36 10 47 65

270 2,723 320 44 188 12,676 391 581 488 166 317

18

47

464

16 10 5 1

41 26 13 3

254 223 702 100

18

47

—

1883

4883

19,907

12,476

8.6

7696

Trade, hotel

44,168

30.5

1,670

16.4

Finance, real estate Public administration,

10,895

7.5

182

1.8

defense Services Other TOTAL

33,077 10,588 1,4457 144,6653

22.9 7.3 1.07 100.0

7.56

1,734 3,037 4268 10,203

17.0 29.8 4.28 100.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 3.9; annual average income per household (2005) U.S.$20,422; sources of income, n.a.; expenditure (1997): food 42.2%, beverages and tobacco 14.8%, entertainment

13.1%, transportation 6.4%, clothing 5.7%, household

goods 2.7%,

other 15.1%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000 % of total

1998

1999

—54,800 71.2%

—92,400 79.8%

2000 | —111,500 82.0%

2001

2002

2003

-86,700 82.8%

—77,200 81.1%

—76,400 65.3%

Imports (2001): U.S.$95,700,000 (machinery and transport equipment 24.2%; food and live animals 15.2%; mineral fuels and lubricants 10.4%; beverages

Demography Population (2007): 20,200. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 107.4, persons per sq km 41.4.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 70.0%; rural 30.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 53.72%; female 46.28%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 23.4%; 15-29, 21.6%; 30-44, 28.4%; 45-59, 18.3%; 60-74, 5.9%; 75 and over, 2.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 20,000; (2020) 22,000. Ethnic composition (2005)4: Palauan 65.2%; Asian 30.3%, of which Filipino 21.6%, Vietnamese 2.3%; other Micronesian 3.1%; white 1.1%; other 0.3%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 51.096; Protestant 26.796; Modekngei (marginal Christian sect) 8.9%; other Christian 1.896; other 11.6%.

Major cities (2005): Koror 10,743; Meyuns 1,153; Kloulklubed 680.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.7 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.80. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 68.0 years; female 72.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 244, of which ischemic heart disease 82, cerebrovascular disease 78; infectious and parasitic diseases 138; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 61; diseases of the respiratory system 45; injuries and accidents 34.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: U.S.$83,671,000 (grants from the U.S. 53.7%; tax revenue 34.9%; nontax revenue 7.9%; trust fund revenue 3.5%). Expenditures: U.S.$87,586,000 (current expenditure 74.1%; capital expenditure

25.996).

Public debt (gross external debt; 2002-03): U.S.$19,429,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (value of sales in U.S.$; 2001): eggs (2003) 638,750, cabbages 116,948, cucumbers 44,009, green onions 23,043, eggplants 18,938, cassava 15,150, bean sprouts 14,274, taro 13,122; livestock (number of live animals; 2001) 702 pigs, 21,189

poultry; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 937 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying: n.a. Manufacturing: includes handicrafts and small items. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004)

and tobacco products 8.396; chemicals and chemical products 7.496). Major import sources (2003): South Korea 56.4%; Japan 18.7%; Germany 11.3%; Indonesia 3.6%; Australia 3.0%.

Exports (2001): U.S.$9,000,000 (mostly high-grade tuna and garments). Major export destinations (2003): Japan 86.7%; Vietnam 5.9%; Zambia 4.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 38 mi, 61 km (paved 59%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars and trucks 7,247. Air transport (2003): passenger arrivals 80,017, passenger departures 78,608. Communications

units number

per 1,000

units per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2006 2004

E 0

awe 0

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

1997

11

606

Cellular

2006

8.39

4149

Internet users

2003

3,150

160

2006

8.0

399

Broadband

2006

i

aa

Landline

Medium

number

PCs Dailies

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 1.9%; incomplete primary education 9.0%; complete primary 3.9%; incomplete secondary 14.9%; complete secondary 42.2%; some postsecondary 10.0%; vocational 4.1%; higher 14.0%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 99.7%; males literate 99.6%; females literate 99.8%. Education (2004-05)

Primary (age 6—13) Secondary (age 14—18) Higher10. 11

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

22

282

2.971

10.5

6 1

97 40

1,139 705

11.7 17.6

Health (2004): physicians 21 (1 per 942 persons); hospital beds 135 (1 per 147 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 7.7. Food: daily per capita caloric intake, n.a.

Military The United States is responsible for the external security of Palau, as specified in the Compact of Free Association of Oct. 1, 1994.

171,000,000 ([2006] 114,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none

(none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (78,000); natural gas, none (none). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 97; remittances (2006) n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 4.8; official development assistance (2005) 295. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 2.0; remittances (2006) n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 995, in permanent crops c. 496, in pasture c. 796; overall forest area (2005) c. 8895. Population economically active (2005): total 10,203; activity rate of total population 51.3% (participation rates: over age 15, 69.1%; female 39.1%; unemployed 4.2%). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Formal transfer of capital to Melekeok on Babelthuap from Koror took place Oct. 1, 2006. ?Sonsorolese-Tobian

is also, according to official sources, considered an official

language. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ^Population age 18 and over only. ?Figure represents commitments. *Transportation and communications includes Public utilities. 7Import duties less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. Subscribers. Palau Community College. 2003-04.

Internet resources for further information: * Department of the Interior: Office of Insular Affairs http://www.doi.gov/oia/index.html * Palau Office of Planning and Statistics http://www.palaugov.net/stats

670

Britannica World Data

Panama

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

Official name: Repüblica de Panamá (Republic of Panama). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (Legislative Assembly [78]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Vice Presidents. Capital: Panama City. Official language: Spanish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: balboa (B); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Bocas del Toro

Chiriqui Coclé

area

2006 estimate

sq km

Bocas del Toro

1,793

4,644

108,026

David

2,528

6,547

409,483

Penonomé

1,911

4,950

227,047

Colón La Palma Chitré

1,880 4,593 902

4,868 11,897 2,8336

235,299 44,575 110,600

Los Santos Panamá Veraguas

Las Tablas Panama City Santiago

1,469 4,506 4,104

3,805 11,671 10,630

89,426 1,653,220 224,186

1,693 904 2,690

4,384 2,341 6,968

9,359 36,848 135,890

28,973

75,0401

Population projection: (2010) 3,509,000; (2020) 4,027,000. Ethnic composition (2000): mestizo 58.1%; black and mulatto 14.0%; white 8.6%; Amerindian 6.7%; Asian 5.5%; other 7.1%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 70.6%; Protestant/independent

1,216,000); San Miguelito Chorrera 55,871.

293,7453;

David

0.8%; traditional

(urban agglomeration

77,7344;

Arraiján

[2005]

63,7534; La

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.0 (world avg. 20.3); (2006) within marriage 17.3%; outside of marriage 82.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.40. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 3.3/0.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 72.7 years; female 77.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 122.2; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 74.6; accidents and violence 44.7; diseases of the respiratory system 41.2.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: B 2,042,000,000 (tax revenue 59.2%, of which income taxes 23.9%, taxes on domestic transactions 20.9%, taxes on foreign trade 10.6%; other current revenue 39.9%, of which revenue from Panama Canal

9.096). Expenditures: B 2,810,000,000 (current expenditure 83.896, of which

wages and salaries 27.2%, transfers 26.3%, debt service 21.1%; development

expenditure 16.2%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$7,514,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 1,766,000, bananas 439,200, rice 280,000, canteloupes and other melons 102,900, plantains 95,150, corn (maize) 70,000, oil palm fruit 70,000, oranges 41,940, coffee 13,150, tobacco 2,400; livestock (number of live animals) 1,564,000 cattle, 286,000 pigs, 180,000 horses; roundwood (2005) 1,298,218 cu m, of which fuelwood 93%; fisheries production (2005) 222,756

(from aquaculture 4%). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 270,000; marine salt 18,000. Manufacturing (value added in B '000,000; 2004): food

and food products 410; beverages 167; cement, bricks, and ceramics 70; print-

ing and publishing 63; fabricated metal products 60. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 5,475,000,000 (4,495,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (1,710,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.1; average annual income per household (1990) B 5,450 (U.S.$5,450); sources of income, n.a.; expenditure (2001): food c. 2295, energy c. 1896, health care c. 1496, education c. 496, other c. 4296.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.4%, in permanent crops 2.0%, in pasture 20.6%; overall forest area (2005) 57.7%. Population economically active (2006): total 1,332,059; activity rate of total population 39.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 66.9%; female 37.1%; unemployed 9.1%).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

% of labour

force

force

1,027.4

6.8

158.2 1,066.6 698.1 446.6 2,885.4 2,701.4 3,539.2 1,231.8 799.7 587.56 15,141.9

2001 -2,177 57.4%

B '000,000 % of total

12.8%; 60-74, 6.6%; 75 and over, 2.4%.

City 415,964

labour

values

1.0 7.0 4.6 2.9 19.1 17.8 23.4 8.1 53 3.96 100.01

193,078

145

2,310 105,200 102,799 8,452 90,787 294,042 89,020 70,291 253,896 122,1847 1,332,059

0.2 7.9 fet 0.6 6.8 22.1 6.7 53 19.1 9.27 100.01

Balance of trade (current prices)

3,283,959

Buddhist

% of total

Foreign trades. °

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 115.4, persons per sq km 44.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 70.896; rural 29.296. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.5496; female 49.4696. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 30.5%; 15-29, 26.3%; 30-44, 21.4%; 45-59,

Christian 14.0%; Muslim 4.4%; Bahai 1.2%; beliefs 0.7%; nonreligious 2.5%; other 5.8%.

in value

(2006) 121; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 1,777.

Demography Population (2007): 3,343,0002.

Major cities (2000): Panama

2006 107.3

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 780; remittances (2006) 149; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 605. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 271; remittances

Indigenous districts

TOTAL

2005 105.1

B '000,0005 Agriculture, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin. Services Other TOTAL

population

sq mi

Unión Chocoe EI Porvenir Llano Tugri

2004 101.8

2006

Colón Darién Herrera

Emberá Kuna Yala (San Blas) Ngóbe Buglé

2003 101.4

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Area and population Capitals

2002 101.3

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$15,536,000,000 (U.S.$4,726 per capita).

1US.$ = B 1.00; 1 £ = B 2.01.

Provinces

2001 100.3

2002 -2,276 60.0%

2003 -2,323 59.3%

2004 —2,702 60.3%

2005 —3,190 63.3%

2006 —3,809 65.1%

Imports (2003): B 3,122,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 18.7%; mineral fuels 13.0%; chemicals and chemical products 12.4%; transport equipment 11.1%). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 26.8%; direct imports from Colón Free Zone 11.9%; Curagao 10.1%; Costa Rica 5.1%; Japan 4.7%.

Exports (2003): B 799,000,000 (marine products 42.3%, of which tuna 16.4%, shrimp and lobster 9.6%, salmon 7.0%; bananas 13.2%; melons 5.9%; cattle

2.3%). Major export destinations

(2006): U.S. 38.5%; Spain 8.2%; The

Netherlands 6.7%; Sweden 5.6%; Costa Rica 4.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads

(2005): route

length 355 km; (2002) passenger-km

35,693,000,00010; (2002) metric ton-km cargo 20,665,000,00011. Roads (200612):

total length 11,984 km (paved 72%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 269,704; trucks and buses 78,699. Panama Canal traffic (2005-06): oceangoing transits 12,764; cargo 205,058,000 metric tons. Air transport (2006)13: passenger-km 6,560,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2005) 37,226,000. Communications Medium Televisions

date 2004

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

620

195

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium PCs

Dailies 2005 2006

1,69415 433

52515 132

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

147

47

2005

16414

5214

2006 2005

220 1815

67 5.615

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 8.9%; primary 36.4%; secondary 33.9%; undergraduate 14.4%; graduate 1.5%; other/unknown 4.9%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 93.0%; males 93.6%; females 92.4%. Education (2005)

Primary (age 6-11)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

242

3,194

17,751

430,152

Secondary (age 12-18)

518

16,392

256,224

15.6

Voc., teacher tr.16

105

2,548

53,976

21.2

65

9,422

120,850

12.8

Higher!e

Health (2004): physicians 4,321 (1 per 715 persons); hospital beds 7,564 (1 per 408 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 14.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,627 (vegetable products 82%, animal products 1896); 14496 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): none". Paramilitary expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.196; per capita expenditure U.S.$50. 1Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2006 revision). ?District adjacent to Panama City within Panama City urban agglomeration. ^Population of cabecera. »At purchaser's prices of 1996. *Taxes and import duties less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. "Includes 121,360 unemployed. 5Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. "Excludes trade passing through Colón Free Zone (2004 imports c.i.f. B 5.250,566,290; 2004 reexports f.o.b. B 5,469,753,451,

of which textiles and clothing 18.3%, machinery and apparatus 16.9%). "Data for 76 km Panama Canal Railway, which reopened in 2001, and National Railway of Chiriquí. UData for Panama Canal Railway. January 1. COPA only. “Circulation of daily newspapers. |5Subscribers. 162002. !7Military abolished 1990; 11,800-member paramilitary includes air and maritime units.

Internet resources for further information: * Dirección de Estadística y Censo http://www.contraloria.gob.pa/dec

Nations of the World

Papua New Guinea

cific ean

Official name: Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (National Parliament [109]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Port Moresby. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: kina (K); valuation

Area and population area

population

Regions/ Provinces

sq km

2000 census

Regions/ Provinces

Highlands

62,400

1,973,996

11,200

432,972

Enga Simbu (Chimbu) Southern Highlands Western Highlands Islands

12,800 6,100 23,800 8,500 57,500

295,031 259,703 546,265 440,025 741,538

Bougainville (autonomous

region)? East New Britain

Manus New Ireland West New Britain Momase (Northern

Coastal)

2006

area

population

sq km

2000 census

East Sepik

42,800

343,181

Madang

29,000

365,106

34,500

539,404

36,300

185,741

200,340

1,041,820

29,500 34,500

183,983 106,898

14,000

210,412

240

254,158

Morobe Sandaun (West Sepik) Papua (Southern Coastal Central Gulf

9,300

175,160

Milne Bay

15,500

220,133

National Capital

2,100

43,387

9,600 21,000

118,350 184,508

142,600

1,433,432

District Oro (Northern) Western TOTAL

22,800 99,300 462,840

133,065 153,304 5,190,786?

Demography Population (2007): 6,331,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 35.4, persons per sq km 13.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 13.4%; rural 86.6%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.79%; female 49.21%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 40.6%; 15-29, 27.3%; 30-44, 18.9%; 45-59, 9.3%; 60-74, 3.3%; 75-84, 0.5%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 6,708,000; (2020) 7,937,000. Doubling time: 32 years. Ethnic composition (1983)4: New Guinea Papuan 84.0%; New

Guinea

Melanesian 15.0%; other 1.0%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant/independent

Christian 44%; Roman

Catholic 22%; traditional beliefs 34965. Major cities (2004): Port Moresby 337,900; Lae 109,800; Madang Wewak 28,600; Arawa (on Bougainville) 20,800; Goroka 17,900.

36,000;

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 31.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 4.05. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 54.3 years; female 60.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases c. 249, of which tuberculosis c. 54; cardiovascular diseases c. 153, of

which ischemic heart disease c. 71; perinatal conditions c. 85; respiratory infections c. 65; accidents c. 53.

on minerals and petroleum 20.5%, indirect taxes 18.6%, personal income taxes 16.0%; grants 23.3%; nontax revenue 5.3%). Expenditures: K 4,104,000,000 (current expenditure 69.0%, of which transfer to provincial governments 16.5%, interest payments 9.0%; development expenditure 31.0%). Public debt (external, outstanding; March 2007): U.S.$1,170,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): oil palm fruit 1,300,000, bananas 919,800, fruits 812,200, coconuts 795,100, sweet potatoes 492,200, game meat 330,000, yams 290,000, vegetables 265,000, taro 260,000, green corn (maize) 235,000, berries 103,000, coffee 76,100, cacao 42,500; livestock (number of live animals) 1,750,000 pigs; roundwood 7,241,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 76%; fisheries production 250,280 (from

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

K 000,000

value

force

force

5,820

33.7

1,696,271

70.3

Mining and quarrying

4,962

28.7

9,282

0.4

Manufacturing Construction

999 1,411

5.8 8.2

25,557 48,312

14 2.0

Public utilities

302 326 1,012 490

1.7 1.9 59 28

2,208

0.1 1.0 148 13 13 3.6 44 100.0

}

1514

24,513

357,581 31,129 32,043 86,391 100,070 2,413,357

88 2.56 100.0

4336 17,269

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 3.6; remittances (2006) 13; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 48; official development assistance (2005) 2337. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 56; remittances (2006) 135; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 11. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.5%, in permanent crops 1.4%, in pasture 0.4%; overall forest area (2005) 65.0%.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) K '000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

32,917 31.9%

42,190 20.7%

43,611 29.9%

43,510 27.2%

45,482 37.0%

46,668 35.5%

Imports (2003): K 4,628,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery 18.5%; food products 14.8%, of which cereals 7.3%; refined petroleum 12.9%; transport equipment 8.8%; chemicals and chemical products 8.496; fabricated metals 6.396). Major import sources (2006): Australia 34.296; U.S. 21.096; Singapore 19.2%; Japan 5.096; New Zealand 2.896. Exports (2006): K 12,731,000,000 (copper 34.0%; gold 24.3%; crude petroleum 23.596; logs 3.996; palm oil 2.496; coffee 2.396). Major export destinations (2006): Australia 40.7%; Japan 14.3%; Philippines 9.7%; Germany 4.5%; S. Korea 4.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 19,600 km (paved 4%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 24,900; trucks and buses 87,800. Air transport: passenger-km (2006)9 748,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 22,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

130

22

2005 2005

7511 64

1311 11

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

391 5110 110 see

64 8.610 18

Education and health Educational attainment (1990). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 82.6%; some primary education 8.2%; completed primary 5.0%; some secondary 4.2%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 57.3%; males literate 63.4%; females literate 50.9%. Education (2002-03)

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-16) Voc., teacher tr.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: K 5,243,000,000 (tax revenue 71.4%, of which taxes

2000

Agriculture, fishing

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

5.83.

Eastern Highlands

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Transp. and commun.

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = K 2.90;

1£=K

671

Higher!

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

3,05512 16112

18,630 7,058

660,425 168,052

35.4 23.8

13812

1,111

16,599

149

5

1,037

7,853

7.6

Health (2005): physicians 750 (1 per 7,849 persons); hospital beds (2000) 14,516 (1 per 371 persons); infant mortality rate 63.0. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 3,100 (army 80.695, maritime element [coastal patrol] 12.9%, air force 6.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$5.

aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2005): copper (metal content; 2006) 194,355; gold 68,483 kg; silver 51,125 kg. Manufacturing (value of exports in U.S.$’000; 2005): forest products 153,000; palm oil 126,100; coconut

oil 30,200; copra 5,600; refined petroleum, n.a. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k W-hr; 2004) 1,399,000,000 (1,399,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (1,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 18,300,000 (476,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 85,300,000 (85,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 46,000 (712,000). Population economically active (2000): total 2,413,357; activity rate 46.596 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.295; female 47.9%; unemployed, n.a.). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 109.3

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

122.2

140.2

143.2

145.6

149.8

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$5,523,000,000 (U.S.$890 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1The national languages are English, Tok Pisin (English Creole), and Motu. 2Bougainville formally attained autonomy within Papua New Guinea (PNG) on June 15, 2005. A referendum on possible future independence is to be held in 10 to 15 years. 3Unadjusted total; census total adjusted for undercount equals c. 5,398,000. *PNG has about 1,200 ethnic communities, more than half of which number less than 1,000 peo-

ple. New Guinea Papuans are predominantly descendants of original arrivals; New Guinea Melanesians are more racially mixed with other Pacific peoples. 5According to the 2000 census PNG is 96% Christian. In actuality, many citizens combine Christian faith with some traditional indigenous practices. ‘Import duties less imputed bank service charges and less subsidies. "Figure represents commitments. 3Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and trading partners and c.if. in commodities. ?Air Niugini only. JCirculation of daily newspapers. “Subscribers. 122001—02. Universities only; 2005.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Papua New Guinea http://www.bankpng.gov.pg * National Statistical Office of Papua New Guinea http://www.nso.gov.pg

672

Britannica World Data

crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (491,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 64,000 (1,254,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (none). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$9,281,000,000 (U.S.$1,543 per capita).

Paraguay Official name: Repüblica del Paraguay (Spanish); Tetà Paraguáype (Guaraní) (Republic of Paraguay). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Chamber of Senators [45]; Chamber of Deputies [80]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Asunción. Official languages: Spanish; Guarani. Official religion: nonet. Monetary unit: guaraní (plural guaranies; (1); valuation (Sept. 5,

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

sq km

2005 estimate

246,925 82,349 91,669 72,907 159,827 14,895 12,933 117 11,474 9,496 14,667

156,049 11,708 49,809 94,532 5,742,601 670,072 122,874 519,647 469,910 149,399 163,610

Regions Departments Occidental Alto Paraguay Boquerón Presidente Hayes Oriental Alto Paraná Amambay Asunción? Caaguazú Caazapá Canindeyü

force

10,560.0

20.2

847,161

32.4

65.7

0.1

5,711

0.2

7,141.2 2,457.5

13.7 4.7

248,035 140,872

9.5 5.4

Public utilities

1,024.7

2.0

17,263

0.6

Transp. and commun.

3,959.2

7.6

95,622

3.6

11,423.3

21.8

583,346

22.3

1,999.9 4,827.2

3.8 9.2

98,969

3.8

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

Regions Departments Central Concepción Cordillera Guairá Itapúa Misiones Neembucú Paraguarí San Pedro TOTAL

area

population

sq km

2005 estimate

2,465

1,722,691 189,749 260,248 192,530 504,736 111,438 82,188 236,945 346,564 5,898,651?

18,051

4,948 3,846 16,525 9,556 12,147 8,705 20,002 406,752

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 39.0, persons per sq km 15.1. Urban-rural (2006): urban 58.196; rural 41.996. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.57%; female 50.43%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 35.9%; 15-29, 28.6%; 30-44, 17.4%; 45-59, 11.2%; 60-74, 5.2%; 75 and over, 1.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 6,460,000; (2020) 7,533,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mixed (white/Amerindian) 85.6%; white 9.3%, of which German 4.4%, Latin American 3.4%; Amerindian 1.8%; other 3.3%.

Religious affiliation (2002): Roman Catholic 89.6%; Protestant (including all Evangelicals) 6.2%; other Christian 1.1%; nonreligious/atheist 1.1%; traditional beliefs 0.6%; other/unknown 1.4%.

Major urban areas (2002)4: Asuncién (2006) 519,661 (urban agglomeration [2005] 1,858,0005); Ciudad del Este 222,274; San Lorenzo 204,3566 Luque

170,9866: Capiatá 154,2745.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 25.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.30. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 3.47/n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 69.2 years; female 73.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 90.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 50.0; accidents 44.2; diseases of the respiratory system 26.5; infectious and parasitic diseases 17.6.

National economy Budget (2006-07): Revenue: G10,174,723,000,000 (tax revenue 65.2%, of which VAT 28.5%, income tax 10.9%, taxes on international trade 8.5%; nontax

revenue including grants 34.8%).Expenditures: @9,682,282,000,000 (current expenditure 77.3%, of which wages and salaries 42.9%; capital expenditure

22.7%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; August 2007): U.S.$2,151,725,000.

Population economically active (2006): total 2,735,646; activity rate 46.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2002], 61.4%; female 38.5%; unemployed 11.1%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

107.3 111.2

118.5 122.1

135.4 143.3

141.3 144.5

150.9 157.5

165.4 176.5

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006—07): soybeans 6,250,000, cassava 4,800,000, sugarcane 4,100,000, corn (maize) 1,250,000, wheat 620,000, sunflower seeds 190,000, oranges (2006) 182,940, sweet potatoes (2006) 165,490, rice 130,000, oil palm fruit (2006) 125,880, cotton seed (2006) 120,000, seed cotton 105,000, maté (2004-05) 74,000; livestock (number of live animals; 2006) 9,982,932 cattle, 1,600,000 pigs, 17,000,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 10,090,794 cu m, of which fuelwood 60%; fisheries production (2005) 23,100 (from aquaculture 996). Mining and quarrying (2005): dimension stone 70,000; kaolin 66,600. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2001): food products 325; beverages 114; chemicals and chemical products 77; tobacco products 55; printing and publishing 34; textiles and wearing apparel 31; plastic products 26; wood products (including metal furniture) 23; leather and hides 12. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 51,921,000,0009 (6,925,000,000);

41253

7.9

4,686.110 52,270.1

9.010 100.0

580,729 — 2,617,708

22.2 — 100.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 4.3. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 76; remittances (2006) 268; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 74; official development assistance (2005) 8111. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 79; remittances (2006) n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 5.0. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.296, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 54.6%; overall forest area (2005) 46.5%.

Foreign trade!2 Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 -999 33.5%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2002 -560 22.8%

2003 —624 20.1%

2004 -1,031 24.1%

2005 -1,564 31.7%

2006 -3,348 46.8%

Imports (2006): U.S.$5,254,271,000 (machinery and apparatus 35.9%; mineral fuels 13.2%; transport equipment 11.5%; chemicals and chemical products 6.3%; food, beverages, and tobacco products 6.1%). Major import sources China 27.0%; Brazil 20.0%; Argentina 13.6%; Japan 8.3%; U.S. 6.4%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$1,906,367,00012 (soybeans 23.0%; meat 22.3%; cereals 11.4%; flour 7.5%; vegetable oils 6.2%; wood 5.2%). Major export destinations: Uruguay 22.0%; Brazil 17.2%; Russia 11.9%; Argentina 8.8%; Chile

6.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): operational route length 36 km; passenger-km, n.a.; metric ton-km cargo, n.a. Roads (1999): total length 29,500 km (paved 51%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 360,070; trucks 81,207. Air transport (2005)13: passenger-km 501,000,000; metric ton-km cargo, none. Communications

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

1,300

224

Cellular

2006

3,23315

53715

Internet users

2006

331

55

Broadband

Medium

Vital statistics

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

% of labour

force

Trade, hotels

Demography Population (2007): 6,127,000.

Consumer price index Earnings index?

labour

value

Manufacturing Construction

Area and population population

% of total

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

1 £ = 10,222.

area

in value @ 000,000,000

Mining

2007) 1 U.S.$ = 465,085;

2005

Landline

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

460 14514 260 1615

78 2514 43 2.715

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 4.1%; incomplete primary education 30.2%; complete primary 30.8%; secondary 26.9%; higher 8.0%. Literacy (2005): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 94.9%; males 95.9%; females 93.9%. Education (2004)

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-18)18 Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

8,156

33,434

930,918

27.8

2,816 111177

44,440 1,13517

526,001 149,120

11.8 sid

Health (2005): physicians 5,517 (1 per 873 persons); hospital beds 5,843 (1 per 1,010 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 33.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,563 (vegetable products 7896, animal products 2296); 13996 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 10,100 (army 75.2%, navy 13.9%, air force 10.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$9. 1Roman Catholicism, although not official, enjoys special recognition in the constitution. "Asunción is the capital city, not a department. ?Detail does not add to total given because ofa statistical discrepancy. ‘Unadjusted final census figures. “Includes the third through ninth largest cities of Paraguay. 5Within Asunción urban agglomeration. 7Civil Registry records only. SMinimum wage. ?Paraguay is the world's second largest net exporter of electricity. !“Taxes on products. Figure represents commitments. 12F lectricity exports are excluded. Transportes Aéreos del Mercosur only. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. !Includes vocational and teacher training. 171999.

Internet resources for further information: * Banco Central del Paraguay http://www.bcp.gov.py * Dirección General Estadística, Encuestas y Censos http://www.dgeec.gov.py

Nations of the World — 673

Peru

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Official name: Republica del Pert (Spanish) (Republic of Peru). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Congress [120]). Head of state and government: President, assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Lima. Official languages: Spanish; Quechua (locally); Aymara (locally). Official religion: Roman Catholicism. Monetary unit: nuevo sol (S/.); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index?

Regions Amazonas

Ancash Apurimac Arequipa Ayacucho Cajamarca Callao Cusco Huancavelica Huánuco Ica Junín La Libertad

sq km

2005 census

39,249

35,915 20,896 63,345 43,815 33,318 147 71,986 22,131 36,849 21,328 44,197 25,500

406,904 1,086,604 437,128 1,172,959 650,817 1,412,262 840,813 1,208,821 463,250 761,216 695,489 1,182,649 1,596,930

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.0 99.1

102.2 103.3

104.5 104.6

108.3 106.1

110.1 105.6

112.3

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

in value S/.'000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing

Area and population population

2001

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$86,579,000,000 (U.S.$3,138 per capita).

1 U.S.$ = S/. 3.16; 1 £ = S/. 6.36.

area

2000

Regions Lambayeque

Lima Loreto Madre de Dios Moquegua Pasco Piura Puno San Martin Tacna Tumbes Ucayali TOTAL

area

population

sq km

2005 census

14,213 34,802 368,852 85,301 15,734 25,320 35,892 71,999! 51,253 16,076 4,669 102,411 1,285,198"

1,122,421 8,153,618 915,138 101,644 164,105 274,568 1,679,899 1,290,052 695,106 286,810 201,336 418,725 27,219,264?

% of total value

labour force?

% of labour force?

17,149,037

6.6

667,800

84

Mining and quarrying Manufacturing

24,653,231 38,867,607

9.4 14.9

45,900 956,400

Construction

13,713,538

52

341,300

5,636,922 19,953,484 42,136,769 41,875,326 19,249,091 15,096,515 23,300,9649 261,632,484

2.1 7.6 16.1 16.0 74 58 8.99 100.0

0.6 11.6 4.1 0.2 Xd 32.9 4.7 3.6 18.6 7.910 100.0

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

20,400 641,000

2,718,300 390,500 298,100 1,540,200 651,50010 8,271,400

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$22,222,000,000. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 2.9%, in perma-

nent crops 0.5%, in pasture 13.2%; overall forest area (2005) 53.7%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-195 1.4%

4292 1.9%

4853 4.9%

43,004 13.3%

45,260 17.9%

48,934 23.1%

Imports (2005): U.S.$12,076,000,000 (consumer goods 19.2%, mineral fuels and lubricants 19.2%, capital goods for industry 17.5%, food products 6.2%). Major import sources (2006): U.S. 16.5%; China 10.3%; Brazil 10.3%;

Demography Population (2007): 27,903,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 56.2, persons per sq km 21.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 72.6%; rural 27.4%. Sex distribution (2005)3: male 49.94%; female 50.06%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 31.1%; 15-29, 28.0%; 30-44, 20.0%; 45-59, 12.1%; 60-74, 6.3%; 75-84, 1.9%; 85 and over, 0.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 28,894,000; (2020) 32,540,000. Doubling time: 48 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Quechua 47.0%; mestizo 31.9%; white 12.0%; Aymara 5.4%; Japanese 0.5%; other 3.2%. Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 8596, of which practicing weekly c. 1596; Protestant c. 726; independent Christian c. 496; other c. 496.

Major cities (2005): metropolitan Lima 7,753,439; Arequipa 783,000; Trujillo 644,547; Chiclayo 495,415; Piura 361,832.

Ecuador 7.2%; Colombia 6.1%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$17,336,000,000 (copper 19.4%, gold 18.3%, crude and refined petroleum 8.8%, clothing and textiles 7.4%, fishmeal 6.6%, molybdenum 6.6%, processed agricultural and livestock products 5.8%, zinc 4.6% ). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 24.0%; China 9.6%; Switzerland 7.1%; Canada 6.8%; Chile 6.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 3,462 km; (2002) passenger-km 98,000,000; (2002) metric ton-km cargo 1,008,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 78,829 km (paved 14%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 824,613; trucks and buses 462,803. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 4,440,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 100,092,000.

Vital statistics

Communications

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 20.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.6 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 1.0/0.1. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.56. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 67.8 years; female 71.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 113; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 112; accidents, poisoning, and violence 60; diseases of the respiratory system 27; diabetes mellitus 14.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: S/. 41,432,000,000 (tax revenue 85.896, of which VAT 44.696, corporate taxes 14.896; nontax revenue

2001

14.296). Expenditures: S/.

43,534,000,000 (current expenditure 77.1%, of which transfers 30.196; debt

service 11.7%; capital expenditure 11.2%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006)4: sugarcane 7,600,000, alfalfa 5,606,000, potatoes 3,290,000, rice 2,225,000, plantains 1,697,000, corn (maize) 1,230,000, asparagus 206,000; livestock (number of live animals) 14,822,226 sheep, 5,241,298 cattle, (2005) 4,500,000 llamas and alpacas; roundwood (2005) 9,142,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 81%; fish-

eries production (2005) 9,416,130 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): iron ore 4,638,0275; zinc 1,028,4185; copper 790,1985; lead 293,9685; molybdenum 16,6325; silver 3,0025; gold 201,888 kg. Manufacturing (value in S/. '000,000; 2005): food and food products 11,854; textiles and wearing apparel 5,310; chemicals and chemical products 4,212; base metals 4,007; cement, bricks, and ceramics 2,859; refined petroleum products 2,431; print-

ing and publishing 1,652. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-

hr; 2005) 23,822,000,000 (21,100,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 16,000

(963,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 40,600,000 ([2004] 60,011,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 8,286,000 (7,233,000); natural gas (cu

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2002

4,592

172

Cellular

2006

Landline

2006

8,50012 2,332

Medium

30012

82

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,800 94611 6,100 48512

103 3511 215 1712

Education and health Educational attainment (2005)3. Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 11.8%; less than complete primary education 24.3%; complete primary 11.5%; incomplete secondary 15.3%; complete secondary 19.0%; higher 18.1%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 91.6%; males 95.6%; females 87.7%. Education (2004) Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-16) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

33,7341? 9,16813

185,829 143,942

4,133,386 2,383,129

22.2 16.6

16,894

278,751

16.5

56,07013

896,501

sie

es

2,161174

Health (2004): physicians 41,266 (1 per 651 persons); hospital beds (2005) 42,159 (1 per 647 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 31.9. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,583 (vegetable products 88%, animal products 12%); 141% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 80,000 (army 50.0%, navy 31.3%, air force 18.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$39.

m; 2005) 4,956,000,000 (561,000,000).

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 4.33; income per household (1988) U.S.$2,173; sources of income (1991): selfemployment 67.1%, wages 23.3%, transfers 7.6%; expenditure (1990): food 29.4%, recreation and education 13.2%, household durables 10.1%.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,241; remittances (2006) 1,825; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,763. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 680; remittances (2006) 133. Population economically active (2002)6: total 12,892,000; activity rate of total population 48.296 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 72.6%; female 42.0%; urban unemployed [2005] 9.696). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Includes the 4,996 sq km area of the Peruvian part of Lake Titicaca. 2Based on final census figure. [Based on preliminary census total. ^In 2006 Peru ranked second in the world in coca production with 114,100 metric tons produced. »Metal content. 5Official estimate. "Private sector only, Lima metropolitan area. $Excludes rural areas. ?Import duties and other taxes on products. !?Unemployed. iiCirculation of daily newspapers. T2Subscribers. 1532002. 142000.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (Spanish) http://www.inei.gob.pe * Banco Central de Reserva del Peru http://www.bcrp.gob.pe

674

Britannica World Data

Philippines

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Republika ng Pilipinas (Filipino); Republic of the Philippines (English). Form of government: unitary republic with two legislative houses (Senate [24]; House of Representatives [240]). Chief of state and head of government: President. Capital: Quezon City/Manilal. Official languages: Filipino; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: piso (P); valuation

Agriculture, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities

Pub. admin., defense Services Others TOTAL

Area and population

area

population

sq mi

sq km

2007 projection?

Legaspi Tuguegarao Quezon City

6,963 11,641 6,198

18,035 30,149 16,052

5,392,300 3,194,400 11,152,800

Butuan San Fernando Cebu Baguio Davao Tacloban San Fernando

7,461 7,559 6,016 6,465 10,491 8,490 4,950

19,324 19,579 15,582 16,745 27,172 21,988 12,821

2,408,400 9,576,900 6,619,800 1,592,400 4,154,300 4,187,000 4,875,200

MIMAROPA

Quezon City

11,274

29,199

2,792,500

National Capital Northern Mindanao

Manila Cagayan de Oro

244 6,030

633 15,817

11,099,800 4,087,700

SOCCSKSARGEN

Cotabato

6,135

15,890

3,817,900

Western Visayas Zamboanga Peninsula

lloilo Zamboanga

7,783 7,009

20,158 18,154

7,149,700 3,284,600

Sultan Kudarat

7,412

19,196

3,320,600

Capitals

Caraga Central Luzon Central Visayas Cordillera Administrative Davao Eastern Visayas Ilocos

Autonomous region Muslim Mindanao

TOTAL

122,1213,^

316,2943.4

88,706,300

Demography Population (2007): 87,960,0005.

11.0%; 60-74, 5.0%; 75-84, 1.0%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection®: (2010) 93,001,000; (2020) 108,748,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Tagalog 20.9%; Visayan (Cebu) 19.0%; Ilocano 11.1%; Hiligaynon (Visaya) 9.4%; Waray-Waray (Binisaya) 4.7%; Central Bikol (Naga) 4.6%; Filipino mestizo 3.5%; Pampango 3.1%; other 23.7%. Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic 64.9%; independent Christian

force

855,452 75,557 1,381,171 235,189 216,062

14.2 13 22.9 3.9 3.6

11,841,000 134,000 3,070,000 1,691,000 114,000

32.7 0.4 8.5 47 0.3

446,224 877,544 662,629

7.4 14.5 11.0

2,470,000 7,270,000 1,153,000

6.8 20.1 3.2

452,642 830,152 — 6,032,62411

7.5 13.8 — 100.011

1,552,000 3,962,000 2,908,00010 36,165,000

4.3 11.0 8.010 100.0

(participation rates: ages 15 and over, 63.6%; female [2006] 39.4%; unemployed [July 2007] 7.8%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2004 120.6

2005 129.8

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—4,028 5.4%

4,239 5.5%

—4,359 5.2%

—6,168 7.0%

—4,364 4.4%

2006 138.0

Imports (2006): U.S.$51,774,000,000 (electronic products 47.2%, mineral fuels 15.4%, machinery and transport equipment 7.7%, iron and steel 2.3%). Major import sources (2004): Japan 20.6%; U.S. 16.0%; Singapore 8.4%; Exports (2006): U.S.$47,410,000,000 (electronic products 62.6%, apparel and clothing accessories 5.6%, copper cathodes and parts 2.6%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 17.4%; Japan 15.8%; China 11.4%; Hong Kong 8.3%; Singapore 7.7%; The Netherlands 6.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 897 km; passenger-km 83,400,000; metric ton-km cargo (2000) 660,000,000. Roads (2003): total length 200,037 km (paved 10%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 767,000; trucks and buses 240,000. Air transport (2006)!2: passenger-km 13,513,000,000; metric ton-km Communications Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 24.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.41. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 67.0 years; female 72.9 years. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2003): 7.3/8. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001): circulatory diseases 143.7; respiratory diseases 65.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 48.4; tuberculosis 35.0; accidents and violence 34.3.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: P 757,945,000,000 (income taxes 42.1%, international duties 17.5%, sales tax 14.4%, nontax revenues 10.6%). Expenditures: P 899,990,000,000 (debt service 33.5%, economic affairs 17.7%, education 15.1%, transportation and communication 6.1%, public order 6.0%, defense

4.9%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 24,350,000, rice 15,330,000, coconuts 14,960,000, bananas 6,795,000,

corn (maize) 6,082,000, pineapples 1,834,000; livestock (number of live animals) 13,046,680 pigs, 3,735,816 goats, 3,357,956 buffalo, 134,300,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 15,819,034 cu m, of which fuelwood 82%; fisheries

production (2005) 2,803,603 (from aquaculture 20%); aquatic plants production 1,338,859 (from aquaculture 100%). Mining and quarrying (2005): copper

16,3209;

gold

37,490

kg.

Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2003): petroleum products 1,980; electronic products 1,696; food products 1,338; chemicals and chemi-

cal products 1,312; beverages and tobacco 1,137. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 55,957,000,000 (55,957,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) 2,482,000 (9,456,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 1,000,000 (816,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 9,345,000

(14,427,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 2,479,000,000 (2,479,000,000).

Household income and expenditure (2000). Average household size (2004) 5.0; income per family (2003) P 148,616 (U.S.$2,742); sources of income: wages 52.1%, self-employment 25.1%, receipts from abroad 11.1%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 45.4%, housing 14.2%, transportation 6.8%.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 19.1%, in permanent crops 16.8%, in pasture 5.0%; overall forest area (2005) 24.0%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$127,832,000,000 (U.S.$1,482 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2003 113.8

Balance of trade (current prices)

[2003] 10,352,249); Caloocan 1,177,604; Davao 1,147,116; Cebu 718,821.

22,5609;

2002 110.0

Foreign trade

cargo 257,000,000.

nickel

2001 106.8

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,130; remittances (2006) 14,923; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 810. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,279; remittances (2006) 15.

17.7% 7; Muslim 5.1%; Protestant 5.0%; traditional beliefs 2.2%; other 5.1%.

Major cities (2000): Quezon City 2,173,831; Manila 1,581,082 (Metro Manila

36,070;

% of labour

force

China 7.4%; Taiwan 7.3%.

Density (2006)6: persons per sq mi 759.4, persons per sq km 293.2. Urban-rural (2003): urban 61.0%; rural 39.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.35%; female 49.65%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 35.1%; 15-29, 28.8%; 30-44, 19.0%; 45-59,

chromite

labour

value

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$35,233,000,000. Population economically active (2007): total 36,434,000; activity rate c. 4196

1 £ = P 94.02.

Bicol Cagayan Valley CALABARZON

% of total

Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = P 46.78;

Regions

in value P’000,000

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

14,770

182

2006 2006

42,86914 3,633

50814 43

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2003 2005 2005

4,521 5,90213 4,615 sat

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

54 7313 55 yei

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 3.8%; primary education 38.5%; incomplete secondary 12.5%; complete secondary 17.2%; technical 5.9%; incomplete undergraduate 11.8%; complete undergraduate 7.3%; graduate 0.7%; unknown 2.3%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 92.6%. Education (2003-04) Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-16) Higher!*

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

37,159 5,026 1,626

340,231 123,074 109,979

12,062,000 5,026,000 2,427,211

35.5 40.8 224

Health: physicians (2005) 98,210 (1 per 857 persons); hospital beds (2004) 82,775 (1 per 999 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 24.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,474 (vegetable products 8496, animal products 1695); 13796 of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 106,000 (army 62.3%, navy 22.6%, air force 15.1%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 0.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$10. 1Additional offices/ministries are located in other suburbs of Metro Manila. 2Official country projection based on 2000 census. ?Sum of regional areas, including coastal water; actual reported total area is 115,831 sq mi (300,000 sq km). ^Land area excluding inland water is 115,124 sq mi (298,170 sq km). *Estimate(s) of the UN World Population Prospects (2006 Revision). Based on actual reported total area. "Includes indigenous Catholics and Protestants. SDivorce was illegal in the Philippines in mid2007. Metal content. Unemployed. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !2Philippines Airlines only. !?Circulation of daily newspapers. !^Subscribers. 152002-03.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistics Office http://www.census.gov.ph

Nations of the World

content of concentrate) 614,800; silver (recoverable metal content) 1,344. Manufacturing (value of sales in zt 000,000; 2006): food products 137,089; transport equipment 84,568; fabricated metal products 49,106; chemical products 47,627; mineral fuels 45,806. Energy production (consumption): electricity (000,000 kW-hr; 2006-07) 156,065 ([2005] 131,186); hard coal ("000 metric tons; 2006-07) 93,135 ([2004] 83,915); lignite ("000 metric tons; 2006) 60,844 ([2005] 61,589); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 5,900,000 ([2005

Poland Official name: Rzeczpospolita Polska (Republic of Poland). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [100]; Sejm [460]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Warsaw. Official language: Polish. Official religion: nonel. Monetary unit: złoty (zł); valuation

134,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) 23,153,000 (16,000,000);

natural gas (cu m; 2006) 5,650,000,000 ([2005] 16,304,000,000).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 20072): U.S.$43,360,000,000. Population economically active (2006): total 16,938,000; activity rate of tota population 44.496 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 64.395; female 45.296;

unemployed [September 2006-August 2007] 14.0%).

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = zt 2.81; 1 £- zt 5.66.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Area and population

area

Provinces

Capitals

Dolnośląskie Kujawsko-Pomorskie

Wroclaw Bydgoszcz/Toruń

Łódzkie Lubelskie Lubuskie

population sq km

2007? estimate

7,702 6,939

19,947 17,972

2,882,317 2,066,371

7,034 9,700

18,219 25,122

2,566,198 2,172,766

sqmi

Łódź Lublin Gorzów Wielkopolski/ Zielona Góra Kraków

5,401 5,862

13,988 15,83

1,008,520 3,271,206

13,729

35,558

5,171,702

3,634

9,412

1,041,941

Rzeszów

6,890

17,845

2,097,564

Podlaskie Pomorskie Slaskie

Bialystok Gdansk Katowice

7,794 7,070 4,762

20,187 18,310 12,334

1,196,101 2,203,595 4,669,137

Swietokrzyskie Warminsko-Mazurskie Wielkopolskie Zachodniopomorskie

Kielce Olsztyn Poznan Szezecin

4,521 9,333 11,516 8,839

11,710 24,173 29,827 22,892

1,279,838 1,426,883 3,378,502 1,692,838

120,726

312,679

38,125,479

Małopolskie Mazowieckie

Opolskie Podkarpackie

Warsaw

(Warszawa)

Opole

TOTAL

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 315.7, persons per sq km 121.9. Urban-rural (20072): urban 61.396; rural 38.796. Sex distribution (20072): male 48.3395; female 51.6796. Age breakdown (20072): under 15, 15.8%; 15-29, 24.1%; 30-44, 20.2%; 45-59,

22.3%; 60-74, 11.8%: 75-84, 4.8%: 85 and over, 1.0%.

Population projection: (2010) 37,930,000; (2020) 37,106,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Polish 90.0%; Ukrainian 4.0%; German 4.0%; Belarusian 0.5%; Kashubian 0.4%; other 1.1%.

Religious affiliation (end of 2005): Roman

Catholic 89.6%; other Catholic

0.3%; Polish Orthodox 1.3%; Protestant 0.4%; Jehovah’s Witness 0.3%; other

(mostly nonreligious) 8.1%.

Major cities (20072): Warsaw 1,702,139; Lódz 760,251; Kraków 756,267; Wroclaw 634,630; Poznan 564,951; Gdansk 456,658; Szczecin 409,068.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.8 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 81.5%; outside of marriage 18.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 0.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.27. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.9/1.9. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 70.9 years; female 79.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 440.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 236.9; accidents, poisoning, and violence 66.5; diseases of the respiratory system 48.6.

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

105.5 108.9

107.4 113.2

108.2 118.1

111.7 122.9

113.8 127.6

114.8 132.5

Household income and expenditure (2006). Average household size 3.1; average disposable annual income zt 9,629 (U.S.$3,103); sources of income: wages 49.4%, transfers 34.9%, self-employment 8.8%; expenditure: food, beverages,

and tobacco 29.8%, housing and energy 19.7%, transportation and communications 13.9%, recreation 7.1%.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 6,274; remittances (2006) 4,364; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 7,006. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 4,341; remittances (2006) 785; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 539. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 41.1%, in permanent crops 1.0%, in pasture 10.7%; overall forest area (2005) 30.0%.

Foreign trade> Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 -58,138 16.4%

zt’000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 38,110,000.

2002 -57,478 14.7%

2003 -56,189 11.9%

2004 -53,494 8.9%

2005 -39,411 6.4%

2006 -50,251 6.8%

Imports (2006): zł 394,030,015,000 (electrical equipment 14.8%; chemicals and chemical products 12.6%; transportation equipment 12.4%; base and fabricated metals 12.0%; machinery and apparatus 10.7%; mineral fuels 10.2%). Major import sources: Germany 24.0%; Russia 9.7%; Italy 6.8%; China 6.1%; France 5.5%. Exports (2006): zt 343,778,977 000 (transportation equipment 20.9%; base and fabricated metals 13.7%; electrical equipment 12.1%; machinery and apparatus 8.6%; food products 8.3%; chemicals and chemical products 6.4%; plastic and rubber products 4.9%). Major export destinations: Germany 27.2%; Italy 6.5%; France 6.2%; U.K. 5.7%; Czech Republic 5.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length

(20072)

20,176

km; passenger-km

18,552,100,000; metric ton-km cargo 53,622,500,000. Roads

(20072)& tota

length 382,615 km (paved 67%). Vehicles (20072): passenger cars 13,384,299; trucks and buses 2,477,167. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 11,640,600,000; metric ton-km cargo 109,700,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2007?

7,8207

2057

20072 2007?

36,7587 11,284

9647 296

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

7,362 4,3338 11,000 2,6407

191 1138 288 697

Education and health

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: zt 197,640,000,000 (VAT 42.7%; excise tax 21.3%; income tax 14.296; corporate taxes 9.896). Expenditures: zl 222,703,000,000 (social security and welfare 22.6%; transfers 15.5%; public debt 12.5%; wages

and salaries 10.4%). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$324,482,000,000 (U.S.$8,508 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

2005

in value 217000,000

Me

675

ET forestry, tishing

Manufacturing Public utilities

Construction

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants

% of total

fovalia

Education (2006-07) Primary (age 7-12)

2006

labour

% of labour

fores

force

6

Secondary (age 13-18) Voc., teacher tr. : Higher

student schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

14,503

186,300

2,484,800

13.3

4,786

61,600

793,700

12.9

448

100,200

1,941,400

19.4

11,035

173,00

2,421,700

14.0

Seas

Bo

ee oo

ES:

Health (2006): physicians 76,0462 (1 per 458 persons); hospital beds 236,980?

160,374 31,502

163 3.2

2,988,000 223,000

176 13

(1 per 162 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 6.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,503 (vegetable products 74%,

62,701 174,845

6.4 17.8

942,000 2,332,000

5.6 13.8

52,207

53

925,000

54

Finance, real estate Fub. admin defense Services

156,797 ages 113,385

16.0 2 11.5

1,165,000 21r 000 2,556,000

6.9 at 154

TOTAL

983,302

100.0

16,938,000

100.0

Other

Educational attainment (20062). Percentage of population age 13 and over having: no formal schooling/incomplete primary education 2.5%; complete primary 21.8%; lower secondary/vocational 28.5%; upper secondary and postsecondary 33.0%; university 14.2%. Literacy (2003): 99.8%.

116.9732

11.98

2,349,0004

1394

animal products 2696); 17496 of FAO recommended minimum requirement. rii

Military Total ü active- duty personnel (November 2006): 141,500 (army 62.9%, navy 5 i cpa a 10.1%, air force 21.2%, centrally controlled staff 5.8% ). Military expenditure

as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$154.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugar beets 11,474,820, potatoes 8,981,976, wheat 7,059,671, triticale 3,196,957, barley 3,161,041, rye 2,621,626, apples 2,304,892, rapeseed 1,651,525, sour cherries 194,928, currants 194,539; livestock (number of live animals) 18,813,000 pigs, 5,281,000 cattle; roundwood (2005) 31,944,000 cu m,

of which fuelwood 11%; fisheries production (2005) 192,854 (from aquaculture 19%).Mining and quarrying (2005): sulfur 1,262,000; copper ore (metal

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Roman Catholicism has special recognition per 1997 concordat with Vatican City. ?January 1. *Taxes less subsidies. 4Includes 2,344,000 unemployed. *Imports c.i.f; exports f.o.b. Public roads only. "Subscribers. 3Circulation of daily newspapers.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistical Office http://www.stat.gov.pl

676

Britannica World Data

Portugal

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic). Form of government: republic with one legislative house (Assembly of the Republic [230]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Lisbon. Official language: Portuguese}, Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

Agriculture, fishing

Construction

Public utilities Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Transp. and commun. Services Pub. admin., defense

Other TOTAL

1 £ = €1.48.

Area and population

area

Continental Portugal Regions Alentejo Algarve Centre (Centro)

Principal cities Evora Faro Coimbra

Lisbon and Tagus Valley (Lisboa e Vale do Tejo) North (Norte)

Lisbon Porto

population.

sq mi

sq km

2006? estimate

12,182 1,929 10,887

31,552 4,996 28,198

10,082,154 765,971 416,847 2,382,448

1,133 8,219

2,935 21,286

2,779,097 3,737,791

897 309 35,556

2,322 801 92,090

Insular Portugal Autonomous

regions

Azores (Acores) Madeira TOTAL

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

3,716

Mining Manufacturing

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

in value €'000,000

24

603,900

10.8

21,083

13.6

17,600 980,500

0.3 17.5

8,488

55

553,000

9.9

3,779 23,854

24 15.4

26,100 1,031,200

05 18.5

19,731 8,762

12.7 5.6

44,655

28.7

384,600 239,600 968,700 351,400

6.9 4.3 17.3 6.3

21,2213 155,289

13.73 100.0

430,7004 5,587,300

7.74 100.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.0; average annual household income (2001): €15,512 (U.S.$13,881); sources of income (1995): wages and salaries 44.4%, self-employment 23.4%, transfers 22.2%; expenditure (2003): food and nonalcoholic beverages 18.7%, transportation 16.3%, housing and energy 10.7%, restaurants and hotels 10.0%, clothing and footwear 7.1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 7,893; remittances (2006) 3,329; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 4,421. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 3,073; remittances (2006) 1,386; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 4,649. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 17.6%, in permanent crops 8.4%, in pasture 15.6%; overall forest area (2005) 41.3%.

487,438

Ponta Delgado Funchal

Foreign trade5

242,241 245,197 10,569,592

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 10,629,000.

€ 000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 298.9, persons per sq km 115.4. Urban-rural (2005): urban 57.6%; rural 42.4%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.40%; female 51.60%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 15.7%; 15-29, 20.4%; 30-44, 22.6%; 45-59, 19.2%; 60-74, 14.8%; 75-84, 5.9%; 85 and over, 1.4%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,731,000; (2020) 10,796,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Portuguese 91.9%; mixed race people from Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde 1.6%; Brazilian 1.4%; Marrano 1.2%; other European 1.2%; Han Chinese 0.9%; other 1.8%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 92.4%, of which Roman Catholic 87.4%, independent Christian 2.7%, Protestant 1.3%, other Christian 1.0%; nonreligious/atheist 6.5%; Buddhist 0.6%; other 0.5%.

Major cities (2001): Lisbon 564,657 (urban agglom. [2005] 2,761,000); Porto 263,131 (urban agglom. [2005] 1,309,000); Braga 164,192; Coimbra 148,443;

Funchal 103,961.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—16,731 23.4%

—13,566 20.0%

—9,044 14.3%

—14,073 21.2%

2006

—17,066 | —18,095 24.8% 21.0%

Imports (2004): €40,293,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 20.0%; road vehicles 12.4%; chemicals and chemical products 11.4%; food products 10.0%;

crude petroleum 6.8%).Major import sources: Spain 29.3%; Germany 14.3%; France 9.3%; Italy 6.1%; U.K. 4.6%.

Exports (2004): €26,220,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 18.5%; road vehicles and parts 13.9%; apparel and accessories 9.7%; chemicals and chemical products 6.7%; fabrics and made-up articles 5.3%; footwear 4.6%; cement,

tiles, and ceramics 3.7%). Major export destinations: Spain 24.9%; France 14.0%; Germany 13.5%; U.K. 9.6%; U.S. 6.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): length 2,836 km; passenger-km 3,217,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,588,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 78,470 km (paved [1999] 86%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 4,918,310; trucks and buses 372,179. Air transport (2006)6: passenger-km 18,688,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 293,549,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.4 (world avg. 20.3); (2004) within marriage 70.9%; outside of marriage 29.1%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 0.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2004): 1.42. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 4.5/2.3. Life expectancy at birth (2004-05): male 74.9 years; female 81.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 348.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 215.4; diseases of the respiratory system 107.1; diseases of the digestive system 44.0.

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: €59,636,000,000 (social contributions 30.995, indirect taxes 28.496, direct taxes 21.096). Expenditures: €63,511,000,000 expenditure 90.0%, development expenditure 10.0% ).

(current

Public debt (2006): c. U.S.$125,000,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): grapes 973,400, tomatoes 922,000, potatoes 577,000, corn (maize) 535,800, olives 275,800, apples 239,700, oranges 228,000, cork (2004) 120,000; livestock (number of live animals) 3,583,000 sheep, 2,344,000 pigs, 1,441,000 cattle, 36,000,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 11,106,000 cu m, of which fuelwood

5%; fisheries production (2005) 218,242 (from aquaculture 3%). Mining and quarrying (2005): marble 800,000; kaolin 160,000; copper (metal content) 89,541; tungsten (metal content) 816. Manufacturing (value added in

Communications Medium Televisions

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

4,312

413

Telephones

Medium PCs

Dailies

Cellular

2006

12,2268

1,1608

Landline

2006

4,231

401

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

1,406

133

2004

6807

657

Internet users

2006

3,213

305

Broadband

2006

1,4608

1378

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: no formal schooling through complete primary 67%; complete lower secondary 13%; complete upper secondary 11%; higher 9%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 92.5%; males literate 95.2%; females literate

90.3%.

Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6-11)?

8,823

65,761

707,279

10.8

Secondary (age 12-17)? !9 Higher

2,113 333

79,455 36,80211

661,922 367,934

8.3

Health: physicians (2004) 35,312 (1 per 297 persons); hospital beds (2005) 37,330 (1 per 283 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 3:3;

U.S.$'000,000; 2003): food products 2,148; cement, tiles, and ceramics 1,611; fabricated metals 1,536; wearing apparel 1,527; printing and publishing 1,225;

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,635 (vegetable products 72%, animal products 28%).

45,105,000,000 (51,586,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (5,514,000);

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 43,960 (army 60.7%, navy 22.8%, air force 16.5%); U.S. troops (November 2006) 94012, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.3%; per capita expenditure U.S.$398.

textiles 1,131. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004)

crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (93,100,000); petroleum products (met-

ric tons; 2004)

(3,938,000,000).

11,369,000

(12,377,000);

natural

gas (cu m; 2004)

none

Population economically active (2006): total 5,587,300; activity rate of total population 52.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.9%; female 46.6%; unemployed 7.7%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 104.4

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

108.1

111.6

1143

116.9

120.1

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$188,263,000,000

(U.S.$17,800 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Mirandese, spoken in the vicinity of Miranda do Douro, has official linguistic rights. ?January 1. ?Taxes less statistical discrepancy. ^Includes 2,900 inadequately defined and 427,800 unemployed. 5Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. STAP, Portugália, and SATA domestic and international airlines. 7Circulation of daily newspapers. 9Subscribers. ?Continental Portugal only. !°Includes 3rd cycle of basic education. End of 2004. 12Mostly air force personnel stationed at Lajes, Azores.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estatística http://www.ine.pt * Banco de Portugal http://www.bportugal.pt/default e.htm

Nations of the World

677

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$58,418,000,000 (U.S.$14,720 per capita).

Puerto Rico Atlantíc Ocean

Official name: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (Spanish); Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Political status: self-governing commonwealth in association with the United States, having two legislative houses (Senate [271]; House of Representatives [511]). Chief of state: President of the United States. Head of government: Governor. Capital: San Juan. Official languages: Spanish; English. Monetary unit: U.S. dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

in value U.S.$'000,000 Agriculture

Manufacturing Mining

Construction

}

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

}

% of total value

333.0 36,555.8

0.4 42.3

1,820.9

21

5,507.9

6.4

10,716.5 14,733.1 8,424.2 8,163.8 208.82 86,464.0

12.4 17.0 9.7 9.4 0.22 100.04

labour force

% of labour force

22,000 136,000 1,000

15 9.6 0.1

87.000

61

16,000 43,000 271,000 47,000 278,000 354,000 165,0003 1,420,000

14 3.0

19.1 3.3 19.6 24.9 11.63 100.04

Population economically active (2006): total 1,420,000; activity rate 35.996 (participation rates: ages 16 and over, 47.8%; female [2002] 42.696; unemployed

1 £ = U.S.$2.01.

[August 2007] 11.9%).

Population (2006 estimate) Municipalities

population

Municipalities

Adjuntas Aguada Aguadilla Agunas Buenas Aibonito Añasco Arecibo Arroyo Barceloneta Barranquitas Bayamón Cabo Rojo Caguas Camuy Canóvanas Carolina Cataño Cayey

18,583 45,165 66,926 31,053 27,146 29,888 102,216 19,038 23,028 30,254 221,546 52,123 142,769 38,803 46,781 187,578 27,036 47,378

Fajardo Florida Guánica Guayama Guayanilla Guaynabo Gurabo Hatillo Hormigueros Humacao Isabela Jayuya Juana Díaz Juncos Lajas Lares Las Marías Las Piedras

Ceiba

17,991

Ciales

20,581

Cidra Coamo Comerio Corozal Culebra (island) Dorado

47,294 39,265 19,460 38,625 2,077 36,002

Loíza Luquillo Manatí Maricao Maunabo Mayagüez Moca Morovis

population

Municipalities

population

41,986 15,203 22,735 45,205 23,653 102,525 42,142 42,483 17,414 60,569 47,301 18,194 52,770 40,129 27,583 37,164 11,948 38,631

Naguabo Naranjito Orocovis Patillas Peñuelas Ponce Quebradillas Rincón Río Grande Sabana Grande Salinas San Germán San Juan San Lorenzo San Sebastián Santa Isabel Toa Alta Toa Baja

24,209 29,918 24,654 20,026 29,045 181,267 27,612 16,155 55,894 27,404 31,985 37,485 426,618 43,921 47,145 22,763 77,599 95,000

33,634 20,452 48,996 6,300 12,679 94,478 43,664 32,379

Trujillo Alto Utuado Vega Alta Vega Baja Vieques (island) Villalba Yabucoa Yauco TOTAL

84,396 34,799 39,372 64,379 9,205 29,762 40,332 48,008 3,927,776

Demography Area: 3,515 sq mi, 9,104 sq km.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 107.0

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

113.6

122.4

137.1

156.1

178.9

Household income and expenditure (2002). Average family size 3.6; average annual income per family (2005) U.S.$41,258; sources of income: wages and salaries 49.7%, transfers 30.6%, rent 7.7%, self-employment

6.1%, other

5.9%; expenditure (2005): food and beverages 17.1%, health care 16.7%, housing 15.3%, transportation 13.4%, household furnishings 11.5%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2006) 3,369; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI) n.a.

Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,143; remittances, n.a.;

FDI, n.a.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.8%, in permanent crops 4.7%, in pasture 12.6%; overall forest area (2005) 46.0%.

Foreign trade5 Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 417,800 23.4%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002 418,200 23.9%

2003 421,500 24.2%

2004 416,200 17.2%

2005 417,688 18.5%

2006 417,500 17.0%

Imports (2004-05): U.S.$38,905,200,000 (chemicals 43.9%, electronics 9.4%, petroleum and coal products 7.5%, transport equipment 7.2%, food and bev-

erages 6.7%).Major import sources (2006): U.S. 50.4%; Ireland 18.6% ; Japan 4.3%.

Population (2007): 3,967,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,129, persons per sq km 435.7. Urban-rural (2003): urban 96.7%; rural 3.3%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.04%; female 51.96%.

Exports (2004-05): U.S.$56,543,200,000 (pharmaceutical and chemical products 65.7%, electronic and electrical products 12.5%). Major export destinations (2006): U.S. 82.6%; The Netherlands 3.9%; Belgium 2.4%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 22.0%; 15-29, 22.8%; 30-44, 20.1%; 45-59,

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004)6: length 59 mi, 96 km. Roads (2005): total length 15,990 mi, 25,735 km (paved 9596). Vehicles: passenger cars (2001) 2,064,100; trucks and buses (1999) 306,600. Air transport (2001): passenger arrivals and

17.8%; 60-74, 11.9%; 75-84, 4.0%; 85 and over, 1.4%. Population projection: (2010) 4,022,000; (2020) 4,149,000. Ethnic composition (2000): local white 72.1%; black 15.0%; mulatto 10.0%; U.S. white 2.2%; other 0.7%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic c. 74%; Protestant c. 13%; independent Christian c. 6%; Jehovah’s Witness c. 2%; nonreligious/atheist c. 2%;

Spiritist c. 1%; other c. 2%. Major metropolitan areas (2006): San Juan 2,590,824; Aguadilla 333,408; Ponce 263,799; San German 144,595; Yauco 123,441; Mayagtiez 111,892.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.91. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 7.8/5.0. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 74.5 years; female 82.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): circulatory diseases 230.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 124.0; diabetes mellitus 66.0; Alzheimer's disease 31.1; accidents 28.1; pneumonia and influenza 26.4.

National economy Budget. Revenue (2005): U.S.$12,444,000,000 (tax revenue 60.896, of which income taxes 44.2%, excise taxes 14.7%; federal grants 26.7%; nontax rev-

enue 12.5%). Expenditures (2002): U.S.$10,556,400,000 (2001; welfare 22.3%; education 22.3%; public safety 15.7%; debt service 9.8%; health 9.2%). Public debt (December 2005): U.S.$42,449,000,000. Production (in metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): plantains 76,350, bananas 52,200, oranges 18,770, tomatoes 18,740, pineapples 15,330, pumpkins, squash, and gourds 14,250, mangoes 12,940, coffee 7,938; livestock (number of live animals) 376,925 cattle, 48,679 pigs;

roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 2,968 (from aquaculture 14%). Mining (2004): crushed stone 8,660. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2001): chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and allied products 17,365;

nonelectrical machinery 3,320; professional and scientific equipment 1,874; electrical machinery 1,739; beverages 1,455. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2006) 24,900,000,000 (20,600,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2002) none (176,000) crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) none (70,809,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2002) 3,001,000 (6,610,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (680,000,000).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

departures 9,396,306; cargo loaded and unloaded 215,603 metric tons’.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2000

1,290

338

Cellular

2005

3,3549

Landline

2005

1,038

8489 262

Medium

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2004 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

33 5418

8.3 1398

916

232

due

d

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling to lower secondary education 25.496; some upper secondary to some higher 56.3%; undergraduate or graduate degree 18.3%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 94.1%. Education (2000-01)

Primary (age 5-12) Secondary (age 13—18) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

1,12910 36310

24,663 12,208

516,458 260,346

20.9 21.3

236,734

tos

4511

9,04511

Health: physicians (2001) 7,623 (1 per 504 persons); hospital beds (2002) 12,351 (1 per 312 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 9.1.

Military Total active duty U.S. personnel (March 2006): 19812. Number of members per constitution. Statistical discrepancy. 73Unemployed. ‘Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?For fiscal year ending June 30. 5Privately owned railway for sugarcane transport only. 7Luis Mufioz Marin International Airport only. 3Circulation of daily newspapers. %Subscribers. !°Public schools only. 111985-86. !2The U.S. naval base at Ceiba was closed in March 2004.

Internet resources for further information: * Junta de Planificación http://www.jp.gobierno.pr * Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico http://www.gdb-pur.com/home.en.htm

678

Britannica World Data

Qatar

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Dawlat Qatar (State of Qatar). Form of government: constitutional emiratel. Head of state and government: Emir assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Doha. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Qatari riyal (QR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 US.$ = QR 3.64; 1 £ = OR 7.32.

Municipalities Ad-Dawhah (Doha) Al-Ghuwayrlyah Jarayan al-Batinah Al-Jumaylryah Al-Khawr Ar-Rayyan Ash-Shamal

Umm Sa‘id Umm Salal Al-Wakrah TOTAL

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

QR '000,000

value

force

force

233

QT

12,025

27

118,707

61.9

17,997

44

Agriculture, fishing Oil, natural gas sector,

other mining Manufacturing

14,0984

7.94

Construction Public utilities

10,291 2,424

54 1.3

Transp. and commun.

5,612

2.9

15,218

3.4

Trade, hotels

7,616

4.0

64,718

14.6

15,760 17,928

8.2 9.3

16,625 53,438

aT 12.0

94,917 7,7436 444,1337

21.4 1.76 100.0

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

area

Capitals — Al-Ghuwayrlyah Jarayan al-Batinah Al-Jumaylryah Al-Khawr Ar-Rayyan Madinat ash-Shamal

Umm Sa‘id Umm Salal Muhammad Al-Wakrah

population

sq mi

sq km

2006 projection

61 241 922 1,008 386 345

159 623 2,389 2,612 1,001 893

370,656 2,332 7,554 10,565 37,600 317,227

348

902

5,253

259 181 431 4,1842

670 470 1,116 10,8362

14,828 37,334 34,716 838,065

Demography Population (2007): 841,0003.

2004

4,495 —5,2555 191,909

23 -2.75 100.0

40,039

9.0

117,049 4,364

26.4 1.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 760; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 843. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,759; remittances

(2006-07) c. 5,000; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 108.

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 1.696, in permanent crops 0.396, in pasture 4.596; overall forest area (2005) negligible.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) QR '000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

427,247 52.5%

426,673 50.1%

432,846 50.9%

448,321 55.1%

460,781 47.9%

456,844 40.7%

Imports (2005): QR 36,621,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 22.3%; road vehicles 14.0%; electrical machinery and apparatus 11.2%; iron

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 201.0, persons per sq km 77.6. Urban-rural (2005): urban 95.4%; rural 4.6%. Sex distribution (2005): male 67.15%; female 32.85%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 21.8%; 15-29, 25.5%; 30-44, 33.7%; 45-59, 16.3%; 60-74, 2.4%; 75 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 885,000; (2020) 1,040,000. Doubling time: 44 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Arab 52.5%, of which Palestinian 13.4%, Qatari 13.3%, Lebanese 10.4%, Syrian 9.4%; Persian 16.5%; Indo-Pakistani 15.2%; black African 9.5%; other 6.3%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim c. 83%, of which Sunni c. 73%, Shi‘ic. 10%; Christian c. 10%, of which Roman

c. 2%; nonreligious c. 2%. Major cities (2004): Ad-Dawhah

Catholic c. 6%; Hindu c. 3%; Buddhist

(Doha) 339,847; Ar-Rayyan 258,193; Al-

Wakrah 26,993; Umm Salal Muhammad 25,413; Al-Khawr 18,036.

and steel 11.0%; chemicals and chemical products 6.7%; food and

mals 5.8%).Major import sources (2006): Japan 12.0%; U.S. 9.9%; Germany 9.3%; Italy 9.3%; U.A.E. 6.0%; China 5.8%; South Korea 5.5%.

Exports (2005): QR 92,234,000,000 (crude petroleum and refined petroleum 55.9%;

natural gas 34.4%;

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 15.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.80. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 3.7/0.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 74.4 years; female 75.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): accidents and violence 36.9; diseases of the circulatory system 33.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 18.1; endocrine, metabolic, and nutritional disorders 12.2; diseases of the res-

piratory system 11.4; ill-defined conditions 34.8.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: QR 64,984,000,000 (oil and natural gas revenue 67.196, investment income 21.996, other 11.095). Expenditures: QR 50,833,-

000,000 (current expenditure 64.496; capital expenditure 35.696). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): clover for forage and silage 250,000, dates 19,844, tomatoes

5,328, can-

taloupes and other melons 4,909, barley 4,890, eggplants 3,100, dry onions 2,989; livestock (number of live animals) 152,700 goats, 111,500 sheep, 13,800

manufactured

fertilizers 2.7%; plastics 2.4%;

organic chemicals 2.1%). Major export destinations (2006): Japan 42.0%;

South Korea 3.9%.

14.1%; Singapore 9.5%; India 4.9%; United Arab Emirates

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 764 mi, 1,230 km (paved 9096). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 265,609; trucks and buses 114,115. Air transport (2006)9: passenger-km 24,032,000,000; metric ton-km cargo

888,498,000.

Communications

Vital statistics

live ani-

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

315

Cellular

2006

92011

2006

228

Medium

Landline

412

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies

1,09611

Internet users

272

Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

145 14310 290 4711

182 18010 346 5611

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal education 34.8%, of which illiterate 10.2%; primary 13.0%; preparatory (lower secondary) 16.2%; secondary 20.0%; postsecondary 15.9%; other 0.1%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 89.0%; males literate 89.1%; females literate 88.6%.

Education (2005)!2 Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Higher!?

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

99

3,738

33,127

8.9

93 1

3,449 664

34,465 11,034

10.0 16.6

camels, 6,565 cattle, 4,500,000 chickens; roundwood, none; fisheries produc-

Health (2005): physicians 1,65714 (1 per 480 persons); hospital beds 1,56714 (1 per 508 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 9.0.

ucts 4,502; chemicals and chemical products 2,168; base metals 1,959; bricks,

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 12,400 (army 68.696, navy 14.596, air force 16.996); U.S. troops (November 2006) 430. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 6.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$2,751.

tion 13,946 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 1,000,000; gypsum, sand and gravel, and clay are also produced. Manufacturing (value added in QR '000,000; 2005): refined petroleum prodcement, and ceramics 892; fabricated metals 469; wearing apparel 442. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 14,396,000,000 ([2004| 13,233,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 272,600,000 ([2004] 33,585,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 11,286,000 (6,131,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 43,500,000,000 ([2004] 16,872,000,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 7.4; income per household: n.a.; sources of income, n.a.; expenditure (2001): housing 17.8%, food and beverages 16.3%, transportation 15.8%, household furnishings 8.6%, clothing and footwear 7.1%, education 5.5%, communica-

tions 5.5%. Population economically active (2004): total 444,133; activity rate of total population 59.7% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 77.1%; female 15.1%; unemployed 1.5%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

2001 101.5

2002 101.7

2003 104.0

2004 1114

2005 120.9

2006 135.2

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$54,259,000,000 (U.S.$66,060 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

‘Constitution came into force on June 9, 2005. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2006 Revision). ^Excludes oil- and natural gas-related manufacturing. “Less imputed bank service charges. Including 6,572 unemployed. 7Of which Qatari, 50,282. *Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. Qatar Airways. 10Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. Public schools only; number of students in private schools (2003-04) 55,608, of which foreign schools 37,631. !3University of Qatar. 4Public sector only.

Internet resources for further information: * Qatar: The Planning Council http://www.planning.gov.qa * Qatar Central Bank http://www.qcb.gov.qa

Nations of the World

Réunion

T

Official name: Département de la Réunion (Department of Réunion). Political status: overseas department (France) with two legislative houses (General Council [49]; Regional Council [45]). Chief of state: President of France. Heads of government: Prefect (for France); President of General Council (for Réunion); President of Regional Council (for Réunion). Capital: Saint-Denis. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

Indian Ocean

:

2000

Consumer price index 100.0 Monthly earnings index’!12 100.0

LO

Saint-Benoit Saint-Denis Saint-Paul Saint-Pierre

285 163 180 341 9681.2

TOTAL

population sq km

2003 estimate

737 421 467 883 2,5071.2

109,071 249,696 148,813 244,723 752,303

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 27.3%; 15-29, 23.7%; 30-44, 24.1%; 45-59, 15.1%; 60-74, 7.3%; 75-84, 2.0%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 829,000; (2020) 918,000. Doubling time: 52 years. Ethnic composition (2000): mixed race (black-white-South Asian) 42.6%; local white 25.6%; South Asian 23.0%, of which Tamil 20.0%; Chinese 3.4%; East

African 3.4%; Malagasy 1.4%; other 0.6%. Religious affiliation (2000): Christian 87.8%, of which Roman Catholic 81.8%, Pentecostal 4.2%; Hindu 4.5%; Muslim 4.2%; nonreligious 1.7%; other 1.8%.

Major cities (2004): Saint-Denis 133,6004 (agglomeration [2003] 178,000); Saint-Paul 92,5004; Saint-Pierre 74,0004 (agglomeration 140,600); Le Tampon

66,6004, 5; Saint-Louis (1999) 43,5194.

2001 —2,627 85.2%

105.0 102.4

106.2 103.1

108.0 x

110.4 sey

113.1 ts

Birth rate per 1,000 population EP 19.0 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 33.096; outside of marriage 67.096. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 13.4 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.42. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2005) 3.9/(2004) 2.0. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 72.3 years; female 80.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 164.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 111.7; accidents, suicide, and violence 54.5; diseases of the respiratory system 41.1.

National economy Budget (2003). Revenue: €750,000,000 (receipts from the French central government and local administrative bodies 50.096; indirect taxes 20.096; direct taxes 9.2%; loans 7.3%; subsidies 6.7% ). Expenditures: €729,000,000 (current

expenditures 68.6%, development expenditures 31.496). Public debt (external, outstanding): n.a. Gross domestic product (2005): U.S.$14,910,000,000 (U.S.$19,130 per capita).

2003 —3,000 86.3%

2004 —3,050 85.9%

2005 —3,427 86.7%

2006 —3,674 88.5%

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

138

185

2004 2001

57916 300

75316 410

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2005 2004

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

278 7415 220 5716

351 9515 282 7418

Education and health Educational attainment (1999). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling through incomplete secondary education 83.0%; complete secondary 7.4%; some higher 3.9%;complete higher 5.7%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 88.9%; males literate 87.0%; females literate 90.8%. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6—10)

teachers

students

teacher ratio

53217

6,502

121,860

Secondary (age 11—17)

86

8,161

63,392

7.8

Voc., teacher tr.

26

3,852

39,206

10.2

1

328

10,562

322

Higher18

187

Health: physicians (20063) 1,902 (1 per 413 persons); hospital beds (20063) 2,674 (1 per 295 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 6.8

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003

2002 -2711 86.0%

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: 13. Roads (2001): total length 754 mi, 1,214 km (paved [1991] 79%). Vehicles (1999): passenger cars 190,300; trucks and buses 44,300. Air transport (2006)14: passenger-km 2,859,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2005) 48,547,000.

Medium

20057. 6

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€000,000

value

force

force

429 371

4.5 3.9

7,562 7,365

Sd 3.6

14

1,550

0.7

627 604 1,113

6.5 6.3 11.6

11,835 9,169 29,976

58 45 14.6

7 1,243

7 12.9

18,562 40,984

9.0 19.9

5,4487 —3458 9,5961

56.87 —3.68 100.0

55,474 23,0139 205,490

27.0 11.29 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 2,000,000, corn (maize) 11,700, pineapples 10,550, cauliflower 5,300, green onions 5,000, cabbages 5,000, carrots and turnips 4,580, toma-

toes 4,000, potatoes 3,700, eggplants 3,200, pimento (allspice) (2005) 800, ginger 95, vanilla 23, tobacco 20, geranium essence (2005) 1.9; livestock (number of live animals) 77,118 pigs, 36,210 cattle, 36,141 goats; roundwood (2005) 36,100 cu m, of which fuelwood 86%; fisheries production (2005) 4,757 (from aquaculture 3%). Mining and quarrying: gravel and sand for local use. Manufacturing (value added in F '000,00010; 1997): food and beverages 1,019, © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

102.4 101.0

Imports (2006): €3,911,679,000 (machinery and equipment 18.4%; food and agricultural products 16.2%; transport equipment 13.2%; mineral fuels 12.1%; chemicals and chemical products 10.9%). Major import sources: France 42.2%; Singapore 8.6%; China 4.0%; Germany 3.8%; Italy 3.2%. Exports (2006): €238,039,000 (food products 69.8%, of which sugar 41.0%; machinery and apparatus 9.3%; transportation equipment and parts 7.6%). Major export destinations: France 59.6%; Mayotte 8.0%; Japan 5.3%; Madagascar 5.2%; Mauritius 3.0%.

Communications

Vital statistics

Services Other TOTAL

2006

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 825.4, persons per sq km 318.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 92.4%; rural 7.6%. Sex distribution (20043): male 49.12%; female 50.88%.

107

2005

Foreign trade

Demography Population (2007): 799,000.

Public utilities

2004

Disbursements for (U.S.$000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 1496, in permanent crops c. 296, in pasture c. 596; overall forest area (2005) c. 3495.

€'000,000 % of total

Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate, business services Pub. admin., defense

2003

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 384; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI) n.a.

sq mi

Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing, mining

2002

17.0%, recreation and culture 10.0%.

area

Saint-Benoit Saint-Denis Saint-Paul Saint-Pierre

2001

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.0; average annual income per capita of household (2003) €11,446 (U.S.$14,456); sources of income (1997): wages and salaries and self-employment 41.8%, transfer payments 41.3%, other 16.9%; expenditure (2001): housing and energy 24.0%, transportation and communications 20.0%, food and beverages

Area and population Capitals

of which meat and milk products 268; construction materials (mostly cement) 394; fabricated metals 258; printing and publishing 192. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 1,620,000,000 (1,620,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) none (721,000). Population economically active (2006): total 321,700; activity rate of total population 40.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 60.9%; female [2005] 43.4%; unemployed [April-June 2006] 29.1%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74; 1 £ = €1.48.

Arrondissements

679

Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel (2004): 3,600 French army and navy personnell9,

1Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Excludes the French overseas territory of French Southern and Antarctic Territories (FSAT), which has been administered from Réunion since January 2001. FSAT comprises numerous, not permanently inhabited, archipelagos as well as other remote islands in the South Indian Ocean and the French-claimed part of Antarctica. 3January 1. 4Population of commune. 5Within Saint-Pierre agglomeration. 5Employed only. ‘Services include Finance, real estate, business services. ?Less imputed bank service charges. ?Non-salaried employees. 10The French franc (F) was the former monetary unit; on Jan. 1, 2002, F 6.56 = €1. Indexes refer to December. !2@Minimum salary in public administration. No public railways; railways in use are for sugar industry. Air Austral only. Circulation of daily newspapers. ‘Subscribers. 172004—05. 13University only. Includes troops and gendarmerie stationed on Mayotte.

Internet resources for further information: ¢ INSEE: Réunion http://www.insee.fr/fr/insee_regions/reunion/home/home_page.asp * Ministére de l'Outre-mer (Paris) http://www.outre-mer.gouv.fr

680

Britannica World Data

Romania

ric tons; 2004) negligible (3,025,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 32,400,000 ([2004] 32,600,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 35,900,000 ([2004]

Official name: Románia (Romania). Form of government: unitary republic with two legislative houses (Senate [137]; Assembly of Deputies [3321]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bucharest. Official language: Romanian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: (new) leu? (RON; plural [new] lei); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1U.$.$ - RON 243; 1£ - RON 489.

94,100,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 11,512,000 (8,705,000);

natural gas (cu m; 2006) 10,231,000,000 ([2004] 16,269,000,000).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$118,368,000,000 (U.S.$5,500 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006 in value U.S.$'000,000

% of total value

13,400

11.0

Agriculture Mining

labour force 2,840,300 119,700

28.3 1.2

Public utilities

5,300

44

Manufacturing

24,800

20.3

1,978,500

19.7

7,370 12,000

6.0 9.8

557,600 491,800

55 49

13,200

10.8

1,192,300

11.9

373,600

3.7

Construction Transp. and commun.

Trade, hotels

197,500

Finance, real estate

Pub. admin.

Population Counties

population 20048 estimate -

Alba Arad

382,971 460,466

Dâmbovița Dolj

538,126 720,554

Arges

647,437

Galati

621,161

Bacau

722,961

Giurgiu Gorj Harghita Hunedoara

population 20048 .estimate -

Counties Prahova Sälaj

829,026 247,796

Satu Mare

371,759

288,018

Sibiu

423,535

386,097 328,547 484,767

Suceava Teleorman Timis

705,202 427,745 661,593

Bihor Bistrija-Násáud Botosani

596,961 318,558 459,195

Bráila

371,749

lalomita

293,102

Tulcea

253,419

Brasov

596,140

lasi

821,621

Válcea

416,908

Buzáu Calarasi

495,878 318,588

IIfov Maramures

280,037 516,562

Vaslui Vrancea

459,255 394,286

Caras-Severin

332,688

Cluj

686,825

Mures

584,089

713,825 223,878

Neamt Olt

570,367 488,176

Constanta Covasna

31,300

25.7

Mehedinti

Other TOTAL

14,630 122,000

12.0 100.0

20

507,500

5.0

1,051,400

10.5

731,4005 10,041,600

7.35 100.0

Services

population 20048 estimate ^ Counties

% of labour force

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,044; remittances (2006) 4,733; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 3,484. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 878; remittances (2006) 34; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 19. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 40.896, in permanent crops 2.0%, in pasture 21.6%; overall forest area (2005) 27.7%.

Foreign trade®

305,901

Balance of trade (current prices)

Municipality Bucharest TOTAL

1,927,559 21,673,328

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography Area: 92,043 sq mi, 238,391 sq km.

Population (2007): 21,549,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 234.1, persons per sq km 90.4.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 53.7%; rural 46.3%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.71%; female 51.29%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 15.7%; 15-29, 23.8%; 30-44, 21.5%; 45-59,

19.7%; 60-74, 13.8%; 75-84, 4.8%; 85 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 21,418,000; (2020) 20,987,000. Ethnic composition (2002): Romanian 89.5%; Hungarian 6.6%; Rom (Gypsy)

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-2,973 11.5%

—2,611 8.6%

—4,537 11.4%

—6,664 12.4%

-9,618 14.8%

-14,836 18.7%

Imports (2004): U.S.$32,664,000,000 (chemicals and chemical products 10.4%; textile yarn and fabrics 10.2%; nonelectrical machinery 10.0%; road vehicles 8.0%; electrical machinery 7.8%; petroleum [all forms] 7.2%). Major import sources (2005): Italy 15.5%; Germany 14.0%; Russia 8.3%; France 6.8%; Turkey 4.9%. Exports (2004): U.S.$23,485,000,000 (clothing and accessories 20.1%, of which women’s/girls’ outerwear 7.8%; iron and steel 9.2%; electrical machinery and parts 7.9%; nonelectrical machinery and parts 7.1%; footwear 6.4%; petroleum products 6.1%).Major export destinations (2005): Italy 19.4%; Germany 14.0%; Turkey 7.9%; France 7.4%; U.K. 5.5%.

2.596; Ukrainian 0.396; German 0.396; other 0.896.

Religious affiliation (2002): Romanian

Orthodox 86.7%; Protestant 6.3%;

Roman Catholic 4.7%; Greek Catholic 0.9%; Muslim 0.3%; other 1.1%. Major cities (2004): Bucharest 1,927,559; Iasi 317,812; Constanta 307,447; Timisoara 307,265; Galati 298,941; Cluj-Napoca 298,006; Craiova 297,291.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.2 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 71.5%; outside of marriage 28.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.32. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 6.6/1.5. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 68.2 years; female 75.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 739.0; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 204.1; diseases of the digestive system 70.2; accidents and violence 62.5.

National economy Budget (in ROL ’000,000,000,0002; 2004). Revenue: 322.0 (VAT 35.0%, excise tax 24.7%, tax on profits 20.0%, nontax revenue 5.8%). Expenditures: 340.7 (economic affairs 26.7%, social assistance 14.0%, police 11.9%, defense 10.5%, interest payments 7.7%, education 5.7%, health 3.6%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$13,341,000,000. Population economically active (2006): total 10,041,600; activity rate 46.5% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 63.7%; female 45.0%; unemployed 7.3%).

Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 11,053 km3; passenger-km 8,638,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 17,022,000,000. Roads (20053)7: length 79,454 km (paved 26%). Vehicles (2004): cars 3,225,367; trucks and buses 525,617. Air transport (2006)8: passenger-km 2,306,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,981,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

134.5 138.9

164.8 178.6

189.9 224.0

212.5 274.5

231.6 339.5

246.8 396.7

Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size (2003) 2.8; average annual income per household ROL 130,295,3882 (U.S.$3,992); sources of income (2003): wages and salaries 44.896, nonmonetary equivalent for consumption of own agricultural produce 23.4%, transfers 19.2%, other 12.6%; expenditure (2004): food and nonalcoholic beverages 46.4%; housing and energy 14.7%; clothing and footwear 6.3%; transport 6.1%. Production (metric tons). Agriculture (2005): corn (maize) 10,388,000, wheat 7,341,000, potatoes 3,739,000, sunflower seed 1,341,000, barley 1,079,000, apples 638,000, tomatoes 627,000, plums 622,000, grapes 506,000; livestock (number of live animals) 7,425,000 sheep, 6,495,000 pigs, 2,808,000 cattle, 87,014,000 chickens; roundwood 14,501,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 20%;

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

15,150

697

2006

17,40019

2006

4,204

80610

195

Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2006

2,800 1,1489 7,000 1,76910

129 539 324 8210

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling 5.5%; primary education 20.1%; lower secondary 27.6%; upper secondary/vocational 36.7%; higher vocational 3.0%; university 7.1%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 97.3%; males 98.4%; females 96.3%. Education (2004-05) Primary Secondary

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index

Transport and communications

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

7,023 1,413

150,168 62,192

1,996,604 773,843

13.3 12.4

Voc., special tech.

156

7,356

327,817

44.6

Higher

117

30,857

650,335

214

Health: physicians (20053) 48,150 (1 per 450 persons); hospital beds (20053) 142,029 (1 per 153 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 15.0.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 69,600 (army 59.3%, navy 10.5%, air force 15.1%, other 15.1% )11. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$90.

fisheries production 13,352 (from aquaculture 55%). Mining (2005): copper

lIncludes 18 elective seats for ethnic minorities. 2The leu was redenominated on July 1, 2005. As of that date 10,000 (old) lei (ROL) = 1 (new) leu (RON). 3January 1. ^Metal content of mine output. ^Includes 3,000 not adequately defined and 728,400 unemployed. ^Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and trading partners and c.i.f. in com-

14,8684;

modities. "Public roads only. STAROM,

zinc

13,7844;

lead

11,6104.

Manufacturing

(value

added

in

Carpatair, Blue Air, and Romavia airlines only;

ucts 782; cement, bricks, and ceramics 571; nonelectrical machinery 526; fab-

includes charter services. ?Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. HParamilitary (including border guards and gendarmerie) total equals 79,900.

ricated metals 519; furniture 397. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 61,829,000,000 ([2004] 55,321,000,000); hard coal (met-

Internet resources for further information: * National Institute of Statistics http://www.insse.ro/cms/rw/pages/index.en.do

U.S.$000,000; 2004): wearing apparel 1,015; iron and steel 883; food prod-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nations of the World

Russia

Area and population (continued)

Official name: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya (Russian Federation). Form of government: federal multiparty republic with a bicameral legislative body (Federal Assembly comprising the Federation Council [172]! and the State Duma [450]). Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Moscow. Official language: Russian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: ruble (RUB); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = RUB 25.70; 1£= RUB 51.66.

10,100 29,700 47,900

26,200 76,900 124,000

856,833 3,411,030 2,137,850

Penza (region) Perm (territory)1° Samara (region) Saratov (region) Tatarstan (republic) Udmurtia (republic) Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk; region)

Penza Perm Samara Saratov Kazan Izhevsk Simbirsk

16,700 62,000 20,700 38,700 26,300 16,300 14,400

43,200 160,600 53,600 100,200 68,000 42,100 37,300

1,407,971 2,748,233 3,189,003 2,608,315 3,761,534 1,544,426 1,335,921

6,592,800

17,075,4009

142,753,551

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 21.4, persons per sq km 8.3.

Urban-rural (20072): urban 73.0%; rural 27.0%. Sex distribution (2004): male 46.49%; female 53.51%. Age breakdown (20062): under 15, 14.996; 15-29, 24.796; 30-44, 21.596; 45-59, 21.9%; 60-69, 8.4%; 70 and over, 8.6%.

Capitals

sq mi

251,200 10,500 13,500 8,400 11,500 23,200 11,500 9,300 400 17,800 Moscow (Moskva) 9,500 Oryol 15,300 Ryazan 19,200 Smolensk 13,200 Tambov 9,900 Tula 32,500 Tver 11,200 Vladimir 20,200 Voronezh 14,100 Yaroslavl 2,400,000 Khabarovsk 140,400 Blagoveshchensk 284,800 Anadyr Petropavlovsk182,400 Kamchatsky 304,500 Khabarovsk (territory) Khabarovsk Koryak (autonomous district)^ Palana 178,100 Magadan (region) Magadan 64,100 Primorye (territory) Vladivostok ,198,200 Sakha (republic) Yakutsk Sakhalin (region) Yuzhno33,600 Sakhalinsk 13,900 Yevreyskaya (autonomous region) — Birobidzhan 648,000 Northwest St. Petersburg 226,800 Arkhangelsk (region) Arkhangelsk 5,800 Kaliningrad (region) Kaliningrad 66,600 Kareliya (republic) Petrozavodsk 160,600 Komi (republic) Syktyukar 32,600 Leningrad (region) St. Petersburg 55,900 Murmansk (region) Murmansk 21,400 Novgorod (region) Novgorod 21,400 Pskov (region) Pskov 600 St. Petersburg (city) 56,300 Vologda (region) Vologda ,974,800 Siberia Novosibirsk Agin Buryat (autonomous district)? ^Aginskoye 35,700 Altay (republic) Gorno-Altaysk 65,300 Altay (territory) Barnaul 135,600 Buryatiya (republic) Ulan-Ude 166,600 Chita (region)® Chita Evenk (autonomous district)” Tyra 296,500 Irkutsk (region)? Irkutsk 36,900 Kemerovo (region) Kemerovo 23,900 Khakassia (republic) Abakan 903,400 Krasnoyarsk (territory)? Krasnoyarsk 68,800 Novosibirsk (region) Novosibirsk 53,900 Omsk (region) Omsk Taymyr (Dolgano-Nenets; autonomous district)? Dudinka 122,400 Tomsk (region) Tomsk 65,800 Tuva (republic) Kyzyl-Orda Ust-Orda Buryat (autonomous district)? Ust-Ordinsky 227,300 Southern Rostov-na-Donu 2,900 Adygeya (republic) Maykop 17,000 Astrakhan (region) Astrakhan 6,010 Chechnia (republic) Grozny 19,400 Dagestan (republic) Makhachkala 1,390 Ingushetiya (republic) Magas 4,800 Kabardino-Balkariya (republic) Nalchik 29,400 Kalmykiya (republic) Elista Karachayevo-Cherkessia 5,400 (republic) Cherkessk 29,300 Krasnodar (territory) Krasnodar 38,900 Rostov (region) Rostov-na-Donu Severnaya Osetiya-Alania 3,100 (republic) Vladikavkaz 25,700 Stavropol (territory) Stavropol 44,000 Volgograd (region) Volgograd 690,600 Urals Yekaterinburg 33,900 Chelyabinsk (region) Chelyabinsk 27,400 Kurgan (region) Kurgan 75,200 Sverdlovsk (region) Sverdlovsk 554,100 Tyumen (region) Tyumen 400,900 Volga Nizhny Novgorod 55,400 Bashkortostan (republic) Ufa 7,100 Chuvashiya (republic) Cheboksary 46,600 Kirov (region) Kirov 9,000 Mari-El (republic) Toshkar-Ola

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Saransk Nizhny Novgorod Orenburg

Demography Population (2007): 141,378,000.

population

area

Central Belgorod (region) Bryansk (region) Ivanovo (region) Kaluga (region) Kostroma (region) Kursk (region) Lipetsk (region) Moscow (city) Moskva (Moscow; region) Oryol (region) Ryazan (region) Smolensk (region) Tambov (region) Tula (region) Tver (region) Vladimir (region) Voronezh (region) Yaroslavl (region) Far Eastern Amur (region) Chukot (autonomous district) Kamchatka (region)*

Mordoviya (republic) Nizhny Novgorod (region) Orenburg (region)

TOTAL

Area and population

Federal districts

681

Moscow (Moskva) Belgorod Bryansk Ivanovo Kaluga Kostroma Kursk Lipetsk

sq km

2006? estimate

650,700 27,100 34,900 21,800 29,900 60,100 29,800 24,100 1,000 46,0003 24,700 39,600 49,800 34,300 25,700 84,100 29,000 52,400 36,400 6,215,900 363,700 737,700

37,356,361 1,511,433 1,331,363 1,099,908 1,014,243 708,988 1,183,884 1,180,849 10,425,075 6,628,107 833,783 1,182,011 1,005,871 1,130,352 1,599,818 1,406,562 1,472,621 2,313,648 1,327,845 6,546,926 881,091 50,526

472,300 788,600

349,240 1,412,260

461,400 165,900 3,103,200

171,569 2,019,529 949,935

87,100 36,000 1,677,900 587,400 15,100 172,400 415,900 84,5005 144,900 55,300 55,300 1,400 145,700 5,114,800

526,235 186,541 13,628,306 1,291,370 939,887 697,521 985,029 1,643,888 864,607 665,365 724,594 4,580,620 1,235,425 19,676,262

92,600 169,100 351,300 431,500

204,474 2,543,265 963,275 1,128,238

767,900 95,500 61,900 2,339,700 178,200 139,700

2,526,977 2,838,533 538,221 2,906,181 2,649,880 2,034,590

816,900 170,500

1,034,137 308,491

589,200 7,600 44,100 15,700 50,300 3,600 12,500 76,100

22,790,246 442,735 994,208 1,162,801 2,640,984 486,970 894,014 288,675

14,100 76,000 100,800

431,488 5,096,572 4,303,546

8,000 66,500 113,900 1,788,900 87,900 71,000 194,800 1,435,200 1,038,3009 143,600 18,300 120,800 23,200

702,338 2,710,275 2,635,640 12,244,214 3,531,272 979,908 4,409,731 3,323,303 30,511,236 4,063,409 1,292,236 1,442,935 711,540

Population projection: (2010) 139,390,000; (2020) 132,242,000. Ethnic composition (2002): Russian 79.82%; Tatar 3.83%; Ukrainian 2.03%; Bashkir 1.15%; Chuvash 1.13%; Chechen 0.94%; Armenian 0.78%; Mordvin 0.58%; Belarusian 0.56%; Avar 0.52%; Kazakh 0.45%; Udmurt 0.44%; Azerbaijani 0.43%; Mari 0.42%; German 0.41%; Kabardinian 0.36%; Ossetian 0.35%; Dargin 0.35%; Buryat 0.31%; Sakha 0.31%; other 4.83%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Christian 58.4%, of which Russian Orthodox

53.1%, Roman Catholic 1.0%, Ukrainian Orthodox 0.9%, Protestant 0.9%; Muslim 8.2761. 12; traditional beliefs 0.896; Jewish 0.696; nonreligious 25.8%; atheist 5.096; other 1.296. Major cities (20062): Moscow 10,425,075; St. Petersburg 4,580,620; Novosibirsk 1,397,015; Yekaterinburg 1,308,441; Nizhny Novgorod 1,283,553; Samara 1,143,346; Omsk 1,138,822; Kazan 1,112,673; Chelyabinsk 1,092,958; Rostovna-Donu 1,054,865; Ufa 1,029,616; Perm 993,319. Other principal cities (20062) population Astrakhan

498,953

population Lipetsk

502,821

population Tolyatti

704,876

Barnaul Irkutsk Izhevsk Kemerovo Khabarovsk Krasnodar

604,187 578,073 619,468 520,138 578,060 710,413

Naberezhnye Chelny Novokuznetsk Orenburg Penza Ryazan Saratov

507,180 562,402 533,872 509,997 513,261 850,086

Tomsk Tula Tyumen Vladivostok Volgograd Voronezh

489,879 509,010 542,463 583,673 991,643 846,349

Krasnoyarsk

920,926

Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk)

617,200

Yaroslavl

603,735

Migration (2006): immigrants 186,380; emigrants 54,061. Refugees (2002): 828,784, of which from Kazakhstan 301,137, Uzbekistan 106,299, Tajikistan 86,041, Georgia 62,868. Households (2004). Total households 51,209,000; average household size 2.8;

distribution by size (1995): 1 person 19.2%; 2 persons 26.2%; 3 persons 22.6%; 4 persons 20.5%; 5 persons or more 11.5%. Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.3 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 70.0%; outside of marriage 30.0%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): -4.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.38. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 7.8/4.5. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 58.9 years; female 72.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006): circulatory diseases 860; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 200; accidents, poisoning, and violence 191, of which suicide 30, transport accidents 27, alcohol poisoning 20; diseases of the digestive system 62; diseases of the respiratory system 58; infectious and parasitic diseases 25. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 1.1% (world avg. 1.0%).

Social indicators Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 2.1%; primary education 7.7%; some secondary 18.1%; complete secondary/basic vocational 53.0%; incomplete higher 3.1%; complete higher 16.0%, of which advanced degrees 0.3%. Quality of working life (2006). Average workweek (2004): 40 hours. Annual rate per 100,000 workers of: injury or accident 290; industrial illness 16.0; death 11.8. Average working days lost to labour strikes per 1,000 employees 0.2. Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (2003): 55.796. Trade union membership in total workforce (2003) c. 459613. Social deviance. Offense rate per 100,000 population (2006) for: murder and attempted murder 19.4; rape and attempted rape 6.3; serious injury 36.2; theft 1,180.4. Incidence per 100,000 population of: alcoholism (1992) 1,727.5; substance abuse (2000) 25.6; suicide (2006) 30.0. Material well-being (2002). Durable goods possessed per 100 households: automobiles 27; personal computers 7; television receivers 126; refrigerators and freezers 113; washing machines 93; VCRs 50; motorcycles 26; bicycles 71.

National economy Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$75,359,000,000. Budget (2006). Revenue: RUB 6,276,300,000,000 (VAT 24.1%; taxes ural resources 17.8%; corporate taxes 8.1%; single social tax Expenditures: RUB 4,281,300,000,000 (transfers 21.4%; defense 2 and cultural services 14.496; law enforcement 12.996; debt 3.996).

on nat5.0%). 15.9%; service

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$956,557,000,000 (U.S.$6,679 per capita).

682

Britannica World Data

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

RUB ’000,000

value

force

force

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

4.2

6,861,000

9.2

2,432,600 4,437,200 773,100 1,356,100

9.1 16.6 29 54

1,196,000 12,470,000 2,063,000 4,460,000

1.6 16.8 2.8 6.0

2,258,500 4,712,800 3,252,700

8.4 17.6 124

6,212,000 11,986,000 5,206,000

8.4 16.2 7.0

1,851,400 1,227,700 3,362,00014 26,781,100?

6.9 46 12.514 100.0

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, real estate

Services Pub. admin., defense Other TOTAL

5.7%; Belarus 5.0%; U.S. 4.7%; France 4.3%; Italy 4.2%; Kazakhstan 2.8%.

1,116,800

Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction

13,500,000 4,875,000 5,316,00015 74,146,000?

Imports (2006): U.S.$137,548,000,000 (machinery, apparatus, and transportation equipment 47.7%; chemicals and chemical products 15.8%; food, beverages, and tobacco 15.7%; nonferrous metals and iron and steel 7.7%). Major import sources: Germany 13.4%; China 9.4%; Ukraine 6.7%; Japan

18.2 6.6 7.215 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 45,006,300, potatoes 38,572,640, sugar beets 30,861,230, barley 18,153,550, sunflower seeds 6,752,860, oats 4,880,270, cabbages 4,073,240, corn (maize) 3,668,560, rye 2,965,060, tomatoes 2,414,860, carrots and turnips 1,918,370, onions 1,788,750, apples 1,617,000, cucumbers 1,423,210, peas 1,157,640; livestock (number of live animals) 21,473,926 cattle, 16,074,449 sheep, 13,454,876 pigs; roundwood (2005) 186,500,000 cu m, of which fuel-

wood 2596; fisheries production (2005) 3,305,698 (from aquaculture 396); aquatic plants production (2005) 50,507 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): nickel 315,00016 [world rank: 1]; mica 101,500 [world rank: 1]; platinum-group metals 123,000 [world rank: 2|]; gem diamonds 21,400,000 carats [world rank: 2]; industrial diamonds 10,400,000 carats [world

rank: 3]; vanadium 9.00016 [world rank: 3]; iron ore (2004) 56,200,00016 [world rank: 5|; cobalt 5,00016 [world rank: 5]; copper ore 675,00016 [world rank: 6]; gold 165,000 kg [world rank: 6]; tin 3,00016 [world rank: 7|; molybdenum 3,00016 [world rank: 7]. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$’000,000; 2004): refined petroleum products 14,329; iron and steel 11,801; food products 8,933; chemicals and chemical products 7,709; nonferrous base metals 7,600; beverages

4,446; transportation equipment 4,255; general purpose machinery 3,369;

Exports (2006): U.S.$301,976,000,000 (fuels and lubricants 65.9%; nonferrous metals and iron and steel 16.4%; machinery, apparatus, and transportation equipment 5.8%; chemicals and chemical products 5.6%; wood and paper products 3.1% ).Major export destinations: The Netherlands 11.9%; Italy 8.3%; Germany 8.1%; China 5.2%; Ukraine 5.0%; Turkey 4.8%; Belarus 4.3%; Switzerland 4.0%; Poland 3.8%; U.K. 3.4%; Finland 3.0%; Kazakhstan 3.0%. Direction of trade (2001) Africa

Financial aggregates 2001 Exchange rate!7, RUB per: U.S. dollar £ SDR International reserves (U.S.$) Total (excl. gold; 000,000) SDRs ('000,000) Reserve pos. in IMF (000,000) Foreign exchange (000,000) Gold (000,000 fine troy oz) % world reserves Balance of payments

2002

2003

30.14 43.72 37.88

31.78 51.22 43.21

29.45 52.56 43.77

32,542 2.9 1.4 32,538 13.60 1.4

44,054 1.2 1.6 44,051 12.46 1.3

73,175 0.7 24 73,172 12.55 1.4

2004 27.75 53.60 43.09 120,809 0.9 28 120,805 12.44 14

2005

2006

28.78 49.56 41.14

26.33 51.69 39.61

175,891 5.6 195.9 175,690 12.44 1.4

295,568 7A 283.3 295277 12.91 15

%

U.S.$000,000

%

405

1.0

942

0.9

5,433

13.1

6,875

6.9

3,208

7.3

2,876

29

Asia (excl. former U.S.S.R.)

5,401

13.0

15772

15.9

China Asia (former U.S.S.R. only) Europe EU

1,617 2,833 23,058 15,282

3.9 68 55.5 36.8

3,878 4,749 58,598 33,295

3.9 48 59.1 33.6

5.3

11,279

11.4

11,150 20 99,19820

11.2 =

Americas

United States

Eastern Europe

2,218

Europe (former U.S.S.R. only) Oceania TOTAL

4,552 177 4152820

11.0 0.4

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length (20072) 85,000 km; passenger-km 171,600,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,858,000,000,000. Roads (20072): total length

854,000 km (paved 85%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 22,342,000; trucks and buses (1999) 5,021,000. Air transport (2006-07): passenger-km 97,510,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,980,000,000. Distribution of traffic (2000) cargo carried

products (excluding furniture) 1,922; printing and publishing 1,648; paper electrical equipment 1,165; tobacco products 1,055.

exports

U.S.$000,000

cement, bricks, and ceramics 3,266; fabricated metal products 1,949; wood products 1,508; textiles and wearing apparel 1,374; rubber products 1,359;

imports

% of national

passengers carried

% of national

— 21.5 40.9 52 M 32.4 — 100.0

23,502 22,033 1,419 27 23 —

545 513 3.3 04 TA —

19,628 43,130

45.5 100.0

(000,000 tons) _ total Intercity transport Road Rail Sea and river Air Pipeline

— 550 1,046 134 0.8 829 — 2,559.8

Urban transport TOTAL

Communications Medium

total

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

50,599

351

2005 2005

120,000? 40,100

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

(000,000)

84022 281

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

17,400 15,075?! 25,689 2,90022

121 105?! 181 202?

(U.S.$000,000)

Balance of visible trade

448,120

446,335

459,850

485,825

4118,364

4139,234

Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments,

-53,764 101,884 -14,325

—60,966 107,301 -17,219

—76,070 135,929 -24,449

-97,382 183,207 -26,311

-125,434 243,798 -33,921

-164,692 303,926 -43,911

current account

433,705

Energy production

429116

(consumption):

435,40

459,514

484,443

electricity (kW-hr; 2006-07)

989,017,-

([2004] 144,978,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006-07) 70,300,000 ([2004

75,460,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 3,482,900,000 ([2005 1,022,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 175,486,000

(94,312,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006-07) 865,524,000,000 ([2005] 402,100,600,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 74,146,000; activity rate of total population 52.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 73.0%; female 49.4%; unemployed 7.2%).

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

121.5 143.1

140.6 170.3

159.9 196.4

177.3 207.7

199.7 232.1

219.1 251.3

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.5%, in permanent crops 0.1%, in pasture 5.6%; overall forest area (2005) 47.9%. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 2.8; income per household: RUB 52,400 (U.S.$1,692); sources of monetary income (2006): wages 66.4%18, transfers 13.2%, self-employment 11.2%, property income 7.2%, other 2.0%; expenditure (2002): food 41.7%, clothing 13.3%, housing 6.2%, furniture and household appliances 5.7%, alcohol and tobacco 3.2%,

transportation 2.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 5,466; remittances (2006) 3,308; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 8,842. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 17,804; remittances (2006) 11,438; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 8,541.

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002 +60,538 39.6%

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2003 +76,309 40.0%

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-17) } Voc., teacher tr. Higher

teachers

students

61,042 — 1,537,000

14,798,000

9.6

2,514,000 7,310,000

18.3 17.9

2,847 1,090

148,000 409,000

teacher ratio

Health (2006): physicians 690,0002 (1 per 206 persons); hospital beds 1,575,000? (1 per 90 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 102. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,363 (vegetable products 79%, animal products 21%); 170% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 1,027,000 (army 38.5%, navy 13.8%, air force 15.6%, strategic deterrent forces 7.8%, command and sup-

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

2001 458,087 40.9%

Education (2006-07)

495,323

000,600 ([2005] 940,000,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2006-07) 237,700,000

Consumer price index Annual earnings index

Education and health

2004 +4106,093 41.2%

2005 +142,766 42.0%

2006 +164,428 37.4%

port 24.3% )?3. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 4.196; per capita expenditure U.S.$217.

1Based on 86 federal districts as of mid-July 2007. 2January 1. *Represents remainder of combined Moscow city and Moskva region areas (47,000 sq km less 1,000 sq km). 4Kamchatka (region) and Koryak (autonomous district) merged on July 1, 2007, to form Kamchatka (territory). Represents remainder of combined Leningrad (region) and St. Petersburg (city) areas (85,900 sq km less 1,400 sq km). Chita (region) and Agin Buryat (autonomous district) are scheduled to merge on March 1, 2008. 7Evenk and Taymyr merged with Krasnoyarsk (territory) on Jan. 1, 2007. SUst-Orda Buryat is scheduled to merge with Irkutsk (region) on Jan. 1, 2008. ?Detail does not add to total given because of gross rounding. 1°On Dec. 1, 2005, Komi-Permyak (autonomous district) merged with Perm (region) to form Perm (territory). “Muslim population may be as high as 16%. !?Shi1 make up c. 8% of all Muslims. Mostly based on a claimed membership of 28,000,000 in the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia,

the successor to the former labour movement. Net taxes on products less imputed bank service charges. !^Includes 5,312,000 unemployed. !*Metal content. !7End of period. !8Includes unreported wages and salaries. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 2°Includes unspecified. 21Refers to top 20 dailies only. 2@Subscribers. 23An additional 415,000 personnel in paramilitary forces include railway troops, special construction troops, federal border guards, interior troops, and other federal guard units.

Internet resources for further information: * Federal State Statistics Service http://www.gks.ru/eng/default.asp * Central Bank of the Russian Federation http://www.cbr.ru/eng

Nations of the World

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,295,000,000 (U.S.$242 per capita).

Rwanda

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repubulika y'u Rwanda (Rwanda); République Rwandaise (French); Republic of Rwanda

2005

| Indian

(English).

i Ocean

Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative bodies op [26]; Chamber of Deputies

80p.

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing

526,432 4,765 105,621

45.3 0.4 94

2,951,492 5,274 43,053

Construction

97,221

8.4

42,180

1.2

5,695

0.5

2,482

0.1

Atlantic

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

e

Ocean

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population!

area

Principal cities Rwamagana Kigali Ruhengeri Gisenyi Gitarama

SUBTOTAL SUBTOTAL (Rwandan part of Lake Kivu) TOTAL

population

sq mi

sq km

2002 census

3,560? 280? 1,430? 2,197 2,312 9,774

9,220? 720? 3,700? 5,689 5,987 25,314?

1,640,000? 745,000? 1,740,000? 1,940,888 2,072,131 —

1,065 26,379

— 8,128,553?

411 10,185

86.2 0.2 1.3

77,297

6.6

30,255

0.9

105,739

9.4

94475

28

32,662 77,965

28 6.7

10,920 25,668

0.3 0.7

155,980 56,568 3,418,047

46 1.7 100.0

122,579 6,9767 1,162,952

10.5 0.67 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2004) 44; remittances (2006) 21; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 5.6; official development assistance (2005) 576. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 31; remittances (2006) 35; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible.

1 U.S.$ - RF 547.75; 1 £ - RF 1,101.

Ouest (Western) Sud (Southern)

% of total

Transp. and commun.

Official languages: Rwanda; French; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Rwandan franc (RF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Est (Eastern) Kigali Nord (Northern)

in value

Trade

Capital: Kigali.

2002

RF ’000,000

Public utilities

Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister.

Provinces

683

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —131.4 41.2%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002 —136.7 50.3%

2003 —166.0 56.8%

2004 —178.2 47 6%

2005 —229.2 47 8%

2006 —296.7 51.0%

Imports (2005): U.S.$354,180,000 (intermediate goods 31.4%, capital goods 31.0%, energy products 22.1%, food 10.0%). Major import sources (2002): Kenya 21.9%; Germany 8.4%; Belgium 7.9%; Israel 4.3%; U.S. 3.5%.

Exports (2005): U.S.$124,980,000 (coffee 30.6%, tea 19.5%, pyrethrum extract 16.2%, tin 14.3%, tantalite 13.5%, gold 3.8%).Major export destinations (2002): Indonesia 30.8%; Germany 14.6%; Hong Kong 8.9%; South Africa 5.5%.

Demography Population (2007): 9,725,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 995.0, persons per sq km 3842. Urban-rural (2006): urban 23.6%; rural 76.4%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.16%; female 51.84%.

Transport and communications

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 43.5%; 15-29, 32.0%; 30-44, 13.4%; 45-59, 7.4%; 60—74, 2.996; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,601,000; (2020) 13,731,000. Doubling time: 28 years. Ethnic composition (2002): Hutu 85%; Tutsi 14%; Twa 1%. Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 4496; Protestant c. 2596; Muslim c. 1396; other c. 18965.

Major cities (2002): Kigali (2003) 656,153; Gitarama 84,669; Butare 77,449; Ruhengeri 71,511; Gisenyi 67,766.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 40.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 24.9 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.43. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 47.2 years; female 49.3 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.1% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2004). Revenue: RF 271,900,000,000 (grants 46.2%; taxes on goods and services 25.8%; income tax 13.5%; import and export duties 9.7%; non-

tax revenue 4.696). Expenditures: RF 253,300,000,000 (current expenditures 64.7%, of which wages 13.1%, defense 9.4%, debt payment 4.7%; capital expenditure 35.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,420,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): plantains 2,653,000, potatoes 1,285,000, sweet potatoes 777,000, cassava 588,200, dry beans 283,400, sorghum 187,400, taro 125,400, corn (maize) 91,810, coffee 21,000, tea 16,000, pyrethrum (2005) 20; livestock (number of live animals) 1,339,740 goats, 1,004,100 cattle, 464,330 sheep, 346,922 pigs; roundwood (2005) 5,495,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 91%; fisheries pro-

duction (2005) 8,186 (from aquaculture 5%). Mining and quarrying (2005): cassiterite (tin content) 700; tungsten (wolframite content) 200; niobium

80,000 kg; tantalum 50,000 kg. Manufacturing (value added in RF '000,000; 2002): food products, beverages, and tobacco products 61,073; cement, bricks, and ceramics 4,326; chemicals and chemical products 3,201; wood and wood

products (including furniture) 2,486. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 173,000,000 (283,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (169,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 179,000 (179,000). Population economically active (2002): total 3,418,047; activity rate of total population 42.096 (participation rates: ages 6 and over, 52.196; female 55.296; officially unemployed 0.996). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

2001 103.0

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

105.3

112.8

126.6

138.1

150.3

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 48.6%, in permanent crops 10.9%, in pasture 18.8%; overall forest area (2005) 19.5%. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.4; average annual income per household, n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2003)6: food and nonalcoholic beverages 37.1%, housing and energy 15.8%, transportation 9.9%, household furnishings 7.6%, health 7.1%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2004): total length 8,704 mi, 14,008 km (paved 19%). Vehicles (2000): passenger cars 10,726; trucks 15,828. Air transport (2000)8: passengers embarked and disembarked 101,000; cargo loaded and unloaded 4,300 metric tons.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

70

7.4

2006

314?

2006

17

34? 1.8

units Medium

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

19 0

24 0

2006

65

7.0

2006

1.79

0.29

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005

Education and health Educational attainment (2000)10. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal education/unknown 45.5%; incomplete primary education 30.1%; complete primary 14.4%; secondary 9.1%; higher 0.9%. Literacy (2006): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 64.9%; males literate 71.4%; females literate 59.8%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7—15)

Secondary (age 16-19)11 Higher

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2,262

28,254

1,752,588

62.0

20

1,738

25,233

14.5

604

7,750

203,551

26.3

Health (2005): physicians 450 (1 per 19,054 persons); hospital beds, n.a.; infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 87.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,936 (vegetable products 9696, animal products 496); 11196 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 35,000 (army 91.4%, air force 2.9%, national police 5.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.9%; per capita expenditure U.S.$7.

1The new administrative structure went into effect at the beginning of 2006. ?Estimate. 3Detail does not add to total given because of some estimated data. ^Based on area excluding Lake Kivu (9,774 sq mi [25,314 sq km]). 5Many small usually Christianlinked schismatic religious groups have proliferated since the 1994 genocide. 5Weights of consumer price index components. "Taxes on imports less imputed bank service charges. ®Kigali airport only. ‘Subscribers. !°Based on the 2000 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey, of which 13,973 people were age 25 and over. Includes vocational and teacher training.

Internet resources for further information: * Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning http://www.minecofin.gov.rw * Banque Nationale du Rwanda http://www.bnr.rw

684

Britannica World Data fuel and light 4.4%, household furnishings 3.7%, transportation 2.1%, other

Saint Kitts and Nevis

5.3%. Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$299,300,000.

Atlantic Ocean

Official name: Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis!. Form of government: federated constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (National Assembly

Population economically active (1995): total 18,170; activity rate of tota population 41.7% (participation rates [1991]: ages 15-64, 70.5%; female 44.4966; unemployed, n.a.). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 2000 2001 2002 1000 102.1 104.1 Consumer price index

[15]).

Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Basseterre. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Eastern Caribbean dollar (EC$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 US.$ = EC$2.70; 1 £ = EC$5.43.

2005 112.6

2006 122.2

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 107; remittances (2006) 3; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 70; official development assistance (2005) 1213. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 11; remittances (2006) 2. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 19%, in permanent crops c. 3%, in pasture c. 6%; overall forest area (2005) c. 15%. area

Capitals

2004 108.9

Earnings index

Area and population Islands

2003 106.4

population

sq mi

sq km

Foreign trade!+

2001 census?

Nevis^

Charlestown

36.0

93.2

11,181

St. Kitts (St. Christopher) TOTAL

Basseterre

68.0 104.0

176.2 269.4

34,703 45,884

Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —111.6 50.3%

U.S.$'000,000 26 of total

Imports

Demography

13.6%;

2002 —118.6 50.2%

2003 —121.0 52.6%

(2003): U.S.$204,800,000 refined petroleum

2004 —106.3 49.4%

2005 —135.1 57.4%

2006 —166.8 61.9%

(machinery and apparatus 22.0%;

8.1%; chemicals

and chemical products

food 6.9%;

transport equipment 6.6%). Major import sources: United States 53.3%; Trinidad and Tobago 12.9%; Canada 9.2%; United Kingdom 9.1%; Japan

Population (2007): 50,400. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 484.6, persons per sq km 187.1. Urban-rural (2005): urban c. 3396; rural c. 6796. Sex distribution (2001): male 49.70%; female 50.30%. Age breakdown (2000): under 15, 30.7%; 15-29, 26.5%; 30-44, 21.1%; 45-59, 10.8%; 60-74, 6.1%; 75-84, 2.9%; 85 and over, 1.9%.

Population projection: (2010) 52,000; (2020) 58,000. Doubling time: 72 years. Ethnic composition (2000): black 90.4%; mulatto 5.0%; Indo-Pakistani 3.0%; white 1.0%; other/unspecified 0.6%. Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant c. 75%, of which Anglican c. 2496,

3.2%. Exports (2003): U.S.$48,300,000 (electrical switches and capacitors 73.1%; raw sugar 14.9%5). Major export destinations: United States 78.5%; United Kingdom 17.0%; Netherlands Antilles 1.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003)15: length 36 mi, 58 km. Roads (2002): total length 238 mi, 383 km (paved [2001] 44%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 6,900;

Methodist c. 23%; Roman Catholic c. 11%; other c. 14%.

trucks and buses 2,500. Air transport (2001)16: passenger arrivals 135,237, passenger departures 134,937; cargo handled 1,802.

1,500; St. Paul’s (on St. Kitts) 1,200.

Communications

Major towns (2006): Basseterre (on St. Kitts) 12,900; Charlestown (on Nevis)

Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 8.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.33. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2001) 7.1/(2002) 0.5. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 69.3 years; female 75.2 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 404.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 110.4; communicable diseases 104.6; accidents, violence, and poisoning 42.9.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: EC$524,600,000 (tax revenue 71.3%, of which taxes on international trade 33.6%, taxes on domestic goods and services 17.3%, company taxes 12.7%; nontax revenue 22.4%; grants 5.2%; other 1.1%).

Expenditures: EC$551,200,000 (current expenditure 86.0%, of which interest payments 19.1%; development expenditure 14.0% ). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 100,0005, tropical fruit 1,300, coconuts 1,000, roots and tubers 700,

pulses 210; livestock (number of live animals) 16,000 goats, 12,500 sheep, 4,800 cattle, 2,000 pigs, 70,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries produc-

tion 450 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying: excavation of sand and crushed stone for local use. Manufacturing (2003): raw sugar 22,000; carbonated beverages (2002) 32,000 hectolitres; beer (2002) 20,000 hectolitres; other manufactures include electronic components, garments, and

cement.

Energy

production

(consumption):

electricity

(kW-hr;

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

t1

239

2004 2004

1018 25

20518 513

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2004 2005 2002 2002

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

11 xot 10 0.518

226 Em 214 1118

Education and health Educational attainment (1991). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 1.6%; primary education 45.9%; secondary 38.4%; higher 8.9%; other or not stated 5.2%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 97.8%. Education (2003-04)

Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12-16) Higher!9

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

23

367

6,394

174

d 1

421 79

4,548 751

10.8 9.5

Health (2005): physicians 62 (1 per 796 persons); hospital beds 247 (1 per 200 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 14.5. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel: the defense force includes coast guard and police units. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP: n.a.

2004)

130,000,000 (130,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (41,000); natural gas, none (none). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$453,000,000 (U.S.$9,110 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

1994

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

EC$'000,000

value

forces

forces

Agriculture, fishing

28.6

25

27

0.2

92.5 141.2

8.0 12.2

1,2908 1,745

Public utilities Transp. and commun.

26.6 149.4

2.3 12.9

416 534

Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

199.7 197.4 179.6

17.3 17.43 15.5

3,367 3,7089 2,738

40.7 99.410 1457.6!

3.5 8.610 100.011

Mining Manufacturing Construction

Services Other TOTAL

2,4397

29

9 342 16,608

14.77

0.2 7.88 10.5

25 3.2 20.3 22.39 16.5

9 24 100.011

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2001) 2.9; average annual income per wage earner (1994) EC$9,940 (U.S.$3,681); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2001)!2: food, beverages, and tobacco 28.8%, education 19.3%, health 14.1%, housing 13.0%, clothing and footwear 9.3%,

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Y The Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis is the alternate official long-form name. 2Includes 4 nonelective seats. Preliminary figures. ‘Nevis has full internal self-government. The Nevis legislature is subordinate to the National Assembly only with regard to external affairs and defense. “Sugarcane production ended in July 2005. Employed persons only. “Includes sugar manufacturing. SExcludes sugar manufacturing. "Finance, real estate includes Services. !°Taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. !!Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !2Weights of consumer price index components. Figure represents commitments. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. !^The light railway formerly serving the sugar industry on Saint Kitts began serving as a scenic tour route in 2003. 16Saint Kitts airport only. "Circulation data unavailable for the one daily newspaper. i3Subscribers. 9Data for Medical University of the Americas at Charlestown, Nevis.

Internet resources for further information: * Official Web site of the Government of St. Kitts & Nevis http://www.gov.kn * Eastern Caribbean Central Bank http://www.eccb-centralbank.org

Nations of the World

Saint Lucia

END

'

| Atlantic |

Official name: Saint Lucia. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with a Parliament consisting of two legislative chambers (Senate [11]; House of Assembly [171]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Castries. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Eastern Caribbean dollar (EC$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = EC$2.70; 1 £ = EC$5.43.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$872,000,000 (U.S.$5,349 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

2004

in value EC$'000,000 Agriculture, fishing

Anse-la-Raye

Anse-la-Raye

Canaries Castries Choiseul

Canaries Castries Choiseul

Dennery

Dennery

27

70

Gros Islet Laborie Micoud Soufriére Vieux Fort TOTAL

Gros Islet Laborie Micoud Soufriére Vieux Fort

39 15 30 19 niri 2382

101 38 78 51 44 6172

2005 .estimate

sq mi

.Ssqkm.

18

47

6,382

31 12

79 31

1,862 67,340 6,323

}

13.0

10,500

0.3

oi

105.8 150.9

56 7.9

4,590 5,650

5.7 7.0

Public utilities Transportation and

100.4

53

410

05

communications Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

392.8 526.2 367.0 259.6

20.6 27.6 19.3 13.6

3,440 19,550 4,710 8,470

4.3 24.3 5.8 10.5

85.7 —159.04 1,906.2

45 -8.34 100.06

4,550 18,7305 80,600

5.6 23.25 100.06

da

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 345; remittances (2004) 26; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 86; official development assistance (2005) 367. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 40; remittances (2004) 3.6; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2000): in temporary crops c. 7%, in permanent crops c. 23%, in pasture c. 3%; overall forest area c. 15%.

population

Capitals

% of labour force

aT

Services Other TOTAL

Districts

labour force

6.0

Manufacturing Construction

äreä

% of total value

70.8

Mining

Area and population

685

13,296 21,660 7,623 16,620 7,935 15,750 164,791

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) 1999 —251.1 67.3%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 168,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 705.9, persons per sq km 272.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 28.0%; rural 72.0%. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.91%; female 51.09%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 28.4%; 15-29, 28.4%; 30-44, 21.5%; 45-59, 12.3%; 60-74, 6.5%; 75 and over, 2.996.

Population projection: (2010) 174,000; (2020) 192,000. Doubling time: 87 years. Ethnic composition (2000): black 50%; mulatto 44%; East Indian 3%; white 1%; other 2%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Roman Catholic 67.5%; Protestant 22.0%, of which Seventh-day Adventist 8.4%, Pentecostal 5.6%; Rastafarian 2.1%; nonreli-

gious 4.5%; other/unknown 3.9%. Major towns (2001): Castries 10,634 (urban area 37,962); Vieux Fort (2004)

4,900; Micoud (2004) 4,000; Soufrière (2004) 3,600.

2000 —259.6 71.0%

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 15.1 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 15.0%; outside of marriage 85.0%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.21. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 3.0/0.7. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 70.0 years; female 77.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 192.7, of which cerebrovascular diseases 75.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 101.8; diabetes mellitus 77.4; communicable diseases 39.4.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: EC$575,700,000 (tax revenue 93.996, of which taxes, duties, and service charges on imports 47.7%, taxes on domestic goods and services 15.5%, taxes on company profits 10.5%; nontax revenue 6.1%). Expenditures: EC$663,200,000 (current expenditures 74.9%, of which interest payments 10.695; development expenditures 25.196). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$248,900,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2004): bananas 42,326, coconuts 14,000, citrus and tropical fruits 7,500, starchy roots

and tubers 6,850, plantains 700, pepper 250, ginger 60; livestock (number of live animals) 14,950 pigs, 12,500 sheep, 12,400 cattle, 9,800 goats; roundwood

(2005) n.a; fisheries production (2005) 1,386, of which tuna 33.6% (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying: excavation of sand for local construction and pumice. Manufacturing (value of production in EC$'000; 2005): food, beverages (significantly alcoholic beverages), and tobacco products 78,002; electrical products 28,279; paper products and cardboard boxes 21,567; coconut oil 2,180. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-

2002 -202.8 59.4%

2003 -282.7 66.3%

2004 -275.9 57.2%

Imports (2004): U.S.$430,800,000 (machinery and transport equipment 19.396; food 18.896; mineral fuels 17.296; chemicals and chemical products 7.596). Major import sources: United States 35.1%; Trinidad and Tobago 14.2%; United Kingdom 7.7%; Japan 3.3%; Barbados 3.3%. Exports (2004): U.S.$103,145,000 (reexports 46.0%, of which mineral fuels 30.6%; domestic exports 43.8%, of which bananas 19.5%, beverages (significantly beer) and tobacco products 11.4%; ships’ stores and bunkers 10.2%). Major export destinations: United Kingdom 46.0%; Trinidad and Tobago 11.8%; Barbados 10.4%; United States 9.2%; Dominica 8.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 750 mi, 1,210 km (paved 596). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 22,453; trucks and buses 8,972. Air transport (2001): passenger arrivals and departures 679,000; cargo unloaded and loaded 3,500 metric tons.

Communications

Vital statistics

2001 —217.8 66.7%

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2001

46

291

2005 2002

10610 51

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

65710 336

2004 2005 2004 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

26 0 55 m

173 0 339 juice 3,130;

coconut cream 2,130. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 113,000,000 (90,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none

(none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (49,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 7.2; income per household: n.a.; sources of income (1997): wages and salaries 44%, other 56%; expenditure (2002) food 50.3%, transportation and communications 14.4%, alcohol and tobacco products 12.2%, household furnishings and operation 11.1%. Population economically active (2003)7: total 64,000; activity rate of total population c. 35% (participation rates: ages 15-64, c. 63%; female c. 32%; unemployed, n.a.). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Population of institutionalized persons (including persons housed in boarding schools, hospitals, and prisons) and visitors. ?Includes area and any population of offshore islets. ‘Within Apia urban agglomeration. "Fruit known locally as nonu; also known as Indian mulberry. “Weights of consumer price index components. "Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. Less imputed bank service charges. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. 1°Polynesian Airlines only. liCirculation for one of two daily newspapers. !?Subscribers. Data are for the National University of Samoa.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Samoa http://www.cbs.gov.ws * Samoa Statistical Services Division http://www.spc.int/prism/Country/W'S/stats

688

Britannica World Data

San Marino

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: Repubblica di San Marino (Republic of San Marino). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Great and General Council [60]). Heads of state and government: Captains-Regent (2). Capital: San Marino. Official language: Italian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

in value €'000,000 Agriculture

area

population sq km

estimate

1.88 3.48

4.86 9.01

1,919 6,082

Chiesanuova

2.11

5.46

1,032

San Marino Domagnano

2.74 2.56

7.09 6.62

4,402 2,916

Faetano Fiorentino

2.99 2.53

7.75 6.57

1,153 2,277

Montegiardino

Montegiardino

1.28

3.31

838

Serravalle

Serravalle

Chiesanuova

Citta (San Marino) Domagnano Faetano Fiorentino

Acquaviva Borgo Maggiore

TOTAL

0.1

38

0.2

41.3 7.4

6,083 1,462

28.6 6.9

Public utilities Mining Transp. and commun. Trade Finance and insurance Services

m ag 15.5 107.8 174.8 99.6

E kod 1.5 10.2 16.5 9.4

mice doc 446 2,600 824 3,073

me ^ 2.1 12.2 3.9 14.4

Pub. admin., defense

145.2

13.7

4,1248

19.48

2,6229 21,272

12.39 100.0

i 1,061.4

es 100.02

Foreign trade!

20071 sq mi

Acquaviva Borgo Maggiore

% of labour force’

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 17%, in permanent crops, n.a., in pasture n.a.; overall forest (2005) c. 296.

Area and population Capitals

labour force*

1.2

Other TOTAL

1£= €148.

% of total value

438.5 78.8

Manufacturing Construction

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

Municipalities

2006

4.07

10.53

9,908

23.632

61.20

30,527

Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

-53.3 1.5%

-54.4 1.8%

-91.0 2.8%

-94.9 2.3%

Urban-rural (2005): urban c. 96%; rural c. 4%. Sex distribution (2007): male 49.16%; female 50.84%.

Age breakdown (2004)3: under 15, 15.3%; 15-29, 16.1%; 30-44, 27.3%; 45-59, 19.6%; 60-74, 14.1%; 75-84, 6.0%; 85 and over, 1.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 31,000; (2020) 33,000. Ethnic composition (20034): Sammarinesi 85.7%; Italian 13.0%; other 1.3%. Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 88.7%; other Christian 3.5%; nonreligious 5.1%; other 2.7%. Major municipalities (20071): Serravalle 9,908; Borgo Maggiore 6,082; San Marino 4,402.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 9.5 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 90.196; outside of marriage 9.9%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 7.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.11. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 7.2/2.8. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 79.4 years; female 85.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 331.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 288.2; accidents, violence, and suicide 26.8; pneumonia 10.1.

National economy Budget (2003). Revenue: €288,000,000 (direct taxes 34.7%; import taxes 33.0%; nontax revenue 22.0%). Expenditures: €272,400,000 (current expenditures 92.0%; capital expenditures 8.0%). Public debt (2003): U.S.$52,900,000. Tourism: number of tourist arrivals (2006) 2,135,589; receipts from visitors,

n.a.; expenditures by nationals abroad, n.a. Remittances: na. Population economically active (2006)5: total 21,272; activity rate of total population 70.496 (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2002] 72.1966; female 42.196; unemployed 3.396). 2003 108.0

—54.6 1.1%

—51.0 1.0%

Transport. Railroads: none (nearest rail terminal is at Rimini, Italy, 17 mi [27 km] northeast). Roads (2001): total length 156 mi, 252 km. Vehicles (20062): passenger cars 32,263; trucks and buses 3,262. Air transport: a heliport provides passenger and cargo service between San Marino and Rimini, Italy, during the summer months. Communications Medium Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

25

893

Telephones Cellular

2006

Landline

2006

1772

57612

21

696

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

23

819

Dailies Internet users

PCs

2005 2006

seal 15

all 510

Broadband

2006

1514

5012

Education and health Educational attainment (20034). Percentage of population age 14 and over having: basic literacy or primary education 41.0%; some secondary 25.0%; secondary 27.0%; higher degree 7.0%. Literacy (2001): total population age 15 and over literate 98.7%; males literate 98.9%; females literate 98.4%. Education (2005-06)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-10) Secondary (age 11-18) Higher'3

2002 105.3

2005

Transport and communications

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 1,291, persons per sq km 498.4.

2001 102.8

2004

Imports (2005): U.S.$2,582,000,000 (manufactured goods of all kinds, petroleum products, natural gas, electricity, and gold). Major import source (2004): significantly Italy. Exports (2005): U.S.$2,531,000,000 (goods include electronics, postage stamps, leather products, ceramics, wine, wood products, and building stone). Major export destinations (2004): Italy 90%; remainder 10%.

Demography Population (2007): 30,500.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) 1998 1999 2000 Consumer price index 96.3 98.3 100.0

2000

teachers

students

teacher ratio

14

245

1,497

6.1

7 1

221 AS

1,358 19

641 x

Health (2002): physicians 117 (1 per 230 persons); hospital beds 134 (1 per 191 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 3.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,753 (vegetable products 73%, animal products 27%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 15. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP: na.

2004 109.5

Annual earnings index

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (20034) 2.5; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2004)7: food and beverages 22.0%, housing 13.8%, transportation 10.6%, vacation and recreation 10.1%, restaurants 9.3%, energy 6.2%, clothing and footwear 6.0%, household furnishings 4.2%. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing: small amounts of wheat, grapes, and barley; livestock (number of live animals; 2005) 991 cattle, 91 sheep, 32 pigs. Quarrying: building stone is an important export product. Manufacturing (2005): processed meats 283,674 kg, o which beef 270,616 kg, veal 8,549 kg, pork 3,615 kg; cheese 56,610 kg; but-

ter 8,110 kg; pasteurized milk 630,784 litres; yogurt (2004) 10,314 litres; other major products include electrical appliances, musical instruments, printing ink, paint, cosmetics, furniture, floor tiles, gold and silver jewelry, clothing,

and postage stamps. Energy production (consumption): all electrical power is imported via electrical grid from Italy (kW-hr; consumption [2004] 212,000,000); coal, none (n.a.); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, none (n.a.); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (56,000,000). Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$1,257,000,000 (U.S.$41,044 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

iMay. 2Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. "Based on derived percentages from official age-breakdown pyramid. ‘January 1. ^Includes about 6,100 crossborder workers. ‘Percentage includes cross-border workers. 7Data is for families. 8Includes 807 employees of public corporations. Includes 517 unemployed and 2,101 self-employed. !°A customs union with Italy has existed since 1862. Circulation of the two daily newspapers is unknown. !?Subscribers. “Excludes 736 secondary students and 843 university students enrolled abroad. i4Figures are for Italy. Defense is the responsibility of Italy; a small voluntary military force performs ceremonial duties and provides limited assistance to police.

Internet resources for further information: * Office of Economic Planning: Data Processing and Statistics http://www.upeceds.sm/eng

Nations of the World

Sáo Tomé and Príncipe

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$55,000,000 (U.S.$356 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Repüblica democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe (Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [55]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Sáo Tomé. Official language: Portuguese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dobra (Db); valuation

2004

Agriculture, fishing

Mining Manufacturing Public utilities

Transp. and commun. Trade

Area and population

area sq km

2001 census

332

859

131,633

T 46 103 88 41

17 119 267 229 105

51,886 13,258 5,501 10,696 15,187

Trindade

47

122

35,105

Santo António

55 55

142 142

5,966 5,966

1,001

137,599

Sáo Tomé Santana São João Angolares Neves Guadalupe

Mé-Zóchi Príncipe Príncipe

TOTAL

3861

6,228;

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 40.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 6.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 34.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 5.71. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: n.a./n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 65.4 years; female 68.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 253.7, of which malaria 52.7; diseases of the circulatory system 198.6;

accidents and injuries 74.3; malignant neoplasms 69.0; iron-deficiency anemia 502.

force4

102,300

16.3

13,518

31.5

ui

iss

m

E

26,300

42

2,893

87

61,200

9.7

4,403

10.2

AR

792 8,787

1.8 20.5

Finance Pub. admin., defense

69,400 190,600

11.0 30.3

i 3,307

ien it

Services TOTAL

4,500 629,300

0.7 100.0

9,237 42,937

}

21.5 100.0!

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-242 78.6%

—26.2 72.5%

—34.1 72.1%

-37.8 84.3%

—46.3 87.2%

—-67.0 89.8%

Belgium 14.3%; France 8.9%; United States 5.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 199 mi, 320 km (paved 68%). Vehicles (1996): passenger cars 4,040; trucks and buses 1,540. Air transport (2001): passenger-km 7,000,000; short ton-km cargo, n.a. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

19

128

2006 2006

186 7.6

1156 47

Budget (2005). Revenue: Db 972,100,000,000 (petroleum exploration bonus-

Voc., teacher tr.

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$293,700,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): coconuts 26,280, cassava 2,700, cinnamon 30, cofgoats, 4,600 cattle, 3,000 cu m, of which fuelwood,

none; fisheries production (2005) 3,600 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying: some quarrying to support local construction industry. Manufacturing (value in Db; 1995): beer 880,000; clothing 679,000; lumber

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2005

Education (2004)

in '000s

persons

6.0 Ai 29 "

38 A 181 i

student/

Primary (age 7-12)

nontax revenue 4.4%). Expenditures: Db 545,500,000,000 (current expenditure 58.7%; capital expenditure 35.5%; other 5.8%).

Medium

per 1,000

erate c. 92%; females literate c. 78%.

Secondary (age 13-18)

es 57.8%; grants 18.9%; taxes 18.9%, of which consumption taxes 7.1%;

units number

Education and health Educational attainment (2001). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 0.3%; primary education 41.4%; lower secondary 25.0%; upper secondary/vocational 8.8%; higher 1.9%; unknown 22.6%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate c. 85%; males lit-

National economy

oil palm fruit 43,460, taro 28,000, bananas 27,000, 6,890, vegetables 6,500, cacao 3,534, corn (maize) fee 29; livestock (number of live animals) 5,000 sheep, 350,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 9,000

% of labour

force4

Imports (2006): U.S.$70,853,000 (food and beverages 30.1%, petroleum products 20.4%, machinery and equipment 13.5%, construction materials 8.7%, transportation equipment 8.2%). Major import sources: Portugal 63.6%; Angola 18.3%; Belgium 4.6%; Gabon 3.5%. Exports (2006): U.S.$3,820,000 (cocoa beans 64.9%, coffee 24.2%, remainder 10.9%). Major export destinations: Portugal 33.3%; The Netherlands 27.1%;

Population projection: (2010) 165,000; (2020) 197,000. Doubling time: 21 years. Ethnic composition (2000): black-white admixture 79.5%; Fang 10.0%; angolares (descendants of former Angolan slaves) 7.6%; Portuguese 1.9%; other 1.0%. Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 8096; Protestant c. 1596; Muslim Trindade 6,049; Santo António (on Príncipe) 1,010.

labour

value

175,090

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Age breakdown (2001): under 15, 42.1%; 15-29, 30.3%; 30-44, 14.4%; 45-59, 6.9%; 60-74, 4.7%; 75-84, 1.3%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

6,635; Santana

% of total

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 409.3, persons per sq km 157.8. Urban-rural (2004): urban 37.9%; rural 62.1%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.34%, female 50.66%.

49,957; Neves

in value Db ’000,000

Foreign trade

Demography Population (2007): 158,000.

c. 396; other c. 296. Major urban areas (2001): Sáo Tomé

2001

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 14; remittances (2006) 1; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 2.4; official development assistance (2005) 32. Disbursements for (U.S.$000,000): tourism (2002) 0.6; remittances (2006) 1; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 8%, in permanent crops c. 49%, in pasture c. 1%; overall forest area (2005) c. 28%.

population

sq mi

Capitals

Aqua Grande Cantagalo Caué Lemba Lobata

}

Construction

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Db 13,510; 1 £= Db 27,157.

Island Districts S&o Tomé

689

Higher

}

schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

717

929

29,784

32.1

117

:

7,367

ME

T

56

n

—

—

—

—

Health: physicians (2004) 81 (1 per 1,803 persons); hospital beds (1991) 532 (1 per 211 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 43.1. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,418 (vegetable products 9596, animal products 596); 19396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2005): 460 (army/coast guard 65.296; presidential guard 34.896). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.296; per capita expenditure U.S.$4.

369,000; bakery products 350,000; palm oil 228,000; soap 133,000; ceramics

87,000.

Energy

production

(consumption):

electricity

(kW-hr;

2004)

37,200,000 (25,600,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none? (none);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (30,000); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.5; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1995)3: food, beverages, and tobacco 71.9%, housing and energy 10.2%, transportation and communications 6.4%, clothing and footwear 5.3%, household durable goods 28%.

Population economically active (2006): total 53,266; activity rate of total population 35.1% (participation rates: ages 10 and over (2001)4 43.796; female 41.6%; unemployed c. 30%). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999 Consumer price index

89.1

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2000 100.0

2001 109.2

2002 120.2

2003 132.0

2004 149.6

2005 175.3

1Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Licenses for petroleum exploration in an offshore area shared by São Tomé and Príncipe and Nigeria were awarded in March 2006. *Weights of consumer price index components. “Employed only. >No data available for the one daily newspaper. ^Subscribers. 71998.

Internet resources for further information: * Instituto Nacional de Estatística http://www.ine.st

690

Britannica World Data

Saudi Arabia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Al-Mamlakah al- Arabiyah as-Sa'üdiyah (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). Form of government: monarchyl. Head of state and government: King. Capital: Riyadh. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Saudi riyal (SR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

area

population

Administrative Regions

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

2004 census

*Asir Al-Bahah Hail Al-Hudüd ash-Shamallyah (Northern Borders) Al-Jawf Jizan Al-Madinah Makkah Najran Al-Qasim

Abha Al-Bahah Hail

29,611 3,830 40,111

76,693 9,921 103,887

1,687,939 377,900 526,882

"Arar Sakakah Jizan Medina (Al-Madinah) Mecca (Makkah) Najran Buraydah

43,165 38,692 4,506 58,684 59,123 57,727 22,412

156,078

111,797 100,212 11,671 151,990 153,128 149,511 58,046

404,240

279,971 361,738 1,187,587 1,512,724 5,797,184 420,345 1,015,972

259,662 56,399 830,000

672,522 146,072 2,149,690

3,360,031 691,716 22,678,262

Riyadh (Ar-Riyad)

Ad-Dammam Tabük

5,458,273

Urban-rural (2005): urban 81.0%; rural 19.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 54.64%; female 45.36%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 38.2%; 15-29, 29.5%; 30-44, 22.9%; 45-59, 5.9%; 60-74, 2.7%; 75 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 25,874,000; (2020) 31,430,000. Doubling time: 26 years. Ethnic composition (2005): Saudi Arab c. 74%; expatriates c. 26%, of which Indian c. 5%, Bangladeshi c. 3.5%, Pakistani c. 3.5%, Filipino c. 3%, Egyptian c. 3%, Palestinian c. 1%, other c. 7%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim c. 94%, of which Sunni c. 8496, Shri c. 10%; Christian c. 3.5%, of which Roman Catholic c. 3%; Hindu c. 1%; non-

religious/other c. 1.596. Major cities (2005)3: Riyadh 4,193,000; Jiddah 2,860,000; Mecca Medina 944,000; Ad-Dammam 766,000.

1,319,000;

39,373

3.0 49.9 0.2 9.5

Construction Public utilities

59,139 11,685

45 0.9

Transp. and commun.

41,367

32

291,290

3.6

Trade, hotels

67,868

52

1,451,457

18.1

Finance, real estate

104,798

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

181,204 29,203 —6,5107 1,307,522

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 29.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 2.6 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 26.7 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2003): 4.5/0.9. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 4.00. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 73.7 years; female 77.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 144, of which ischemic heart disease 69; accidents and violence 66; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 44; diabetes mellitus 20.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: SR 673,682,000,000 (oil revenues 89.7%). Expenditures: SR 393,322,000,000 (current expenditures 82.0%; capital expenditures

18.0%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 2,400,000, alfalfa 1,644,661, dates 970,488, tomatoes 495,572, potatoes 440,974, watermelons 364,437, sorghum 244,000, cucumbers 211,598, barley 138,000, grapes 132,175, corn (maize) 90,634; livestock (number of live animals) 7,000,000 sheep, 2,200,000 goats, 352,000 cattle, 260,000 camels; round-

wood, n.a. fisheries production (2005) 74,778 (from aquaculture 1996). Mining and quarrying (2005): gypsum 713,000; silver 13,501 kg; gold 7,456 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.$.$'000,000; 1998): industrial chemicals 3,349; refined petroleum 1,806; cement, bricks, and tiles 1,505; fabricated

metal products 1,129; food products 990; iron and steel 615. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 176,124,000,000 ([2006] 163,151,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 3,286,000,000 ([2004] 609,600,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

112,228,000 (67,300,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 81,350,000,000 ([2004] 65,679,000,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 8,024,885, of which 3,900,591 Saudi

workers and 4,124,294 foreign nationals; activity rate of total population 33.9% (participation rates: ages 15-64 [2003] c. 54%; female 15.5%; unemployed 6.3%). 2003 99.7

102,178 505,107

1.3 6.3

836,898 79,466

10.4 1.0

8.0

339,174

13.9 22 -0.57 100.0

4.2

1,425,995 2,191,925 501,9018 8,024,8859

17.8 27.3 6.38 100.09

(2001-05 avg.) 301.

Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 1.796, in permanent crops 0.196, in pasture 79.196; overall forest area (2005) 1.396.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 3138.0 37.1%

2002 — 4150.7 38.4%

2003 4211.2 43.3%

2004 4304.7 47.6%

2005 44542 50.5%

2006 45343 51.6%

U.S. 14.8%; Japan 9.0%; Germany 8.2%; China 7.4%; U.K. 4.7%.

Exports (2005): SR 677 144,000,000 (crude and refined petroleum 86.2%; other mineral fuels [mostly natural gas] 3.3%; organic chemicals 2.6%; plastic products 2.4%).Major export destinations: Japan 15.6%; U.S. 15.5%; South Korea 8.5%; China 6.0%; India 5.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 1,392 km; (2003) passenger-km 232,000,000; (2003) metric ton-km cargo 778,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 174,429 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 4,452,793; trucks and buses 4,110,271. Air transport (2006)!2: passenger-km

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

6,576

292

2006 2006

19,66314 3,951

83014 167

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

2004

2005

2006

100.0

100.7

102.9

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$365,786,000,000

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

8,184 1,09313 4,700 21814

354 4813 198 9.214

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of Saudi (non-Saudi) population age 10 and over who: are illiterate 19.996 (12.196), are literate/have primary education 39.5% (40.6%), have some/completed secondary 34.2% (36.0%), have at least begun university 6.4% (11.3%). Literacy (2005): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 80.4%; males 85.8%; females 73.3%. Education (2005)

National debt (domestic only; end of 2004): c. U.S.$150,000,000,000.

2002 99.1

3.7

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.7; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (1998-99): food and nonalcoholic beverages 37.3%, transportation 18.9%, housing and energy 15.7%, household furnishings 9.7%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 5,181; remittances (2006) n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 1,661; official development assistance (2005) 1310. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 4,764; remittances (2006) 14,318; FDI

Communications

2001 98.9

299,494 }

28,722,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,092,000,000.

Vital statistics

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

force

Imports (2005): SR 222,985,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 24.6%; transport equipment 20.7%; food and live animals 13.6%; base and fabricated metals 10.6%; chemicals and chemical products 9.7%).Major import sources:

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 29.2, persons per sq km 11.3.

(U.S.$15,131 per capita).

% of labour

force

652,338 3,145 123,912

SR '000,000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 24,209,0002.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index? 1000

labour

value

Petroleum and natural gas* Other mining Manufacturing®

Area and population

Ash-Sharqiyah (Eastern Province) Tabük TOTAL

% of total

Agriculture

SR 3.75; 1 £ = SR 7.54.

Ar-Riyad

in value SR ’000,000

Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-18) Vocational's Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

13,163 11,301 113 10816

213,355 184,429 7,371 12,379

2,417,811 2,025,888 67,399 603,767

11.3 11.0 9.1 48.8

Health (2005): physicians 43,348 (1 per 533 persons); hospital beds 53,192 (1 per 435 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 12.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,527 (vegetable products 86%, animal products 1496); 19096 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 124,50017 (army 60.2%, navy 12.4%, air force 14.5%, air defense forces 12.9%); U.S. troops (June 2007) 274. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP expenditure U.S.$1,092.

(2005): 8.2%; per capita

1Additionally, there is the Consultative Council consisting of 150 appointed members. 2Expatriates constitute 27% of total population. [Urban agglomerations. ‘Urban areas only. Excludes refined petroleum. Includes refined petroleum. "Import duties less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. ?Includes 4,124,294 (51.496) foreign workers. °Figure represents commitments. Imports c.if., exports f.o.b. 12Saudi Arabian Airlines only. i5Circulation of top 10 dailies only. !^Subscribers. 152006. 162003. !7Excludes 100,000 in national guard and 15,500 paramilitary.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Department of Statistics http://www.cds.gov.sa/statistic/sindexe.htm * Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency http://www.sama.gov.sa

Nations of the World

Senegal

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Atlantic Ocean”

Official name: République du Sénégal (Republic of Senegal). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate! [1002]; National Assembly [150]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Dakar. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

691

2005

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

CFAF ’000,000,000

value

force

force

1,789,467 1,998 161,124 ai 60,935 58,081 378,241 4,623 ae 268,721 16,286 2,739,476

65.3 0.1 5.9 w 2.2 2.1 13.8 0.2 s 9.8 0.6 100.0

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance Services Pub. admin., defense Other TOTAL

CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

1991

668.3 45.2 631.6 106.3 207.3 409.6 715.9 881.5

14.7 1.0 13.8 2.3 4.5 9.0 15.7 19.3

322.2 573.310 4,561.2

TA 12.610 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 12.8%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 29.3%; overall forest area (2005) 40.0%.

Area and population

-8rea... — population. Regions

sq km

2007? estimate

Dakar Diourbel Fatick Kaolack Kolda Louga

547 4,903 7,910 15,449 21,112 25,254

2,565,000 1,271,700 675,500 1,171,400 951,800 761,000

area... Ajpopulation. Regions Matam Saint-Louis Tambacounda Thiès Ziguinchor TOTAL

sq km

20078 estimate

29,041 19,241 59,542 6,670 7,352 197,0214

514,500 812,400 708,800 1,442,300 468,900 11,343,300

Demography Population (2007): 12,522,0005.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) CFAF '000,000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

200612

-312 17.5%

-375 20.1%

—470 24.3%

-521 24.6%

—698 30.1%

-935 38.5%

Imports (2005): CFAF 1,697,000,000,000 (petroleum [all forms] 19.2%; food and live animals 19.2%, of which rice 7.8%; machinery and apparatus 12.4%; transport equipment 8.5%). Major import sources (2005): France 22.8%; Nigeria 11.4%; Brazil 4.5%; Thailand 4.2%; United States 4.2%.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 164.9, persons per sq km 63.7. Urban-rural (2005): urban 41.6%; rural 58.4%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.99%; female 50.01%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 42.2%; 15-29, 28.4%; 30-44, 16.0%; 45-59, 8.7%; 60-74, 3.9%; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 13,516,000; (2020) 16,946,000. Doubling time: 26 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Wolof 34.6%; Peul (Fulani) and Tukulor 27.1%; Serer 12.0%; Malinke (Mandingo) 9.7%; other 16.6%. Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 94%® (including Shi7 c. 5%); Christian (mostly Roman Catholic) c. 496; other c. 296. Major cities (20073): Dakar 2,243,4007; Touba 529,200; Thiés 263,500; Kaolack 186,000; Mbour 181,800; Saint-Louis 171,300; Rufisque 162,100.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 38.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 27.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 5.13. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 55.0 years; female 57.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases c. 385, of which malaria c. 134; respiratory infections c. 165; cardiovascular diseases c. 119; perinatal conditions c. 91; accidents c. 81.

National economy

Exports (2004): CFAF 697,000,000,000 (petroleum [all forms] 19.3%; phosphorous pentoxide and phosphoric acids 13.6%; fresh fish 12.6%; crustaceans and mollusks 9.0%; manufactured fertilizers 4.7%).Major export destinations (2005): Mali 16.9%; India 13.1%; France 9.5%; Spain 6.1%; Italy 5.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 563 mi, 906 km; (2004) passengerkm 122,000,000; (2004) metric ton-km cargo 358,000,000. Roads (2003): tota length 8,436 mi, 13,576 km (paved 29%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 147,000; trucks and buses 46,000. Air transport (2006)P: passenger-km 937,000,000; metric ton-km cargo, none.

Communications Medium

date

Televisions

2003

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

869

7T

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies 2006 2006

2,98315 283

24515 23

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

250

21

2005

7014

6.514

2006 2006

650 2915

53 2.415

Education and health Educational attainment (2005)16. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 68.296; incomplete primary education 13.096; complete primary 3.7%; incomplete secondary 9.5%; complete secondary 1.4%; higher 2.4%; unknown 1.8%. Literacy (2003): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 40.2%; males literate 49.9%; females literate

Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 955,800,000,000 (tax revenue 89.0%, of which

30.8%.

taxes on domestic goods and services 28.7%, income taxes 21.4%, taxes on

imports 19.7%; grants 7.9%; nontax revenue 3.1%). Expenditures: CFAF

Education (2003-04)

1,084,400,000,000 (current expenditures 58.0%, of which public debt interest

payments 4.3%; development expenditure 42.0%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,467,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane (2006) 829,500, peanuts (groundnuts) 703,400, millet 608,600, corn (maize) 400,000, cassava 281,500, paddy rice 279,100, watermelons 241,400, sorghum 144,000, oil palm fruit 74,000, seed cotton 45,000; livestock (number of live animals) 4,863,000 sheep, 4,144,000 goats, 3,091,000 cattle, 513,700 horses; roundwood 6,070,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 87%;

fisheries production 405,263 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying: calcium phosphate (crude rock; 2005) 1,451,000. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2002): food and food products 108; industrial chemicals 70; cement, bricks, and ceramics 31; paints, soaps, and pharmaceuticals

21; beverages 11. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 2,351,000,000 (2,351,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels;

Primary (age 6-12)

Secondary (age 13-18) Higher18

student/ schools!7

teachers

students

teacher ratio

5,670

32,005

1,382,700

43.2

3

1,017

25,063

24.6

591

13,654

360,000

26.4

Health: physicians (2005) 693 (1 per 17,115 persons); hospital beds (1998) 3,582 (1 per 2,500 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 61.4.

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,513 (vegetable products 92%, animal products 8%); 136% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 13,620 (army 87.4%, navy 7.0%, air force 5.6%); French troops (November 2006) 840. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$11.

2004) negligible (8,583,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 1,127,000

(1,309,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 13,000,000 ([2004] 13,000,000).

Population economically active (2003): total 4,383,0008; activity rate of total population 39.4768 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 71.5968; female 42.0968; unemployed [2005] c. 4096). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 103.1

2002 105.4

2003 105.3

2004 105.9

2005 107.7

2006 110.0

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 8.7; sources of income (1997-2000)? agricultural 45%; other 55%; expenditure (2005): food and nonalcoholic beverages 54.8%, household furnishings 6.9%, housing and energy 6.3%, communications 6.0%, transportation 4.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 212; remittances (2006) 633; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 59; official development assistance (2005) 689. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 57; remittances (2006) 77; FDI (2001-05 avg.)

15. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$9,335,000,000 (U.S.$770 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Originally created in 1999, abolished in 2001, and reinstated in August 2007. ?Includes 65 appointees of president. December 31; official projection based on 2002 census. 4Summed total of regions as reported in 2002 census; reported total from same source was 196,021 sq km. *Estimate of U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (August 2006 update), including c. 3,000,000 abroad, many of whom are illegal workers. “Most citizens practice a syncretic form of Islam. "Includes communes of Pikine (2004; pop. 815,378) and Guédiawaye (2004; pop. 274,014), adjacent to Dakar commune (2004; pop. 1,009,256). SEstimate of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. ? Approximate figures for span of years. !°Taxes and duties on imports. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. !?Estimated figures. BAir Sénégal International only. 14Circulation of 3 leading daily newspapers only. 15Subscribers. Based on the 2005 Senegal Demographic and Health Survey, of which 22,795 people were age 25 and over. 17200203. 18Universities only; 2005.

Internet resources for further information: * Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie http://www.ansd.sn * La Banque de France: La Zone Franc http://www.banque-france.fr/fr/eurosys/zonefr/zonefr.htm

692

Britannica World Data

Serbia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Republika Srbija (Republic of Serbia). Form of government: republic with National Assembly (250). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Belgrade. Official language: Serbian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Serbian dinar (CSD); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$

population

Administrative divisions

sq km

2005 estimate

Central Serbia

55,962!

5,427,851

Districts

% of labour

force?

force?

137,780

12.6

540,295

16.3

16,580 168,613

1.5 15.4

31,113 518,585

0.9 15.6

Construction

31,973

29

159,197

48

Public utilities

34,687

3.2

61,934

1.9

Transp. and commun.

110,834

10.1

151,384

45

Trade, hotels

121,800

11.1

491,445

148

158,547

145

3.4 4.3 12.4

21.114 100.0

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

118,870

10.9

112,906 143,318 413,208

194,59213 1,094,376

17.818 100.0

700,331 14 3,323,716

}

Other TOTAL

Administrative divisions

area

population

sq km

2005 estimate

3,224

1,596,919

21,5361

2,012,918

City Belgrade

Bor

3,507

140,367

Braničevo Jablanica Kolubara

3,865 2,769 2,474

197,194 236,062 187,629

Mačva

3,268

322,703

Districts

Morava

3,016

221,523

Central Banat

3,256

202,286

2,729 3,520 2,761

379,076 229,707 101,538

North Bačka North Banat South Bačka

1,784 2,329 4,016

196,843 160,757 598,331

Podunavlje

1,248

208,297

South Banat

4,245

310,862

Pomoravlje Rasina Raška Sumadija Toplica Zaječar Zlatibor

2,614 2,668 3,918 2,887 2,231 3,623 6,140

223,391 253,823 295,575 295,241 99,288 131,896 307,622

Srem West Bačka SUBTOTAL

3,486 2,420 77,498!

337,216 206,623 7,440,769

Kosovo? TOTAL

10,887 88,3851

2,055,500 9,496,269?

Vojvodina, Autonomous Province of

Foreign trade!” Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —2,308 38.8%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2002 —3,228 42.2%

2003 —4,309 42.3%

2004 —6,643 47.1%

2005 —5,550 37.9%

2006 —6,230 32.4%

Exports (2005): U.S.$4,553,400,000 (base metals 15.4%; food and food products 14.7%; chemicals and chemical products 8.8%; rubber and plastic products 6.4%). Major export destinations: Bos—Her. 16.4%; Italy 14.4%;

Age breakdown (2002)6: under 15, 15.796; 15-29, 20.296; 30-44, 19.996; 45-59, 21.1%; 60-74, 17.2%; 75-84, 4.7%; 85 and over, 0.6%; unknown 0.6%.

Population projection®: (2010) 7,343,000; (2020) 7,151,000. Ethnic composition (2002)¢: Serb 82.9%; Hungarian 3.9%; Bosniac 1.8%; Rom (Gypsy) 1.4%; Yugoslav 1.1%; Croat 0.9%; Montenegrin 0.9%; other 7.1%. Religious affiliation (2002)¢: Orthodox 85.0%; Roman Catholic 5.5%; Muslim 3.2%; Protestant 1.1%; other/unknown 5.2%. Major cities (2002): Belgrade 1,120,092; Novi Sad 191,405; Ni& 173,724; Pri&tina

(in Kosovo) 165,8447; Kragujevac 146,373.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005)6: 97 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 778%, outside of marriage 22.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 14.3 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2004)® 1.60. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005)6: 5.2/1.0. Life expectancy at birth (2005)6: male 69.9 years; female 75.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2003)6: diseases of the circulatory system 763.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 254.0; accidents, violence, and poisoning 51.7; diseases of the respiratory system 48.9.

National economy Budget (2005)8. Revenue: CSD 701,200,000,000 (tax revenue 91.2%, of which VAT 30.8%, excises and customs duties 15.7%, personal and corporate income tax 14.9%; nontax revenue 8.8%). Expenditures: CSD 669,600,000,000 (current expenditure 95.1%; capital expenditure 4.9%). Population economically active (2006)9: total 3,323,716; activity rate of total population 44.096 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 63.6%; female 43.0%; unemployed 20.9969). 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

194.9 229.6

232.8 348.4

255.9 436.5

284.1 540.1

329.9 670.4

371.8 834.1

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): corn (maize) 6,017,000, sugar beets 3,189,000, wheat 1,875,000, potatoes 930,300, plums 556,200, soybeans 429,600, sunflower seeds 384,900, grapes 359,500; livestock (number of live animals) 3,211,597 pigs, 1,609,239 sheep, 1,096,185 cattle; roundwood!! (2005) 3,170,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 58%;

fisheries production!! (2005) 7,022 (from aquaculture 65%). Mining and quarrying (2005): copper (metal content) 27,000; lead (metal content) 2,000. Manufacturing (value added in CSD ’000,00012; 2004): food products and beverages 48,970; chemicals and chemical products 21,862; cement, bricks, and ceramics 11,445; fabricated metal products 10,395; rubber products 8,359.

Energy production (consumption)&: electricity (KW-hr; 2004) 33,874,000,000 (22,911,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 424,000 (303,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 34,400,000 (30,900,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 4,840,000

products

Germany 9.8%; Macedonia 5.8%; Russia 5.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length (200518) 3,809 km; passenger-km 684,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 4,232,000,000. Roads (2004): total length

23,927 mi, 38,507 km (paved 6296). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 1,497,418; trucks and buses 257,642. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 1,252,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 5,470,000.

Communications Medium Televisions!! Telephones Cellular Landline

date — 2000 2006 2006

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,980

279

6,64420 2,719

63320 259

units Medium

date

PCs!! Dailies! Internet users Broadband

2005 2002 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

446 1,01519 1,400 12220

55 9519 133 16%

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education/unknown 7.8%; incomplete primary education 16.2%; complete primary 23.9%; secondary 41.1%; higher 11.0%. Literacy (2002): total population age 10 and over literate 96.6%. Education (2004—05)6 Primary (age 7-14)?! Secondary (age 15-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

3,832

38,894

672,472

173

146

6,059

159,736

26.4

1,475

58,632

39.8

10,374

218,508

214

77

students

teacher ratio

Health (2004): physicians (2003) 19,900 (1 per 379 persons); hospital beds 45,283 (1 per 166 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 8.06.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

(metric

tons;

2004)

(3,150,00011); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 317,000,000 (794,000,000).

3,150,0004

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$34,927,000,000 (U.S.$4,700 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI, n.a. Land use as % of total land area (2002)6: in temporary crops 43.3%, in permanent crops 4.1%, in pasture 18.2%; overall forest area 25.2%.

Germany 10.3%; Italy 8.6%; China 4.8%; U.S. 3.6%.

Density (2007)4.5: persons per sq mi 247.4, persons per sq km 95.5. Urban-rural (2002)® urban 56.4%; rural 43.6%. Sex distribution (2005)® male 48.62%; female 51.38%.

petroleum

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2006)6 1 3.2; average annual income per household CSD 394,740 (U.S.$5,620); sources of income: wages and salaries 47.7%, transfers 26.5%, self-employment 5.5%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 35.1%, housing and energy 18.9%, transportation 11.2%, clothing and footwear 6.8%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2004) 220; remittances (2005) 2,400; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 82211; official development assistance (2005) 1,2601 16, Disbursements

Imports (2005): U.S.$10,575,700,000 (mineral fuels 18.9%; chemicals and chemical products 13.6%; machinery and apparatus 10.3%; transportation equipment 8.2%; base metals 7.6%). Major import sources: Russia 15.9%;

Demography Population (2007): 7,402,0004.

(29,419,000!);

labour

value!?

Public debt (external, outstanding; August 2007): U.S.$8,697,300,000.

area

Consumer price index® Monthly earnings index® 1°

% of total

Mining and quarrying Manufacturing

Area and population

Nisava Pčinja Pirot

in value CSD ’000,00012 Agriculture, forestry, fishing

CSD 59.62; 1 £ = CSD 120.17.

2006

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 39,686 (army 83.6%, air force (16.4% )22. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2006) 2.3%; per capita expenditure U.S.$996, 1Summed total of district areas; reported total is based on older survey. ZUN-administered province from June 1999. 5Summed total of separate estimates for Serbia and Kosovo. ^Excludes Kosovo, whose 2007 projected population per a Kosovar source is 2,114,000. 5Excludes the area of Kosovo, which is 10,887 sq km (4,203 sq mi). 5Excludes Kosovo. 72003 estimate. $Consolidated general government. ?Includes Kosovo. 10Average gross monthly earnings. !!Data for Serbia and Montenegro. !2In constant prices of 2002. 13Taxes less subsidies. 4Includes 693,024 unemployed. !^First quarter. léFigure represents commitments. "Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and cif. in commodities and trading partners. i$January 1. !?Circulation of daily newspapers. 20Subscribers. 212003-04. 2N ATO-sponsored troops in Kosovo (March 2007) 16,500.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bank of Serbia http://www.nbs.yu/english/index.htm * Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia http://webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu/axd/en/index.php

Nations of the World

Seychelles

([2004] 220,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (178,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2002): total 43,859; activity rate of total population 53.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 80.1%; female [1997] 47.6%; unemployed [2006] 2.6%).

Official name: Repiblik Sesel (Creole); Republic of Seychelles (English); République des Seychelles (French). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [34]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Victoria. Official languages: nonel. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Seychelles rupee (roupi; SR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = SR 6.87; 1 £ = SR 13.81.

Price and earnings indexes (2001 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

Les Mamelles

Mahé Praslin Outer (coralline) Islands TOTAL

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

94.4

100.0 100.0

100.2 101.4

103.5 105.4

107.5 108.5

108.5 111.7

108.1 112.9

sq km

2002 census

yy

21.6

56.0

2,099

s

1.6

42

Victoria ice

55.6 15.3 81.64 175.7

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.5; average annual income per household, n.a.; sources of income (1997): wages and salaries 77.2%, self-employment 3.8%, transfer payments 3.2%; expenditure (2001)10: food 25.595, housing and energy 14.8%, beverages 13.3% (of which alcoholic 10.7%), clothing and footwear 6.7%, transportation 5.8%, recreation 5.5%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 2%, in permanent crops c. 13%, in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) c. 89%.

population

sq mi

Inner (granitic) Islands La Digue?

2001

8.4. area

Principal towns

2000

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2006) 227; remittances (2006) 11; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 58; official development assistance (2005) 109. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 39; remittances (2006) 10; FDI (2001-05 avg.)

Area and population Island Groups?

693

2,352

144.0 39.5 211.34 455.0

68,476 7,000 1,250 81,177

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 84,300. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 479.8, persons per sq km 185.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban c. 5396; rural c. 4796. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.68%; female 49.32%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 23.8%; 15-29, 26.4%; 30-44, 24.4%; 45-59, 15.1%; 60-74, 7.0%; 75 and over, 3.3%.

SR '000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—1,513 37.5%

—1,046 29.5%

-747 20.1%

-1,132 26.1%

—1,844 33.0%

—2,080 33.1%

Imports (2006): SR 4,180,000,000 (mineral fuels 26.7%; food and beverages 24.1%, of which fish, crustaceans, and mollusks 12.6%; machinery and appa-

ratus 11.0%; iron and steel 5.5%; vehicles 4.3%).Major import sources: Saudi Arabia 26.4%; Singapore 11.3%; France 8.0%; Spain 8.0%; South Africa

Population projection: (2010) 85,000; (2020) 89,000. Doubling time: 74 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Seychellois Creole (mixture of Asian, African, and

7396. Exports (2006): SR 2,100,000,000 (domestic exports 56.5%, of which canned

European) 93.2%; British 3.0%; French 1.8%; Chinese 0.5%; Indian 0.3%;

fish meal 1.2%; reexports 43.5%, of which petroleum products to ships and aircraft 42.496). Major export destinations!?: United Kingdom 42.095; France 26.1%; Italy 18.0%; Germany 3.7%.

other unspecified 1.2%. Religious affiliation (2002): Roman

Catholic 82.3%; Anglican 6.4%; other

tuna 49.5%, medicaments and medical appliances 3.9%, crustaceans 1.2%,

Christian 4.5%; Hindu 2.1%; Muslim 1.1%; other 2.1%; unknown 1.5%.

Major towns (2004): Victoria 23,200; Anse Royale 3,800. Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.3 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 23.6%; outside of marriage 76.4%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.5 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.11. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 4.65/1.7. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 68.9 years; female 75.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006): diseases of the circulatory system 279.0; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 121.7; diseases of the respiratory system 88.7; diseases of the digestive system 37.8.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2006): total length 312 mi, 502 km (paved 9696). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 7,070; trucks and buses 2,796. Air transport (2006)13: passenger-km 1,089,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 22,502,000. Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

22

266

Telephones Cellular

2006

fe

85115

Landline

2006

22

260

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons 193

2005

16

Dailies Internet users

2004 2006

3.514 29

4214 343

Broadband

2006

1.31

1515

Education and health National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: SR 2,476,000,000 (current revenue 97.1%, of which dividends and interest 14.0%, income and business tax 12.0%, indirect taxes on services 9.5%, trades tax 9.1%, indirect taxes on locally manufactured

goods 8.8%, indirect taxes on imported goods 6.9%; grants 2.9%). Expenditures: SR 2,302,000,000 (current expenditure 82.5%, of which public debt interest charges 17.6%, education 8.6%, health 8.4%, social security con-

tributions 6.4%, defense 3.8%; development expenditure 17.5%). Public debt (2006): U.S.$1,035,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$659,000,000 (U.S.$7,660 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

SR '000,000

value

forces

forces

107.4

25

1,189

3.0

X

pu

15

—

Agriculture, fishing

Mining, quarrying Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Trade, hotels Transportation and communications Pub. admin., defense Finance, real estate

Services

}

Other TOTAL

673.8 540.7

15.9 12.7

4,465 3,702

11.3 9.4

107.0 929.6

25 21.9

1,089 7,978

27 20.2

801.2 562.0

18.8 13.2

966.9

132

3,366 6,710 2,370

8.677

8.5 17.0 6.0

—0.87 100.0

— 39,561

—36.07 4,252.6

21.9 — 100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): coconuts 2,529, eggs 2,170, bananas 2,046, assorted vegetables 1,750, tea 189,

cinnamon 1118; livestock (number of live animals) 18,500 pigs, 5,150 goats, 570,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) negligible; fisheries production 107,327 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2006): granite 93,000. Manufacturing (2006): canned tuna 40,222; fish meal 14,821; copra 253; soft drinks 92,250 hectolitres; beer and stout 67,300 hectolitres; mineral water 60,270 hectolitres; fruit juices 30,950 hectolitres; cigarettes 19,000,000 units.

Energy production

(consumption):

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 251,000,000

Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 12 and over having: less than primary or primary education 23.2%; secondary 73.4%; higher 3.4%. Literacy (2005): total population age 12 and over literate 96.0%; males literate 96.0%; females literate 96.0%. Education (2005)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6-15)

25

670

9,204

13.7

Secondary (age 16-18)

13

590

7,895

13.4

8

183

1,837

10.0

Voc., teacher tr.

Health (2006): physicians 83 (1 per 1,019 persons); hospital beds 417 (1 per 203 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 9.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,547 (vegetable products 81%, animal products 19%); 141% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 200 (army 10096)16. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP U.S.$157.

(2005): 1.896; per capita expenditure

1Creole, English, and French are all national languages per constitution. ?The Seychelles are administratively divided into 26 districts and geographically split among 43 Inner (granitic) Islands and (at least) 73 Outer (coralline) Islands. ?Includes area and population of Inner Islands other than Les Mamelles, Mahé, and Praslin. ‘Includes c. 62 sq mi (c. 160 sq km) land area of Aldabra atoll. Residents only; marriage rate if including visitors is 11.6. 5Formally employed only. "Import duties less imputed bank service charges. $Exported tonnage. ?Figure represents commitments. !^Weights of consumer price index components. Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. Domestic exports only. SAir Seychelles only. i^Circulation of daily newspapers. l5Subscribers. léExcludes the 250-member paramilitary, which is primarily the coast guard.

Internet resources for further information: * Seychelles in Figures http://www.nsb.gov.sc * Central Bank of Seychelles http://www.cbs.sc

694

Britannica World Data

Sierra Leone

26,000, millet 25,000, coffee 15,530, tomatoes 15,070, sorghum 14,140, cacao beans 13,940, kola nuts 4,500; livestock (number of live animals) 540,000 goats, 470,000 sheep, 350,000 cattle, 52,000 pigs; roundwood (2005) 5,546,391

Official name: Republic of Sierra Leone. Form of government: republic with one legislative body (Parliament [1241]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Freetown. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: leone (Le); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = Le 2,983; 1£= Le 5,996.

cu m, of which fuelwood 98%; fisheries production 145,993 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2006): bauxite 1,071,140; rutile 73,600; diamonds 582,330 carats. Manufacturing (2006): soap 467,360; cement 234,440; paint 142,730 gallons; soft drinks 2,088,750 crates; beer and stout

832,100 cartons. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 244,000,000 (244,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (1,942,000);

petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 178,000 (248,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.0; average annual income per household, n.a.

Public debt (external, outstanding; January 2006): U.S.$1,467,100,000. Population economically active (2003-04): total 2,005,900; activity rate of total population 40.0% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 68.2%; female 53.6%;

unemployed, n.a.). Area and population

area

Provinces/Area Districts

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

2004 census

Eastern Province

Kenema

6,005

15,553

1,191,539

Kailahun

Kailahun

1,490

3,859

358,190

Kenema

Kenema

2,337

6,053

497,948

Kono Northern Province

Sefadu

2,178

5,641

335,401

Makeni

13,875

35,936

1,745,553

Bombali Kambia

Makeni Kambia

3,083 1,200

7,985 3,108

408,390 270,462

Koinadugu

Kabala

Port Loko Tonkolili Southern Province

Bo Bonthe

4,680

12,121

265,758

Port Loko Magburaka

2,208 2,704

5,719 7,003

453,746 347,197

Bo

7,604

19,694

1,092,657

2,015 1,335

5,219 3,458

463,668 129,947

2,665 1,585

6,902 4,105

260,910 228,392

4 215 210 5 27,699

10 557 544 13 71,740

9,740 947,122 174,249 772,873 4,976,871

Bo Bonthe

Moyamba Pujehun

Moyamba Pujehun

Sherbro? Western Area Freetown (rural) Freetown (urban)? TOTAL

Bonthe Freetown Freetown Freetown

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

population

2004 121.3

Le '000,000 % of total

2001 -313,608 73.0%

2002 —452,826 68.9%

2003 —490,166 53.0%

2004 —397,501 34.5%

2005 —527,441 36.6%

10.2%; cacao 5.0%; reexports 12.3%). Major export destinations (2006): Belgium 51.7%; U.S. 19.0%; The Netherlands 6.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 6,185,000; (2020) 7,747,000. Doubling time: 30 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Mende 26.0%; Temne 24.6%;

Limba

7.1%;

Kuranko 5.5%; Kono 4.2%; Fulani 3.8%; Bullom-Sherbro 3.5%; other 25.3%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 65963; Christian c. 25%3; traditional beliefs/other c. 1096. 149,957; Kenema

128,402; Yoni

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2002)6: length 52 mi, 84 km. Roads (2002): total length 7,020 mi, 11,300 km (paved 8%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 17,439; trucks and buses 12,428. Air transport: passenger-km (2001) 73,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2004) 8,000,000. Communications Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 46.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 23.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 22.7 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): n.a./n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 6.15. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 37.7 years; female 42.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases 1,343.0, of which diarrheal diseases 270.8, malaria 198.7, HIV/AIDS 116.5; accidents, injuries, and violence 215.2; diseases of the circulatory sys-

tem 180.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 75.6.

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

63

13

2003 2002

1138 24

238 48

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

1999 2004 2004 2005

0.1 167 10 wee

ae 3.37 2.0 sus

Education and health Educational attainment (2004): percentage of total population having: no formal schooling 62.296; incomplete/complete primary 24.696; lower secondary 6.4%; upper secondary 4.2%; vocational 2.0%; incomplete/complete higher 0.6%. Literacy (2004): total population age 10 and over literate c. 39%; males c. 4996; females c. 2996. Education (2004)

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue:

Le 765,762,000,000 (grants 46.096; import taxes 22496; corporate taxes 8.196; income tax 6.396; petroleum taxes 5.596). (current expenditures 75.296, of which

wages and salaries 27.6%, goods and services 24.8%, debt service 15.196; capital expenditures 24.896). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,791,000,000 (U.S.$312 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

1,497

34.0

159 443 311

3.6 10.1 7.31

Forestry Fishing Mining Manufacturing, handicrafts

115

2.6

Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun.

96 19 299

2.2 0.4 6.8

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

414 288 182

9.4 6.5 4.1

Services Other TOTAL

429 1494 4,401

9.8 3.44 100.0

1,119,000

60.6

728,000

39.4

1,847,000

100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): rice 1,062,000, cassava 350,000, oil palm fruit 166,100, peanuts (groundnuts) 115,200, sugarcane 70,000, pulses 58,300, plantains 30,460, sweet potatoes

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher!?

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2,7049 4959

17,327 5,2649

1,158,399 74,235

66.9 eae

1,3219

20,131

ee

301

4,310

143

P

1

Health: physicians (2004) 162 (1 per 30,384 persons); hospital beds (2001) 2,770 (1 per 1,680 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 162.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,875 (vegetable products 95%, animal products 595); 10296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

2003

Le '000,000,000 Agriculture

2006 —485,136 26.2%

China 8.0%; U.K. 7.0%; The Netherlands 5.8%; South Africa 4.7%. Exports (2006): Le 684,311,100,000 (diamonds 54.1%; rutile 12.3%; bauxite

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 42.8%; 15-29, 26.1%; 30-44, 16.0%; 45-59, 9.6%; 60-74, 4.7%; 75-84, 0.7%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Le 830,410,000,000

2006 148.9

Imports (2006): Le 1,169,446,800,000 (fuels 37.3%; machinery and transport equipment 17.5%; food and live animals 14.2%; chemicals and chemical products 6.1%). Major import sources (2006): Cóte d’Ivoire 9.7%; U.S. 8.1%;

Urban-rural (2005): urban 40.7%; rural 59.3%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.23%; female 50.77%.

Expenditures:

2005 135.9

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 211.8, persons per sq km 81.8.

87,627: Makeni 82,840: Koidu 80,025.

2003 106.2

Foreign trade5

Population (2007): 5,866,000.

772,873; Bo

2002 98.7

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 64; remittances (2006) 2; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 14; official development assistance (2005) 343. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 32; remittances (2006) 2; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 8.0%, in permanent crops 1.0%, in pasture 30.7%; overall forest area (2005) 38.5%.

Demography

Major cities (2004): Freetown

2001 102.1

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): c. 12,500 (army c. 98%, navy c. 2%, air force, none). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$2.

Includes 12 paramount chiefs elected to represent each of the provincial districts. Urban district. Often mixed with traditional beliefs. ‘Indirect taxes less imputed bank service charges. “Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. 5Marampa Mineral Railway; there are no passenger railways. "Circulation of daily newspapers. 8Subscribers. ?2000-01. 1?University of Sierra Leone only.

Internet resources for further information:

* Statistics Sierra Leone http://www.statistics.sl * Bank of Sierra Leone http://www.bankofsierraleone-centralbank.org

Nations of the World

Singapore

695

82.5%, self-employment 12.3%, other 5.2%; expenditure: housing costs and furnishings 22.4%, transportation and communications 21.4%, food 21.3%, education 7.8%, health 5.1%, clothing and footwear 3.6%.

Official name: Xinjiapo Gongheguo (Chinese); Republik Singapura (Malay); Cingkappur Kudiyarasu (Tamil); Republic of Singapore (English). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Parliament [941]). Chief of state: President?. Head of state government: Prime Minister?. Capital: Singapore. Official languages: Chinese; Malay; Tamil; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Singapore dollar (S$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Population economically active (2006): total 1,880,8007; activity rate of total population 52.1%7 (participation rates: ages 15-64, 71.3%7; female 42.5%7; unemployed 3.6% ). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.0 102.3

100.6 103.1

101.1 104.9

102.8 108.7

103.3 112.4

104.3 116.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 5,736; remittances, n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 13,653. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 9,853; remittances,

n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 7,926. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.9%, in permanent crops 0.3%, in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) 3.4%.

Foreign trade!

1 US.$ = $$1.53; 1 £ = $$3.07.

Balance of trade (current prices) Population (2006 estimate)! De facto population

4,483,9005

De jure population

3,608,5006

2001 310,335 2.4%

$$'000,000 % of total

2002 415,590 3.6%

2003 441,261 8.0%

2004 442,278 6.7%

2005 449,341 6.9%

2006 | 452,635 6.5%

Imports (2006): $$378,924,000,000 (machinery and apparatus [including parts] and transport equipment 54.7%; crude and refined petroleum 19.7%; chemicals and chemical products 6.0%; food, beverages, and tobacco products 2.496). Major import sources (2005): Malaysia 14.4%; U.S. 12.4%; China

Demography Area: 271.8 sq mi, 704.0 sq km. Population (2007): 4,564,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 16,792, persons per sq km 6,483. Urban-rural: urban 10096. Sex distribution (2007)7: male 49.48%; female 50.52%.

10.8%; Japan 10.1%; Indonesia 5.5%.

Exports (2006): $$431,559,000,000 (domestic exports 52.7%, of which electronics 18.2%, petroleum [all forms] 13.8%, chemicals and chemical products

Age breakdown (2007)7: under 15, 18.9%; 15-29, 20.2%; 30-44, 25.8%; 45-59, 22.7%; 60-74, 9.1%; 75-84, 2.6%; 85 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,725,000; (2020) 5,109,000. Ethnic composition (2007)7: Chinese 74.8%; Malay 13.5%; Indian 9.0%; other 2.7%.

Religious affiliation (2000)?: Buddhist/Taoist/Chinese folk-religionist 51.0%; Muslim 14.9%; Christian 14.6%; Hindu 4.0%; traditional beliefs 0.6%; non-

religious 14.9%.

Vital statistics

9.2%; reexports 47.3%, of which electronics, nonelectrical machinery and

transport equipment

34.6%). Major export destinations (2005): Malaysia

14.7%; U.S. 11.5%; Indonesia 10.7%; Hong Kong 10.4%; China 9.5%; Japan

6.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 24 mi (39 km)!7. Roads (200618): tota length 3,234 km (paved [2004] 99%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 476,333; trucks and buses 158,586. Air transport (2006)19: passenger-km 90,288,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 12,809,000,000.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006)7: 10.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006)7: 4.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006)7: 5.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006)7: 1.26. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005)7: 5.3/1.6. Life expectancy at birth (2006)7: male 78.0 years; female 81.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005)7: diseases of the circulatory system 150.9, of which ischemic heart diseases 82.9; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 120.7; pneumonia 68.1.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: $$31,072,000,000 (income tax 48.196, goods and services tax 12.7%, fees and charges 6.8%, assets taxes 6.6%, customs and excise

duties 6.3%). Expenditures: $$29,875,000,000 (security and external relations 42.8%, education 21.3%, transportation 6.8%, health 6.2%, trade and indus-

try 5.6%).

Public debt (2006): U.S.$122,000,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): hen eggs 20,800, vegetables 5,800, orchids (15% of the world market) and other ornamental plants are cultivated for export; livestock (number of live animals) 250,000 pigs, 2,000,000 chickens; roundwood,

negligible; fisheries

production® 7,837 (from aquaculture 76%). Quarrying: limestone, n.a.?. Manufacturing (value added in $$'000,000; 2005): pharmaceuticals 8,204; semiconductors 7,636; computer-related electronics 7,218; professional and

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

1,847

2006 2006

4,78921 1,854

425 1,068?! 413

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2,960 1,62420 1,717 797?!

682 38320 383 178?!

Education and health Educational attainment (2005)7. Percentage of population age 15 and over?2 having: no schooling 16.4%; primary education 22.0%; lower secondary 21.3%; upper secondary 15.1%; technical 8.2%; university 17.0%. Literacy (2004)7: 94.6% Education (2005)

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

178 164

12,343 11,495

290,261 213,063

23.5 18.5

9

5,466

89,701

16.4

21

5,929

88,342

14.9

Health (2006): physicians 6,931 (1 per 647 persons); hospital beds 11,545 (1 per 388 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births? 2.6. Food: n.a.

scientific equipment 6,203; refined petroleum and petrochemicals 4,826; other electronics 3,066; ships, oil platforms, and related products 2,498; aircraft and spacecraft 2,264; chemicals and chemical products 2,199; printing 1,305;

food and food products, beverages, and tobacco products 1,213. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 38,213,000,000 (34,761,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (324,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 31,094,000 (8,794,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 72,500 (army 69.0%, navy 12.4%, air force 18.6%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 4.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$1,274.

(6,303,000,000).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$127,980,000,000 (U.S.$29,210 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006 in value S$'000,000 Agriculture, quarrying Manufacturing Construction

2005 % of total value

178

0.1

57,989 7,528

27.6 3.6

labour force10

% of labour force10

19,80011 485,100 184,400

0.811 20.5 7.8

Public utilities

3,492

1.6

TE

a

Transp. and commun. 12

28,132

13.4

260,100

11.0

Trade, hotels

35,685

17.0

474,700

20.1

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense,

54,61713

26.013

357,600

15.1

21,378 99214 209,991

10.2 0.514 100.0

485,100 100,50015 2,367,300

20.5 4.215 100.0

Services Other TOTAL

Household income and expenditure (2003). Average household size 3.6; income per household $$58,404 (U.S.$33,523); sources of income: wages and salaries

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1Includes 10 nonelective seats. ?Title per constitution is Head of State. ?Has principal executive authority per constitution. ‘Singapore does not have a local government structure. Five community development councils established in 2001 manage a variety of Social services. *The de facto population figure (as of the 2000 census) includes citizens (2,973,091), noncitizens with permanent residency status (290,118), and temporary residents (754,524). 5The de jure population figure excludes temporary residents. "Based on de jure population. SAquarium fish farming is also an important economic pursuit; Singapore produces 3096 of the world's ornamental fish. ?The last granite quarry closed in 1999. 10Based on household survey. Includes not adequately defined. Includes information services. Includes ownership of dwellings. !4Taxes less imputed bank service charges. Unemployed. !^Imports c.i.f., exports f.o.b. "Length of Singapore portion of Singapore-to-Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, railway. !3January 1. J?Singapore Airlines, Singapore Airlines Cargo, and SilkAir only. 2°Circulation of daily newspapers. ?!Subscribers. ?Nonstudent population only.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistics Singapore http://www.singstat.gov.sg * Ministry of Trade and Industry http://app.mti.gov.sg

696

Britannica World Data

Slovakia

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$3,340,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$52,921,000,000 (U.S.$9,820 per capita).

Official name: Slovenská Republika (Slovak Republic). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Council [150]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bratislava. Official language: Slovak. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Slovak koruna (Sk); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population Regions

area

Capitals

population

sq mi

sq km

2005! estimate

Banska Bystrica Bratislava

Banska Bystrica Bratislava

3,651 793

9,455 2,053

658,368 601,132

Košice Nitra

Košice Nitra

2,607 2,449

6,753 6,343

770,508 709,350

Prešov Trenčín Trnava Zilina TOTAL

Prešov Trenčín Trnava Zilina

3,472

8,993

796,745

1,738 1,602 2,621 18,933

4,501 4,148 6,788 49,0352

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

forces

forces

58,577 7,718 324,682 83,091 101,944

3.6 0.5 19.8 5.1 6.2

226,100

8.5

146,278 249,792 280,336 79,874

8.9 15.3 17.1 49

156,200 392,400 183,400 161,800

5.9 14.8 6.9 6.1

147,440 156,5315 1,636,263

9.0 9.65 100.0

406,600 361,1008 2,654,800

15.3 13.66 100.0

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Sk 24.85; 1 £ = Sk 49.95.

in value Sk ’000,000

100,800 |

3.8

666,400

254

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 1,210; remittances (2006) 424; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,921. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 486; remittances

(2006) 16.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 29.4%, in permanent crops 0.6%, in pasture 16.5%; overall forest area (2005) 40.1%.

601,392 553,198 694,129 5,384,822

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 5,396,000.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

-2,135 7.8%

-2,117 6.9%

—645 1.5%

—1,384 2.4%

-2,387 3.6%

-3,086 3.6%

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 285.0, persons per sq km 110.0. Urban-rural (2006): urban 55.4%; rural 44.6%. Sex distribution (20061): male 48.54%; female 51.46%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 16.7%; 15-29, 24.5%; 30-44, 21.8%; 45-59,

Imports (2005): U.S.$34,292,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 25.8%, mineral fuels 15.4%, road vehicles 12.3%, base and fabricated metals 10.0%). Major import sources (2005): Germany 25.1%; Czech Republic 19.3%; Russia 10.5%;

Population projection: (2010) 5,402,000; (2020) 5,372,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Slovak 85.8%; Hungarian 9.7%; Rom

Exports (2004): U.S.$27,603,000,000 (machinery, apparatus, and parts passenger vehicles 15.4%; iron and steel 9.1%; parts and accessories senger vehicles 7.5%; chemicals and chemical products 5.4%; refined leum 5.2%). Major export destinations (2005): Germany 26.2%;

30.7%: 60-74, 11.3%: 75-84, 4.2%: 85 and over, 0.8%.

(Gypsy)

1.7%; Czech 0.8%; Ruthenian and Ukrainian 0.7%; other 1.3%.

Religious affiliation (2001): Roman Catholic 68.9%; Protestant 9.2%, of which Lutheran 6.9%, Reformed Christian 2.0%; Greek Catholic 4.1%; Eastern Orthodox 0.9%; nonreligious 13.0%; other/unknown 3.9%. Major cities (20051): Bratislava 425,155; Košice 235,006; Prešov 91,767; Nitra 85,742; Zilina 85,268; Banska Bystrica 81,704.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.0 (world avg. 20.3); (2004) within marriage 75.2%; outside of marriage 24.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 0.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2004): 1.25. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 4.8/2.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 70.1 years; female 77.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 520.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 212.8; diseases of the respiratory system 54.0; diseases of the digestive system 51.8; accidents 35.4.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: Sk 466,400,000,000 (tax revenue 46.695, of which taxes on goods and services 37.296; social security contributions 39.996; nontax revenue 10.496; grants 3.196). Expenditures: Sk 515,900,000,000 (social protection 32.4%; general administration 21.8%; health 18.5%; defense 4.5%; education

3.7%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): alfalfa, clover, and corn (maize) for forage 3,837,000, sugar beets 1,370,908, wheat 1,342,693, corn 838,000, barley 641,000, potatoes 263,083, rapeseed 259,650, sunflower seeds 228,606, grapes 52,037; livestock (number of live animals) 1,108,265 pigs, 527,889 cattle; roundwood (2005) 9,302,000

cu m, of which fuelwood 3%; fisheries production (2005) 2,648 (from aquaculture 36%). Mining and quarrying (2005): magnesite 447,700; iron ore (metal content) 300,000; kaolin 85,000. Manufacturing (value added in Sk 000,000; 2004): base? and fabricated metals 54,558; transportation equipment 26,251; electrical equipment 26,146; food products 23,621; machinery

and apparatus 21,935; mineral and nuclear fuels 19,511. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 30,567,000,000 (28,705,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) none (5,151,000); lignite (metric tons; 2005) 2,511,000 ([2004] 3,589,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 279,000 (41,876,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 5,569,000 (2,337,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) 169,000,000 (6,555,000,000). Population economically active (2006): total 2,654,800; activity rate of total population 49.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 68.9%; female 45.8%; unemployed [March 2006-February 2007] 10.0%).

Austria 6.1%; Poland 4.7%.

21.2%; of paspetroCzech

Republic 14.1%; Austria 7.1%; Italy 6.7%; Poland 6.3%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 3,658 km; passenger-km 2,181,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 9,463,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 26,719 mi, 43,000 km (paved 87%). Vehicles (20051): passenger cars 1,337,425; trucks and buses 179,412. Air transport (2006)7: passenger-km 2,596,207,000; metric ton-km cargo 29,000. Communications

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2004

2,285

425

Cellular

2006

4,8939

Landline

2006

1,167

9089 216

Medium

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005 2006 2006

1,929 8948 2,256 3179

358 1668 418 599

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: primary education 1%; complete lower secondary 13%; complete upper secondary 75%; higher 11%. Literacy (2001): total population age 15 and over literate virtually 100%. Education (2005)

Primary (age 6-14)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

15.2

2,304

34,914

532,188

Secondary (age 15-18)

238

7,568

99,758

13.2

Voc., teacher tr.

455

11,123

146,518

13.2

26

10,220

116,195

11.4

Higher

Health (2005): physicians 20,158 (1 per 267 persons); hospital beds 48,622 (1 per 111 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 6.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,592 (vegetable products 73%, animal products 2796); 12896 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 15,223 (army 39.7%, air force 24.0%, headquarters staff 17.2%, support/training 19.1%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$153.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

107.3 108.2

110.9 118.2

120.4 125.7

129.5 138.5

133.0 151.1

138.9 164.1

Household income and expenditure (2003). Average household size 2.9; average annual gross income per household Sk 288,388 (U.S.$7,842); sources of income: wages and salaries 73.9%, transfers 19.6%, self-employment 4.7%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 25.7%, energy 18.8%, transportation 9.0%, recreation 7.5%, clothing and footwear 7.3%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lJanuary 1. @Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Mostly iron and steel and to a lesser extent aluminum. 4^Excludes persons on child-care leave and conscripts. "Bank service charges and indirect taxes. ‘Including 353,400 unemployed. 7SkyEurope and Slovak airlines only, including charter services. 3Circulation of daily newspapers. ?Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bank of Slovakia http://www.nbs.sk * Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic http://www.statistics.sk/webdata/english/index2 a.htm

Nations of the World

Slovenia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Republika Slovenija (Republic of Slovenia). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with two legislative houses (National Council [40]; National Assembly [90]. Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Ljubljana. Official language: Slovene. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€000,000

value

force

force

Agriculture, forestry

606

2.0

93,000

9.0

Mining Manufacturing

135 6,381

0.4 21.0

6,000 266,000

0.6 25.8

Construction

1,659

5.4

57,000

5.5

792

2.6

10,000

1.0

2,084 3,784 5,788 1,613

6.8 12.4 19.0 5.3

54,000 160,000 86,000 59,000

5.2 155 8.3 5.7

3,794 3,8126 30,448

12.5 12.56 100.08

175,000 64,0007 1,030,0002

17.0 6.27 100.08

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

1 £ = €1.481.

Population economically active (2006): total 1,030,000; activity rate 51.4% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 71.3%; female 46.7%; unemployed [April

2006—March 2007] 5.6%).

Area and population area Statistical regions?

Principal cities

sami

population

_sqkm_

20062 _ estimate—

Gorenjska Kranj Gori&ka Nova Gorica Jugovzhodna Slovenija Novo mesto Koroška Ravne na Koroškem Notranjsko-kraška Postojna Obalno Kraško Koper Osrednjeslovenska Ljubljana Podravska Maribor Pomurska Murska Sobota

825 898 653 401 562 403 1,367 838 516

2,137 2,325 1,690 1,041 1,456 1,044 3,540 2,170 1,337

199,000 120,000 140,000 74,000 51,000 106,000 500,000 319,000 122,000

Savinjska Spodnjeposavska

920 342 102 7,827

2,384 885 264 20,273

257,000 70,000 45,000 2,003,000

Zasavska TOTAL

697

Celje Krško Trbovlje

Demography Population (2007): 2,011,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 256.9, persons per sq km 99.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 51.0%; rural 49.0%. Sex distribution (20072): male 49.09%; female 50.91%. Age breakdown (20072): under 15, 14.0%; 15-29, 20.3%; 30-44, 22.5%; 45-59, 22.3%; 60-74, 14.1%; 75-84, 5.6%; 85 and over, 1.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 2,010,000; (2020) 1,981,000. Ethnic composition (2002)4: Slovene 91.2%; Serb 2.2%; Croat 2.0%; Bosniac (ethnic Muslim) 1.8%; other 2.8%. Religious affiliation (2002): Roman Catholic 57.8%, Muslim 2.4%, Orthodox 2.396, Protestant 0.896, nonreligious/atheist 10.296, other/unknown/ unspec-

ified 26.5%. Major cities (20062)5: Ljubljana 266,941; Maribor 111,073; Kranj 52,938; Koper

49,479; Celje 48,607.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.4 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 52.8%; outside of marriage 47.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 0.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.31. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 3.2/1.2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 74.8 years; female 81.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2006): diseases of the circulatory system 359.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 266.1; accidents and violence 79.2; diseases of the respiratory system 61.6.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: SIT 2,739,000,000,000 (tax revenue 51.7%, of which taxes on goods and services 33.1%, personal income tax 9.4%; social security contributions 38.3%; nontax revenue 7.4%; grants 2.6%). Expenditures: SIT 2,846,000,000,000 (social protection 40.8%; health 14.6%; general administration 12.6%; education 12.6%; defense 3.1%).

Public debt (2006): U.S.$9,900,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): silage 1,052,364, corn (maize) 276,106, sugar beets 262,031, wheat 134,449, apples 119,176, potatoes 106,974, grapes 105,486, hops 1,916; livestock (number of live animals) 547,430 pigs, 452,517 cattle; roundwood (2005) 2,732,822

cu m, of which fuelwood 35%; fisheries production (2005) 2,759 (from aquaculture 56%). Mining and quarrying (2005): sand and gravel 11,000,000; salt 125,000. Manufacturing (value added in SIT ’000,000; 2005): chemicals and chemical products 189,495; fabricated metal products 177,195; nonelectrical machinery 153,770; food and food products and beverages 113,309; wood and

wood products (including furniture) 112,501; rubber products and plastic products 91,398. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kkW-hr; 2006) 14,117,000,000 (13,298,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) none (45,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 4,522,000 ([2004] 5,329,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 2,200 ([2004] negligible); petroleum products (metric tons; 2006) none (2,269,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 4,000,000 (1,105,000,000). Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 8.6%, in permanent crops 1.4%, in pasture 15.3%; overall forest area (2005) 62.8%. Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size 2.7; average annual income per household SIT 4,151,377 (U.S.$21,542); sources of income: wages and salaries 53.4%, transfers 27.9%, self-employment 5.1%; expenditure: housing and energy 20.1%, transportation 16.2%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 15.9%, recreation and culture 9.2%. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$38,197,000,000 (U.S.$19,020 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

108.4 111.9

116.5 122.9

123.0 132.1

127.4 139.2

130.6 144.7

133.8 151.6

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,894; remittances (2006) 282; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 732. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 1,019; remittances (2006) 119; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 377.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) €000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—998 4.6%

612 2.7%

-952 4.0%

—1,360 5.1%

—1,408 4.7%

—1,584 4.5%

Imports (2006): €18,341,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 32.5%, of which road vehicles 11.2%; chemicals and chemical products 12.2%; min-

eral fuels 11.2%, of which petroleum and petroleum products 7.0%; iron and steel 5.7%). Major import sources: Germany 20.4%; Italy 18.6%; Austria 12.2%; France 6.2%; Croatia 4.0%.

Exports (2006): €16,757,000,000 (machinery and transport equipment 38.2%, of which road vehicles 13.6%, electrical machinery and apparatus 9.9%; chemicals and chemical products 13.7%, of which medicines and pharmaceuticals 6.9%; furniture and parts 5.1%). Major export destinations: Germany 19.7%; Italy 12.9%; Croatia 8.7%; Austria 8.7%; France 6.8%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 763 mi, 1,228 km; passenger-km 793,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 3,373,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 23,961 mi, 38,562 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 980,261; trucks and buses 72,409. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 1,043,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 3,436,000.

Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2005

559

279

Cellular

2006

1,82011

2006

837

90711 417

Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

808 36210 1,251 26411

404 18110 623 13211

Education and health Educational attainment (2004). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 0.6%; incomplete and complete primary education 28.6%; secondary 6.0%; vocational 50.2%; some higher 5.0%; undergradu-

ate 8.7%; advanced degree 0.9%. Literacy (2006): virtually 100%. Education (2006-07)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7—14)'? Secondary (age 15-18)? Vocational Higher

teachers

students

teacher ratio

802 142

13,225 7,707

167,890 99,860

12.7 13.0

50 63

533 3,584

15,831 91,426

29.7 25.5

Health: physicians (2005) 4,620 (1 per 433 persons); hospital beds (2004) 9,584 (1 per 208 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 3.4. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,756 (vegetable products 65%, animal products 35%); 139% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 6,550 (army 100%). Military expenditure as percentage of GNP U.S.$257.

(2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure

1The Slovenian tolar (SIT) was the former monetary unit; on Jan. 1, 2007, SIT 239.64 = €1. *January 1. 3Actual first-order administration is based on 193 municipalities. 4Prorating 8.9% of population not responding to census questionnaire. »Populations of municipalities. 5Net taxes on products. "Includes 61,000 unemployed and 3,000 not distributed. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. Z^Circulation of daily newspapers. !!Subscribers. 122005—06.

Internet resources for further information: * Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia http://www.stat.si/eng/index.asp * Bank of Slovenia http://www.bsi.si/en

698

Britannica World Data Population economically active (2006): total 201,000; activity rate of total population 41.0% (participation rates: ages 15 and over 68.8%; female 38.3%; unemployed [2003] 15.2%).

Solomon Islands Official name: Solomon Islands. Form of government: constitutional monarchy! with one legislative house (National Parliament [50]). Chief of state: British Monarch represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Honiara. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Solomon Islands dollar (SI$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 US.$ = SI$7.63; 1 £ = SI$15.34.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

Central Islands

area

Capitals

sq mi

Tulagi

population sq km

2007 estimates

237

615

26,100

1,482

3,837

24,100

Guadalcanal

Honiara

2,060

5,336

73,000

Isabel Makira-Ulawa Malaita

Buala Kira Kira Auki

1,597 1,231 1,631

4,136 3,188 4,225

24,500 37,700 149,200

Rennell and Bellona Temotu Western

Tigoa Santa Cruz Gizo

259 334 2,114

671 865 5,475

2,800 22,800 75,800

Capital Territory Honiara

—

9

TOTAL

22

10,954

28,370

59,100

495,000?

Population (2007): 495,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 45.2, persons per sq km 17.4. Urban-rural (2005-06)3: urban 16.0%; rural 84.0%. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.53%; female 48.47%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 40.0%; 15-29, 28.7%; 30-44, 17.9%; 45-59, 8.5%; 60-74, 3.9%; 75 and over, 1.0%.

Population projection: (2010) 531,000; (2020) 647,000. Doubling time: 27 years. Ethnic composition (2002): Melanesian 93.0%; Polynesian 4.0%; Micronesian 1.5%; other 1.5%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Protestant c. 7096, of which Anglican c. 3296, Adventist c. 10%; Roman Catholic c. 18926; traditional beliefs c. 596; other c. 796.

Major towns (2004): Honiara (on Guadalcanal) 57,600; Gizo (in the New Georgia Islands) 6,200; Auki (on Malaita) 4,700; Buala (on Santa Isabel)

2,900.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 30.0 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 3.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 26.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.78. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): n.a./n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 70.4 years; female 75.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 157, of which cerebrovascular diseases 47, ischemic heart disease 46; respiratory diseases 45; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 43; about 2096 of the population has malaria, one of the world's highest rates.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: $1$946,200,000 (tax revenue 73.096, of which VAT 17.9%, logging duties 13.6%, import duties 9.3%, corporate tax 8.2%; nontax revenue 13.9%; grants 13.1%). Expenditures: SI$911,100,000 (current expenditure 90.5%, of which wages 27.3%, debt service 13.9%; capital expenditure 9.5%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$148,100,000. Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$411,000,000 (U.S.$849 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003

Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transportation and communications Trade, hotels Finance Pub. admin., defense

Services

}

Other TOTAL

2001 —38.2 28.9%

2002 -11.3 8.9%

% of total value 31.9

—

—

labour forces 14,938

% of labour forces 28.7

16,100

4.2

1,476

28

3,200

0.8

1,397

27

15,800

4.1

469

0.9

11,800 68,100 29,100

3.0 17.6 7.5

24

119,700

30.9

1,246 3,274 806 6,758

vus 100.0

}

6.3 1.5 13.0

21,757

41.7

Eom 52,121

S 100.0

Household income and expenditure (2005-06)3. Average household size 6.2; average annual income per household U.S.$3,129; sources of income: home production® 36.9%, wages and salaries 26.6%, transfers 8.8%, self-employment 7.8%; expenditure: food 53.5%, housing 15.8%, transportation 6.8%,

education 3.8%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2003 —19.6 11.7%

2004 -24.7 11.3%

2005 -82.6 28.7%

2006 —130.2 35.1%

Imports (2006): U.S.$250,613,000 (machinery and transport equipment 24.7%; petroleum [all forms] 21.7%; food 14.1%; construction materials 10.0%; chemicals 5.296). Major import sources: Australia 25.3%; Singapore 23.4%; Japan 7.8%; New Zealand 5.0%; Fiji 4.2%. Exports (2006): U.S.$120,393,000 (timber 70.2%; fish products 15.9%; palm oil 3.3%; cacao beans 3.3%; gold? 1.9%). Major export destinations: China 45.7%; South Korea 14.0%; Japan 8.5%; Thailand 4.4%; The Philippines

4.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2007): total length 1,500 km (paved 2.7%). Vehicles (1993): passenger cars 2,052; trucks and buses 2,574. Air transport (2004)9: passenger-km 76,733,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,259,000.

Televisions

Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

53

11

2005 2005

6.0 74

13 16

units Medium

date

PCs

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

22

47

Dailies Internet users

2006 2006

4.010 8.0

8.310 17

Broadband

2005

0.411

0.811

Education and health Educational attainment (2005-06)3. Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no schooling/unknown 15.6%; primary education 46.7%; secondary 32.8%; vocational 4.0%; higher 0.9%. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 76.6%. Education (2005)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-16) Voc., teacher tr.13 }

Higher?

teachers

students

teacher ratio

52012

2,412

92,091

38.2

2312

1,865

22,487

12.1

S

9,560

1

Health (2005): physicians 89 (1 per 5,293 persons); hospital beds 691 (1 per 682 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 20.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,056 (vegetable products 90%, animal products 10%); 116% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military

2004

123,500

eae 387,300

2006 160.0

Balance of trade (current prices)

Medium

Vital statistics

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

2005 148.1

Foreign trade?

Communications

Mining

2004 138.2

which fuelwood 20%; fisheries production 29,597 (from aquaculture, none); aquatic plants production (2005) 120 (from aquaculture 100%). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 10 kg?. Manufacturing (2006): coconut oil 59,000, vegetable oils and fats (2002) 50,000, copra 21,214, palm oil 5,427, cocoa 3,828. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 68,000,000 (55,000,000); coal, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (57,000); natural gas, none (none). Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2.0; remittances (2006) 2.0; foreign direct disinvestment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) -3. 0: official development assistance (2005) 198. Disbursements for (US. $000, ,000): tourism (2005) 5.0; remittances (2006) 6.0; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.6%, in permanent crops 2.1%, in pasture 1.4%; overall forest area (2005) 77.6%.

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography

in value SI$'0004

2003 129.5

coconuts 276,000, oil palm fruit 162,290, sweet potatoes 88,723, taro 40,000, yams 29,663, cacao beans 3,785; livestock (number of live animals) 53,000 pigs, 13,500 cattle, 230,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 692,000 cu m, of

Taro

Choiseul

2002 117.7

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006):

Area and population Provinces

2001 1069

Total active duty personnel (2007): none; c. 200-300 military troops and police in an Australian-led multinational regional intervention force (from mid2003) maintain civil and political order.

1A federal system of government is expected with the implementation of a planned new constitution in 2008. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 3Based on the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2005-06 comprising 3,822 households. ^At 1992 factor cost. 5Persons employed in the monetary sector only. 5Mostly food preparations and handicrafts. "Although small-scale artisanal production continued, production at the country's only gold mine was suspended from 2000 because of lawlessness, but it resumed in 2007. 5Imports c.i.f; exports f.o.b. ?Solomon Airlines only. 1°Circulation of the one daily newspaper. HSubscribers. 121994. 132002; vocational and teacher training are carried out at the College of Higher Education.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Solomon Islands http://www.cbsi.com.sb * Solomon Islands National Statistics Office http://www.spc.int/prism/country/sb/stats

Nations of the World

Somalia!

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Official name: Soomaaliya (Somali) (Somalia). Form of government: transitional regime? with one legislative body (Transitional Federal Assembly

Agriculture Mining Public utilities

|

65.0 09 T

70

3.4

Construction Transp. and commun.

119 155

5.7 7.4

Trade, restaurants Finance Pub. admin., defense

170

8.1

197

94

Services Other TOTAL

Area and population

area

population

Regions

Principal cities

sq mi

sq km

1980 estimate

Bakool Banaadir

Xuddur Mogadishu (Muqdisho)

10,000 400

27,000 1,000

148,700 520,100

Boosaaso

27,000

70,000

222,300

Bay

Baydhabo

15,000

39,000

451,000

Galguduud Gedo Hiiraan Jubbada Dhexe Jubbada Hoose Mudug? Nugaalé Sanaag” Shabeellaha Dhexe Shabeellaha Hoose Togdheer?

Dhuusamarreeb Garbahaarrey Beledweyne Bu'aale Kismaayo Gaalkacyo Garoowe Ceerigaabo Jawhar Marka Burao

17,000 12,000 13,000 9,000 24,000 27,000 19,000 21,000 8,000 10,000 16,000

43,000 32,000 34,000 23,000 61,000 70,000 50,000 54,000 22,000 25,000 41,000

255,900 235,000 219,300 147,800 272,400 311,200 112,200 216,500 352,000 570,700 383,900

45,000 637,000

655,000 5,074,000

Hargeysa

17,000 246,0008

% of total value

1,357 19

Manufacturing

Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister?. Capital: Mogadishu. Official languages: Somali; Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: Somali shilling (Shilin Soomaali; So.Sh.); valuation4, 5.

Woqooyi Galbeed? TOTAL

2001-02

in value U.S.$'000,000

[2753]).

Barié

699

2,088?

labour force }

% of labour force

2,617,000

100.08

67.0

469,000

12.0

820,000

21.0

ds 3,906,000

os 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances (2005) c. 1,000; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 8.8; official development assistance (2005) 236. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism, n.a.; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 1.7%, in permanent crops 0.04%, in pasture 68.5%; overall forest area (2005) 11.4%.

Foreign trade!2 Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

—118 31.6%

-105 21.6%

-166 32.8%

—267 60.3%

-257 57.0%

—302 61.4%

Imports (2003): U.S.$397,000,000 (agricultural products 26.5%, of which sugar 13.5%, cereals 6.4%; unspecified 73.5%). Major import sources (2004): Djibouti 31%; Kenya 14%; India 10%; Brazil 6%; Oman 5%.

Exports (2003): U.S.$95,000,000 (agricultural products 45.1%, of which goats and sheep 25.6%, bovines 7.8%; unspecified 54.9%). Major export destinations (2004): Thailand 29%; United Arab Emirates 24%; Yemen 15%; India 8%; Oman 6%.

Demography Population (2007): 8,699,0009. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 35.4, persons per sq km 13.7. Urban-rural (2006): urban 36.5%; rural 63.5%. Sex distribution (2002): male 51.47%; female 48.53%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 44.1%; 15-29, 27.1%; 30-44, 16.1%; 45-59, 8.5%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75-84, 0.6%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 9,486,000; (2020) 12,291,000. Doubling time: 24 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Somali 92.4%; Arab 2.2%; Afar 1.3%; other 4.1%. Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim (nearly all Sunni) c. 99%; other c. 1%. Major cities (1990): Mogadishu 1,320,000!9; Hargeysa (in Somaliland; 1997) 300,000; Kismaayo 90,000; Berbera (in Somaliland) 70,000; Marka 62,000.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2003): total length 13,650 mi, 22,000 km (paved 12%). Vehicles: passenger cars, n.a.; trucks and buses, n.a. Air transport (2003)!3: passenger arrivals 50,096, passenger departures 41,979; cargo unloaded 3,817 metric tons, cargo loaded 152 metric tons. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

108

14

2005 2005

50015 100

6115 12

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

75 4.514 94 oa

9.1 0.514 11 oa

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 45.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 28.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 6.84. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 46.4 years; female 49.9 years. Major causes of death as percentage of all deaths (2001-02): sickness 61.1%; old age 19.0%; accidents 11.0%, of which land mines 3.6%; war-related 4.3%;

pregnancy/childbirth-related 4.0%.

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2002): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 19.2%; males literate 25.1%; females literate 13.1%. Education (2003-04)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-14) Secondary (age 15-18)

1,172 sss

teachers 9,088 a

students

teacher ratio

285,574 PS

31.4 s

Voc., teacher tr.

Higher's

National economy Budget (1991). Revenue: So.Sh. 151,453,000,000 (domestic revenue sources [principally indirect taxes and import duties] 60.4%; external grants and transfers 39.6%). Expenditures: So.Sh. 141,141,000,000 (general services 46.9%; economic and social services 31.2%; debt service 7.0%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,882,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 200,000, corn (maize) 190,000, sorghum 150,000, cassava 85,000, bananas 38,000, sesame seed 30,000, dry beans 18,000, dates 12,000, coconuts 12,000, oranges 8,700, lemons and limes 8,300, sweet potatoes 7,000, grapefruit 6,200, other tree/bush products include khat, frankincense, and myrrh; livestock (number of live animals) 13,100,000 sheep, 12,700,000 goats, 7,000,000 camels, 5,350,000 cattle; roundwood 10,912,897 cu m, of which fuelwood 99%; fisheries production 30,000 (from aquaculture, none). Mining and quarrying (2004): gypsum 1,500; salt 1,00011; garnet and opal are mined

in Somaliland. Manufacturing (value added in So.Sh. 000,000; 1988): food 794; cigarettes and matches 562; hides and skins 420; paper and printing 328; plastics 320; chemicals 202; beverages 144. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 286,000,000 (286,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) n.a. (n.a.); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2001-02): total 3,906,000; activity rate of total population 52.6% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 56.4%; female, n.a.; unemployed 47.4%). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999

2000

Consumer price index

100.0

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Household income and expenditure (2001-02). Average household size 5.8; income per household U.S.$226; sources of income: self-employment 50%, remittances 22.5%, wages 14%, rent/aid 13.5%; expenditure, n.a.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,313,000,000 (U.S.$274 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Health (1997): physicians 265 (1 per 25,032 persons); hospital beds 2,786 (1 per 2,381 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005) 116.7. Food: n.a.

Military Total active duty personnel: no national army from 199117. 18, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP: n.a.

1Proclamation of the “Republic of Somaliland” in May 1991 on territory corresponding to the former British Somaliland (which unified with the former Italian Trust Territory of Somalia to form Somalia in 1960) had not received international recognition as of December 2007. This entity represented about a quarter of Somalia's territory. ? “New transitional government” from October 2004 (with its legislature based in Baidoa from February 2006 through December 2007) lacked effective control at the end of 2007. 3Planned number. ‘The So.Sh. had limited availability and circulation in 2007; 1 U.S.$ = c. 23,000 So.Sh. (1 £ = c. 45,000 So.Sh.) at the “black market" rate of

February 2007. 5Somaliland's sole legal tender from 1995 is the Somaliland shilling; in July 2006 1 U.S.$ = 6,500 Somaliland shillings. ‘Part of “autonomous region” of Puntland from 1998. 7Part of “Republic of Somaliland” from 1991. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2006 Revision) including Somaliland. !°Estimated urban agglomeration, 2005. !!'The Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 disrupted salt production. It was unclear in late 2007 if production had resumed. Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. Four Somaliland airports only. M4Circulation of daily newspapers. PSubscribers. “The (public) Somali National University closed in 1991; a small private university opened in 1997. Four small universities operated in Somaliland in 2004. Ethiopian forces backing the central government were fighting Islamist forces from December 2006 to October 2007. 18AU peacekeeping troops (September 2007) 1,600 (of planned 7,000).

Internet resources for further information: * World Bank and UNDP Survey on Somalia http://www.so.undp.org

700

Britannica World Data

South Africa

4

Official name: Republic of South Africa (English). Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (National Council of Provinces [90]; National Assembly [400]). Head of state and government: President. Capitals (de facto): Pretorial (executive); Bloemfontein? (judicial); Cape Town (legislative). Official languages: 3. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: rand (R); valuation

Indian Ocean

area Capitals Bisho Bloemfontein Johannesburg Pietermaritzburg Polokwane Nelspruit

North West

Mafikeng

Northern Cape Western Cape

Kimberley Cape Town

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

34,441

94,322 251,596 33,400 31,029 135,713 197,252 285,757 204,560

2.3 6.2 16.5 22 2.0 8.9 12.9 18.8 13.4

170,3038 1,523, 25410

11.28 100.0

Services

Area and population

Eastern Cape Free State Gauteng KwaZulu-Natal Limpopo Mpumalanga

in value R '000,000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

84.882

Other TOTAL

14.52.

Provinces

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = R 7.23: 1£=R

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.0; expenditure (2005): food, beverages, and tobacco 25.8%, transportation and communications 16.9%, household furnishings 9.7%, housing 9.6%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$241,635,000,000 (U.S.$5,005 per capita).

"statistical discrepancy" TOTAL

population 2007 estimate

sq mi

sq km

65,475 49,993 6,568 35,560 47,842 30,691

169,580 129,480 17,010 92,100 123,910 79,490

6,906,200 2,965,600 9,688,100 10,014,500 5,402,900 3,536,300

44,911

116,320

3,394,200

139,703 49,950

361,830 129,370

1,102,200 4,839,800

— 470,6934

— 1,219,0904

900 47,850,700

56

925,000

5.5

411,000 1,706,000 935,000 100,000 616,000 3,024,000 1,296,000

2.4 10.2 5.6 0.6 S 18.0 Tr

3,259,000

19.4

4,516,0009 16,788,000

26.99 100.0

}

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 7,335; remittances (2006) 735. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 3,374; remittances (2006) 1,067. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 12.1%, in permanent crops 0.8%, in pasture 69.1%; overall forest area (2005) 7.6%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

45,255 9.2%

34,756 8.1%

43,430 4.6%

—281 0.3%

—1,204 1.1%

6,175 4.6%

Imports (2003): U.S.$34,543,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery 13.8%, chemical

Demography

products 10.7%, crude petroleum 10.4%, road vehicles 7.1%, telecommuni-

Population (2007): 47,851,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 101.6, persons per sq km 39.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 59.28%; rural 40.72%. Sex distribution (2007): male 49.24%; female 50.76%.

7.0%; China 6.9%; U.K. 6.8%; Saudi Arabia 6.5%; Japan 5.9%.

cations equipment 5.0%).Major import sources (2005): Germany 14.9%; U.S.

Exports (2003): U.S.$36,230,000,000!2 (gold 12.7%, iron and steel 10.7%, platinum-group

Age breakdown (2007): under 15, 31.9%; 15-29, 29.2%; 30-44, 19.3%; 45-59, 11.7%; 60-74, 6.3%; 75 and over, 1.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 49,154,000; (2020) 52,706,000. Ethnic composition (2001): black 78.4%, of which Zulu 23.8%, Xhosa 17.6%,

Pedi 9.4%, Tswana 8.2%, Sotho 7.9%, Tsonga 4.4%, Swazi 2.7%, other black 44%; white 9.6%; Coloured 8.9%; Asian 2.5%; other 0.6%.

Religious affiliation (2005): independent

Christian 37.1%,

of which Zion

Christian 9.5%; Protestant 26.1%; traditional beliefs 8.9%; Roman Catholic 6.7%; Muslim 2.5%; Hindu 2.4%; nonreligious 3.0%; other/unknown 13.3%.

Major urban agglomerations (2005): Johannesburg 3,288,000; Cape Town 3,103,000; Ekurhuleni (East Rand® 3,043,000; Ethekwini (Durban) 2,643,000; Tshwane (Pretoria!) 1,282,000.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 18.5 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 21.3 (world avg. 8.6). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 3.9/0.7. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2007): 2.69. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 49.0 years; female 52.5 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 18.8% (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): infectious and parasitic diseases c. 286; circulatory diseases c. 170; respiratory diseases c. 165; accidents and injuries c. 112; malignant neoplasms (cancers) c. 73.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: R 411,085,100,000 (personal income taxes 30.6%, VAT 28.0%, company income taxes 23.5%).Expenditures: R 417,819,200,000 (transfer to provinces 36.0%, debt payments 12.7%, police and prisons 9.0%, defense 5.4%, education 3.0%, health 2.4%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$11,662,000,000. Production (in metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugarcane 20,275,400, corn (maize) 6,935,000, wheat 2,105,000, potatoes 1,863,000, grapes 1,550,000, oranges 1,334,000; livestock (number of live animals) 24,983,000 sheep, 13,790,000 cattle; roundwood (2005) 33,071,100 cu

m, of which fuelwood 36%; fisheries production (2005) 820,750 (from aquaculture, negligible); aquatic plants production (2005) 9,619 (from aquaculture 30%). Mining and quarrying (value of sales in R ’000,000,000; 2005): platinum-group metals 38.4; coal 35.6; gold 24.6; ferrous metals 11.4; rough diamond production 15,766,000 carats. Manufacturing (value of sales in R 000,000; 2005): food products and beverages 153,496; transport equipment 137,870; chemicals 81,240; base metals 57,886; refined petroleum 57,697; fab-

ricated metals 41,442. Energy production (consumption)*: electricity (KW-hr;

2005) 244,920,000,000 (223,257,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2005) 244,500,000

([2004] 180,287,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 4,800,000 (206,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 23,825,000 (19,750,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2004) 1,978,000,000 (1,978,000,000).

Population economically active (2005): total 16,788,000; activity rate of total population 35.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 56.5%; female 45.7%; unemployed 26.7%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001 — 1057

2002 115.4

2003 122.1

2004 123.8

2005 128.1

2006 134.0

8.8%,

road

vehicles

8.6%,

food

6.6%,

nonelectrical

machinery 6.5%). Major export destinations (2005): U-K. 11.1%; U.S. 9.1%; Japan 8.3%; Germany 6.3%; China 5.2%; Italy 4.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: route length (2005) 20,872 km; (2001) passenger-km 3,930,000,000; (2001) metric ton-km cargo 106,786,000,000. Roads (2002):

length 362,099 km (paved 20%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 4,574,972; trucks and buses 2,112,601. Air transport (2006)13: passenger-km 25,501,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,228,000,000.

Communications Medium Televisions

Vital statistics

metals

Telephones Cellular

Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

9,134

199

2005

33,96015

2005

4,729

72415

101

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

3,966 1,40814 5,100 16515

85 3014 109 3.515

2005 2004 2005 2005

Education and health Educational attainment (2006). Percentage of population age 20 and over having: no formal schooling 10.4%; some primary education 21.1%; complete primary/some secondary 34.0%; complete secondary 24.9%; higher 9.1%. Literacy (2005): total population age 15 and over literate 87.1%. Education (2003) Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-17)

student/ schools'®

teachers

students

teacher ratio

17,197 10,4287;

220,950 141,648

7,470,476 4,186,882

33.8 29.6

7,398

259,959

35.1

43,023

717,793

16.7

Voc., teacher tr.

50

Higher

3618

Health: physicians (2006) 33,220 (1 per 1,427 persons); hospital beds (2004) 153,465 (1 per 303 persons); infant mortality rate (2007) 45.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,933 (vegetable products 87%, animal products 13%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 62,334 (army 66.3%, navy 9.3%, air force 14.7%, military health service 9.7%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$76. Name ipality (North Xhosa; Islands

of larger municipality including Pretoria is Tshwane. 2Name of larger municincluding Bloemfontein is Mangaung. *Afrikaans; English; Ndebele; Pedi Sotho); Sotho (South Sotho); Swazi; Tsonga; Tswana (West Sotho); Venda; Zulu. 4Area of provincial South Africa; total area including Prince Edward equals 471,011 sq mi (1,219,912 sq km). 5Based on total area. °Within

Ekurhuleni

municipality.

72004

data

include

Botswana,

Lesotho,

Namibia,

and

Swaziland. Taxes on products less subsidies on products. Includes 4,487,000 unemployed. Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. Excluding gold ore. SAA only. Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 162002. Includes combined and intermediate. !8Public institutions only.

Internet resources for further information: * South African Reserve Bank http://www.reservebank.co.za * Statistics South Africa http://www.statssa.gov.za

Nations of the World — 701

Spain

(2005): slate 1,200,000; sepiolite 800,000; fluorspar 133,495; gold 5,500 kg.

Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2003): food products 13,909;

chemicals and chemical products 10,881; motor vehicles and parts 10,009; bricks, cement, and ceramics 9,426; nonelectrical machinery 7,785; fabricat-

Official name: Reino de Espafia (Kingdom of Spain). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (Senate [2591]; Congress of Deputies [350]). Chief of state: King. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Madrid. Official language: Castilian Spanish?. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: euro (€); valuation

ed metal products 7,721. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kWhr; 2006) 275,575,000,000

11,572,000 (37,552,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 6,820,000 (6,820,000);

crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 863,190,000 (457,438,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2006-07) 56,376,000 ([2004] 58,547,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2006) 80,376,000 (35,739,000,000).

Public debt (December 2005): U.S.$355,341,000,000. Population economically active (2006)5: total 21,584,800; activity rate of tota population 49.2% (participation rates: ages 16-64, 71.9%; female 41.9%;

unemployed 8.596).

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = €0.74;

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

1 £ = €1.48.

Consumer price index Earnings index

Area and population Autonomous communities Andalucia Aragón Asturias Baleares (Balearic Islands) Canarias (Canary Islands) Cantabria

Castilla-La Mancha i h

arain

population:

sq km

2006? estimate

87,590 47,697 10,604

7,975,672 1,277,471 1,076,896

4,992

1,001,062

7,447

1,995,833

5,253

.area Autonomous communities Galicia La Rioja Madrid Murcia Navarra País Vasco Valenciana

568,091

79409

1,9321261

Castilla y León

93,813

2,523,020

Extremadura

41,634

1,086,373

Cataluña

32,091

7,134,697

population,

sq km

2006? estimate

29,574 5,029 8,022 11,313 9,801 7,089 23,255

2,767,524 306,377 6,008, 183 1,370,306 601,874 2,133,684 4,806,908

19

75,861

i

vaus

50d sue

3 o

^

:

r

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

103.6 103.8

106.8 108.1

110.0 112.7

113.4 118.8

117.2 1224

121.3 128.1

Foreign trade® Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 —43,019 14.3%

Barcelona 1,605,602 (urban agglomeration 5,309,404); Seville 704,414; Zaragoza 649,181; Malaga 560,631.

2004 —61,486 17.3%

2005 -77,813 20.2%

2006 —89,687 20.9%

ery 12.0%; mineral fuels 11.2%; chemicals and chemical products 9.8%; elec-

Population projection: (2010) 46,572,000; (2020) 47,953,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Spaniard 44.9%; Catalonian 28.0%; Galician 8.2%; Basque 5.5%; Aragonese 5.0%; Rom (Gypsy) 2.0%; other 6.4%4. Religious affiliation (2006): Roman Catholic c. 77%, of which practicing weekly c. 19%; Muslim c. 2.5%; Protestant c. 1%; other (mostly nonreligious) (urban agglomeration

2002 2003 —41,9/5 | —46,279 13.8% 14.4%

Imports (2004): €208,410,703,600 (road vehicles 17.0%; nonelectrical machin-

Age breakdown (20073): under 15, 14.396; 15-29, 19.796; 30-44, 25.396; 45-59, 18.9%; 60-74, 13.6%; 75-84, 6.2%; 85 and over, 2.0%.

3,128,600

2001

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006—07) 54,435; remittances (2006) 8,863; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 28,246. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2006-07) 18,043; remittances (2006) 11,004; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 38,531. Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size 2.9; average annual net income per household (2004) €21,551 (U.S.$26,758); expenditure: housing 26.5%, food 17.8%, household expenses 7.5%, clothing/ footwear 6.5%.

€000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 232.6, persons per sq km 89.8. Urban-rural (2005): urban 76.7%; rural 23.3%. Sex distribution (20073): male 49.42%; female 50.58%.

c. 19.5%.

2000

ie

Autonomous cities Ceuta

Demography Population (2007): 45,321,000.

Major cities (2006): Madrid

(256,120,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2006)

6,008,183);

Valencia

805,304;

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.7 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 73.4%; outside of marriage 26.6%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.3 (world avg. 8.6). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2006) 4.7/(2005) 1.1. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.35. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 80.0 years; female 83.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): diseases of the circulatory system 285.8; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 225.6; diseases of the respiratory system 106.0; diseases of the digestive system 44.2.

trical machinery 8.9%). Major import sources: Germany

16.0%; France

15.3%; Italy 9.1%; U.K. 6.1%; China 4.1%; The Netherlands, Belgium, and

Luxembourg 4.1%. Exports (2004): €146,924,722,500 (road vehicles 23.3%; food 11.8%, of which fruits and vegetables 6.0%; chemicals and chemical products 8.5%; nonelectrical machinery 8.1%). Major export destinations: France 19.4%; Germany 11.6%; Portugal 9.8%; Italy 9.0%; U.K. 9.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 15,212 km; passenger-km 22,105,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 11,599,000,000. Roads (2003): length 677,646 km (paved 99%). Vehicles (20073): cars 20,909,000; trucks, vans, and buses 4,945,000. Air transport (2006-07): passenger-km 78,501,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,124,499.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

24,228

2006 2006

46,15210 18,385

564 1,02810 409

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

12,000 4,2409 18,578 6,65510

269 972 414 14810

Education and health National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: €129,546,000,000 (direct taxes 55.6%; indirect taxes 34.8%; transfers 4.3%; other 5.3%). Expenditures: €174,976,000,000 (current expenditures 64.9%, of which wages and salaries 12.6%, debt service 10.0%; capital expenditures 10.0%, of which transfers 4.6%; other 25.1%).

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$1,208,184,000,000 (U.S.$27,530 per capita). 2006

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

€000,000

value

forces

forces

26,178 2,108

34 0.3

944,300 66,400

4.4 0.3

Manufacturing

123,164

14.7

3,106,900

14.4

Public utilities

13,892

1.7

118,800

0.5

Construction Transp. and commun.

81,141 55,490

9.7 6.6

2,542,900 1,158,200

11.8 5.4

Trade and hotels

140,105

16.7

4,386,200

20.3

Finance, real estate

157,029

18.8

2,329,900

10.8

109,282

13.0

3,865,500

17.9

45,481

5.4

1,221,600

5.7

Agriculture Mining

Services Pub. admin., defense

Other TOTAL

83,6876 837,557

10.06 100.0

1,844,1007 21,584,800

8.57 100.0

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 27.3%, in permanent crops 9.9%, in pasture 21.2%; overall forest area (2005) 35.9%. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): alfalfa 11,000,000, barley 8,318,400, grapes 6,401,500, sugar beets 6,045,400, wheat 5,575,800, olives 5,032,300, tomatoes 3,679,300, corn (maize) 3,460,800, oranges 3,210,900, potatoes 2,501,800, tangerines, mandarins, and clementines 2,000,000, chilies and peppers 1,074,000, sunflower seeds 606,800; livestock (number of live animals) 25,131,000 pigs, 22,513,970 sheep, 6,464,000 cattle; roundwood 15,531,798 cu m, of which fuelwood 14%; fisheries pro-

duction (2005) 1,070,730 (from aquaculture 21%). Mining and quarrying

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2007-08)

Primary (age 6-11)

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 16 and over having: no formal schooling 12.2%; primary education 26.1%; secondary 47.8%; undergraduate degree 6.5%; graduate degree 7.4%. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 97.9%; males 98.7%; females 97.2%.

Secondary (age 12—17)1? Universities

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

12,428

623974

«2,603,175

1391

8,538 74

; 107,905

2,982,200 1,381,749

11.111 12.8

Health (2006): physicians (2005) 199,123 (1 per 223 persons); hospital beds3 159,215 (1 per 282 persons); infant mortality rate 3.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,169 (vegetable products 67%, animal products 33%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 147,255 (army 64.9%, navy 13.2%, air force 15.5%, other 6.4%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$268. lIncludes 51 indirectly elected Spanish official language of the ing Euskera [Basque], Catalan, ing Autonomous Communities.” which Moroccan

seats. ?The constitution states that “Castilian is the State,” but that “all other Spanish languages (includand Galician) will also be official in the correspond3January 1. 4Foreign residents (2007): 4.5 million, of

13%, Romanian

12%, Ecuadorian

9%. 5Excludes conscripts. "Taxes

less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. 7Includes 1,837,100 unemployed. 3SImports c.if; exports f.o.b. ?Circulation of daily newspapers. !°Subscribers. 112004. ZIncludes vocational.

Internet resources for further information: * Banco de Espaíia http://www.bde.es * National Institute of Statistics http://www.ine.es/welcoing.htm

702

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$27,026,000,000 (U.S.$1,407 per capita).

Sri Lanka

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: $ri Lanka Prajatantrika Samajavadi Janarajaya (Sinhala); Ilangai Jananayaka Socialisa Kudiarasu (Tamil) (Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (Parliament [225]). Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capitals: Colombo (executive and judicial); Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte (Colombo suburb; legislative). Official languages: Sinhala; Tamil. Official religion: none2. Monetary unit: Sri Lankan rupee (LKR); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

2006

Arabian Sea

Badulla Batticaloa Colombo Galle Gampaha Hambantota Jaffna Kalutara Kandy Kegalle Kilinochchi

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

2,306,000 B 5 1,385,000 458,000 485,000 1,043,000 234,000

28.3 z 8 17.0 5.6 6.0 12.8 29

TED 000"

ee

623,0009 8,141,00010

7.79 100.0

328,002 46,202 72,483 564,988 216,833 344,909 672,052 364,967 257,837

11.2 1.6 25 19.3 7.4 11.8 23.0 12.5 8.8

— 2,924,172

— 100.0

55,809

Other TOTAL

19

}

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$9,812,000,000.

Population economically active (2006): total 7,602,000; activity rate 38.296 (participation rates: ages 15-59 [2000] 60.6%; female 36.3%; unemployed 6.5%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

Area and population

Ampara Anuradhapura

% of total

Services

1 US.$ = LKR 113.25; 1£= LKR 227.66.

Districts

in value LKR '000,000

Agriculture Mining Public utilities Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Indian Ocean

2005

area

population

sq km

2006 estimate

4,415 7,179

627,000 791,000

2,861 2,854 699 1,652 1,387 2,609 1,025 1,598 1,940 1,693 1,279

837,000 556,000 2,421,000 1,040,000 2,125,000 547,000 595,000 1,102,000 1,361,000 797,000 142,000

Districts Kurunegala Mannar

Matale Matara Monaragala Mullaitivu Nuwara Eliya Polonnaruwa Puttalam Ratnapura Trincomalee Vavuniya TOTAL

area

population

sq km

2006 estimate

4,816 1,996

1,993 1,283 5,639 2,617 1,741 3,293 3,072 3,275 2,727 1,967 65,610

1,511,000 100,000

471,000 804,000 420,000 145,000 735,000 382,000 745,000 1,073,000 395,000 164,000 19,886,000?

Demography Population (2007): 20,102,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 793.5, persons per sq km 3064. Urban-rural (2005): urban 15.196; rural 84.996. Sex distribution (2005)4: male 50.82%; female 49.18%. Age breakdown (2005)4: under 15, 24.1%; 15-29, 26.6%; 30-44, 22.6%; 45-59,

Consumer price index Minimum wage index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

114.2 104.9

125.1 112.7

133.0 120.5

143.0 123.3

159.7

181.5 “iss

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 14.2%, in permanent crops 15.5%, in pasture 6.8%; overall forest area (2005) 29.9%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) LKR '000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—102,591 10.6%

—134,706 13.0%

—148,324 13.0%

-227,171 16.3%

-253,083 16.5%

—-350,110 19.6%

Imports (2005): LKR 891,359,000,000 (petroleum 18.7%; textiles [mostly yarns and fabrics] 17.3%; machinery and equipment 9.7%; food and beverages 8.596; building materials 5.796). Major import sources (2004): India 18.096; Singapore 8.7%; Hong Kong 7.7%; China 5.7%; Iran 5.2%; Japan 5.1%. Exports (2005): LKR 638,276,000,000 (textiles, clothing, and accessories 45.6%; tea 12.8%; sapphires, other precious and semiprecious stones, and jewelry 6.3%; rubber tires, tubes, and medical gloves 6.2%). Major export destinations (2004): U.S. 32.4%; U.K. 13.5%; India 6.8%; Belg.—Lux. 5.1%; Germany 4.7%.

16.0%; 60-74, 8.0%; 75-84, 2.3%; 85 and over, 0.4%.

Transport and communications

7.4%; other 2.4%.

Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 1,449 km; passenger-km 4,684,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 134,000,000. Roads (2003): total length 97,286 km (paved 8196). Vehicles (200512): passenger cars 293,747; trucks and buses 453,61013. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 8,796,000,000; metric ton-km

Population projection: (2010) 20,666,000; (2020) 22,202,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Sinhalese 72.4%; Tamil 17.8%; Sri Lankan Moor Religious affiliation (2005): Buddhist c. 70%; Hindu c. 15%; Christian (mostly Roman Catholic) c. 8%; Muslim (nearly all Sunni) c. 7%. Major cities (2004): Colombo 669,700 (greater Colombo 2,490,300); DehiwalaMount Lavinia 218,8005; Moratuwa 184,8005; Jaffna 172,300; 127,200; Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte 120,8005; Kardy 114,800.

Negombo

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.8 (world avg. 8.6). Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 9.9/n.a. Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.11. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 72.5 years; female 76.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 252; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 101; diseases of the respiratory system 82; injuries, accidents, and violence 81.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: LKR 584,783,000,000 (tax revenue 57.696, of which VAT 23.7%, excises 13.2%; domestic borrowings 21.2%; foreign loans/grants 13.8%; nontax revenue 7.4%). Expenditures: LKR 584,783,000,000 (interest 10.9%; defense 10.5%; health

7.7%; transport and communication 7.4%; tsunami expenditure 4.1%). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2003—04)6 4.3; average annual income per household (2002) LKR 153,636 (U.S.$1,606); sources of income (2002): wages 42.0%, nonmonetary income 18.9%, agriculture 7.8%, other 31.3%; expenditure (2002): food and nonalcoholic beverages 44.5%, housing 12.6%, transportation and communication 7.1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 429; remittances (2005) 1,908; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 221; official development assistance (2005) 1,3787. Disbursements for (U.$.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 315; remittances (2006) 257; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 16. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): rice 3,342,000, sugarcane 1,136,600, coconuts 913,000, plantains 504,480, tea 310,800, natural rubber 109,140, peppercorns 18,600, cinnamon 12,990; livestock (number of live animals) 1,214,650 cattle, 314,080 buffalo; roundwood

(2005) 6,277,917 cu m, of which fuelwood 89%; fisheries production (2005) 163,684 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2006): kaolin 9,500; graphite 3,200; sapphires 790,000 carats; diamonds, n.a. Manufacturing (value added in LKR 000,000; 2004): textiles and apparel 91,308; food, beverages,

and tobacco 72,636; petrochemicals 26,179. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 8,766,000,000 (7,254,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (95,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (16,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 2,085,000 (3,550,000).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Communications Medium

Vital statistics

payments 20.5%; welfare 15.9%; education

cargo 325,416,000.

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

2,400

117

Televisions

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

5,41315 1,884

25915 90

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005

734

35

2005

59114

3014

2006 2006

428 295

21 15%

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003—04)6: percentage of population age 5 and over literate 93.0%; males literate 94.9%; females literate 91.3%. Education (2002-03) Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

10,475

194,931

4,096,886

21.0

36

535

18,074

33.8

13

3,386

59,734

17.6

Health (2004): physicians 8,749 (1 per 2,351 persons); hospital beds 60,328 (1 per 341 persons); infant mortality rate (2003) 11.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,559 (vegetable products 94%, animal products 6%); 138% of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 150,900 (army 78.1%, navy 9.9%, air force 12.0% )16. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$30. 1English has official status as “the link language” between Sinhala and Tamil. "Buddhism has special recognition. ?Provisional estimate. ^Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2004 Revision). "Within greater Colombo. 5Excludes 7 districts in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. "Pub. admin., defense and Services include Mining and Public utilities. SUnemployed. ?Excludes 231,000 foreign workers, of whom a significant number are housemaids in Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. !?Figure represents commitments. liImports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. !2January 1. Includes dual-purpose vehicles. !4Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. iéExcludes 58,200 paramilitary forces; opposition Tamil group to government (from 1983) numbered 8,000-11,000 in March 2006.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Sri Lanka http://www.cbsl.gov.lk * Department of Census and Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.lk

Nations of the World

Sudan, The

1,200,000; benzene 1,139,000; sugar 730,000; cement 227,000; soap 75,000; ani-

mal hides and skins 9,400,000 units. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 4,521,000,000 (3,458,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 132,700,000 (34,300,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2006) 3,912,000 (3,623,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2000): total 12,207,00016; activity rate of tota population 37.8% (participation rates: female 29.9%; unemployed, n.a.).

Official name: Jamhiriyat as-Sidan (Republic of the Sudan). Form of government: military-backed interim regime with Council of States (501); National Assembly (4502)3. Head of state and government: President assisted by Vice Presidents. Capital: Khartoum4. Official languages*: Arabic; English. Official religion: 6. Monetary unit: Sudanese pound (SDG); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 1000

population

sq km

2006 estimates?

Territory of Southern Sudan

27,028,641 1,193,203 1,583,1799 2,890,3489 1,006,8019 2,796,330 1,171,118 4,350,096 2,529,370 1,111,859 1,320,405 1,027,534 833,743 1,369,300 1,124,473 1,532,085 1,188,707

States Bahr el-Ghazal, Northern!o Bahr el-Ghazal, Westem Equatoria, Central Equatoria, Eastern Equatoria, Western Jungalr Lakes Unity Upper Nile Warab

States 1,840,687 Blue Nile 45,844 Darfur, Northern 296,420 Darfur, Southem 127,300 Darfur, Western 79,460 al-Jazirah 23,373 Kassala 36,710 Khartoum 22,142 Kordofan, Northern 185,302 Kordofan, Southern’! 79,470 Kordofan, Western 111,373 Nile 122,123 Northern 348,765 al-Qadarif 75,263 Red Sea 218,887 Sinnar 37,844 White Nile 30,411

TOTAL

2002 114.6

2003 123.5

2004 133.8

2005 145.2

2006 155.9

area

population

sq km

2006 estimate?

Foreign trade!?

619,745

8,818,766

33,558

826,646

93,900 22,956 82,542 79,319 122,479 40,235 35,956

1,467,870 334,827 225,872 1,731,341 1,189,330 567,329 262,787

77,773 31,027

1,212,979 999,785

Area and population area

2001 105.8

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.2. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2006) 189; remittances (2006) 1,016; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 1,290; official development assistance (2005) 1,829. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 668; remittances (2006) 2. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 7.2%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 49.3%; overall forest area (2005) 28.4%.

SDG 2.04; 1 £ = SDG 4.117

northern Sudan

703

2,460,43212 35,847,407

Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 3113 3.4%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002 —497 11.3%

2003 —340 6.3%

2004 -297 3.8%

2005 —1,933 16.7%

2006 —2,417 17.6%

Imports (2006): U.S.$8,074,000,000 (machinery and equipment 34.8%; manufactured goods 20.3%; transport equipment 18.5%; foodstuffs 9.4%, of which wheat and wheat flour 5.1% ). Major import sources: China 20.8%; EU 17.2%; Saudi Arabia 8.0%; Japan 7.4%; India 6.6%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$5,657,000,000 (crude petroleum 83.2%; benzene 6.3%; sesame seeds 3.0%; livestock [mainly sheep and camels] 2.2%; cotton 1.5%; gold 1.1%; gum arabic 0.8%).Major export destinations: China 75.0%; Japan 9.2%; U.A.E. 4.0%; Saudi Arabia 2.2%; Egypt 1.7%.

Transport and communications

Demography Population (2007): 39,379,00013. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 40.7, persons per sq km 15.7. Urban-rural (2006): urban 37.695; rural 62.496. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.69%; female 49.31%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 42.1%; 15-29, 28.4%; 30-44, 16.9%; 45-59, 8.4%; 60-74, 3.6%; 75-84, 0.5%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 41,980,000; (2020) 52,040,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2003): black c. 52%; Arab c. 39%; Beja c. 6%; foreigners c. 296; other c. 196.

Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 4,578 km; passenger-km 49,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 893,000,000. Roads (2000): total length 11,900 km (paved 36%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 47,300; trucks and buses 62,500. Air transport: (2003) passenger-km 659,000,000; (2001) metric ton-km cargo

54,542,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2003

12,886

352

Telephones

Religious affiliation (2005): Sunni Muslim 68.4%; traditional beliefs 10.8%; Roman Catholic 9.5%; Protestant 8.8%, of which Anglican 5.4%; other 2.5%. Major cities (1993): Omdurman 1,271,403; Khartoum 947,48314; Khartoum North 700,887; Port Sudan 308,195; Kassala 234,622; Juba (in Southern Sudan) 114,980.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 35.3 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.2 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 4.79. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 47.1 years; female 48.8 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 1.6% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: SDD 1,507,500,000,000 (nontax revenue 61.0%, of which government receipts for crude petroleum 50.3%; tax revenue 39.0%, of which customs and excise duties 20.9%). Expenditures: SDD 1,825,300,000,000 (federal government 64.1%; transfers to: northern states

19.7%; Southern Sudan 16.2%).

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$11,163,000,000.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$33,882,000,000 (U.S.$900 per capita).

Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

4,68319 637

12119 17

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

hà

2005

seat

2006 2006

3,500 2.119

oes

Em 91 0.0519

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2003): total population age 15 and over literate 60.996; males 71.696; females 50.496. Education (2005-06) Primary (age 6—13) Secondary (age 14-16) Higher20

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

16,729 2,459 75

143,327 35,994

4,624,302 639,827 446,998

32.3 17.8

Health (2006): physicians 8,799 (1 per 4,384 persons); hospital beds 26,577 (1 per 1,451 persons); infant mortality rate 96.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,351 (vegetable products 82%, animal products 18%); 128% of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 104,800 (army 95.4%, navy 1.7%, air force 2.996 21. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$13.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

in value SDD ’000,000,00015 Agriculture Petroleum other Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate

Services Pub. admin., defense Other TOTAL

2,965 955 20 885 410 115 1,135 1,485 715 210 535 100 9,530

2004

% of total value

labour force!

% of labour force!6

31.1 10.0 0.2 9.3 43 12 11.9 15.6 7.5 22 5.6 14 100.0

7,925,000

57.4

tion, in December 5,881,000

42.6

13,806,000

100.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): sugarcane 7,186,000, sorghum 4,275,000, millet 745,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 520,000, tomatoes 484,000, wheat 415,000, dates 328,200, seed cotton 311,000,

sesame seeds 277,000, gum arabic (2005-06) 11,600; livestock (number of live animals) 49,797,000 sheep, 42,526,000 goats, 40,468,000 cattle, 3,908,000 camels; roundwood 19,871,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 89%; fisheries pro-

duction 63,600 (from aquaculture 3%). Mining and quarrying (2006): marble

11,470 cu m; gold 3,246 kg. Manufacturing

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lExcludes two observers with no voting rights. 2All appointed. "Comprehensive peace agreement ending 21-year-long war in southern Sudan signed Jan. 9, 2005; interim constitution from July 9, 2005, to be effective for 6 years. Southern Sudan adopted its own constitution, in conformity with the peace agreement and interim constitu-

(2006): diesel 1,817,000; flour

2005. #Council of States meets in Khartoum; National Assembly

meets in Omdurman; Juba will also be an alternating seat of “the interim power-sharing government” per an official December 2007 announcement. ^Arabic and English are both designated official working languages per 2005 interim constitution. $Islamic law and custom are applicable to Muslims only. 7The Sudanese pound (SDG) replaced the Sudanese dinar (SDD) on Jan. 10, 2007; 1 SDG = 100 SDD. Estimate of online World Gazetteer. 92.2 million people in Darfur were internally displaced in mid-2007; another 235,000 were refugees in eastern Chad. 1°Excludes disputed Abyei area. Includes disputed Abyei area. Summed total; reported total is 2,505,810 sq km, including a water area of 129,810 sq km. Estimate of U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (July 2007 update). “Population of 2006 urban agglomeration (including Omdurman and Khartoum North) is 6.7 million including 2 million internally displaced persons. Derived estimates from % of total value. FAO estimate. Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. 18Press censorship from 1989 was still imposed in late 2006. Subscribers. 202004—05. ?!Foreign troops (September 2007): Southern Sudan-UN peacekeeping 8,800; Darfur—African Union 7,000, UN peacekeeping 13,000 pending.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Sudan http://www.bankofsudan.org * Central Bureau of Statistics http://cbs.gov.sd

704

Britannica World Data

Suriname

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Republiek Suriname (Republic of Suriname). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [51]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Paramaribo. Official language: Dutch. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Suriname dollar (SRD)!; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1US.$ = SRD 2.78; 1 £ - SRD 5.59.

Districts

Brokopondo Nieuw Amsterdam Totness Albina Nieuw Nickerie Onverwacht Groningen

Sipaliwini Wanica

2 Lelydorp Paramaribo

TOTAL

population 2004 census

sq km

2,843 908 1,507 1,786 2,067 2,082 1,404

7,364 2,353 3,902 4,627 5,353, 5,393 3,636

14,215 24,649 2,887 16,642 36,639 18,749 15,980

50,412 171

130,567 443

34,136 85,986

70

182

242,946

63,2513.4

163,820?

492,829

4.7

12,593

7.3

687,804

11.9

9,308

5.4

Manufacturing Construction

749,826 176,858

12.9 34

10,971 14,031

6.3 8.1

1.0

Public utilities

274,092

47

1,659

Transp. and commun.

459,316

7.9

8,711

5.0

Trade, hotels

633,094

10.9

29,845

17.2

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

600,206 553,809

10.3 9.5

9,073 27,995

52 16.2

66,952

1.2

25,063

14.5

808,561

13.9

519,1488 5,802,465

Imports

Urban-rural (2005): urban 73.996; rural 26.196. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.7196; female 50.2996.

Population projection: (2010) 528,000; (2020) 583,000. Doubling time: 58 years. Ethnic composition (2004): Indo-Pakistani (“Hindustani”) 27.4%; Suriname Creole (*Afro-Surinamese") 17.796; Maroon (descendants of runaway slaves living in the interior) 14.7%; Javanese (“Indonesian”) 14.6%; mixed race 12.5%; Amerindian c. 1.5%; other/unknown c. 11.6%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Christian (mostly Roman Catholic and Moravian) 40.7%; Hindu 19.9%; Muslim 13.5%; nonreligious 4.4%; traditional beliefs 3.3%; other 2.5%; unknown 15.7%.

Major cities (1996/97): Paramaribo 222,800 (urban agglomeration 289,000); Lelydorp 15,600; Nieuw Nickerie 11,100; Mungo (Moengo) 6,800; Meerzorg 6,600.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 17.6 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.05. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 4.0/1.3. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 70.3 years; female 75.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 265; communicable diseases 172; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 87; injuries 76; diabetes mellitus 32.

2002

2003

+52.5 5.2%

-30.2 2.3%

dus

23,8819 173,130

2004

2005

2006

+170.4 10.8%

-115.8 5.9%

+93.7 3.5%

(2005): U.S.$1,099,900,000

13.89 100.0

(machinery and transport

equipment

products 6.9%). Major import sources: U.S. 24.4%; The Netherlands 14.5%; Trinidad and Tobago 10.5%; China 5.4%; Japan 4.3%. Exports (2005): U.S.$929,100,000 (alumina 48.1%; gold 36.4%; shrimp and fish 6.1%; crude petroleum 5.8%; rice 1.5%). Major export destinations: Norway 23.9%; U.S. 16.8%; Canada 16.4%; France 8.1%; Iceland 2.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2003)13: length 98 mi, 157 km; passengers, n.a.; cargo, n.a. Roads (2003): total length 2,674 mi, 4,304 km (paved 26%). Vehicles (2000): passenger cars 61,365; trucks and buses 23,220. Air transport (2005) 14: passenger-km 1,745,800,000; metric ton-km cargo 27,100,000.

Communications Medium

units

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: SRD 1,665,800,000 (tax revenue 77.1%, of which taxes on international trade 23.3%, corporate taxes 18.3%, income tax 16.2%;

nontax revenue 18.0%; grants 4.9%).Expenditures: SRD 1,660,500,000 (current expenditures 87.4%, of which wages and salaries 36.6%, transfers 13.0%,

interest 6.4%; capital expenditures 11.9%; net lending 0.7%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$504,300,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): rice 195,000, sugarcane 120,000, bananas 17,488, plantains 11,318, oranges 10,210, coconuts 8,638, cassava 4,495; livestock (number of live animals) 137,000 cattle, 24,500 pigs, 3,800,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 226,846 cu

m, of which fuelwood 20%; fisheries production (2005) 40,191 (from aquaculture 1%). Mining and quarrying (2006): bauxite 4,945,000; alumina 2,133,000; gold (2005) 10,619 kg5. Manufacturing (value of production at factor cost in SRG; 1993): food products 992,000,000; beverages 558,000,000; tobacco 369,000,000; chemical products 291,000,000; pottery and earthen-

ware 258,000,000; wood products 180,000,000. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 805,800,000 ([2004] 1,509,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 4,800,000 ([2004] 3,248,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 374,000 (583,000); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2004): total 173,130; activity rate of total population 35.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 56.0%; female 36.7%; unemployed 9.5%). 2004 216.8

2005 238.3

2006 265.3

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,039,000,000 (U.S.$4,478 per capita).

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

118

243

Televisions

Telephones Cellular

2006

32016

Landline

2006

82

Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

PCs

63416

2001

20

45

Dailies Internet users

2006 2005

visi 32

us 64

Broadband

2006

2.716

5316

162

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2004): total population age 15 and over literate 89.6%; males literate 92.0%; females literate 87.2%. Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

2003 198.7

9.08 100.0

26.8%, mineral fuels 15.6%, food products 9.1%, chemicals and chemical

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 28.5%; 15-29, 26.8%; 30-44, 24.3%; 45-59, 12.0%; 60-74, 6.2%; 75 and over, 2.2%.

2002 161.6

Sons

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 8.1, persons per sq km 3.1.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

272,799

Mining and quarrying

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2001 139.8

force

Foreign trade!2

Demography Population (2007): 510,000.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index® 100.0

% of labour

force

Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 4.0; average disposable income per household SRD 32,150 (U.S.$11,760); sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2000)10: food and beverages 40.0%, housing, energy, and household furnishings 23.6%, clothing and footwear 11.0%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 45; remittances (2006) 4.0; foreign direct disinvestment (2001-05 avg.) -35; official development assistance (2005) 5111. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 17; remittances (2006) 9.0; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.4%, in permanent crops 0.06%, in pasture 0.1%; overall forest area (2005) 94.7%.

Town district Paramaribo

labour

value

Agriculture, forestry, fishing

Other TOTAL

sq mi

Brokopondo Commewijne Coronie Marowijne Nickerie Para Saramacca

% of total

Informal sector?

area

Capitals

in value SRD ’000,000

Services

Area and population

2004

Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18)

}

students

teacher ratio

30817

3,520

65,527

18.6

1417

1,526

24,307

15.9

1,770

21,511

12.2

286

3,081

10.8

Voc., teacher tr.

Higher'®

teachers

1

Health: physicians (2001) 236 (1 per 2,000 persons); hospital beds (2005) 1,797 (1 per 278 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 20.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,973 (vegetable products 88%, animal products 12%); 156% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 1,84019 (army 76.1%, navy 13.0%, air force 10.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.696; per capita expenditure U.S.$43. 1The Suriname dollar (SRD) replaced the Suriname guilder (SRG) on Jan. 1, 2004, at a rate of 1 SRD

= SRG

1,000. 2No

capital; administered

from Paramaribo.

3Area

excludes 6,809 sq mi (17,635 sq km) of territory disputed with Guyana. ^Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. >Recorded production; unrecorded production may be as high as 30,000 kg. *Paramaribo and its environs only. 7Smuggling or unregulated activities in such areas as gold mining and tree removal. ®Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. ?Includes 16,425 unemployed. lOWeights of consumer price index components. “Figure represents commitments. 12Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. 13There are no public railways operating in Suriname; 52 mi (83 km) of the private railroad were operational in 2003. “Scheduled flights only. Circulation data for three daily newspapers is unavailable. !6Subscribers. 172001—02. !8Anton de Kom University of Suriname; 2001-02. 19All services are part of the army.

Internet resources for further information: * Suriname Statistical Yearbook http://www.suriname.nu/101alg/statis01.html * General Bureau of Statistics http://www.statistics-suriname.org

Nations of the World

Swaziland

Production

Official name: Umbuso weSwatini (Swazi); Kingdom of Swaziland (English). Form of government: monarchy! with two legislative houses (Senate [302]; House of Assembly [653]). Head of state and government: King, assisted by Prime Minister. Capitals: Mbabane (administrative and judicial); Lozitha and Ludzidzini (royal); Lobamba (legislative). Official languages: Swati (Swazi); English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: lilangeni4 (plural emalangeni [E]); valuation

fruit and pomelo 34,040, corn (maize) 26,170, pineapples 8,570, seed cotton 6,500; livestock (number of live animals) 580,000 cattle, 3,200,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 890,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 63%; fisheries production 70 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): ferrovanadium 345; crushed stone 566,771 cu m. Manufacturing (value of exports in U.S.$'000; 2002): apparel and clothing accessories 173,500; unbleached wood pulp 56,100; preserved fruit (significantly pineapples) 17,400; wood furniture 11,800. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 156,300,000 (1,123,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2005) 221,700 ([2003] 372,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, none (n.a.); natural gas, none (none). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.4; average annual income per household (2002) c. U.S.$1,540; sources of income, n.a.; expenditure (1996)12: food 24.596, housing 15.996, household furnishings and operation 13.2%, clothing and footwear 11.0%, transportation and communications 8.2%, education 6.1%.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 69; remittances (2006) 81; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 25; official development assistance (2005) 5313. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 15; remittances (2006) 11; foreign direct disinvestment (2001-05 avg.) -1.4.

14.52.

Area and population

area

population

Capitals

sami

Hhohho Lubombo

Mbabane Siteki

1,378 2,296

3,569 5,947

269,826 201,696

Manzini Nhlangano

1,571 1,459

4,068 3,780

292,100 217,100

6,704

17,364

TOTAL

.Sqkm.

1997 .census

Districts

Manzini Shiselweni

forestry, fishing

(2006): sugarcane 5,000,000, roots and tubers 54,620, oranges 35,900, grape-

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S$ 2 E 723: 1£-E

(metric tons except as noted). Agriculture,

705

Foreign trade!4 Balance of trade (current prices)

980,7225

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

—136 7.0%

-82 3.8%

490 4.6%

3118 3.7%

3140 4.2%

473 2.0%

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 1,141,0006.

Imports (2002): U.S.$879,400,000 (food and live animals 15.0%; machinery and apparatus 14.5%; chemicals and chemical products 10.8%; refined petrole-

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 170.2, persons per sq km 65.7. Urban-rural (2006): urban 24.196; rural 75.996. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.26%; female 51.74%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 41.0%; 15-29, 33.7%; 30-44, 11.6%; 45-59,

Major import sources (2004): South Africa 95.6%; EU 0.9%; Japan 0.9%. Exports (2003): U.S.$1,484,000,000 (soft drink [including sugar and fruit juice] concentrates 51.3%; cottonseed and lint 14.8%; wood pulp 12.0%; sugar 8.0%; reexports 6.7%).Major export destinations (2004): South Africa 59.7%;

8.3%; 60-74, 4.4%; 75-84, 0.9%; 85 and over, 0.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,160,0006; Ethnic composition (2000): Swazi 82.3%; 1.4%; mixed (black-white) 1.0%; other Religious affiliation (2000): Christian c.

(2020) 1,218,0008. Zulu 9.6%; Tsonga 2.3%; Afrikaner 3.4%. 87%, of which African indigenous

c. 43%, unaffiliated Christian c. 19%, Protestant c. 18%, Roman c. 5%; traditional beliefs c. 11%; Muslim 1%; nonreligious c. 1%.

Catholic

Major cities (1997): Mbabane 57,992; Manzini 25,571 (urban agglomeration 78,734); Big Bend 9,374; Mhlume 7,661; Malkerns 7,400.

USS. 8.8%; EU 8.8%; Mozambique 6.2%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 187 mi, 301 km; passenger-km, n.a.); metric ton-km cargo (2001) 746,000,000. Roads (2002): total length 2,233 mi, 3,594 km (paved 30%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 44,113; trucks and buses 47,761. Air transport: (2000) passenger-km 68,000,000; metric ton-km

cargo, n.a.

Communications

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 27.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 28.8 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): —0.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 3.62. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 32.5 years; female 34.0 years. Adultpopulation (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 33.4967 (world avg. 1.096). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases c. 1,846, of which HIV/AIDS-related c. 1,560, tuberculosis c. 94; car-

diovascular diseases c. 138; respiratory infections c. 126; malignant neoplasms (cancers) c. 71.

Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

38

34

2006 2006

25017 44

24317 43

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Budget (2004-05). Revenue: E 4,842,000,000 (receipts from Customs Union of Southern Africa 57.3%, individual income taxes 14.6%, sales taxes 11.3%,

taxes on companies 8.4%, grants 2.4%). Expenditures: E 5,554,500,000 (general administration 26.2%, education 20.1%, police/defense

15.2%, trans-

portation and communications 10.6%, health 8.0%). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$2,775,000,000 (U.S.$2,448 per capita).

2001

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

E ’000,000

value

force’

force’

1,063.6 57.0 3,403.0 797.3 134.0

65 0.4 20.9 4.9 0.8

Transp. and commun.

479.7

3.0

Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

945.1 475.6 1,856.0

254.9 6,796.110 16,262.3

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities

Services Other TOTAL

195,0989 620 19,898 5,779 1,409

49.89 0.1 ET 15 0.3

58 2.9 11.4

in '000s

persons

42 2916 42 -

41 2816 40 oe

Education and health Educational attainment: n.a. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 79.6%; males literate 80.9%; females literate 78.3%. student/

Primary (age 6-12)

schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

54118

6,680

208,444

31.2

3,684

62,401

384

5,798

Secondary (age 13-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

}

3

16.9

154

Health (2004): physicians 171 (1 per 6,047 persons); hospital beds (2000) 1,5701? (1 per 665 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2005)

12,508 7,492

a2 1.9

1.6 41.810 100.0

25,923 123,87211 392,000

Ge 31.611 100.0

Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 1,664 (vegetable products 86%, animal products 14%); 90% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (2006): c. 3,000 troops. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 1.8%; per capita expenditure U.S.$39.

}

Population economically active (2001): total 392,000; activity rate of total population 39.396 (participation rates: ages 15 and over, n.a.; female, n.a.; unemployed [2004] c. 3196). Price index (2000 = 100) 1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

89.1

100.0

105.9

118.7

127.3

131.7

138.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$451,000,000. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 10.3%, in permanent crops 0.8%, in pasture 69.8%; overall forest area (2005) 31.5%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

per 1,000

71.8.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2004

number

2005 2004 2005 2005

Education (2004)

National economy

Consumer price index

um 10.6%; textile yarn, fabrics, made-up articles 8.6%; road vehicles 8.4%).

1Controversial constitution became effective by royal decree on Feb. 8, 2006. ?Includes 20 nonelective seats. ?Includes 10 nonelective seats. ^The lilangeni is at par with the South African rand. ?Final results; includes 51,005 residents abroad. ‘Estimate of UN

World Population Prospects (2006 Revision). 7Statistically derived midpoint of range. SFormally employed only (except for Agriculture and Other). ?Includes informally employed (mostly in Agriculture). Includes indirect taxes less imputed bank service charges and subsidies. !!Unemployed. !?Weights of consumer price index components. JFigure represents commitments. “Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. Scheduled passenger train service was terminated in January 2001. 16Circulation of daily newspapers. !7Subscribers. 182001. i?Excludes National Psychiatrie Hospital.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Swaziland http://www.centralbank.org.sz * Swaziland Government http://www.gov.sz

706

Britannica World Data

Sweden

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Konungariket Sverige (Kingdom of Sweden). Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Parliament [349]. Chief of state: King. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Stockholm. Official language: Swedish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Swedish krona (SEK); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

population

Counties

sq km

20071 estimate

Blekinge Dalarna Gävleborg Gotland Halland

3,055 30,404 19,756 3,184 5,719

151,436 275,711 275,653 57,297 288,859

Jämtland

54,100

Jönköping Kalmar Kronoberg Norrbotten Orebro Ostergötland

area

population

sq km

2007! estimate

Sódermanland Stockholm Uppsala Värmland Västerbotten

6,607 6,789 7,206 19,388 59,284

263,099 1,918,104 319,925 273,489 257,581

127,020

Västernorrland

23,107

243,978

11,253 11,694

331,539 233,776

Västmanland Västra Götaland

6,614 25,389

248,489 1,538,284

9,429 106,012 9,343 11,646

179,635 251,886 275,030 417,966

TOTAL LAND AND SMALL LAKES AREA 4 LARGE LAKES OTHER UNDISTRIBUTED

441,3482 8,9262 21

11,369

1,184,500

TOTAL

450,295

Skåne

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force?

force?

Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction

Area and population area

in value SEK '000,000 Agriculture

1 U.S.$ = SEK 6.83; 1 £ = SEK 13.72.

Counties

2006

26,313

1.0

86,000

1.9

10,070 474,707 64,398 109,422

0.4 17.8 24 44

8,000 653,000 25,000 270,000

02 142 05 59

Transp. and commun.

170,443

6.4

274,000

6.0

Trade, hotels

288,465

10.8

664,000

14.5

Finance, real estate

554,883

20.7

687,000

15.0

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

493,798 110,128 370,3718 2,672,998

18.5 44 13.88 100.0

249,000 1,414,000 256,0009 4,586,000

5.4 30.8 5.69 100.0

Population economically active (2006): total 4,586,0007; activity rate of total population 50.5% (participation rates: ages 16-64, 78.7%; female 47.6%; unemployed [July 2006-June 2007] 4.9%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.4 102.9

104.6 106.4

106.6 109.4

107.0 112.3

107.5 115.7

109.0 119.2

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 7,361; remittances (2006) 630; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 10,812. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 10,776; remittances (2006) 611; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 17,187.

Foreign trade!? 9,113,257

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 9,142,000. Density (2007)3: persons per sq mi 57.7, persons per sq km 22.3. Urban-rural (2005): urban 84.4%; rural 15.6%. Sex distribution (20071): male 49.64%; female 50.36%. Age breakdown (20071): under 15, 17.096; 15-29, 18.896; 30-44, 20.796; 45-59, 19.5%; 60-74, 15.2%; 75-84, 6.2%; 85 and over, 2.6%.

Population projection: (2010) 9,282,000; (2020) 9,706,000. Ethnic composition (20061)4: Swedish 83.895; other European 10.1%, of which Finnish 2.996, pre-1991 Yugoslav 2.2%; Asian 4.196; other 2.096.

Religious affiliation (2005): Church of Sweden (including nonpracticing) c. 7796; other Protestant c. 4.596; Muslim c. 496; Roman Catholic 1.6%; Orthodox 1.196; other 11.896. Major cities (20071): Stockholm 782,885; Góteborg 489,757; Malmó 276,244; Uppsala 185,187; Linköping 138,580; Västerås 132,920.

Vital statistics

2001 +143,800 9.8%

SEK '000,000 % of total

2002 +149,100 10.2%

2003 +146,500 9.7%

2004 +165,600 10.1%

2005 +140,800 7.8%

2006 +127,000 8.1%

Imports (2006): SEK 724,200,000,000 (road vehicles 10.9%; crude and refined petroleum 10.8%; nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 10.1%; office machines/telecommunications equipment 9.9%; base metals 6.8%). Major import sources: Germany 17.9%; Denmark Netherlands 6.3%; U.K. 6.2%; Finland 5.9%.

9.4%;

Norway

8.7%;

The

Exports (2006): SEK 851,200,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery and apparatus 14.4%; road vehicles 13.6%; telecommunications equipment 8.5%; paper and paper products 6.8%; medicines and pharmaceuticals 6.0%; iron and steel 5.7%). Major export destinations: Germany 9.9%; U.S. 9.4%; Norway 9.3%; U.K. 7.2%; Denmark 7.0%; Finland 6.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (20051): length 6,866 mi, 11,050 km; (2005) passenger-km 8,922,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 21,675,000,000. Roads (2005): total length

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 11.6 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 44.5%; outside of marriage 55.5%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 10.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.77. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 5.0/2.2. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 78.7 years; female 82.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 474.9, of which ischemic heart disease 221.7, cerebrovascular disease 112.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 238.9.

264,320 mi, 425,383 km (paved 31%). Vehicles (20061): passenger cars 4,154,000; trucks and buses 474,000. Air transport (2006)": passenger-km 4,404,000,000; (2005) metric ton-km cargo 2,784,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular

Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

8,645

2006

9,60713

2006

5,399

965

units Medium

date

PCs

1,05813

Dailies Internet users

594

Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

7,548 4,31212 6,981 2,34613

836 4801? 769 25813

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: SEK 718,249,000,000 (taxes on goods and services 45.6%, statutory social security fees 37.9%, income/profits/capital gains taxes 9.5%, property taxes 5.2%). Expenditures: SEK 750,965,000,000 (social insurance 40.0%, defense 5.9%, education 5.8%, health 5.1%, debt service

4.7%).

Public debt (September 2007): U.S.$175,055,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugar beets 2,189,000, wheat 2,001,400, barley 1,112,400, potatoes 772,600, oats 635,000, triticale 263,200, rapeseed 221,000; livestock (number of live animals) 1,681,000 pigs, 1,590,000 cattle, 480,000 sheep, (2004) 250,500 reindeer; roundwood (2005) 98,700,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 7%; fisheries

production (2005) 262,239 (from aquaculture 2%). Mining and quarrying

(2005): iron ore 15,300,0005; zinc 214,6005; copper 97,8005; silver 250,000 kg>.

Manufacturing (value added in SEK '000,000; 20056): electrical machinery, telecommunications equipment, and electronics 108,909; road vehicles/parts 65,211; chemicals

and chemical products

62,320; nonelectrical machinery

61,004; paper and paper products 44,198; food, beverages, and tobacco 34,544; fabricated metals 32,673; printing and publishing 25,060. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 154,981,000,000 (147,587,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (3,329,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (150,600,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 18,360,000 (11,691,000); natural gas (cu m; 2004) none (1,054,000,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2005) 2.1; average annual disposable income per household (2004) SEK 258,900 (U.S.$35,230); sources of gross income (2004): wages and salaries 60.2%, transfer payments 30.7%, self-employment 2.8%; expenditure (2005): housing and energy 20.7%, transportation 16.6%, recreation and culture 15.5%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 13.3%, household furnishings 7.5%. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 6.5%, in permanent crops 0.01%, in pasture 12.0%; overall forest area (2005) 66.9%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$381,786,000,000 (U.S.$42,030 per capita).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education and health Educational attainment (20061). Percentage of population age 15-74 having: incomplete or complete primary education 24.1%; incomplete or complete secondary 50.4%; incomplete or complete higher 23.9%; unknown 1.6%. Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

Primary/lower secondary (age 7-15) Upper secondary (age 16-18) Higher

teachers

students

4,963

108,23314

1,023,634

m 64

37,6404 36,4131

teacher ratio

347,713 397,679!6

9.5 9.2 11.415

Health (2005): physicians 27,600 (1 per 327 persons); hospital beds 26,540 (1 per 340 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 2.4.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 27,600 (army 50.0%, navy 28.6%, air force 21.4%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$612. lJanuary 1. 2Area of small lakes equals 31,034 sq km; total inland water area including 4 large lakes equals 39,960 sq km. ?Density based on land area only (410,335 sq km). ^Foreign-born persons or those with both parents born abroad are identified by country of origin. *Metal content. 5At constant prices of 2000. "Ages 16—64 only. ?Taxes less subsidies. ?Includes 246,000 unemployed. JoImports c.i.f.; exports f.0.b. Includes SAS international and domestic traffic applicable to Sweden only. Circulation of daily newspapers. 13Subscribers. “Includes part-time teachers and teachers on leave. 152002-03. 162003-04.

Internet resources for further information:

* Statistics Sweden http://www.scb.se/default

2154.asp

Nations of the World

income: work

Switzerland

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$394,522,000,000 (U.S.$52,922 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Area and population area

population

Cantons

sq km

20073 _estimate

Aargau Appenzell AusserRhoden^ Appenzell InnerRhoden^

1,404

574,813

243

52,509

172

15,300

Basel-Landschaft4

518

267,166

Solothurn

37 5,959 1,671 282 685 7,105 838

184,822 958,897 258,252 433,235 38,084 187,920 69,292

Thurgau Ticino Uri Valais Vaud Zug Zürich

1,493

359,110

803

168,912

Neuchátel

Cantons Nidwalden^ Obwalden Sankt Gallen Schaffhausen Schwyz

TOTAL

area

population

.Sqkm

20073 estimate.

276 491 2,026 298 908

40,012 33,755 461,810 73,866 138,832

791

248,613

991 2,812 1,077 5,224 3,212 239 1,729

235,764 324,851 34,948 294,608 662,145 107,171 1,284,052

41,284

7,508,739

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 477.2, persons per sq km 184.3. Age breakdown (20063): under 15, 16.0%; 15-29, 18.1%; 30-44, 23.6%; 45-59, 20.6%; 60-74, 13.9%; 75-84, 5.7%; 85 and over, 2.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 7,742,000; (2020) 8,066,000. National composition (20053): Swiss 79.4%; pre-1991 Yugoslav 4.7%; Italian 4.1%; Portuguese 2.2%; German 2.0%; Turkish 1.0%; other 6.6%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Roman Catholic 41.8%; Protestant 33.0%; Muslim other Christian

2.7%; nonreligious

Major urban agglomerations (20063): Ztirich 1,101,710; Geneva 493,445; Basel 486,146; Bern 343,789; Lausanne 310,028; Luzern 199,202.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.7 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 86.3%; outside of marriage 13.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 1.6 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.42. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.4/2.9. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 78.7 years; female 83.9 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 301.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 207.0; diseases of the respiratory system 51.6; accidents, suicide, violence 44.9.

National economy Budget (2004)5. Revenue: CHF 165,097,000,000 (tax revenue 59.1%, of which taxes on income and wealth 39.6%; nontax revenue 22.2%; social security

18.7%). Expenditures:

CHF

170,738,000,000

(social security

19.0%; social welfare 16.2%; education 16.2%; health 11.3%; transportation

8.4%; defense 2.9%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): cow’s milk 3,922,500, sugar beets 1,243,000, wheat 540,700, potatoes 392,000,

apples mals) which 45%).

266,300, grapes 128,100, pears 83,000; livestock (number of live ani1,652,000 pigs, 1,554,700 cattle; roundwood (2005) 5,044,061 cu m, of fuelwood 21%; fisheries production (2005) 2,689 (from aquaculture Mining (2006): salt 560,000.6 Manufacturing (value added in CHF

°000,000; 2002): chemicals and chemical products 14,771; professional and scientific equipment 10,892; food products, beverages, and tobacco 8,907;

fabricated metal products 7,883. Energy production (consumption): electricity (k W-hr; 2004) 65,299,000,000 (64,596,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) none (177,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) none (37,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 5,034,000 (10,527,000); natural gas (cu m;

2005) none (3,058,000,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 4,220,0007; activity rate of total population 55.8% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 81.2%; female 45.7%; unemployed 4.0%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Annual earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.0 102.5

101.7 104.3

102.3 105.8

103.1 106.7

104.3 107.8

105.4

Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size 2.3; average gross income per household CHF 102,072 (U.S.$82,084); sources of

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

5,540

1.2

160,000 684,000

3.7 15.7

96,274

21.1

25,335

5.6

5,000 24,000 297,000 253,000 806,000 672,000 158,000 837,000 473,000 4,369,000

0.1 0.5 6.8 58 18.4 15.4 3.6 19.2 10.8 100.0

}

}

99,399 112,363

218 24.7

120,403

26.4 —0.99 100.010

-3,7229 455,59410

Public debt (end of year; 2004): U.S.$111,952,100,000.

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 11,063; remittances (2006) 1,946; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 7,636. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 9,262; remittances (2006) 13,871; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 22,332. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 10.2%, in permanent crops 0.6%, in pasture 27.3%; overall forest area (2005) 30.9%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 41,665 0.6%

CHF '000,000 % of total

2002 47,534 2.9%

2003 46,877 2.6%

2004 49,325 3.3%

2005 47,883 2.6%

2006 411,655 3.4%

Netherlands 5.0%; U.S. 5.0%.

Urban-rural (2005): urban 75.2%; rural 24.8%. Sex distribution (20063): male 48.97%; female 51.03%.

obligations

in value

Imports (2005): CHF 149,094,300,000 (chemicals 22.0%; machinery 20.1%; vehicles 9.6%; precision instruments, watches, and jewelry 7.2%). Major import sources (2006): Germany 33.3%; Italy 11.2%; France 10.3%; The

Demography Population (2007): 7,607,000.

4.3%; Orthodox 1.8%; Jewish 0.2%; 11.1%; other 0.8%; unknown 4.3%.

Mining Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, insurance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

20078

CHF ’000,000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing Manufacturing

CHF 1.20; 1 £ = CHF 2.42.

Luzern

housing and energy

27.5%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 12.9%, transportation 12.0%, recreation 10.8%, restaurants and hotels 10.2%.

Official name: Swiss Confederation!. Form of government: federal state with two legislative houses (Council of States [46]; National Council [200]). Head of state and government: President of the Federal Council. Capital: Bern2. Official languages: French; German; Italian; Romansh (locally). Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Swiss franc (CHF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Basel-Stadt^ Bem Fribourg Genéve Glarus Graubünden Jura

64.7%, transfers 24.0%; expenditure:

707

Exports (2005): CHF 156,977,300,000 (chemicals 34.9%; machinery 22.4%; watches 7.9%; fabricated metals 7.4%; precision instruments 7.3%). Major export destinations (2006): Germany 20.2%; U.S. 10.3%; Italy 8.9%; France 8.6%; U.K. 4.7%; Japan 3.6%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: length (2004) 3,122 mi, 5,024 km; passenger-km (2003) 15,400,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2003) 9,534,000,000. Roads (20063): total length 44,301 mi, 71,296 km. Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 3,863,807;

trucks and buses 307,264. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 22,788,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,039,032,000.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

persons

Medium

date

in '000s

Televisions

2004

4,300

Telephones Cellular

Landline

2006

7,41813

2006

5,040

576

units Medium

date

PCs

1,02113

Dailies Internet users

694

Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

6,430 2,4861? 4,360 2,14013

857 33312 600 28313

Education and health Educational attainment (2006). Percentage of resident Swiss and resident alien population age 25-64 having: compulsory education 17.9%; secondary 52.2%; higher 29.9%. Education (2004)

Primary (age 7-12) Secondary (age 13-18) Vocational

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

5,760

42,800

532,092

12.4

405

34.000

387,723

ae

i

175,978

nz

26,234

195,947

75

1,122

Higher

21

Health (2005): physicians 28,251 (1 per 266 persons); hospital beds (2004) 42,417 (1 per 176 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 4.2. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,085 (vegetable products 63%, animal products 37%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 4,20014, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$464.

1Official long-form name in French is Confédération Suisse; in German, Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft; in Italian, Confederazione Svizzera; in Romansh, Confederaziun

Svizra. "The federal supreme court is located in Lausanne. *January 1. ^Demicanton; functions

as a full canton.

^Combines

federal,

cantonal

and

communal

budgets.

$Polished diamond exports (2006): U.S.$661,000,000. 7Foreign workers account for c. 26% of population economically active. 5Second quarter. ?Taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank charges. !°Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. llImports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. !2Circulation of daily newspapers. !5Subscribers. !^Excludes 191,600 reservists and 32,900 air force personnel to be mobilized as needed; the 105,000-

member civil defense forces are not part of the armed forces.

Internet resources for further information: * Swiss National Bank http://www.snb.ch/en * Swiss Federal Statistical Office http://www.statistik.admin.ch

708

Britannica World Data

Syria

tobacco 23,788; textiles and clothing 20,344; fabricated metals 15,462; cement,

Official name: Al-Tumhüriyah al- Arabiyah as-Suriyah (Syrian Arab Republic). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (People's Assembly [250]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Damascus. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: none}. Monetary unit: Syrian pound (S.P); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

hr; 2005) 34,900,000,000 (34,000,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petrole-

bricks, and tiles 11,194. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kWum (barrels; 2006) 147,825,000 (83,950,000); petroleum products (metric tons;

2004) 10,756,000 (10,651,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 8,500,000,000 (5,100,000,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 7,880,000; activity rate of total population 40.4% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 66.8%; female 30.9%; unemployed 8.5%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Earnings index?

1 U.S.$ = S.P 5228; 1 £ - S.P 105.09. Area and population

Governorates Dara Dayr az-Zawr Dimashq

area

Capitals

.sqmi.

Dara Dayr az-Zawr Damascus

Halab Hamah Al-Hasakah

Aleppo Hamah Al-Hasakah

Idlib Al-Ladhigqryah Al-Qunaytirah Ar-Raqqah As-Suwayda’

Idlib Latakia Al-Qunaytirah (abandoned) Ar-Raqqah As-Suwayda

Hims

Tartüs

Homs (Hims)

1,440

3,730

870,000

33,060 18,032

1,056,000 2,358,000

7,143 3,430 9,009

18,500 8,883 23,334

4,174,000 1,431,000 1,169,000

2,354 887 7183 7,574 2,143

6,097 2,297 1,8613 19,616 5,550

1,304,000 897,000 71,000 821,000 321,000

16,302

Tartüs

2006? , estimate

12,765 6,962

42,223

730

Damascus

—

1,892

41

71,4983

1,578,000

103.0 118.2

102.9 134.1

108.8 139.0

113.7 147.6

121.9 by

134.1 he

2001 |423,000 5.0%

2002 480,200 14.5%

2003 428,271 5.6%

2004 -78,005 13.5%

2005 -—173,656 22.0%

Exports (2005): S.P 307,750,000,000 (crude petroleum 58.196, textiles 5.896, live animals and meat 3.496, cotton fibre 2.796). Major export destinations (2004): Italy 22.7%; France 18.0%; Turkey 12.9%; Iraq 9.0%; Saudi Arabia 6.2%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim c. 86%, of which Sunni c. 74%, “Alawite (Shr1) c. 1196; Christian c. 896, of which Orthodox c. 5%, Roman Catholic c. 2%; Druze c. 3%; nonreligious/atheist c. 3%.

1,975,200; Damascus

1,614,500; Homs

(Hims)

800,400; Latakia 468,700; Hamah 366,800.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 2,711 km; passenger-km (2004) 691,916,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,922,829,000. Roads (2004): total length

48,767 km (paved 20%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 227,639; trucks and buses 441,579. Air transport (2006)1?: passenger-km 2,340,000,000; metric tonkm cargo 16,000,000.

Communications Medium

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 27.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 4.8 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.40. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004)5: 10.0/1.0. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 69.0 years; female 71.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 156, of which ischemic heart disease 64, cerebrovascular disease 44; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 56; accidents, injuries 38.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: S.P 377,100,000,000 (petroleum royalties and taxes 33.2%; nonpetroleum nontax revenues 27.0%; nonpetroleum tax on income and profits 13.596; taxes on international trade 6.796). Expenditures: S.P 436,500,000,000 (current expenditures 61.496, capital expenditures 38.696). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$5,640,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$28,697,000,000 (U.S.$1,479 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

20036

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

S.P '000,000

value

force

force

320,227

20.1

1,168,743

23.3

423,384

26.6

608,705

12.4

40,320

25

500,384

10.0

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants, hotels Finance, real estate

180,145 240,976 73,712

11.3 154 4.6

265,487 677,229 89,747

5.3 13.5 1.8

Pub. admin.

143,679

24

1,158,279

294

132,7697 1,593,169

8.47 100.0

548,4388 5,017,012

10.98 100.0

37,957

9.0

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 4,668,750, sugar beets 1,096,291, seed cotton 1,021,996, tomatoes 945,500, barley 700,000, potatoes 608,400, oranges 503,033, olives 501,000,

apples 312,493, grapes 310,000, grapefruit 281,800, eggplants 154,400, almonds 119,648; livestock (number of live animals) 19,651,051 sheep, 1,295,725 goats, 1,082,623 cattle; roundwood (2005) 58,100 cu m, of which fuelwood 31%; fisheries production (2005) 16,980 (from aquaculture 5096). Mining and quarrying (2005): phosphate rock 3,850,000; gypsum 440,000. Manufacturing (value added in S.P '000,000; 2002): food, beverages, and

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

100.0 100.0

China 7.8%; Russia 5.4%; Saudi Arabia 5.2%; U.S. 4.7%.

7.3%; Palestinian Arab 3.9%; Armenian 2.7%; other 3.8%.

Other TOTAL

2006

Imports (2005): S.P 481,406,000,000 (mineral fuels 25.796, base and fabricated metals 13.2%, machinery and equipment 12.7%, foodstuffs 12.4%, transport equipment 8.0%).Major import sources (2004): Turkey 9.4%; Ukraine 8.7%;

Population projection: (2010) 20,481,000; (2020) 24,442,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Syrian Arab 74.9%; Bedouin Arab 7.4%; Kurd

Services

2005

18,356,000

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 37.0%; 15-29, 31.1%; 30-44, 18.7%; 45-59, 8.4%; 60-74, 3.7%; 75 and over, 1.1%.

}

2000 428,660 7.1%

S.P '000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 266.4, persons per sq km 102.9. Urban-rural (2005): urban 50.6%; rural 49.4%. Sex distribution (2006): male 51.21%; female 48.79%.

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction

2004

Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 19,048,0004.

Major cities (2004): Aleppo

2003

Foreign trade!!

728,000

105

185,1803

2002

1,578,000

Municipality TOTAL

2001

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004): 5.2; income per household: n.a.; sources of income (2003-04)16: wages 49.296, selfemployment 39.896; expenditure: n.a. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,175; remittances (2006) 823; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 236; official development assistance (2005) 78. Disbursements for (U.$.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 550; remittances (2006) 40; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 25.496, in permanent crops 4.5%, in pasture 45.4%; overall forest area (2005) 2.5%.

population

.sqkm.

2000

Televisions

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

3,093

178

Telephones Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

4,6754 3,243

25214 175

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

800

44

2006

17519

9.419

2006 2006

1,500 5.614

81 0.0314

Education and health Educational attainment (2003-04)10, Percentage of population having: no formal education (illiterate) 14.3%; no formal education (literate) 9.9%; primary education 45.8%; secondary 22.5%; incomplete higher 3.9%; higher 3.6%. Literacy (2005): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 78.4%; males literate 90.6%; females literate 66.1%. Education (2004) Primary (age 6-9)

Secondary: (age: 10°17) } Voc., teacher tr. Higher!$

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

15,095

124,665

2,192,764

17.6

52073 ^

224916 3

427

7,712

191,328

248

1,73515 : 4

Health (2004): physicians 25,890 (1 per 685 persons); hospital beds 22,282 (1 per 760 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 28.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,058 (vegetable products 86%, animal products 14%); 166% of FAO recommended minimum.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 307,600 (army 65.0%, navy 2.5%, air force 13.0%, air defense 19.5%). UN peacekeeping troops in Golan Heights (September 2007) 1,043. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 7.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$80. Islam is required to be the religion of the head of state and is the basis of the legal system. ?January 1. ?Includes 454 sq mi (1,176 sq km) of territory in the Golan Heights recognized internationally as part of Syria but occupied by Israel or UN peacekeepers. 4Excludes 1,400,000 recent Iraqi refugees and 450,000 longstanding Palestinian refugees in mid-2007. Syrian Arabs only. Syrian population only, excluding the armed forces. 7Import duties and indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. Manufacturing only. !°Based on the Household Income and Expenditure Survey with a survey population of 124,525. 1!Imports ci.£.; exports f.o.b. l2SyrianAir only. PCirculation of eight daily newspapers only. Subscribers. 152002-03. 16A)-Baath, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tishreen universities only.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bureau of Statistics http://www.cbssyr.org/index.htm * Central Bank of Syria http://www.banquecentrale.gov.sy/index.html

Nations of the World

Gross national income (2005): U.S.$354,900,000,000 (U.S.$16,630 per capita).

Taiwan

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Chung-hua Min-kuo (Republic of China). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative body (Legislative Yuan [225]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Premier. Capital: Taipei. Official language: Mandarin Chinese. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: New Taiwan dollar (NT$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 US.$ = NT$33.03; 1 £ = NT$66.40.

2006

Chang-hua

area

population

sq km

20071 estimate

Special municipalities

area

population

sq km

20071 estimate

1,074

1,315,034

Chia-i Hsin-chu

1,902 1,428

553,841 487,692

ae

4,628

345,303

d

amm 2,793

1,245,474

460,226 ——— Chia-i Hsin-ch

104

394 757

4,106 t

535,205 :

163 176

1,044,392 760,037

Kao-hsiung

Miao-li

Nan-t'ou P'eng-hu

1,820

559,986

127

91,785

Kao-hsiung

Taipei Municipalities Chi-lung

893,544 1,543,436 1,106,690

Non-Taiwan Counties Kinmen

T'ai-pei

2,052

3,767,095

(Quemoy)

T'ai-tung

3,515

235,957

Lienchiang

T'ao-yüan Y ün-lin

1,221 1,291

1,911,161 728,490

1,514,706

2,632,242 390,633

60

STE

2,776 2,051 2,016

154

272 133

Taichung T'ai-an

P'ing-tung T'ai-chung T’ai-nan

272,364 I

% of total value

labour force?

f

% of labour force?

181,709 38,315 2,730,320 234,072 177,235 724,329 2,442,317 2,159,732 1,273,278 1,408,596 489,0848 11,858,987

1.5 0.3 23.0 2.0 1.5 6.1 20.6 18.2 10.7 11.9 4.28 100.0

554,000 7,000 2,777,000 829,000 88,000 626,000 2,424,000 473,000 333,000 2,000,000 411,0009 10,522,000

5.3 0.1 26.4 7.9 0.8 5.9 23.0 4.5 3.2 19.0 3.99 100.0

Household income and expenditure (2004). Average household size (20071) 3.1; average annual disposable income per household NT$891,249 (U.S.$26,673); sources of income: wages and salaries 55.3%, transfers 15.2%, self-employment 15.1%; expenditure: food, beverages, and tobacco 23.7%, housing and energy 23.1%, education, recreation, and culture 13.3%, health care 12.9%,

transportation and communication 12.5%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 5,040; remittances (2005) 323; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 1,906. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 8,682; remittances (2005) 1,342; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 5,844. Land use as % of total land area (2001): in temporary crops 16.1%, in permanent crops 6.6%, in pasture 0.3%; overall forest area 58.1%.

area

(Matsu) TOTAL

Foreign trade!? 153

76,491

29 36,188

9,786 22,876,527

Demography Population (2007)?: 22.902,000.

Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 U.S.$000,000 % of total

2002

415,629 6.8%

2003

418,050 — 416,931 7.4% 6.2%

2004

2005

2006

46,124 1.8%

415819 4.2%

421,319 5.0%

Imports (2006): U.S.$202,698,135,000 (minerals 19.1%, electronic machinery

Density (2006)2: persons per sq mi 1,639, persons per sq km 632.9. Urban-rural (2000)3: urban 80%; rural 20%. Sex distribution (20071): male 50.6795; female 49.3396. Age breakdown (20071): under 15, 18.196; 15-29, 23.596; 30-44, 24.696; 45-59, 20.5%; 60-74, 9.1%; 75-84, 3.4%; 85 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 23,075,000; (2020) 23,252,000. Ethnic composition (2003): Taiwanese c. 84%; mainland Chinese c. 14%; indigenous tribal peoples c. 2%, of which Ami 0.6%. Religious affiliation (2002): Buddhism 23.8%; Taoism 19.7%; Christian 4.5%, of which Protestant 2.6%, Roman Catholic 1.3%; I-kuan Tao 3.7% (syncretistic religion); Muslim 0.6%; other (mostly Chinese folk-religionist or non-religious) 47.7%. Major cities (20071): Taipei 2,632,242; Kao-hsiung 1,514,706; T'ai-chung 1,044,392; T’ai-nan 760,037; Pan-ch-'iao 544,292; Chung-ho 411,011; Chi-lung

390,633.

18.1%, metals and metal products 11.4%, chemicals 11.1%, nonelectrical machinery 8.8%, precision instruments, clocks, watches, and musical instru-

ments 6.1%).Major import sources: Japan 22.8%; China 12.2%; U.S. 11.2%; South Korea 7.4%; Saudi Arabia 4.8%.

Exports

(2006): U.S.$224,017,271,000

(nonelectrical machinery,

electrical

machinery, and electronics 49.8%, metal products 10.7%, clocks, precision instruments, watches, and musical instruments 8.2%, plastic articles 7.1%).

Major export destinations: China 23.1%; Hong Kong 16.7%; U.S. 14.4%; Japan 7.3%; Singapore 4.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006)11: route length 1,118 km; passenger-km 12,352,000,000, metric ton-km cargo 997,000,000. Roads (2006): total length 39,286 km (paved, n.a.). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 5,698,000; trucks and buses 1,000,000. Air transport (2006)12: passenger-km 59,108,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 11,470,000,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.9 (world avg. 20.3); (2006) within marriage 95.8%; outside of marriage 4.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 5.9 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 3.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 1.11. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 6.2/2.8. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 74.5 years; female 80.8 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005)3: malignant neoplasms (cancers) 163.8; cerebrovascular diseases 57.8; heart disease 57.1; diabetes 46.2; accidents and suicide 36.8; pneumonia 25.0; liver diseases 24.7; kidney

diseases 21.2.

Communications

units number

per 1,000

persons

Medium

date

in '000s

Televisions

1999

9,200

418

Telephones

Cellular Landline

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2006 2006

23,24914 14,497

1,02014 636

Internet users Broadband

2005 2003 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

13,098 6,53013 14,520 4,50614

575 28913 637 19714

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 4.6%; primary 19.8%; vocational 23.7%; secondary 26.8%; some college 12.0%; higher 13.1%. Literacy (1999): population age 15 and over literate 94.6%; males 97.6%; females 91.4%.

National economy Budget (2005)4. Revenue: NT$2,115,227,000,000 (tax revenue 72.4%, of which income taxes 30.696, business tax 11.296, customs tax 3.896). Expenditures: NT$2,309,564,000,000 (social security 27.495; education, science, and culture 20.496; economic development 20.296). Population economically active (2006): total 10,522,000; activity rate of total population 46.3% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 57.9%; female 42.4%;

unemployed 3.9%).

2000

2001

100.0 100.0

100.0 98.7

2002

99.8 98.7

2003

2004

2005

2006

99.5 101.3

101.1 103.9

103.5 106.8

104.1 108.2

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): rice 1,262,000, sugarcane 651,000, citrus fruits 548,991, pineapples 491,588, wheat 271,000, soybeans 187,000; livestock (number of live animals) 7,068,621 pigs, 134,793 cattle; timber 30,372 cu m; fisheries production 1,282,279 (from

aquaculture 25%). Mining and quarrying (2006): marble 25,493,000. Manufacturing (value added in NT$’000,000,000; 2003): electronic parts and

components 452; computers, telecommunications, video electronics 232; refined petroleum products 223; base chemicals 195; base metals 180; trans-

port equipment 159. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr;

2004) 181,245,000,000 (167,478,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2002)6 (50,600,

000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2004) 280,000 ([2003] 327,000,000); natural

gas (cu m; 2004) 796,000,000 [2002] 8,127,000,000).

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2006-07) Primary (age 6-12) Secondary (age 13-18)

Vocational Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

2,651 1,210

100,692 100,498

1,798,436 1,757,352

17.9 17.5

50,388 ^ 1,263,977

25.4

163

Health (2006): physicians 34,899 (1 per 654 persons); hospital beds 148,962 (1 per 153 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2004) 5.9.

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

in value NT$'000,000 Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

Area and population Taiwan area Counties

709

Military Total active duty personnel (March 2006): 290,000 (army 69.0%, navy 15.5%, air force 15.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$324. lJanuary 1. ?Includes Quemoy and Matsu groups. ?For Taiwan area only, excluding Quemoy and Matsu groups. ^General government. ?In manufacturing. 5Coal production ceased in 2000. ?Civilian persons only. 3Import duties, VAT, and other producers. Unemployed. Imports cif; exports fo.b. UTaiwan Railway Administration only. China Airlines, EVA, and Far Eastern Air transport only. Circulation of top 10 dailies only. Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (Taiwan) http://eng.dgbas.gov.tw/mp.asp?mp-2 * Taiwan Yearbook 2006 http://www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/5-gp/yearbook

710

Britannica World Data

Tajikistan

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Jumhurii Tojikiston (Republic of Tajikistan). Form of government: parliamentary republic with two legislative houses (National Assembly [341]; House of Representatives [63]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Dushanbe. Official language: Tajik (Tojik). Official religion: none. Monetary unit: somoni (TJS); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Agriculture Mining Public utilities

force

1,993.5

21.5

1,706.1

18.4

1,432,000 wis ste

482.2 556.3

5.2 6.0

118,000 64,000 66,000

5.4 2.9 3.0

1,975.0

21.3

110,000

5.0

29.2 649.1

0.3 7.0

ES 34,000

ah 1.6

|

Services Other TOTAL

area

population 20062

Capitals

sq mi

Qürghonteppa

sq km

estimate

9,600

24,800

2,463,300

Khujand

9,800

25,400

2,060,900

Khorugh

24,800

64,200

218,400

Autonomous oblast Kühistoni Badakhshon (Gorno-Badakhshan)

% of labour

force

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Area and population

Sughd

labour

value

Trade, hotels

1 £= TJS 6.95.

Khatlon

% of total

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun.

1 U.S.$ = TJS 3.44;

Oblasts

in value TJS ’000,000

City Dushanbe

—

40

100

646,400

No oblast administration

—

11,050

28,600

1,531,300

143,100?

6,920,300

TOTAL

55,300*.^

850.1 1,030.76 9,272.2

92 11.16 100.0

65.6 2s see

297,000 56,5007 2,183,5004

13.6 2.67 100.04

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 6.6%, in permanent crops 0.9%, in pasture 22.8%; overall forest area (2005) 2.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 1.0; remittances (2006) 1,019; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 77; official development assistance (2005) 1898. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2004) 3.0; remittances (2006) 393; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size (2004) 5.2; average disposable income per household TJS 3,462 (U.S.$1,111); sources of income: wages and salaries 45.5%, self-employment 28.9%, transfers 7.0%; expenditure: food 72.1%, clothing 8.2%, transportation and communications 4.5%, household furnishings 2.2%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Population (2007): 6,736,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 121.8, persons per sq km 47.1.

Urban-rural (2006): urban 26.3%; rural 73.7%. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.74%; female 50.26%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 35.6%; 15-29, 31.2%; 30-44, 18.8%; 45-59, 9.2%; 60-74, 4.0%; 75 and over, 1.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 7,062,000; (2020) 8,342,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Tajik 80.0%; Uzbek 15.3%; Russian 1.1%; Tatar 0.3%; other 3.3%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Sunni Muslim c. 7896; Shi'1 Muslim c. 696; nonreligious c. 1296; other (mostly Christian) c. 496. Major cities (20022): Dushanbe 575,900; Khujand Kurgan-Tyube 61,200; Ura-Tyube 51,700.

147,400; Kulyab 79,500;

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

-286.6 1.596

—125.4 8.8%

—125.2 8.2%

—204.6 11.4%

-332.0 15.4%

Imports (2004): U.S.$1,247,000,000 (alumina 26.8%, petroleum products 8.2%, electricity 5.3%, grain and flour 4.3%, natural gas 2.7%, unspecified 52.7%). Major import sources (2005): Russia 19.3%; Kazakhstan 12.7%; Uzbekistan 11.5%; Azerbaijan 8.6%; China 7.0%.

Exports (2004): U.S.$915,000,000 (aluminum 62.6%, cotton fibre 17.7%, electricity 6.6%). Major export destinations (2005): The Netherlands 46.6%; Turkey 15.8%; Russia 9.1%; Uzbekistan 7.3%; Latvia 4.9%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): length 299 mi, 482 km; passenger-km (2003) 50,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2003) 1,087,000,000. Roads (2000): total

length 17,254 mi, 27,767 km (paved [1996] 83%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars, ta; trucks and buses, n.a. Air transport (2005)?: passenger-km

Vital statistics

1,030,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 7,031,000.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 27.4 (world avg. 20.3); (1994) legitimate 90.8%; illegitimate 9.2%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 20.2 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.14. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 7.6/0.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 61.2 years; female 67.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2001): diseases of the circulatory system 189.4, of which ischemic heart disease 62.9; diseases of the respiratory system 58.3; infectious and parasitic diseases 30.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 28.4; violence, poisoning, and accidents 25.8.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: TJS 1,566,000,000 (tax revenue 87.7%, of which taxes on goods and services 46.5%, customs duties 16.1%, payroll tax 11.0%, income tax 10.0%; nontax revenue 9.8%; grants 2.3%). Expenditures: TIS 1,944,000,000 (education 17.3%; defense 12.3%; social security and welfare

12.2%; general administrative services 9.5%; health 5.5%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$785,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): potatoes 573,700, wheat 570,850, raw seed cotton 440,245, tomatoes 221,000, onions 199,000; livestock (number of live animals) 1,893,000 sheep, 1,377,000 cattle, 1,160,000 goats, 42,000 camels; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production

(2005) 210 (from aquaculture 12%). Mining and quarrying (2004): antimony (metal content) 2,000; silver 5,000 kg; gold 3,000 kg. Manufacturing (value of production in TJS ’000,0005; 2001): nonferrous metals (nearly all alu-

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

2,850

357

2005

26510

4010

2005

280

43

units Medium

date

PCs 2006 Dailies 2005 Internet users — 2005 Broadband 2003

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

TE 0

hid 0

20

31

1010

1.619

Education and health Educational attainment (1989). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: primary education or no formal schooling 16.3%; some secondary 21.1%; completed secondary and some postsecondary 55.1%; higher 7.5%. Literacy (2006): percentage of total population age 15 and over literate 99.5%; males literate 99.7%; females literate 99.2%. Education (2004-05)

Primary (age 6-13) Secondary (age 14-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools!!

teachers

students

teacher ratio

670

32.498

693,078

213

3,108

56,790

960,215

16.9

52

3,132

24,195

7.7

34

7,8303

119,317

16.3

Health (20072): physicians 13,300 (1 per 506 persons); hospital beds 40,300 (1 per 167 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 45.0. Food (2004): daily per capita caloric intake 1,963 (vegetable products 89%, animal products 11%); 77% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

minum) 442,000; food 138,000; textiles 104,000; grain mill products 51,000;

basic chemicals 10,000. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kWhr; 2006—07) 19,198,800,000 ([2005] 17,321,000,000); hard coal (metric tons;

2006) 102,000 ([2004] 138,000); lignite (metric tons; 2004) 15,000 (15,000);

crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 161,000 ([2004] 110,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (1,283,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 20,000,000

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 7,600 (army 100%); Russian troops (2007) 7,000. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 2.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$7.

([2004] 563,500,000).

Population economically active (2003): total 1,932,000; activity rate of tota population 29.1% (participation rates: ages 15-62 [male], 15-57 [female 51.7%; female [1996] 46.5%; officially unemployed [September 2006-August

2007] 2.4%).

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

137.0 150.7

150.7 208.0

176.3 286.2

188.7 390.1

203.8 550.5

228.2 752.4

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$3,478,000,000 (U.S.$524 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lIncludes 8 members appointed by the President and 1 seat reserved for the former president. 2January 1. 3Includes c. 400 sq mi (c. 1,035 sq km) ceded to China in May 2002. 4Detail does not add to total given because of gross rounding. 5At 1998 constant prices. ‘Indirect taxes less subsidies. 7Including 46,500 unemployed. Figure represents commitments. Tajikistan Airlines only. !°Subscribers. 112006-07.

Internet resources for further information:

* State Statistical Committee http://www.stat.tj/english/home.htm * National Bank of Tajikistan http://www.nbt.tj/en

Nations of the World

711

Tanzania

zanites 3,100 kg; diamonds 219,600 carats. Manufacturing (2005): cement

Official name: Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania (Swahili); United Republic of Tanzania (English). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with one legislative house (National Assembly [3241]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Dar es Salaam (acting)?. Official languages: Swahili; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Tanzanian shilling (TZS); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

tolitres; konyagi (a Tanzanian liquor) 41,050 hectolitres; cigarettes 4,308,000,000 units. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr;

1,281,000; wheat flour 347,296; sugar 202,200; soft drinks 36,566,355 hec-

2004) 2,478,000,000 (2,591,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2004) 65,000 (65,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (1,074,000). Population economically active (2002): total 14,841,000; activity rate 43.1% (participation rates: over age 9, 64.9%; female 48.0%; officially unemployed 3.796). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

1 US$ = TZS 1277; 1 £= TZS 2,567.

Area and population Administrative regions

aea

„Population.

sq km

2005 estimate

Mainland Tanzania

Rukwa

(Tanganyika) Arusha Dar es Salaam Dodoma Iringa

Kagera

36,486 1,393 41,311 56,864

1,433,000 2,809,000 1,792,000 1,559,000

37,037

1917000

28,388

Kigoma

Kilimanjaro

13,309

Lindi

66,046 :

Manyara Mara

Mtwara Mwanza

16,707 19,592

Pwani (Coast)

32,407

aut

1441000

Zanzibars

1,145,000

19,566

60,350

1,466,000

70,799

Ruvuma Shinyanga Singida Tabora Tanga

2214000

820,000 i

45,820

Mbeya

Morogoro

area. Administrative regions

é

sq km

2005 estimate

68,635

1,256,000

63,498 50,781 49,341 76,151 26,808

1,197,000 3,070,000 1,154,000 1,894,000 1,722,000

Pemb:

906

384,000

1,554

689,000

Und ja (Zanzibar)

total LAND AREA

883,749

1480000

5j,

942,7994

3,207,000 947,000

INLAND WATER

2002 106.2

2003 109.9

2004 110.0

2005 119.4

2006 130.3

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 5.0; annual income per household (2000-01)6 TZS 1,055,000 (U.S.$1,310); sources of income (2000-01)6: agricultural income 51.4%, self-employment 20.6%, wages and salaries 12.0%, transfer payments 7.8%; expenditure (2001)10: food 55.9%, transportation 9.7%, energy 8.5%, beverages and tobacco 6.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 824; remittances (2006) 16; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 473; official development assistance (2005) 1,505. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 554; remittances (2006) 41. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 4.5%, in permanent crops 1.2%, in pasture 48.7%; overall forest area (2005) 39.9%.

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices)

"temo|

2,211,000

1,887,000

Population

2001 105.1

!

59.050

37,394,000

TZS '000,000,000 % of total

2001 —626 31.5%

2002 —547 24.4%

2003 -823 37.7%

2004 —1,257 30.226

2005 —1,370 28.1%

2006 —2,695 38.4%

Imports (2005): TZS 3,125,000,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 22.5%, transport equipment 12.1%, crude and refined petroleum 11.5%, construction materials 10.5%, food and beverages 7.5%). Major import sources (2006): South Africa 12.7%; U.A.E. 11.6%; China 7.2%; Saudi Arabia 5.9%; Japan 5.8%; India 5.5%.

Exports (2005): TZS 1,608,000,000 (gold 40.7%, cotton 7.9%, coffee 5.2%, cashews 3.4%, diamonds 1.8%, cloves 0.6%). Major export destinations (2006): U.K. 18.1%; Switzerland 13.9%; South Africa 9.2%; China 6.9%; Germany 5.8%.

Demography Population (2007): 39,384,000. Density (2007)*: persons per sq mi 107.9, persons per sq km 41.7. Urban-rural (2006): urban 38.595; rural 61.596. Sex distribution (2006): male 49.46%; female 50.54%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 44.3%; 15-29, 29.1%; 30-44, 14.6%; 45-59, 7.6%; 60-74, 3.6%; 75-84, 0.796; 85 and over, 0.196.

Population projection: (2010) 41,893,000; (2020) 49,989,000. Ethnolinguistic composition (2000): 130 different Bantu tribes 95%, of which Sukuma 9.5%, Hehe and Bena 4.5%, Gogo 4.4%, Haya 4.2%, Nyamwezi 3.6%, Makonde 3.3%, Chagga 3.0%, Ha 2.9%; other 5%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 3596, of which Sunni c. 30%, Shi7c. 5%; Christian c. 3596; other (significantly traditional beliefs) c. 3096; Zanzibar only is 99% Muslim. Major urban areas (2002): Dar es Salaam 2,339,910; Arusha 270,485; Mbeya 232,596; Mwanza 209,806; Morogoro 209,058; Unguja (Zanzibar) 205,870.

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 36.8 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 4.93. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 48.5 years; female 50.9 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 6.5% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy

3,690

km;

passenger-km

(2003)

1,305,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2003) 4,461,000,000. Roads (2006): length

85,000 km (paved 5%). Vehicles: passenger cars (2000) 36,000; trucks and buses (1999) 98,800. Air transport (2005)!2: passenger-km 246,000,000; metric ton-km 2,364,000.

Communications

units

units

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

1,500

41

Cellular

2006

5,76714

14814

Internet users

2006

157

4.0

Broadband

Medium

Landline

Vital statistics

Medium

date

PCs Dailies

2005 2004 2005 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

356 10513 384 we

9.3 2.913 10 oa

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 49.4%; incomplete/complete primary education 44.0%; incomplete/complete secondary 5.5%; postsecondary 0.9%, of which university 0.4%; other 0.2%. Literacy (2006): percentage of population age 15 and over literate 69.4%; males 77.5%; females 62.2%.

Budget (2003-04). Revenue: TZS 1,447,500,000,000 (VAT 34.2%, income tax 24.9%, excise tax 15.0%, import duties 9.095). Expenditures: TZS 2,531,500,000,000 (current expenditure 74.5%, of which wages 18.3%, education 17.7%, health 8.4%, interest payments on debt 4.8%; capital expenditure 25.5%).

Gross national income (2006)6: U.S.$12,743,000,000 (U.S.$332 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2003

Agriculture, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2001): length

2002

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

TZS '000,000

value

force?

force?

4,417,900 191,200 711,000 546,200 157,000 454,000 1,153,300 564,300 869,300 929,800 698,4008 10,692,400

41.3 1.8 6.6 5.1 1.5 4.2 10.8 53 8.1 8. 6.58 100.09

11,592,000 71,000 272,000 157,000 43,000 129,000 1,101,000 29,000

81.1 0.5 1.9 1.4 0.3 0.9 7.7 0.2

901,000

6.3

14,294,0009

100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$6,183,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): cassava 6,500,000, corn (maize) 3,373,000, sweet potatoes 1,056,000, rice 784,000, sorghum 750,000, coconuts 372,000, seed cotton 300,000, cashew nuts 90,400, tobacco leaves 52,000, coffee 34,300, tea 30,300, cloves 12,271; livestock (number of live animals) 17,719,091 cattle, 12,550,000 goats, 3,521,000 sheep; roundwood (2005) 24,025,852 cu m, of which fuelwood 90%;

fisheries production (2005) 347,811 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): gold 52,236 kg; garnets 7,400 kg; rubies 3,400 kg; tan-

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Education (2005) Primary (age 7-13) Secondary (age 14-19)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

14,257 1,745

135,013 23,904

1,869,154 290,355

13.8 124

Voc., teacher tr.

56

1,06215

Higher

39

2,06415

9,13615

23,638

8.615

9.115

Health (2002): physicians 822 (1 per 42,085 persons); hospital beds 36,853 (1 per 939 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 73.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,230 (vegetable products 94%, animal products 696); 12396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 27,000 (army 85.2%, navy 3.7%, air force 11.1%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.1%; per capita expenditure U.S.$4. lIncludes 232 directly elected seats, 75 seats reserved for women, 5 seats indirectly elected, 10 appointed by the President, and 1 each for the Attorney General and the Speaker. ?Only the legislature meets in Dodoma, the longtime planned capital. “Has local internal government structure; Unguja (Zanzibar) island has 3 administrative regions, Pemba island has 2. ^A recent survey indicates a total area of 945,090 sq km (364,901 sq mi). 5Based on land area only. Mainland Tanzania only. 7Employed only. 8Net taxes less imputed bank service charge. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. !°Weights of consumer price index components. Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and cif. in commodities and trading partners. Air Tanzania only. Z3 Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 151998.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Tanzania http://www.bot-tz.org * National Bureau of Statistics http://www.nbs.go.tz

712

Britannica World Data

Thailand

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005

Official name: Ratcha Anachak Thai (Kingdom of Thailand). Form of government: constitutional monarchy! with one legislative house (National Legislative Assembly [242]). Chief of state: King. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Bangkok. Official language: 'Thai. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: baht (THB); valuation

Bangkok and vicinities Eastern Northeastem

Northern Southem Sub-central Western

population 2006 estimate?

Bangkok Chon Buri Udon Thani

2,997 14,094 65,195

7,762 36,503 168,855

9,948,392 4,401,785 21,376,830

Chiang Mai Surat Thani

65,500 27,303

169,644 70,715

11,890,752 8,600,436

6,407 16,621

16,594 43,047

2,957,143 3,653,368

198,117

513,120

62,828,706

11.3 29 344 3.2 3.2

15,315,300 54,600 5,306,600 2,038,900 99,300

41.6 0.2 14.4 5.5 0.3

497,675

7.9

1,052,900

2.9

1,138,118

18.0

7,616,800

20.7

364,454

58

1,009,000

2.7

326,106 530,615 — 6,319,333

52 84 — 100.0

1,170,100 2,614,900 516,1008 36,794,500

32 74 1.46 100.0

Household income and expenditure (2006). Average household size (2004) 3.5; average annual income per household THB 213,444 (U.S.$5,634); sources of income: wages and salaries 39.9%, self-employment 32.6%, nonmonetary income 16.2%, transfers 9.4%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 33.2%, housing, energy, and household furnishings 24.6%, transportation and communications 24.3%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 10,104; remittances (2006) 1,333; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 2,377; official development assistance (2005) 6077. Disbursements

for (U.S.$’000,000):

tourism

(2001-05 avg.) 262.

(2005)

4,995; remittances,

n.a.; FDI

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 322.5, persons per sq km 124.5. Urban-rural (2006): urban 29.996; rural 70.196. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.7996; female 51.2196.

THB '000,000,000 % of total

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 21.796; 15-29, 24.196; 30-44, 24.196; 45-59, 18.896; 60—74, 8.6%; 75-84, 2.2%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 65,125,000; (2020) 67,990,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Tai peoples 81.4%, of which Thai (Siamese) 34.9%, Lao 26.5%; Han Chinese 10.6%; Malay 3.7%; Khmer 1.9%; other 2.4%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Buddhist c. 83%; Muslim (nearly all Sunni) c. 9%; traditional beliefs c. 2.5%; nonreligious c. 2%; other (significantly Christian) c. 3.5%.

Major cities (2000): Bangkok 6,355,144; Samut Prakan 378,741; Nonthaburi 291,555; Udon Thani 222,425; Nakhon Ratchasima 204,641.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.9 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.84. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 5.5/1.4. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 69.9 years; female 74.7 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic diseases c. 170, of which HIV/AIDS-related c. 91; cardiovascular diseases c.

135; malignant neoplasms (cancers) c. 97; accidents c. 52. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 1.4% (world avg. 1.0%).

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: THB 1,490,900,000,000 (tax revenue 81.8%, of which taxes on goods and services 40.0%, income taxes, on corporations 23.7%, on individuals 9.3%; nontax revenue 13.4%; social contributions 4.8%). Expenditures: THB 1,316,800,000,000 (economic affairs 30.3%; education 20.0%; general public services 17.6%; health 8.4%; defense 6.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$13,483,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

sugarcane 49,586,000, rice 30,292,000, cassava 16,938,000, oil palm fruit 5,003,000, corn (maize) 3,886,000, natural rubber 2,980,000, pineapples 2,183,000, coconuts 1,871,000, bananas 1,865,000, mangoes 1,800,000, tangerines 670,0004; livestock (number of live animals) 8,023,000 pigs, 5,610,000 cattle, 187,400,000 chickens; roundwood 28,566,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 70%;

fisheries production 3,743,000 (from aquaculture 31%). Mining and quarrying (2005): gypsum 6,920,000; feldspar 1,000,000; dolomite 950,000; zinc [metal content] 42,570; gemstones (significantly rubies and sapphires) 800,000 carats; gold 4,400 kg. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2000): textiles and wearing apparel 1,905; electronics 1,817; food products 1,311; motor vehicles 1,225; office machines and computers 1,045; electrical machin-

ery and parts 964; tobacco products 821. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 136,767,000,000 (133,572,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2004) negligible (7,536,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 18,991,000 ([2004] 20,547,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 69,900,000 ([2004] 315,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 44,725,000 (39,643,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005) 24,807,000,000 ([2004] 27,295,000,000). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 27.7%, in permanent crops 7.0%, in pasture 1.6%; overall forest area (2005) 28.4%. Population economically active (2006; end of 3rd quarter): total 36,867,200; activity rate of total population 56.4% (participation rates: ages 15-59, 78.5%; female 46.0%; unemployed 1.2%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

2001 4125.2 2.2%

2002 4142.9 2.5%

2003 4182.7 2.8%

2004 476.2 1.0%

2005 -327.0 3.6%

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.6 101.0

102.3 100.2

104.1 102.5

107.0

111.8 im

117.0 “iss

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$202,098,000,000 (U.S.$3,190 per capita).

2006 +60.5 0.6%

Imports (2006): THB 4,871,000,000,000 (electrical machinery 19.6%, of which electronic integrated circuits 4.2%; crude petroleum 15.6%; nonelectrical machinery and parts 14.1%; base and fabricated metals 13.4%, of which iron and steel 8.2%). Major import sources: Japan 20.1%; China 10.6%; U.S. 6.7%; Malaysia 6.6%; Singapore 4.5%. Exports (2006): THB 4,931,500,000,000 (nonelectrical machinery 18.3%; electrical machinery 17.8%, of which electronic integrated circuits 4.9%; food products 11.0%; road vehicles 7.7%; rubber [all forms] 6.7%; plastics [all forms] 5.0%). Major export destinations: U.S. 15.0%; Japan 12.7%; China 9.0%; Singapore 6.4%; Hong Kong 5.5%; Malaysia 5.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2006): route length 4,071 km; (2003) passenger-km 10,251,000,000; (2003) metric ton-km cargo 3,987,000,000. Roads (2004): total

length 57,403 km (paved 99%). Vehicles (2006): passenger cars 3,312,941; trucks and buses 4,568,895. Air transport (2006)?: passenger-km 56,891,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,107,000,000.

Communications Medium

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

17,971

289

Televisions Telephones Cellular

2006

40,81611

Landline

2006

7,073

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

64311

111

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005 2006 2006

4,408 3,95710 8,466 T

70 6310 133 ie

Education and health Educational attainment (2006). Percentage of employed population having: no formal schooling 3.6%; incomplete primary education 33.9%; complete primary 21.5%; lower secondary 14.4%; upper secondary 12.0%; some to complete higher 14.1%; unknown 0.5%. Literacy (2003): population age 15 and over literate 92.5%; males literate 94.9%; females literate 90.5%. Education (2004)

student/ schools

Primary (age 6-11)

m

Secondary (age 12-17)

E

Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

teachers

students

298,270 ^ 6,112,687 }

teacher ratio

20.5

4,385,297 215,798

65,548

624,547

2,251,453

23.2

34.3

Health: physicians (2004) 18,918 (1 per 3,307 persons); hospital beds (2005) 134,016 (1 per 470 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 11.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,042 (vegetable products 90%, animal products 1096); 16396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 306,600 (army 62.096, navy 23.0%, air force 15.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.196; per capita expenditure U.S.$31. 1Under an interim constitution (in effect from Oct. 1, 2006) issued by leaders of a military coup d'état. New military-backed government structure (per new constitution approved by referendum in August 2007) was pending following late December 2007 elections. ?Actual local administration is based on 76 provinces. ?Official government estimates. ^Includes mandarins, clementines, and satsumas.

2000

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

720,391 184,473 2,154,389 201,925 201,187

Foreign trade?

Demography Population (2007): 63,884,000.

Consumer price index Average earnings index

force

Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

sq km

TOTAL

% of labour

force®

Finance, real estate

sq mi

Saraburi Ratchaburi

labour

value

Trade, hotels

area Principal cities

% of total

Transp. and commun.

Area and population Regions?

in value THB ’000,000

Agriculture, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = THB 34.30; 1£= THB 68.94.

2006

?Third quarter. *Includes

449,900 unemployed. "Figure represents commitments. 3Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. ?Thai and Bangkok airways. !?Circulation of daily newspapers. !!Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * National Statistical Office Thailand http://web.nso.go.th/eng/index.htm * Bank of Thailand http://www.bot.or.th

Nations of the World

Togo

T.

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$2,254,000,000

(U.S.$352 per capita).

Atlan

Official name: République Togolaise (Togolese Republic). Form of government: republic! with one legislative body (National Assembly

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

[81].

CFAF 482.77; 1 £ = CFAF 970.43.

CA

Population population

population

2005? estimate

Regions Prefectures

510,446 111,997

Haho Kloto

194,917 192,763

Sotouboua Tchamba Tchaoudjo De la Kara

141,073 83,997 173,379 689,2103

Moyen-Mono Ogou Wawa Des Savanes

75,382 264,915 162,610 628,9043

53,845 108,766

Kpendjal Oti

120,612 138,919

Binah Dankpen Doufelgou

67,844 77,536 87,228

Kéran Kozah Des Plateaux

Tandjouaré Tóne Maritime

73,229 220,763

Avé Golfe^

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

234,762

88,305 100,151 43,076

Vo Yoto Zio

225,070 159,380 261,684

79,690

TOTAL

5,227 ,2275

fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

418.5 31.7 97.1 37.1 35.5 61.7 135.6 119.2 um 107.8 114.410 1,158.6

36.1 27 8.4 3.2 3.1 5.3 11.7 10.3 P 9.3 9.910 100.0

1,210,000

57.9

881,000

421

2,091,000

100.0

Foreign trade!! Balance of trade (current prices)

91,536 1,224,425

Lacs

Est-Mono

% of total

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2004) 19; remittances (2006) 179; foreign direct investment (2001-05 avg.) 52; official development assistance (2005) 87. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2004) 8; remittances (2006) 34. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 46.1%, in permanent crops 2.2%, in pasture 18.4%; overall forest area (2005) 7.1%.

92,613 276,761 2,196,857

1,201,8103

Agou Amou Danyi

in value CFAF ’000,000,000

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,469,000,000.

2005? estimate

Centrale Blitta

Assoli Bassar

2003

Agriculture, forestry,

Head of state and government: President assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Lomé. Official language: French. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: CFA franc (CFAF); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ =

Regions Prefectures

713

U.S.$ 000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

—158.8 18.2%

-151.5 15.2%

-156.7 11.6%

-252.3 17.3%

—346.5 22.5%

428.3 25.9%

Imports (2004): U.S.$548,100,000 (mineral fuels 23.0%; food products 9.7%; iron and steel 8.1%; construction materials 7.4%; machinery and apparatus 6.9%; road vehicles 6.4%).Major import sources: France 19.5%; China 8.3%; Céte d'Ivoire 6.1%; Belgium 4.8%; Italy 3.7%. Exports (2004): U.S.$384,400,000 (food products 19.1%, of which cocoa beans

Demography

6.4%; portland cement

Area: 21,925 sq mi, 56,785 sq km.

17.3%; cotton 15.3%; phosphates 13.6%; iron and

steel 11.7%). Major export destinations: Burkina Faso 13.1%; Benin 12.2%;

Population (2007): 6,585,0006. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 300.3, persons per sq km 116.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 40.196; rural 59.996. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.0795; female 50.9396.

Ghana 11.9%; Mali 11.2%; China 4.4%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 42.3%; 15-29, 29.9%; 30-44, 15.6%; 45-59, 8.0%; 60-74, 3.5%; 75 and over, 0.7%.

Population projection: (2010) 7,122,000; (2020) 8,984,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Ewe 22.2%; Kabre 13.4%; Wachi 10.0%; Mina

5.6%; Kotokoli 5.6%; Bimoba 5.2%; Losso 4.0%; Gurma 3.4%; Lamba 3.2%;

Adja 3.0%; other 24.4%. Religious affiliation (2004): Christian 47.2%, of which Roman Catholic 27.8%, Protestant 9.5%, independent and other Christian 9.9%; traditional beliefs 33.0%; Muslim 13.7%; nonreligious 4.9%; other 1.2%.

Major cities (2003): Lomé 676,400 (urban agglomeration [2005] 1,337,000); Sokodé 84,200; Kpalimé 75,200; Atakpamé 64,300; Kara 49,800.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 37.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 10.0 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 5.01. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 55.0 years; female 59.1 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 3.2%7 (world avg. 1.0%). Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): infectious and parasitic

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2004): route length 568 km; passenger-km (2001) 44,000,000; metric ton-km cargo (2001) 440,000,000. Roads (2001): total length 7,500 km (paved 24%). Vehicles (2002): passenger cars 51,400; trucks and buses 24,500. Air transport: passenger-km (2001) 130,000,000; metric tonkm cargo (2003) 7,000,000. Communications

units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions

2004

650

107

Telephones Cellular Landline

2006 2006

70818 82

11218 13

units Medium

date

PCs

Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

185

34

2004 2006 2005

giz 320 ai

1.512 51 ae

Education and health Educational attainment (1998)14. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal education 56.3%; primary education 24.596; secondary and higher 18.3%; unknown 0.9%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 53.2%; males 68.7%; females 38.5%.

diseases c. 572, of which HIV/AIDS-related c. 220, malaria c. 136; lower res-

piratory infections c. 180; perinatal conditions c. 86.

Education (2003-04)

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: CFAF 175,600,000,000 (tax revenue 87.0%, of which taxes on international trade 41.5%; nontax revenue 7.0%; grants 6.0%). Expenditures: CFAF 168,400,000,000 (current expenditure 80.0%, capital expenditure 20.0%). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): cassava 767,400, yams 621,100, corn (maize) 543,300, sorghum 224,600, rice 76,280, dry beans 52,810, peanuts (groundnuts) 39,290, coffee 10,200, cacao beans 7,300; livestock (number of live animals) 1,850,000 sheep, 1,480,000 goats; roundwood (2005) 5,927,873 cu m, of which fuelwood 97%;

fisheries production (2005) 29,267 (from aquaculture 5%). Mining and quar-

rying (2005): limestone 2,400,000; phosphate rock 1,020,870; diamonds 41,000

carats. Manufacturing (value added in CFAF '000,000; 2006): food products,

beverages, and tobacco manufactures 33,800; bricks, cement, and ceramics 19,300; base and fabricated metals 10,800; wood and wood products 7,300.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 262,000,000 (610,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (622,000). Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.0; expenditure (2004)8: food products 36.1%, hotels and restaurants 12.9%, housing and energy 12.4%, transportation 8.5%, clothing and footwear 6.0%. Population economically active (2003): total 2,295,0009; activity rate of total population 38.995? (participation rates: over age 15, 70.2969; female 37.0969; unemployed [2004] c. 3296). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

103.9

107.1

106.1

106.5

113.7

116.2

Primary (age 6—11) Secondary (age 12-18)

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

5,01915 79115

22,210 9,537

984,846 355,547

44.3 37.3

1,492

19,838

13.3

400

13,500

33.8

Vocational

Higher's

vus

Health: physicians (2004) 225 (1 per 23,357 persons); hospital beds (2002) 4,991 (1 per 997 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 622. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,123 (vegetable products 9796, animal products 396); 11696 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 8,550 (army 94.7%, navy 2.3%, air force 3.0%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.5%; per capita expenditure U.S.$5.

Y[ransitional government ended with October 2007 elections. ?January 1. ?Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ^Golfe prefecture includes Lomé. 5Official country estimate. ‘Estimate of UN World Population Prospects (2006 Revision). Statistically derived midpoint of range. 5Weights of consumer price index components. ?Estimate of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. "Import duties and taxes. “Import figures are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.if. for commodities and trading partners; trade data breakdown for commodities and trading partners is based on c. 2/3 of both imports and exports only. !2Circulation of daily newspapers. !3Subscribers. /4Based on the 1998 Togo Demographic and Health Survey, of which 14,075 respondents were age 25 and over. 2001-02.

Internet resources for further information: Banque Centrale des Etats de l'Afrique de l'Ouest http://www.bceao.int * DGSCN-Togo http://www.stat-togo.org

714

Britannica World Data

Population economically active (2003): total 36,450; activity rate 34.196 (participation rates: ages 15-64 (1996) 60.4%; female 41.9%; unemployed 5.2%).

Tonga Official name: Pule'anga Fakatu'i 'o Tonga (Tongan); Kingdom of Tonga (English). Form of government: hereditary constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Legislative Assembly [341]). Head of state and government: King assisted by Prime Minister. Capital: Nuku'alofa. Official languages: Tongan; English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: pa'anga (T$); valuation

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Earnings index?

'Ohonua

Vava’u4

2006 preliminary

sq km 87.4

5,165

42.5 27.7 100.6

110.0 Tir 260.5

7,572 1,652 71,260

46.0

119.2

15,485

278.16 11.4 289.5

720.36 29.6 749.9

101,134

133.4 132.8

148.1 139.1

160.4 142.8

170.1

2002-03 —56.7 61.7%

2003-04 —69.0 71.3%

2004-05 -89.6 73.6%

2005-06 -102.8 77.1%

New Zealand 35.0%; Fiji 27.0%; Australia 10.7%; U.S. 9.1%; Japan 3.6%.

Major towns (2006): Nuku'alofa (on Tongatapu) 23,438 (urban agglomeration, 34,058); Neiafu (on Vava'u) 4,108; Haveloloto 3,3848; Tofoa-Koloua 3,1938;

Pangai (in the Ha'apai Group) 2,523.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 25.2 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.4 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 19.8 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.30. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 6.79/1.1. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 71.0 years; female 74.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004)19: circulatory diseases 150.5; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 71.8; endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic disorders 51.8; respiratory diseases 39.9.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: T$172,446,000 (tax revenue 72.9%; grants 15.1%; nontax revenue 12.0%). Expenditures: T$166,031,000 (current expenditure 93.0%; development expenditure 7.0% ). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005): coconuts 58,000, pumpkins, squash, and gourds 20,000, cassava 9,000, sweet potatoes 6,000, yams 4,400, plantains 3,000, vanilla 130; livestock (number of live animals) 81,000 pigs, 12,500 goats, 11,400 horses, 11,250 cattle, 300,000 chickens; roundwood 2,100 cu m, of which fuelwood, none; fisheries produc-

tion (2005) 1,901 (from aquaculture, negligible); aquatic plants production (2005) 887 (from aquaculture 9%). Mining and quarrying: coral and sand for local use. Manufacturing (value of production in T$'000; 2005): food prod-

ucts and beverages 19,722; bricks, cement, and ceramics 4,109; chemicals and chemical products 2,044; printing and publishing 1,313; furniture 1,310; fab-

ricated metal products 1,193. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 54,000,000 (47,000,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) none (38,000). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$230,000,000 (U.S.$2,304 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005-06

2001-02 —43.6 55.1%

Imports (2005-06): U.S.$113,075,000 (mineral fuels and chemical products 31.7%; food and beverages 28.0%; machinery and transport equipment 12.9%; motor vehicles 3.6%; dressed timber 3.6%). Major import sources:

Roman Catholic c. 1296; Baha' c. 596; other c. 296.

2003

in value T$'000

% of total value

labour force

100,567 1,708

21.0 0.4

10,990 60

30.1 0.2

12,516 30,409

2.6 6.4

8,540 1,440

23.4 3.9

Public utilities

9,694

2.0

530

1.5

Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

21,522 59,726 49,930 75,324

45 125 10.4 157

1,580 3,570 760 2,590

4.3 9.8 2.1 7.1

39,393 77,75011 478,539

8.2 16.311 100.0

4,500 1,89012 36,450

12.4 5.212 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

119.5 115.2

2000-01 —49.9 67.6%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Population projection: (2010) 103,000; (2020) 107,000. Doubling time: 35 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Tongan 95.2%; mixed-race (Euronesian) 0.7%; British or Australian expatriates 0.5%; other 3.6%. Religious affiliation (2005): Mormon c. 3596; Protestant c. 3096, of which Methodist c. 2596; independent Christian (mostly local Methodist) c. 1696;

Services Other TOTAL

108.3 114.2

Balance of trade (current prices)

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 37.4%; 15-29, 29.8%; 30-44, 14.6%; 45-59, 9.4%; 60-74, 6.7%; 75 and over, 2.1%.

Manufacturing Construction

100.0 100.0

Foreign trade!

Demography Population (2007): 101,000. Density (2007)7: persons per sq mi 363.2, persons per sq km 140.2. Urban-rural (2005): urban 23.5%; rural 76.5%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.62%; female 49.38%.

Agriculture Mining

2006

ing 5.3%, clothing and footwear 3.4%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2006-07) 13; remittances (2006) 66; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 4.0; official development assistance (2005) 1617. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2002) 3.0; remittances (2006) 16; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops c. 2196, in permanent crops c. 1596, in pasture c. 696; overall forest area (2005) c. 596.

population

33.7

Neiafu

TOTAL LAND AREA INLAND WATER TOTAL

2005

kava, and tobacco 12.3%, household furnishings and operation 12.0%, hous-

sq mi

Pangai Hihifo Nuku'alofa

2004

of own produce 16.1%, other 28.6%; cash expenditure (2002)16: food and nonalcoholic beverages 44.496, transportation 14.296, alcoholic beverages,

area

'Eua?

2003

5.7; cash income per household T$12,871 (U.S.$6,511); sources of cash incomel5: wages and salaries 35.6%, remittances from overseas 19.7%, sales

Area and population

Ha'apai^ Niuass Tongatapu?

2002

Household income and expenditure (2000-01). Average household size (2006)

1 £ = T$4.04.

Principal towns

2001

Public debt (external, outstanding; 200614): U.S.$83,200,000.

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = T$2.01;

Divisions?

2000

% of labour force

Exports (2005-06): U.S.$9,225,000 (squash 43.7%; fish 34.7%; root crops 7.9%; manufactured goods 6.8%; kava 3.2%). Major export destinations: Japan 53.7%; New Zealand 11.6%; U.S. 10.5%; Australia 2.1%; Fiji 1.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (1999): total length 680 km (paved 27%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 7,705; trucks and buses 5,297. Air transport (2002): passenger-km 14,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 1,000,000. Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

7.

2005

3019

29819

2005

14

139

70

units Medium

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2005

5.0 0

50 0

2006

3.1

31

2005

0.619

0.619

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

Education and health Educational attainment (1996). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: primary education 26%; lower secondary 58%; upper secondary 8%; higher 6%; not stated 2%. Literacy (2006): c. 99%. Education (2004)

student/ schools

Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-16) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

124

teachers

83420

42 8

E

students

16,94020

teacher ratio

20.320

12,911 1,012

36

1,121

13.9

657

Health (2004): physicians 41 (1 per 2,447 persons); hospital beds 296 (1 per 332 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 20.0. Food (1992): daily per capita caloric intake 2,946 (vegetable products 82%, animal products 18%); 129% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (October 2007): 450-member force includes air and coast guard elements. Tonga has defense cooperation agreements with both Australia and New Zealand. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2004): 1.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$23.

lIncludes 16 nonelective seats and 9 nobles elected by the 33 hereditary nobles of Tonga. 2Divisions have no administrative functions; 3 island councils constitute the local administrative framework (including a combined islands council for "Eua, Niuas, and Tongatapu. 3Eua and Tongatapu together constitute Tongatapu island group. ^Also the name of an island group. >Also known as Niuatoputapu island group. ®Total includes 27.6 sq mi (71.5 sq km) of uninhabited islands. 7Based on land area. 8Within Nuku’alofa urban agglomeration. ?Marriages on Tongatapu only. Deaths occurring in hospitals only. Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. 12Unemployed. Manufacturing only. “January 1. |Noncash annual income equals T$5,734 (U.S.$2,901), of which consumption of own produce 45.6%, imputed rent 43.1%. 16Weights of consumer price index components. !7Figure represents commitments. !8Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. Subscribers. 292005.

Internet resources for further information: * Tonga Department of Statistics http://www.spc.int/prism/Country/TO/stats * National Reserve Bank of Tonga http://www.reservebank.to

Nations of the World

Trinidad and Tobago

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$17,542,000,000 Atlantic Ocean

Official name: Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Form of government: multiparty republic with two legislative houses (Senate [31]; House of Representatives [414]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Port of Spain. Official language: English. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Trinidad and Tobago dollar (TT$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

705.4

0.6

25,700

4.1

51,600.1 6,491.8 9,585.7

45.1 5.7 84

20,400 55,500

3.2 8.9

194500

167

Transp. and commun.

5,955.4

52

42,700

Trade Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

13,426.87 13,309.8 8,147.4

11.77 11.6 743

106,600 48,100

6.8 174 7.7

181.000

29:0

—231.99 114,474.6

-0.29 100.0

Agriculture Petroleum, natural gas,

other mining Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities

866.7

Services

population:

area,

population)

sq km

2000 census

sq km

2000 census

Trinidad Counties Couva/Tabaquite/ Talparo

4,852

1,208,282

720

162,779

Mayaro/Rio Claro

853

33,480

Penal/Debe Princes Town San Juan/Laventille Sangre Grande Siparia Tunapuna/Piarco

247 621 220 899 510 527

83,609 91,947 157,295 64,343 81,917 203,975

Cities Port of Spain San Fernando

Boroughs

13 19

49,031 55,419

Arima

11

32,278

Chaguanas

60

67,433

Point Fortin

Tobago? TOTAL

24 303 5,155

19.056 t 54,084 1,262,366

Demography Population (2007): 1,303,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 654.8, persons per sq km 252.8. Urban-rural (2005): urban 12.296; rural 87.8963. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.1795; female 50.8396. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 22.3%; 15-29, 30.2%; 30-44, 22.6%; 45-59, 15.4%; 60-74, 7.0%; 75-84, 2.0%; 85 and over, 0.5%.

Population projection: (2010) 1,314,000; (2020) 1,358,000. Ethnic composition (2000): black 39.2%; East Indian 38.6%; mixed 16.3%;

08

4,617.48

Other TOTAL

yatea.

105720

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force in value TT$'000,000

Area and population

128

(U.S.$13,520 per capita).

2006

1US.$ = TT$6.29; 1 £ = TT$12.64.

Diego Martin `

715

}

4.08

}

40,60010 625,20011

6.510 100.0

Population economically active (2005): total 623,700; activity rate of total population 48.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.1%; female 41.9%; unemployed [2006] 6.2%). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Consumer price index

105.5

109.9

114.1

118.3

126.5

137.0

100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$1,197,000,000.

Foreign trade!? Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 2002 2003 2004 TT$'000,000 44,500 — 41,180 +8099 — 49,544 96 of total 9.296 2.596 14.296 13.5%

2005 424,670 25.696

2006 +48,364 37.196

Imports (2006): TT$40,934,000,000 (mineral fuels 35.096, machinery 19.796, chemicals and chemical products 8.196, transport equipment 7.096, food products 6.7%). Major import sources (2005): United States 27.2%; Venezuela 13.1%; Brazil 13.1%; Japan 5.4%; Canada 4.1%.

Exports (2006): TT$89,298,000,000 (crude and refined petroleum 39.8%, natural gas [all forms] 34.4%, chemicals [including ammonia, methanol, and urea] 15.1%, iron and steel 3.6%). Major export destinations (2005): United States 68.6%; Jamaica 5.4%; Barbados 2.9%; Mexico 2.4%; France 2.2%.

Chinese 1.6%; white 1.0%; other/not stated 3.3%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Roman Catholic c. 29%; Hindu c. 24%; Protestant c. 19%; independent and other Christian c. 7%; Muslim c. 7%; nonreligious c. 2%; other/unknown c. 12%.

Major cities/built-up areas (2000): Chaguanas 67,433; San Fernando 55,149; Port of Spain 49,031 (greater Port of Spain [2004] 264,000); Arima 32,2784; Point Fortin 19,056; Scarborough (on Tobago) 15,8305. Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.7 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.0 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.63. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2002): 5.8/1.2. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 67.3 years; female 71.4 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2000): diseases of the circulatory system 278.7; endocrine and metabolic disorders 110.7; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 99.1; infectious and parasitic diseases 55.8.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2000): total length 8,320 km (paved 51%). Vehicles (2001): passenger cars 261,087; trucks and buses 54,843. Air transport (2005)13: passenger-km 3,101,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 47,883,000. Communications Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

461

359

Cellular

2006

1,65515

1,27515

Landline

2006

325

250

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2005 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

129 15914 163 2115

100 12314 126 1615

Education and health Educational attainment (2000). Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal schooling 2.5%; primary education 35.4%; secondary 52.0%; university 4.6%; other/not stated 5.5%. Literacy (2002): total population age 15 and over literate 98.5%; males 99.0%; females 97.9%.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: TT$38,489,000,000 (taxes on oil/natural gas corporations 45.7%; VAT 10.6%; nonoil company taxes 10.4%; other oil revenue 9.8%; personal income taxes 8.2%). Expenditures: TT$31,062,000,000 (current expenditures 85.4%; development expenditures and net lending

14.6%).

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006):

Education (2004)

Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12—16) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

48016 10116

7,839 5.422

137,313 105,381

17.5 194

3

1,720

16,751

9.7

sugarcane 503,000, fruits 68,685, coconuts 10,560, rice 2,259, pigeon peas 976, cocoa 433, coffee 89; livestock (number of live animals) 59,300 goats, 43,000 pigs, 28,200,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 99,467 cu m, of which fuelwood

Health (2004): physicians 1,293 (1 per 998 persons); hospital beds 4,55317 (1 per 283 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 13.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,946 (vegetable products 83%, animal products 17%); 151% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Manufacturing (2006): methanol 6,015,600; anhydrous ammonia 5,110,500; cement 883,000; urea 688,300; iron and steel billets 673,000; steel wire rods 485,700; refined sugar (2005) 55,500; liquefied natural gas 29,880,500 cu m;

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 2,700 (army 74.1%, coast guard 25.996). Military expenditure as percentage of GNP (2005): 0.2%; per capita expenditure U.S.$25.

35%; fisheries production (2005) 13,414 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2005): limestone 850,000; natural asphalt 16,200.

beer (2001) 552,000 hectolitres; rum (2001) 231,000 hectolitres. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 6,430,000,000 (6,430,000,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 52,100,000 ([2004] 47,800,-

000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 7,013,000 (601,000); natural gas

(cu m; 2006) 37,973,000,000 ([2004] 12,528,000,000).

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 3.8; average income per household® TT$53,015 (U.S.$8,484); expenditure (2003): housing 20.4%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 18.0%, transportation 16.7%, recreation and culture 8.5%, energy 5.8%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 453; remittances (2006) 87; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 907. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism. (2005) 222; remittances, n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 108. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 14.6%, in permanent crops 9.2%, in pasture 2.1%; overall forest area (2005) 44.1%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

lExcludes speaker, who may be elected from outside the House of Representatives. ?Semiautonomous island. *Per World Urbanization Prospects (2005 Revision). ^Within greater Port of Spain. ‘Population of St. Andrew parish. Approximately 2002; exact date of information is unknown. 7Excludes hotels. 8Includes hotels. 9Net of VAT less imputed bank service charges. !°Includes 39,000 unemployed. !!Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ?Imports c.if.; exports f.o.b. BWIA only; BWIA was replaced by Caribbean Airlines from Jan. 1, 2007. 14Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 16200102. !7Includes beds in nursing homes.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago http://www.central-bank.org.tt * Central Statistical Office http://www.cso.gov.tt

716

Britannica World Data

Tunisia

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2006

Official name: Al-Jumhiriyah at-Tinisiyah (Tunisian Republic). Form of government: multiparty republic! with two legislative houses (Chamber of Councilors [1262]; Chamber of Deputies [189]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Tunis. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: dinar (TND); valuation

Area and population Governorates Al-Ariānah Bajah

area

population

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Al-Arianah Bajah

192 1,374

498 3,558

2006 estimate 447,200 303,600

Banzart

Bizerte (Banzart)

1,423

3,685

532,900

Bin ‘Aris Jundübah Al-Kaf

Bin ‘Aris Jundübah Al-Kaf

294 1,198 1,917

761 3,102 4,965

531,200 419,400 258,100

3,316

8,588

440,200

1,145 409

2,966 1,060

384,300 347,000

393

1,019

475,200

1,076 2,770 3,471 3,114

2,788 7,175 8,990 8,066

714,500 348,700 328,000 419,400

2,592

6,712

550,300

8,527

22,084

7,545

881,500

2,700 1,788 1,012 15,015

6,994 4,631 2,621 38,889

401,100 233,700 568,100 144,100

1,822

4,719

99,400

134

346

989,000

Madanin

Al-Mahdiyah Manubah Al-Munastir

Nabul Qabis Qafsah Al-Qasrayn Al-Qayrawan

Madanin

Al-Mahdiyah Manubah Al-Munastir

Nabul Qabis Qafsah Al-Qasrayn Al-Qayrawan

Qibilr

Qibilr

Sidi Bü Zayd Silianah Süsah Tatauin

Sidi Bü Zayd Silianah Süsah Tatauin

Şafāqis

Tawzar

Şafāqis

Tawzar

Tünis

Tunis (Tunis)

Zaghwan

Zaghwan

TOTAL

2,913

1,069

63,1703

2,768

163,6103

145,500

165,700

10,128,100

Demography Population (2007): 10,226,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 161.9, persons per sq km 62.5. Urban-rural (2005): urban 65.3%; rural 34.7%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.39%; female 49.61%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 25.9%; 15-29, 30.1%; 30-44, 22.1%; 45-59, 13.2%; 60-74, 6.6%; 75-84, 1.8%; 85 and over, 0.3%.

Population projection: (2010) 10,527,000; (2020) 11,561,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Tunisian Arab 67.2%; Bedouin Arab 26.6%; Algerian Arab 2.4%; Amazigh (Berber) 1.4%; other 2.4%. Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 99%, of which Sunni c. 97%, ShTic. 2%; other c. 1%. Major cities (2004): Tunis 728,453 (urban agglomeration [2003] 1,996,000); Safaqis 265,131; Al-Ariānah 240,7494; Sūsah 173,047; Ettadhamen 118,4874.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2005): 17.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2005): 5.9 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 2.04. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (2001) 6.4/(1999) 0.1. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 71.6 years; female 75.5 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases 267; accidents, injuries, and violence 62; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 57.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: TND 12,279,600,000 (tax revenue 64.5%, of which VAT 18.7%, income tax 12.4%, social security 11.1%; grants and loans 24.3%;

nontax revenue 11.2%). Expenditures: TND 13,024,500,000 (current expenditure 78.7%; development expenditure 21.3%). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$12,982,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 1,251,000, olives 1,000,000, tomatoes 850,000, potatoes 370,000, barley 354,000, green chilies and peppers 260,000, grapes 140,000, dates 125,000, almonds 50,000; livestock (live animals) 7,213,390 sheep, 1,426,640 goats, 686,320 cattle, 231,000 camels; roundwood (2005) 2,366,704 cu m, of which

fuelwood 91%; fisheries production (2005) 111,782 (from aquaculture 2%). Mining and quarrying (2005): phosphate rock 8,204,000; iron ore 206,000; zine (metal content) 29,200. Manufacturing (value added in TND 000,000; 2005): textiles, leather, and wearing apparel 1,948; refined petroleum and petroleum products 1,478; food products 1,210; electrical machinery 1,181; chemi-

cals and chemical products 695. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 13,006,000,000 (11,239,000,000); coal (metric tons; 2002) none (1,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2005) 26,200,000 ([2004] 11,964,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) 1,811,000 (3,922,000); natural gas (cu

1; 2005) 2,344,000,000 (3,642,000,000).

Household income and expenditure (2000). Average household size (2004) 4.5; income per household TND 6,450 (U.S.$4,640); expenditure: food and beverages 38.0%, housing and energy 21.5%, household durables 11.1%, health and personal care 10.0%, transportation 9.7%, recreation 8.7%, other 1.0%.

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$28,905,000,000 (U.S.$2,830 per capita). © 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

in value TND '000

% of total value

labour forces

% of labour force

Agriculture Mining Public utilities

4,393,300 237,500 2,544,300

10.7 0.6 6.2

547,800

16.0

Manufacturing Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services

7,001,600 2,212,200 4,410,400 2,387,500 8,956,300 5,327,700 220,000

17.0 5.4 10.7 5.8 21.8 13.0 0.5

946,300

27.7

3,430,1006 41,120,900

8.36 100.0

Other TOTAL

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = TND 1.28; 1 £= TND 2.58.

2005

1,435,600

42.1

484,9007 3,414,600

14.27 100.0

Population economically active (2006): total 3,503,400; activity rate of total population 34.696 (participation rates: age 15 and over 46.696; female 25.096; unemployed 14.396). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Hourly earnings index?

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.0 104.2

104.8 107.7

107.6 111.9

111.5 115.4

113.8

118.9 s

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,124; remittances (2006) 1,499; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 662. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 365; remittances (2006) 15; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 7.0. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 18.0%, in permanent crops 13.8%, in pasture 31.2%; overall forest area (2005) 6.8%.

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) TND ’000,000 % of total

2001

2002

4,161 17.9%

—3,762 16.2%

2003 —3,696 15.2%

2004

2005

2006

—3,905 13.9%

—3,494 11.4%

—4,451 12.7%

Imports (2005): TND 17,101,500,000 (textiles 17.3%; crude and refined petroleum 12.5%; machinery and apparatus 10.8%; electrical machinery 10.7%; motor vehicles 6.7%; food products 5.5%). Major import sources: France 23.5%; Italy 20.9%; Germany 8.2%; Spain 5.1%; Libya 3.9%. Exports (2005): TND 13,607,700,000 (textiles 32.7%; electrical machinery 14.5%; crude and refined petroleum 12.9%; leather products 5.0%; phosphates and phosphate derivatives 4.4%; olive oil 3.5%). Major export destinations: France 32.9%; Italy 24.0%; Germany 8.4%; Spain 5.5%; Libya 4.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 2,153 km; passenger-km 1,317,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 2,068,200,000. Roads (2004): total length 19,232 km (paved 66%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 825,990; trucks and buses 119,064. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 2,976,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 17,916,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2004

2,150

217

2006

7,33911

71911

2006

1,269

124

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

2005 2005 2006 2005

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

568 27210 1,295 1611

56 2710 127 1.611

Education and health Educational attainment (2005). Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling 22.0%; primary education 36.5%; secondary 33.1%; higher 8.4%. Literacy (2006): total population age 10 and over literate 74.3%; males literate 83.4%; females literate 65.3%. Education (2005-06) Primary (age 6-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Higher

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

4,551 1,513 191

59,265 71,658 16,919

1,134,414 1,134,177 321,838

19.1 15.8 19.0

Health: physicians (2005) 9,422 (1 per 1,036 persons); hospital beds (2004) 17,269 (1 per 576 persons); infant mortality rate (2005) 20.3. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,408 (vegetable products 90%, animal products 10%); 180% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 35,300 (army 76.5%, navy 13.6%, air force 9.9%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 1.6%; per capita expenditure U.S.$29. 1A single party dominates the political system in practice. ?Statutory number; 41 seats are nonelective. ?Total includes 3,506 sq mi (9,080 sq km) of saline lakes that are not distributed by governorate. Within Tunis urban agglomeration. 5Figures are rounded estimates. *Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. "Unemployed. Minimum wage for 40-hour workweek. *Imports c.i.f; exports f.o.b. }°Circulation of daily newspapers. Subscribers.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Tunisia http://www.bct.gov.tn * National Statistics Institute (French only) http://www.ins.nat.tn

Nations of the World

Turkey

717

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$397,699,000,000 (U.S.$5,380 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (Republic of Turkey). Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (Grand National Assembly of Turkey [550]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Ankara. Official language: Turkish. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: New Turkish lira (YTL)4; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = YTL 1.30; 1 £ = YTL 2.61.

2005

2006

in value YTL ‘000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

% of total value

labour force

% of labour force

49,957,330

10.2

6,088,000

24.6

6,962,712 101,246,002 21,311,774 15,460,290 71,654,589 99,739,960 43,878,051 47,719,600 19,911,382 9,360,6727 487,202,362

1.4 20.8 44 3.2 14.7 20.5 9.0 9.8 4.1 1.97 100.0

128,000 4,186,000 1,267,000 93,000 1,163,000 4,730,000 1,010,000 1,225,000 2,440,000 2,446,0008 24,775,0003

0.5 16.9 54 0.4 4.7 19.1 4.1 4.9 9.8 9.98 100.0

Public debt (external, outstanding; June 2007): U.S.$65,310,000,000. Area and population

area

Geographic regions?

Largest cities

sq mi

sq km

2005 estimate

Aegean

izmir

34,748

89,997

9,407,000

Black Sea

Samsun

44,881

116,240

8,304,000

Central Anatolia

Ankara

72,607

188,052

12,189,000

East Anatolia

Malatya

57,876

149,899

6,403,000

Marmara Mediterranean South Eastern Anatolia

Istanbul Adana Gaziantep

28,196 34,687 29,540

73,028 89,838 76,509

19,147,000 9,384,000 7,231,000

783,5623

72,065,000

TOTAL

302,535

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 18,152; remittances (2006) 851; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 3,752; official development assistance (2005) 1,6689.

population

Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,872; remittances, n.a.;

FDI (2001-05 avg.) 622.

Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 30.4%, in permanent crops 3.4%, in pasture 19.0%; overall forest area (2005) 13.2%.

Foreign trade! Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 73,884,000.

U.S.$000,000 % of total

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 244.2, persons per sq km 94.3.

Urban-rural (2006): urban 62.5%; rural 37.5%. Sex distribution (2005): male 50.44%; female 49.56%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 28.3%; 15-29, 27.7%; 30-44, 22.4%; 45-59, 13.4%; 60-74, 6.5%; 75-84, 1.5%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Population projection: (2010) 76,690,000; (2020) 84,948,000. Ethnic composition (2000): Turk 65.1%; Kurd 18.9%; Crimean Tatar 7.2%; Arab 1.8%; Azerbaijani 1.0%; Yoruk 1.0%; other 5.0%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 97.595, of which Sunni c. 82.596, Shr1 (mostly nonorthodox Alevi) c. 15.096; nonreligious c. 2.096; other (mostly Christian) c. 0.596. Major urban agglomerations (2005): Istanbul 9,712,000; Ankara 3,573,000; Izmir 2,487,000; Bursa 1,414,000; Adana 1,245,000; Gaziantep 992,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 18.7 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.18. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 9.0/1.3. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 69.1 years; female 74.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005)4: diseases of the circulatory system 308; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 90; diseases of the respiratory system 61; infectious and parasitic diseases 15.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: YTL 134,819,231,000 (tax revenue 79.3%, of which tax on income 22.5%; nontax revenue 17.2%; grants and other revenue 3.5%). Expenditures: YTL 141,020,860,000 (finances 51.8%; education 10.5%; labour and social security 10.2%; defense 7.2%). Production (in '000 metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 20,010, sugar beets 14,452, tomatoes 9,855, barley 9,551, potatoes 4,397, grapes 4,000, corn (maize) 3,811, watermelons 3,805, seed cotton 2,590, apples 2,002, cucumbers and gherkins 1,800, cantaloupes 1,7665, onions 1,765, olives 1,600, oranges 1,536, sunflower seeds 1,118, hazelnuts 661, lentils 623, green beans 564, chickpeas 552, apricots 460, cherries 310, figs 290, tea 205, tobacco 140; livestock (number of live animals) 25,304,000 sheep, 10,526,000 cattle, 317,000,000 chickens, (2004) 230,037 angora goats; roundwood (2005) 16,185,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 3196; fisheries production

(2005) 546 (from aquaculture 2296). Mining (2005): magnesite 3,400; refined borates 800; chromite 700; copper ore (metal content) 48; marble 800,000 cu m. Manufacturing (value added in U.S.$'000,000; 2005)6: food products 8,800;

telecommunications equipment, electronics 7,450; chemicals and chemical products 7,400; base metals 7,000; motor vehicles and parts 6,500; textiles

6,100. Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) 161,983,-

000,000 (118,768,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2005) 3,010,000 ([2004] 18,900,000); lignite (metric tons; 2005) 55,600,000 ([2004] 45,500,000); crude

petroleum (barrels; 2006) 15,900,000 ([2004] 185,800,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) 23,724,000 ([2004] 24,972,000); natural gas (cu m;

2004) 708,000,000 (23,372,000,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 24,775,000; activity rate of total population 34.2% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 51.1%; female 26.1%; unemployed [May 2006- April 2007] 9.796). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

2001 154.4

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

223.8

280.4

304.6

329.5

360.6

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.1; average annual income per household (2003) TL 10,767,998,904 (U.S.$7,174); sources of income (2004): wages and salaries 38.7%, self-employment 31.8%, transfers 21.2%; expenditure (2005): housing 25.9%, food and nonalcoholic beverages 24.9%, transportation 12.6%; household furnishings 6.8%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001 -10,065 13.8%

2002 -15,495 17.7%

2003 -22,087 18.9%

2004 -34,373 21.4%

2005 -43,298 22.8%

2006 -52,140 23.4%

Imports (2006): U.S.$137,449,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 21.5%; mineral fuels 21.5%; base and fabricated metals 13.7%; transport equipment 9.1%; chemicals and chemical products 9.0%). Major import sources: EU 42.5%, of which Germany 10.6%, Italy 6.2%, France 5.2%; Russia 12.8%;

China 6.9%; U.S. 4.5%. Exports (2006): U.S.$85,309,000,000 (textiles and wearing apparel 23.1%; transport equipment 15.9%; machinery and apparatus 15.0%; base and fabricated metals 14.2%; mineral fuels 6.1%; vegetables 4.5%; prepared foodstuffs, beverages, and tobacco 3.8%). Major export destinations: EU 56.0%, of which Germany 11.3%, U.K. 8.0%, Italy 7.9%, France 5.4%; U.S. 5.9%;

Russia 3.8%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 5,404 mi, 8,697 km; passenger-km 5,036,000; metric ton-km cargo 9,152,000,000. Roads (2004): total length 215,959 mi, 347,553 km (paved 45%). Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 5,730,320; trucks and buses 2,624,259. Air transport (2006)11: passenger-km 37,512,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 391,831,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2002

29,440

424

2006 2006

52,663!? 18,832

72213 258

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

4,073 4,94812 12,283 2,77419

57 7012 168 3818

Education and health Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: no formal schooling through primary education 64%; lower secondary 10%; upper secondary/higher vocational 17%; university 9%. Literacy (2006): total population age 15 and over literate 88.1%; males literate 96.0%; females literate 80.4%. Education (2006-07) Primary (age 6—10) Secondary (age 11-16) Voc., teacher tr. Higher'^

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

34,656 3,690 4,244 1,306

402,829 103,389 84,276 84,785

10,846,930 2,142,218 1,244,499 2,181,217

26.9 20.7 14.8 25.7

Health: physicians (2004) 104,226 (1 per 683 persons); hospital beds (2006) 180,767 (1 per 404 persons); infant mortality rate (2006) 22.6. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,416 (vegetable products 88%, animal products 12%); 17396 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 514,850 (army 78.1%, navy 10.2%, air force 11.796)15. 16. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.896; per capita expenditure U.S.$143. 1INew

Turkish

lira

(YTL)

introduced

Jan.

1, 2005;

1 YTL

-

TL

1,000,000.

2Administratively divided into 81 provinces as of 2007. 5Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ^Projected rates based on about 4496 of total deaths. 5Includes other melons except watermelons. 5Rounded figures. "Import duties less imputed bank service charges. SUnemployed. ?Figure represents commitments. Imports c.i.£.; exports f.o.b. Atlasjet, Turkish, Pegasus, and Sun Express airlines only. !2Circulation of daily newspapers. 13Subscribers. 142005-06. 15Turkish troops in Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Nov. 2006) 36,000. 16U.S. troops in Turkey (June 2007) 1,650.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Bank of Turkey http://www.tcmb.gov.tr/yeni/eng * Turkish Statistical Institute http://www.turkstat.gov.tr/Start.do

718

Britannica World Data

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$6,047,000,000 (U.S.$1,234 per capita).

Turkmenistan

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Official name: Türkmenistan (Turkmenistan). Form of government: unitary singleparty republic with one legislative body (Majlis [Parliament; 50]). Head of state and government: President assisted by the People's Councill. Capital: Ashgabat (formerly Ashkhabad). Official language: Turkmen. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: manat (m); valuation

2003

1£=m 10,453.

area

population 2001 estimate

Provinces

Capitals

sq mi

sq km

Ahal Balkan

Ashgabat Balkanabat

36,700 53,500

95,100 138,500

767,700 468,900

28,400 36,200

73,600 93,800

1,165,000 1,130,700

33,500

86,800

1,251,300

100 188,5003

300 488,100

695,300 5,478,900

Daşoguz Türkmenabat

Mary

Mary

City Ashgabat TOTAL

(Chärjew)

—

% of total

labour

% of labour

value

force

force

13,102

23.5

892,400

48.5

19,392

34.8

226,800

123

2.6 5.9 49 6.4 0.7

4,147 3,259

7.4 5.9

2,281 Qus

4.1 ix

48,300 108,200 90,700 115,800 12,600

ae

A

28,800 284,900

1.6 155

13,528 55,709

243 100.0

30,200 1,838,700

1.6 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1998) 192; remittances (2006) 47; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 83; official development assistance (2005) 248. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (1997) 125; remittances (2006) 17; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 4.796, in permanent crops 0.196, in pasture 65.396; overall forest area (2005) 8.896.

Area and population

Daşoguz Lebap

in value m '000,000,000

Agriculture Minin Manufacturing } Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade Finance Public administration, defense Services Other TOTAL

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ 2 m 5,2002;

1998

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices) 2001 +271 5.5%

U.S.$'000,000 % of total

Demography Population (2007): 5,097,0004.

Imports

2002 +737 14.8%

2003 +1,270 20.6%

(2003): U.S.$2,450,000,000

2004 +545 8.5%

2005 +1,301 15.2%

2006 +1,963 19.8%

(machinery and transport

equipment

45.9%, basic manufactures 19.9%, chemicals and chemical products 11.1%,

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 27.0, persons per sq km 10.4.

food products 5.3% ). Major import sources (2006): U.A.E. 13.9%; Azerbaijan

Urban-rural (2005): urban 46.2%; rural 53.8%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.24%; female 50.76%.

11.3%; Turkey 9.9%; Russia 8.0%; Ukraine 7.8%.

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 31.8%; 15-29, 30.0%; 30-44, 20.6%; 45-59, 11.4%; 60-74, 4.6%; 75-84, 1.4%; 85 and over, 0.2%.

Population projection*: (2010) 5,345,000; (2020) 6,148,000. Doubling time: 37 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Turkmen 79.2%; Uzbek 9.0%; Russian 3.0%; Kazakh 2.5%; Tatar 1.1%; other 5.2%.

Religious affiliation (2000): Muslim (mostly Sunni) 87.2%; Russian Orthodox

Exports (2003): U.S.$3,720,000,000 (natural gas 49.7%, petrochemicals 18.3%, crude petroleum 8.9%, cotton fibre 3.2%, cotton yarn 2.2%). Major export destinations (2006): Ukraine 46.3%; Iran 16.8%; Azerbaijan 4.2%; U.A.E. 3.2%; Italy 3.1%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 1,516 mi, 2,440 km; (1999) passenger-km 701,000,000; (1999) metric ton-km cargo 7,337,000,000. Roads (2001): total

1.7%; nonreligious 9.0%; other 2.1%.

Major cities (1999): Ashgabat (2002) 743,000; Türkmenabat 203,000; Daşoguz 165,000; Mary 123,000; Balkanabat 108,000.

length 22,000 km (paved 82%). Vehicles (1995): passenger cars 220,000; trucks and buses 58,200. Air transport (2005)10: passenger-km 1,913,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 25,997,000.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 25.6 (world avg. 20.3); (1998) within marriage 96.2%; outside of marriage 3.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.3 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 19.3 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 3.19. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population: (1998) 5.4/(1994) 1.5. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 64.9 years; female 71.3 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases 462.1, of which ischemic heart diseases 243.4, hypertensive heart disease 105.7; lower respiratory infections 77.6; infectious and parasitic diseases 65.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 60.9.

National economy Budget (2004)5. Revenue: m 14,262,000,000 (tax revenue 94.3%; nontax revenue 5.7%). Expenditures: m 14,251,000,000,000 (current expenditure 94.8%; development expenditure 5.2% ). Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$912,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 3,260,000, seed cotton 700,000, tomatoes 282,000, watermelons 250,000, grapes 180,000, potatoes 175,000, rice 135,000; livestock (number of live animals) 15,694,000 sheep, 2,065,000 cattle, 904,000 goats; roundwood (2005)

3,400 cum, of which fuelwood 100%; fisheries production (2005) 15,016 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying (2004): iodine 250,000, salt 215,000, gypsum 100,000. Manufacturing (2003): residual fuel oils (2001) 2,681,000; distillate fuel (gas-diesel oil) 1,750,000; motor spirits (2001) 1,283,000; wheat flour 503,000; cement 239,000. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 11,470,000,000 (9,816,000,000); crude

petroleum (barrels; 2005) 69,600,000 ([2004] 46,600,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 6,230,000 (3,407,000); natural gas (cu m; 2005)

63,000,000,000 ([2004] 13,691,000,000).

Household income and expenditure. Average household size income per household: n.a.; sources of income (1998): wages 70.6%, pensions and grants 20.9%, self-employment (mainly income) 2.3%, nonwage income of workers 1.1%; expenditure

(2002) 5.7; and salaries agricultural (1998): food

45.2%, clothing and footwear 16.8%, furniture 13.3%, transportation 7.6%,

health 7.0%. Population economically active (2003): total 2,073,0006; activity rate of total population 44.1% (participation rates: ages 15-64, 70.7966; female 46.8966; unofficially unemployed [2004] 6096). Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

855

182

2005 2005

10512 398

2212 82

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2005

348 5711 65 oa

72 12! 13 m

Education and health Educational attainment (2000)15. Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 3.096; incomplete primary to complete standard secondary education 60.1%; vocational secondary 23.5%; higher 13.2%; unknown 0.2%. Literacy (1995): total population age 15 and over literate 98.8%; males literate 99.3%; females literate 98.3%. Education (2004)

student/ schools

Primary (age 7-9) Secondary (age 10-16) Vocational Higher

teachers

students

teacher ratio

wb 1,705 15 16

Health: physicians (2002) 20,032 (1 per 231 persons); hospital beds (1997) 33,000 (1 per 131 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 59:2: Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,217 (vegetable products 81%, animal products 19%); 167% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 26,000 (army 80.8%, navy 2.7%, air force 16.5%). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 3.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$93. 1Hybrid body with a number of legislative powers that is a branch of state power per August 2003 constitutional amendment. ?Unofficial “black market” rate in mid-2006, 1 US$ = m 24,000. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ‘Estimate of U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (July 2007 update); official Turkmen estimates are significantly higher. »Budget statistics are unreliable because the government spends large amounts of extra-budgetary funds. ‘Estimates of the ILO Employment Trends Unit. 72nd quarter only; fronvto Russia only. 3Figure represents commitments. ?Imports c.i.£; exports f.o.b. "Turkmenistan Airlines only. Circulation of daily newspapers. l?^Subscribers. Based on 2000 Turkmenistan Demographic and Health Survey, of which 13,566 people are age 25 and over.

Internet resources for further information: * Asia Development Bank: Turkmenistan http://www.adb.org/Turkmenistan/default.asp

Nations of the World

Energy production (consumption): electricity (KW-hr; 2005) n.a. (4,200,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum, none (none); petroleum products, none (none); natural gas, none (none). Population economically active (2002): total 3,4636; activity rate of total population 36.2% (participation rates: ages 15 and over, 58.2%; female 43.4%; unemployed 6.596).

Tuvalu Official name: Tuvalu. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with one legislative house (Parliament [15]). Chief of state: British Monarch, represented by Governor-General. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: government offices are

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 100.0 Consumer price index

at Vaiaku, Fongafale islet, of

Vaitupu TOTAL

sq km

2002 census

Fongafale

1.08

2.79

4,492

1.07 1.49 0.16 0.98 1.09 1.15 0.70

2.78 3.87 0.42 2.53 2.83 2.99 1.82

589 664 35 663 548 586 393

2.16 9.903,4

5.60 25.633

1,591 9,561

Religious affiliation (2002): Christian 97.0%, of which Church of Tuvalu (Congregational) 91.0%, Seventh-day Adventist 2.0%, Roman Catholic 1.096; Bahz' 1.996; other 1.196.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 22.2 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 92.7%; outside of marriage 7.3%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 15.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.98. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): n.a./n.a. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 66.1 years; female 70.7 years. Number of deaths (2002): diseases of the circulatory system 35, of which ischemic heart diseases 11, cerebrovascular diseases 11; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 9; injuries 7; diseases of the respiratory system 7.

National economy Budget (2005). Revenue: $A 25,539,000 (tax revenue 23.996, nontax revenue? 38.096, grants 38.196). Expenditures: $A 22,323,000 (current expenditure 95.4%, development expenditure 4.6% ). Public debt (external; 2002): U.S.$5,000,000. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$26,000,000 (U.S.$2,441 per capita).

116.0

119.9

2002 -20,110 97.6%

2003 -23,8968 98.8%

2004 -15,317 97.7%

2005 -16,828 99.1%

% of total value

4,565 1,016

16.9 3.8

237 1,370

0.9 5.1

3,429 3,700 4,055 7,188

12.7 13.7 15.0 26.7

—1,8418 26,9454

1,433 1,794

labour forces

% of labour forces

ratus 17.4%; base and fabricated metals 15.4%; wood and wood products

12.5%;

transportation

equipment

11.6%).

Major

export

destinations:

Germany 60.5%; Italy 20.2%; Fiji 6.8%; Australia 2.7%; Ghana 1.5%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2002): total length 8 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 102; trucks and buses 33. Air transport: n.a. units number

per 1,000

Medium

date

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones Cellular Landline

1996

0.1

13

2005 2005

1.311 0.9

13511 93

units Medium

date

PCs Dailies Internet users Broadband

2006 2004 2005 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

E 0 1.7 2s

iss 0 177 sa

Education and health Educational attainment (2004—05)12. Percentage of population age 15 and over having: no formal education/unknown 8.896; primary education 52.496; secondary 29.8%; higher 9.0%. Literacy (2004): total population literate 95%. Education (2006)

student/ schools

Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12-18) Vocational Higher'4

gis 2 1 1

teachers

students

teacher ratio

103

2,067

20.1

52 we

643 6013 27015

12.4 m

Total active duty personnel (November 2006): none; Tuvalu has nonformal security arrangements with Australia and New Zealand.

} 1,2597

36.47

F

a

435

126

178 198 395

BA 5.7 11.4

6.7

ga

AS

—6.88 100.0

2869 3,463

8.39 100.04

5.3

New Zealand 9.9%; China 5.1%.

Exports (2005): $A 80,403 (precision instruments 18.6%; machinery and appa-

Military

2002

in value $A ‘000

4.196). Major import sources: Australia 33.7%; Fiji 19.7%; Singapore 17.5%;

Health: physicians (2003) 4 (1 per 2,393 persons); hospital beds (2001) 56 (1 per 170 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 19.5.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

}

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture!0, forestry, fishing (2006): coconuts (2005) 1,139, fruits 749, vegetables 530, bananas (2005) 284, roots and tubers 140, other agricultural products include breadfruit, pulaka (taro), pandanus fruit, sweet potatoes, and pawpaws; livestock (number of live animals; 2005) 13,500 pigs, 15,000 ducks, 45,000 chickens; roundwood,

n.a.; fisheries production (2005) 2,561 (from aquaculture, negligible). Mining and quarrying: n.a. Manufacturing (value added in $A '000; 2002): local cigarettes 755, cottage industries (including handicrafts and garments) 158.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

112.8

2001 —6,737 99.1%

Communications

Major locality (2002): Fongafale islet of Funafuti atoll 4,492.

Other TOTAL

110.0

5.2%; textiles 4.5%; chemical products 4.3%; base and fabricated metals

other) 4.6%; other Pacific 1.5%; other 0.3%.

Services

106.6

Imports (2005): $A 16,908,333 (food products including live animals 33.4%; mineral fuels 21.7%; machinery and apparatus 13.7%; transport equipment

Population projection: (2010) 9,700; (2020) 9,700. Doubling time: 47 years. Ethnic composition (2002): Tuvaluan (Polynesian) 93.6%; mixed (Tuvaluan/

Public utilities

2000 —8,866 99.6%

$A 000 % of total

14.1%; 60-74, 5.8%; 75 and over, 1.6%.

Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels, and restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

101.5

Balance of trade (current prices)

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 979.8, persons per sq km 378.5. Urban-rural (2004): urban 55.2%; rural 44.8%. Sex distribution (2006): male 48.79%; female 51.21%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 30.3%; 15-29, 27.5%; 30-44, 20.7%; 45-59,

Mining Construction

2006

Foreign trade

Demography Population (2007): 9,700.

Agriculture, fishing Manufacturing, handicrafts

2005

alcohol and tobacco 2.6%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (1998) 0.2; remittances (2006) 3.0; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 6.8; official development assistance (2005) 9.0. Disbursements for (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2006) n.a.; remittances (2006) n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) negligible. Land use as 96 of total land area (2003): in temporary crops, n.a., in permanent crops c. 6796; in pasture, n.a.; overall forest area (2005) c. 3395.

„population

sq mi

Asau

2004

energy 12.2%, education, health, and recreation 9.5%, transportation 6.3%,

Capitals Tonga Lolua — Kua Tanrake Savave Fangaua

2003

self-employment 12.1%, overseas remittances 9.1%; expenditure: food and nonalcoholic beverages 48.9%, housing 18.8%, household furnishings and

area

Nanumaga Nanumea Niulakita Niutao Nui Nukufetau Nukulaelae

2002

income: wages and salaries 47.0%, rents, interest, bonuses, and other 28.7%,

Area and population

Funafuti

2001

Household income and expenditure (2004-05). Average household size 5.3; average annual net income per household $A 13,007 (U.S.$9,746); sources of

Funafuti atoll. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary units: Tavaluan dollar = Australian dollar ($T = $A)1; valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = $A 1.21; 1 £ = $A 2.44.

Islands?

719

TTransactions over $A 1 are conducted

in $A only. ?Local government

councils have

been established on all islands except Niulakita. *Another survey puts the area at 9.4 sq mi (24.4 sq km). ^Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. “Includes remittances from phosphate miners in Nauru and seafarers on German ships, rentals of fishing resources to Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S., and the leasing of the country's Internet domain "tv." 8Total number of wage earners, unpaid workers, and subsistence workers all over age 15. "Excludes non-handicraft manufacturing. Indirect taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. ?Includes 60 not adequately defined and 226 unemployed. !°Because of poor soil quality, only limited subsistence agriculture is possible on the islands. !!Subscribers. !?Based on the 2004-05 Household Income and Expenditure Survey, comprising 459 households. 132000. “University of the South Pacific Tuvalu campus. 152004.

Internet resources for further information: * Central Statistics Division http://www.spc.int/prism/country/tv/stats

720

Britannica World Data

Uganda

Population economically active (2002-03): total 9,773,000; activity rate of total population 37.7% (participation rates [2001]: ages 15-64, 78.9%; female 35.2%; officially unemployed 3.5%).

Official name: Republic of Uganda. Form of government: multiparty republic with one legislative house (Parliament [3331]. Head of state and government: President assisted by the Prime Minister. Capital: Kampala. Official languages: English; Swahili. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: Ugandan shilling (UGX); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = UGX 1,778; 1 £ = UGX 3,574.

Price index (2000 = 100) 2000 Consumer price index 100.0

energy, and services

2004

2005

2006

102.0

101.7

109.6

113.3

122.5

130.6

19.9%, education

8.0%, transportation 6.2%, health

3.9%, household durable goods 3.9%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 355; remittances (2006) 845; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 204; official development assistance (2005) 1,198. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 133; remittances (2006) 360. Population

sq mi

sq km

2002 census

Central Eastern Northern

Kampala Jinja Gulu

23,708 15,243 32,970

61,403 39,479 85,392

6,575,425 6,204,915 5,363,669

Western

Mbarara

21,343

55,277

6,298,075

241,551

24,442,084

TOTAL

2003

per household (1999-2000)12 UGX 141,000 (U.S.$91)13; sources of income (1999-2000)12: wages and self-employment 78.0%, transfers 13.0%, rent 9.0%; expenditure (2002-03): food and nonalcoholic beverages 41.3%, rent,

arga Principal cities

2002

Public debt (external, outstanding; 2005): U.S.$4,250,000,000. Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 4.7; income

Area and population

Geographic regions?

2001

93,2634 5

Foreign trade!4 Balance of trade (current prices) U.S.$'000,000 % of total

2000—01

2001-02

2002-03

2003-04

2004-05

2005-06

—483.0 34.5%

—530.3 35.9%

—620.8 37.9%

—672.1 34.2%

—838.8 34.8%

—1,061.0 37.7%

Imports (2005): U.S.$2,054,137,000 (petroleum products 16.7%; chemicals and chemical products 13.1%; food, beverages, and tobacco products 11.496, o

Demography Population (2007): 30,263,0006. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 396.7, persons per sq km 153.2. Urban-rural (2006): urban 13.1%; rural 86.9%. Sex distribution (2006): male 50.08%; female 49.92%. Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 50.3%; 15-29, 27.7%; 30-44, 12.9%; 45-59, 5.7%; 60-74, 2.7%; 75-84, 0.6%; 85 and over, 0.196.

Population projection: (2010) 33,399,000; (2020) 47,691,000. Ethnolinguistic composition (2002): Ganda 17.3%; Nkole 9.8%; Soga 8.6%; Kiga 7.0%; Teso 6.6%; Lango 6.2%; Acholi 4.8%; Gisu 4.7%.

Religious affiliation (2002): Christian 85.3%, of which Roman Catholic 41.9%, Anglican 35.9%, Pentecostal 4.6%, Seventh-day Adventist 1.5%; Muslim 12.1%; traditional beliefs 1.0%; nonreligious 0.9%; other 0.7%. Major cities (2002): Kampala 1,208,5448; Gulu 119,430; Lira 80,879; Jinja 71,213; Mbale 71,130; Mbarara 69,363.

gold 9.0%15, tea 4.2%, petroleum products

Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 48.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.0 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 35.1 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 6.88. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 50.2 years; female 51.9 years. Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 6.7%? (world avg. 1.0%). National economy Budget (2003-04). Revenue: UGX 2,939,000,000,000 (tax revenue 52.7%, of which VAT 18.1%, petroleum taxes 9.2%, income tax 6.8%, tax on international trade 4.6%, corporate taxes 4.2%; grants 43.2%; nontax revenue 4.1%). Expenditures: UGX 3,170,000,000,000 (current expenditures 58.8%, of which education 13.8%, public administration 11.0%, defense 10.3%, public order 5.796, health 5.396; capital expenditures 41.296). Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): plantains 9,054,000, cassava 4,926,000, sweet potatoes 2,628,000, sugarcane 1,950,000, corn (maize) 1,258,000, millet 687,000, potatoes 628,000,

sorghum 440,000, soybeans 175,000, sesame 166,000, peanuts (groundnuts) 154,000, coffee 133,310, pigeon peas 88,000, cowpeas

71,000, tea 34,334,

tobacco 32,000; livestock (number of live animals) 8,034,000 goats, 6,973,000 cattle, 2,000,000 pigs, 1,648,000 sheep, 22,849,000 chickens; roundwood

(2005) 39,972,000 cu m, of which fuelwood 9296; fisheries production (2005) 427,575 (from aquaculture 395). Mining and quarrying (2005): cobalt 638; columbite-tantalite (ore and concentrate) 273 kg. Manufacturing (2005): cement 692,709; sugar 182,906; soap 127,589; corrugated iron sheets 61,564; wheat flour 20,286; footwear 46,313,000 pairs; soft drinks 1,635,440 hec-

production

(consumption):

electricity (kW-hr;

2005)

1,858,000,000 ([2004] 1,726,000,000); crude petroleum, none (none); petro-

leum products (metric tons; 2004) none (504,000). Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 26.496, in permanent crops 10.9%, in pasture 25.9%; overall forest area (2005) 18.4%. Gross national income (2006): U.S.$9,702,000,000 (U.S.$324 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force 2005-06

in value UGX '000,000 Agriculture, forestry, fishing Mining Manufacturing Construction Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels Pub. admin., defense Finance, real estate Services Other TOTAL

2002

% of total value

labour force’?

% of labour force!?

4,911,854

28.9

5,314,527

76.5

122,572 1,339,253 1,636,916 187,189 1,439,852 2,251,368 635,526 1,079,716 1,909,531 1,500,01611 17,013,793

0.7 7.9 9.6 14 8.5 13.2 3.7 6.4 11.2 8.811 100.0

19,740 154,247 108,708 14,369 125,235 422,176 173,597 22,101 399,221 196,386 6,950,307

0.3 2.2 1.6 0.2 1.8 6.1 2.5. 0:3 5.7 2.8 100.0

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

3.9%, tobacco

3.9%, cotton

3.5% )16. Major export destinations: The Netherlands 10.5%; U.A.E. 10.4%; Switzerland 9.2%; Kenya 8.9%; Democratic Republic of the Congo 7.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): route length 1,244 km; passenger-km!7; ton-km cargo 185,559,000. Roads (2003): total length 70,746 km (paved Vehicles (2005): passenger cars 65,472; trucks and buses 100,323. Air port: passenger-km (2003) 237,000,000; metric ton-km cargo

27,000,000.

Communications

Vital statistics

tolitres. Energy

which cereals 6.9%; transportation equipment 9.8%; base and fabricated metals 8.2%). Major import sources: Kenya 25.3%; Japan 7.1%; South Africa 7.0%; U.A.E. 6.7%; India 6.4%; China 5.3%. Exports (2005): U.S.$812,857,000 (coffee 21.3%, fish and fish products 17.6%,

Medium

date

units number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

Televisions Telephones

2003

450

Cellular

2006

2,00919

2006

108

Landline

17 6719

3.6

metric 23%). trans(2004)

units Medium PCs Dailies Internet users

Broadband

number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2005 2004 2006 2005

300 8918 750 ak

10 3.418 25

sia

Education and health Educational attainment (2002). Percentage of population age 25 and over having: no formal schooling 34.4%; incomplete primary education 36.0%; complete primary 11.1%; incomplete secondary 12.0%; complete secondary (some higher) 1.8%; complete higher (including vocational) 4.7%. Literacy (2006): population age 15 and over literate 66.8%; males literate 76.8%; females literate 57.7%. Education (2005) Primary (age 5-11) Secondary (age 12-15) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

student/ schools20

teachers

students

teacher ratio

13,371 3,645

143,247 31,890

7,152,099 619,519

54.3 T2

15

2,126

31,944

18.4

35

4,16820

88,36020

12.620

Health (2004): physicians 2,209 (1 per 11,947 persons); hospital beds 26,772 (1 per 986 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 68.5. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 2,333 (vegetable products 95%, animal products 595); 13296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 45,000 (army 10096). Military expenditure as percentage of GDP U.S.$7.

(2005): 2.3%; per capita expenditure

1Statutory number; includes 13 ex officio members. ?Swahili became official in September 2005. 3Actual local administration in 2007 is based on 79 districts and one city (Kampala). Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. 5Includes water area of 16,984 sq mi (43,989 sq km); Uganda's portion of Lake Victoria comprises 11,954 sq mi (30,960 sq km). Estimate of U.S. Bureau of the Census International Database (August 2006 update). "Based on land area only. SUrban agglomeration. ?Statistically derived midpoint of range. !°-Employed only; excludes informal sector of c. 2,600,000 workers. !!Indirect taxes. ?Based on nationally representative household survey. The household income for urban areas is UGX 302,900 (U.S.$195). 4Imports f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.if. in commodities and trading partners. Most gold exports are reexports from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 1¢In 2005 the estimated value of the unreported illegal export trade in diamonds from the Democratic Republic of the Congo via Uganda was c. U.S.$200,000,000. 17All Uganda passenger rail service was suspended in 1997; limited service resumed in mid-2007. 1$Circulation. 1?Subscribers. 202004.

Internet resources for further information: * Bank of Uganda http://www.bou.or.ug * Uganda Bureau of Statistics http://www.ubos.org

Nations of the World

Population economically active (2005): total 22,280,800; activity rate of total population c. 47% (participation rates [2003]: ages 15-64, 65.8%; female 48.9%; unemployed [2006] 7.4%).

Ukraine Official name: Ukrayina (Ukraine). Form of government: unitary multiparty republic with a single legislative body (Parliament [450]). Head of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Kiev (Kyyiv). Official language: Ukrainian. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: hryvnya (UAH);

PP

Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100)

M

cn d is

Black

Sea

Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

112.0 135.2

112.8 163.6

118.7 200.9

129.4 256.2

146.9 350.2

160.3

Gross national income (2006): U.S.$105,253,000,000 (U.S.$2,260 per capita). Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

(Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$ = UAH 5.01; 1 £= UAH 10.08.

2005

Area and population

saba.

population

sq km

2007! estimate

20,900 31,865 8,097 31,974 26,517 13,928 31,415 28,461 20,645

1,324,602 1,147,542 905,444 3,415,344 4,568,206 1,383,944 2,806,052 1,114,790 1,358,379

28,131 26.684

1,747,341 2374 431

21,833 24,598 33,310 28,748 20,047

2,564,740 1,209,815 2,393,578 1,536,232 1,153,622

Provinces Cherkasy Chernihiv Chernivtsi Dnipropetrovsk Donetsk Ivano-Frankivsk Kharkiv Kherson Khmelnytsky

Kirovohrad

24,588

Kyyiv (Kiev) Luhansk

Lviv Mykolayiv Odesa (Odessa) Poltava Rivne

1,049,806

721

za

„population

Provinces

sq km

2007! estimate

Sumy Ternopil Vinnytsya Volyn Zakarpatska (Transcarpathia) Zaporizhzhya Zhytomyr

23,834 13,823 26,513 20,144

1,207,491 1,103,432 1,682,579 1,037,374

12,777 27,180 29,832

1,242,965

26,081

1,975,189

1,843,209 1,314,095

‘ane :

Krym (Crimea)

Cities Kiev Sevastopol TOTAL

839 864 603,628

2,720,371 379,005 46,559,578

Agriculture Mining Manufacturing Public utilities Construction Transp. and commun. Trade, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense Services Other TOTAL

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

UAH '000,000

value

force

force

|

40,542 17,939 86,863 15,169 16,370 47,435 56,041

9.2 44 19.7 3.4 3.7 10.7 12.7

115,644

26.2

45,4494 441,452

10.34 100.0

4,005,500

18.0

4,072,400

18.3

941,500 1,400,500 4,175,200 1,214,500

4.2 6.3 18.7 5.5

1,028,900

46

3,841,500

17.2

1,600,8005 22,280,800

7.25 100.0

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$7000,000): tourism (2005) 3,125; remittances (2006) 595; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 2,486; official development assistance (2005) 6088. Disbursements for (U.S.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 2,805; remittances (2006) 34. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 56.1%, in permanent crops 1.6%, in pasture 13.8%; overall forest area (2005) 16.5%.

Foreign trade Balance of trade (current prices)

Demography Population (2007): 46,457,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 199.3, persons per sq km 77.0.

Urban-rural (2006): urban 68.0%; rural 32.0%. Sex distribution (20062): male 45.97%; female 54.03%.

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 14.3%; 15-29, 23.0%; 30-44, 21.1%; 45-59, 21.2%; 60-74, 14.1%; 75-84, 5.5%; 85 and over, 0.8%.

Population projection: (2010) 45,570,000; (2020) 42,706,000. Ethnic composition (2001): Ukrainian 77.8%; Russian 17.3%; Belarusian 0.6%; Moldovan 0.5%; Crimean Tatar 0.5%; other 3.3%.

Religious affiliation (2004): Ukrainian Orthodox, of which “Kiev patriarchy” 19%, “no particular patriarchy” 16%, “Moscow patriarchy” 9%, Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox 2%; Ukrainian Catholic 6%; Protestant 2%; Latin Catholic 2%; Muslim 1%; Jewish 0.5%; nonreligious/atheist/other 42.5%. Major cities (20062): Kiev 2,718,000; Kharkiv 1,461,000; Dnipropetrovsk 1,039,000; Odesa (Odessa) 1,001,000; Donetsk (2005) 999,975.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.8 (world avg. 20.3); (2005) within marriage 78.6%; outside of marriage 21.4%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.2 (world avg. 8.6). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.21. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2006): 7.6/3.8. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 62.1 years; female 73.6 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 998.4, of which ischemic heart disease 655.6, cerebrovascular disease 218.6; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 192.4; accidents 96.7.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: UAH 133,464,000,000 (tax revenue 71.0%, of which VAT 37.8%, tax on profits of enterprises 19.4%, excise tax 6.4%; nontax revenue 26.8%; other 2.2%). Expenditures: UAH 137,063,000,000 (social secu-

rity 22.1%; education and health 12.8%; transportation and communications 4.9%; agriculture 4.8%; energy and construction 4.1%; other 51.3%). Public debt (external; April 2007): U.S.$12,400,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): sugar beets 22,421,000, potatoes 19,467,000, wheat 14,000,000, barley 11,316,000, corn (maize) 6,320,000, sunflower seeds 5,324,000, cabbages 1,465,000, tomatoes 1,461,000, pumpkins/squash 1,064,000, apples 475,000, sour cherries 120,000; livestock (number of live animals) 7,053,000 pigs, 6,514,000 cattle, 140,500,000 chickens; roundwood (2005) 14,606,300 cu m, of

which fuelwood 56%; fisheries production (2005) 273,688 (from aquaculture 11%). Mining and quarrying (2005): iron ore 37,700,0003; manganese 770,0003; ilmenite concentrate (2004) 370,000. Manufacturing (value of production in UAH

’000,000,000; 2005): base and fabricated metals 103.4; food

and beverages 76.3; machinery and apparatus 59.7; coke and refined petroleum 44.0; chemicals and chemical products 30.2. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2006) 192,204,000,000 ([2004] 76,831,000,000); hard coal (metric tons; 2006) 61,200,000 ([2004] 64,500,000); lignite (metric tons; 2006) 278,000 ([2004] 634,000); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006) 32,200,000 ([2004] 177,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004)

20,576,000 (11,938,000); natural gas (cu m; 2006) 17,733,000,000 ([2004] 78,531,000,000). Household income and expenditure (2005). Average household size 2.6; average annual disposable income per household UAH 16,527 (U.S.$3,225); sources of income: wages and salaries 46.0%, transfers 30.9%, self-employment 4.9%, other 18.2%; expenditures: food 61.0%7; remainder 39.0%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

U.S.$000,000 % of total

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

+198 0.6%

+710 1.9%

+518 1.1%

+3,676 6.0%

—1,907 2.7%

—6,671 8.0%

Imports (2006): U.S.$45,039,000,000 (mineral fuels 28.2%, of which natural gas 10.6%, crude petroleum 9.8%; machinery and apparatus 17.5%; road vehicles 10.9%; base and fabricated metals 7.4%). Major import sources (2005): Russia 35.5%; Germany 9.4%; Turkmenistan 7.4%; China 5.0%.

Exports (2006): U.S.$38,368,000,000 (base and fabricated metals 42.8%, of which basic iron and steel 34.0%; agricultural products 12.3%; chemical products 8.8%; machinery 8.7%).Major export destinations (2005): Russia 22.1%; Turkey 6.0%; Italy 5.6%; Germany 3.8%; Poland 3.0%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005): length 21,870 km; passenger-km 52,400,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 223,400,000,000. Roads (2005): total length 169,104 km (paved 98%). Vehicles: passenger cars (2005) 5,538,972; trucks and buses (2004) 1,093,372. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 4,393,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 40,692,000,000.

Communications Medium

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2006 2006

49,0761° 12,341

Telephones

Cellular Landline

1,0491° 264

units Medium

date

PCs

2005

Dailies Internet users

2004 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

1,810 2,4669 5,545

38

529 119

Education and health Literacy (2004): 99.4%; males literate 99.7%; females literate 99.2%. Education (2005-06) Primary (age 6-13)

Secondary (age 14-17) Voc., teacher tr.

Higher

}

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

21,700

543,000

5,399,000

9.9

1,023

495,600

951

2,709,100

Health (2006): physicians 225,000 (1 per 208 persons); hospital beds 444,000 (1 per 105 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births 9.8. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,289 (vegetable products 8196, animal products 19%); 167% of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November

2006): 272,500 (army 45.9%, air force/air defense 18.0%, navy 5.0%, paramilitary 31.1%"); Russian naval forces (November 2006) 1,100. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.4%; per capita expenditure U.S.$42.

lApril 1. ?Tanuary 1. ?Metal content. 4Net indirect taxes and taxes on production less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. ‘Unemployed. *Includes pensions, scholarships, subsidies, and remittances.

7Includes

beverages, tobacco products, and

expenditures in cafés and hotels. Figure represents commitments. ?Circulation of eight daily newspapers published in Kiev only. !°Subscribers. Includes internal security troops and border/coastal guards.

Internet resources for further information: * National Bank of Ukraine http://www.bank.gov.ua/ENGL/Of publ/index.htm * State Statistics Committee of Ukraine http://www.ukrstat.gov.ua

722

Britannica World Data

co 2,673; cement, bricks, and tiles 2,508. Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2005) 60,698,000,000 (53,874,000,000); coal, none (none); crude petroleum (barrels; 2006-07) 942,585,000 ([2005] 153,000,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2004) 22,655,000 (9,667,000); natural gas (cu m;

United Arab Emirates Official name: Al-Imarat al- Arabiyah al-Muttahidah (United Arab Emirates). Form of government: federation of seven emirates with one advisory body (Federal National Council [401]). Chief of state: President. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: Abu Dhabi. Official language: Arabic. Official religion: Islam. Monetary unit: ditham (AED); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1 U.S.$

2006) 47,000,000,000 ([2004] 38,753,000,000).

Population economically active (2004): total 2,459,145; activity rate of total population 56.9% (participation rates: over age 14, 76.2%; female [2001] 11.7%; unemployed [2001] 2.4%). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Wages and services index

*Ajmàn (Ajman) Dubayy (Dubai) Al-Fujayrah (Fujairah) Ra’s al-Khaymah

area?

Abu Dhabi

“Ajman Dubai Al-Fujayrah

sq km

2005 census?

28,210

73,060

1,292,119

100 1,510 500

Ra’s al-Khaymah

Sharjah

Umm al-Qaywayn “other non-nationals” TOTAL

Umm al-Qaywayn —

population

sq mi

Capitals

Ash-Sharigah (Sharjah)

260 3,900 1,300

660

1,700

1,000

2,600

300 — 32,280

780 — 83,600

189,849 1,200,309 118,617 197,571

724,859 45,756 335,615 4,104,695^

Demography Population (2007): 4,444,000. Density (2007): persons per sq mi 137.7, persons per sq km 532. Urban-rural (2005): urban 76.7%; rural 23.3%. Sex distribution (2006): male 68.61%; female 31.39%.

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

102.8 117.0

105.8 125.2

109.1 130.9

114.6

121.7 e

133.0 eee

Foreign trade? Balance of trade (current prices)

Bedouin 9.4%, Egyptian Arab 6.2%, Omani Arab 4.1%, Saudi Arab 4.0%; South Asian 35.7%, of which Pashtun 7.1%, Balochi 7.1%, Malayali 7.1%; Persian 5.0%; Filipino 3.4%; white 2.4%; other 5.4%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Muslim c. 62%

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

451.7 17.4%

+53.7 16.3%

+78.3 18.9%

+101.2 17.8%

3157.2 22.3%

3207.1 24.7%

Germany 6.2%; Japan 5.8%; U.K. 5.5%; France 4.1%.

Population projection: (2010) 4,976,000; (2020) 6,495,000. Doubling time: 51 years. Ethnic composition (2000): Arab 48.1%, of which U.A.E. Arab 12.2%, U.A.E.

(mostly Sunni); Hindu c. 21%;

Christian c. 9%; Buddhist c. 4%; other c. 4%. Major cities (2007): Dubai 1,225,137; Abu Dhabi 633,136; Sharjah 584,286; Al“Ayn 444,331; “Ajman 250,808; Ra’s al-Khaymah 121,626.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 16.1 (world avg. 20.3). Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 2.2 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 13.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.44. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2004): 2.9/0.8. Life expectancy at birth (2006): male 73.0 years; female 78.1 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2002): cardiovascular diseases 119.6, of which ischemic heart disease 55.9; accidents 61.9; malignant neo-

plasms (cancers) 34.1; infectious and parasitic diseases 17.6.

National economy Budget (2006). Revenue: AED 200,704,000,000 (royalties on hydrocarbons 80.596; tax revenue 4.296; other 15.396). Expenditures: AED 128,238,000,000

(current expenditures 78.596; development expenditure 13.196; loans, net equity, and foreign grants 8.496). Gross national income (2006): U.S.$174,536,000,000 (U.S.$41,082 per capita).

Exports (2006): AED 523,350,000,000 (crude petroleum 40.8%; reexports 32.3%; free zone exports 14.4%; natural gas 5.0%; nonpetroleum emirateproduced exports 4.1%; refined petroleum products 3.4%).Major export destinations: Japan 25.9%; South Korea 10.3%; Thailand 5.9%; India 4.5%; Iran

3.6%; unspecified 15.4%.

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads: none. Roads (2003): total length, n.a. (paved roads only, 4,030 km). Vehicles (2003): passenger cars 684,092; trucks and buses 92,965. Air transport

5,027,339,000. Medium Televisions

2006 in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

AED 000,000

value

force

force

12,241

2.0

193,059

6.8

223,4225 1,130 73,433

37.35 0.2 12.3

33,127 5,803 361,7665

1.2 0.2 12.75

Construction Public utilities

45,124 9,522

7.5 1.6

647,132 34,142

22.8 1.2

Transp. and commun.

38,517

6.4

174,489

6.1

Trade, hotels

72,989

12.2

642,541

22.6

Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

81,795 39,025

13.6 6.5

120,448 284,441

4.2 10.0

11,333 —9,2806 599,231

1.9 —1.56 100.0

346,695 — 2,843,643

122 — 100.0

date

Cellular Landline

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2004

843

216

5,51911 1,310

1,29411 307

cargo units

Medium

date

PCs

Dailies 2006 2006

metric ton-km

units number

Telephones

Internet users Broadband

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

2005

850

2006

70610

208

16510

2006 2006

1,709 24111

401 561

Education and health Educational attainment (2005)12. Percentage of population age 10 and over having: no formal schooling (illiterate) 9.196, (literate) 13.396; primary education 14.596; incomplete/complete secondary 42.096; postsecondary 4.296; undergraduate 15.1%; graduate 1.8%. Literacy (2005): total population age 10 and over literate 90.9%; males literate 90.4%; females literate 92.2%. Education (2004-05)

student/ schools

teachers

students

teacher ratio

Primary (age 6-11)

17,255

262,807

152

Secondary (age 12-18)

21,619

162,992

75

176

1,357

TT

2,94813

68,18214

21.513

Higher

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

(2006): passenger-km 73,893,000,000;

Communications

Vocational

Services Other TOTAL

2004

Imports (2006): AED 316,280,000,000 (emirate imports 78.7%9, free zone imports 21.3%).Major import sources: U.S. 11.4%; China 11.0%; India 9.8%;

Age breakdown (2006): under 15, 20.8%; 15-29, 29.3%; 30-44, 36.9%; 45-59, 11.3%; 60-74, 1.5%; 75-84, 0.2%; 85 and over, negligible.

Crude petroleum Quarrying Manufacturing

2003

Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 2,233; remittances (2006) n.a.; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 5,421. Disbursements for (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 5,300; remittances (2006) n.a.; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 1,853. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 0.8%, in permanent crops 2.3%, in pasture 3.6%; overall forest area (2005) 3.7%.

AED'000,000,000 % of total

Agriculture

2002

and light 36.1%, transportation and communications 14.9%, food 14.4%, education, recreation, and entertainment 10.3%, durable household goods 7.4%.

Area and population

Abū Zaby (Abu Dhabi)

2001

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2004) 6.4; income per household: n.a.; sources of income: n.a.; expenditure (2000)7: rent, fuel,

AED 3.67; 1 £ - AED 738.

Emirates

2000

Health (2004): physicians 4,86415 (1 per 779 persons); hospital beds 7,775 (1 per 487 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 13.9. Food (2004): daily per capita caloric intake 3 280 (vegetable products 7496, animal products 2696); 16296 of FAO recommended minimum requirement.

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 50,500 (army 87.1%, navy 5.0%, air force 7.9%).Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.0%; per capita expenditure U.S.$546.

dates 760,000, tomatoes 240,000, alfalfa for forage and silage 210,000, eggplants 20,000, pumpkins and squash 20,000, onions 15,944, cabbages 15,000, cucumbers and gherkins 15,000, lemons and limes 11,500; livestock (number of live animals) 1,520,000 goats, 580,000 sheep, 250,000 camels, 115,000 cattle, 15,000,000 chickens; roundwood, n.a.; fisheries production 90,570 (from

Y[wenty seats are appointed by the rulers of the 7 emirates and 20 seats (as of December 2006) are indirectly elected by the nearly 7,000 sheikhs in the UAE. 2Approximate figures; border/territorial disputes exist with Saudi Arabia/Iran, respectively. ?Preliminary. 4The national population equals 824,921, non-national population 3,279,774 (including 335,615 “other non-nationals”). 5Includes natural gas. Less imputed bank service charges. "Weights of consumer price index components. $Imports are f.o.b. in balance of trade and c.i.f. in commodities and trading partners. ?Principal 2004 imports c.i.f. (AED 195,700,000,000) for Abū Zaby, Dubayy, and Ash-Shariqah only were machinery and apparatus 23.3%, gold/diamonds/jewelry 19.4%, transport equipment 12.1%. 10Circulation of 12 leading daily newspapers only. !4Subscribers. Excludes 335,615 “other non-nationals.” 132001-02. 42002-03. Public sector only.

fabricated metal products and machinery 3,695; food, beverages, and tobac-

Internet resources for further information: * United Arab Emirates National Media Council http://uaeinteract.com * Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates http://www.centralbank.ae

Public debt (2005): c. U.S.$20,000,000,000. Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2005):

aquaculture 196). Mining and quarrying (2005): gypsum 100,000; lime 50,000. Manufacturing (value added in AED 000,000; 2002): chemical products (including refined petroleum) 18,467; textiles and wearing apparel 4,281;

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

Nations of the World

United Kingdom

Population projection: (2010) 61,617,000; (2020) 64,138,000. Sex distribution (2005): male 48.96%; female 51.04%. Major cities (2005; urban agglomeration): London 7,518,000

Official name: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Form of government: constitutional monarchy with two legislative houses (House of Lords [7501|; House of Commons [646]). Chief of state: Sovereign. Head of government: Prime Minister. Capital: London. Official language: English; both English and Welsh in Wales. Official religion: ?. Monetary unit: pound sterling (£); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007) 1£= U.S.$2.01; 1 U.S.$ = £0.50.

723

(8,505,000);

Birmingham 1,001,000 (2,280,000); Manchester 441,000 (2,228,000); Leeds 723,000 (1,519,000); Glasgow 579,000 (1,159,000); Newcastle 276,000 (879,000); Liverpool 448,000 (810,000); Sheffield 521,000; Bradford 485,000; Edinburgh 458,000; Bristol 398,000; Wakefield 321,000; Cardiff 320,000; Coventry 304,000; Doncaster 290,000; Sunderland 284,000; Belfast 268,000.

Mobility (2001). Population living in the same residence as 2000: 88.6%; different residence, same country/region (of the U.K.) 8.6%; different residence, different country/region (of the U.K.) 2.1%; from outside the U.K. 0.7%.

Households (2003-04). Average household size 2.4; 1 person 28%, couple 22%, couple with 1-2 children 16%, couple with 3 or more children 3%, single parent with children 6%, other 25%.

Immigration (2004): permanent residents 518,000, from Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka 10.6%, South Africa 5.6%, Australia 5.0%, Pakistan 4.1%, United States 2.7%, New Zealand 1.5%, Canada 1.0%, other 69.5%, of which EU 20.8%.

Population (2005 estimate) Countries

population

England

50,431,700?

Counties Bedfordshire Buckinghamshire Cambridgeshire Cheshire Cornwall (incl. Isles of Scilly) Cumbria Derbyshire Devon Dorset Durham East Sussex Essex Gloucestershire Hampshire Hertfordshire

Isle of Wight+

397,700 481,500 588,900 679,900 519,400 498,900 747,500 731,000 401,100 499,800 497,900 1,340,000 575,200 1,259,500 1,048,200

Nottingham

278,700

159,700

Unitary Districts

Plymouth Poole Portsmouth Reading Redcar and Cleveland Rutland Slough South Gloucestershire Southampton Southend-on-Sea Stockton-on-Tees Stoke-on-Trent Swindon Telford and

246,100 137,100 189,600 145,100

Aberdeen City Aberdeenshire Angus Argyll and Bute Clackmannanshire Dumfries and Galloway Dundee City East Ayrshire East Dumbartonshire East Lothian East Renfrewshire Edinburgh, City of Eilean Siaré Falkirk

205,910 233,430 108,790 90,870 48,630

Fife Glasgow City Highland Inverclyde Midlothian Moray North Ayrshire North Lanarkshire Orkney Islands Perth and Kinross Renfrewshire Scottish Borders Shetland Islands South Ayrshire South Lanarkshire Stirling West Dumbartonshire West Lothian

356,740 578,790 213,590 82,130 79,190 86,590 135,830 323,420 19,590 138,590 170,000 109,730 22,000 111,780 306,280 86,930

Wrekin

140,200

138,600 37,300 117,500 248,100 222,000 159,300 186,700 238,300 184,000

161,600

Thurrock 146,600 Torbay 132,800 Warrington 194,700 West Berkshire 146,300 Windsor and Maidenhead 138,500 Wokingham 153,600 York 186,800 Metropolitan Counties/Greater London Greater London’ 7,517,700 Greater Manchester 2,547,600 Merseyside 1,367,100 South Yorkshire 1,285,600 Tyne and Wear — 1,095,200

446,600 555,800

173,700

population

Peterborough

140,000

Kent 1,369,900 Lancashire 1,156,100 Leicestershire 627,800 Lincolnshire 678,700 Norfolk 824,200 North Yorkshire 582,000 Northamptonshire 651,800 Northumberland 311,300 Nottinghamshire 762,700 Oxfordshire 626,900 Shropshire 289,000 Somerset 515,600 Staffordshire 816,700 Suffolk 692,100 Surrey 1,075,500 Warwickshire 533,900 West Sussex 764,400

Wiltshire Worcestershire Unitary Districts Bath and NE Somerset Blackburn with Darwen Blackpool Bournemouth Bracknell Forest Brighton and Hove Bristol Darlington Derby East Riding of Yorkshire Halton Hartlepool Herefordshire Kingston upon Hull Leicester Luton Medway Middlesborough Milton Keynes NE Lincolnshire North Lincolnshire North Somerset

population

West Midlands West Yorkshire

2,591,300 2,118,600

Wales 2,958,600 Unitary Districts Blaenau Gwent 68,400 Bridgend 130,800

Scotland

Caerphilly

170,200

Ballymena

163,600 111,200

Cardiff Carmarthenshire Ceredigion Conwy Denbighshire Flintshire Gwynedd

319,700 178,100 78,300 111,500 96,000 150,200 118,000

Ballymoney Banbridge Belfast Carrickfergus Castlereagh Coleraine Cookstown

327,400 118,800 90,000 178,800 249,100 288,000 184,900

251,100 137,600 218,500 157,500 157,100 195,100

148,340 142,360 119,400 105,960 91,800 89,600 457,830 26,370 149,150

91,400 163,780

Northern Ireland — 1,724,400? Districts Antrim 50,500 Ards 75,300 Armagh 55,800

142,900

255,000 398,300 99,200 233,700

5,094,800

60,700 28,700 44,800 268,000 39,200 65,700 56,600 34,100

Isle of Anglesey

68,900

Craigavon

84,700

Merthyr Tydfil Monmouthshire Neath and Port Talbot

54,900 87,700 135,600

Derry Down Dungannon Fermanagh

107,300 67,400 50,700 59,700

Newport

139,600

Pembrokeshire Powys Rhondda, Cynon,

117,500 131,500

Limvady Lisburn Magherafelt

Taff

231,600 226,400 90,300

Moyle 16,500 Newry and Mourne 91,600 Newtownabbey 80,800 North Down 78,300 Omagh 50,700 Strabane 38,700 TOTAL 60,209,500

Swansea Torfaen The Vale of Glamorgan Wrexham

122,900 130,500

Larne

31,100 34,100 111,500 41,800

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 12.4 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 56.3%; outside of marriage 43.7%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 9.5 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2005): 2.9 (world avg. 11.7). Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2005): 1.79. Marriage/divorce rates per 1,000 population (2005): 4.7/2.6. Life expectancy at birth (2005): male 75.9 years; female 81.0 years. Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2004): diseases of the circulatory system 362.2, of which ischemic heart disease 177.3, cerebrovascular disease 101.1; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 256.8; diseases of the respiratory system 130.2, of which pneumonia 56.8; diseases of the digestive system 47.9; accidents 21.0; diseases of the genitourinary system 17.9; diseases of the endocrine system 14.6, of which diabetes mellitus 11.3; violence 7.6, of which

suicide and intentional self-harm 6.8.

Social indicators Educational attainment (2003). Percentage of population age 25-64 having: up to lower secondary education only 16%; upper secondary 56%; higher 28%, of which at least some university 19%. Distribution of disposable income (2002-03) percentage of household income by quintile (highest)

1

2

3

4

5

53

10.6

16.6

243

43.2

Quality of working life (2004). Average full-time workweek (hours): male 40.8, female 37.5. Annual rate per 100,000 workers for (2005)7: injury or accident 562; death 0.6. Proportion of labour force (employed persons) insured for damages or income loss resulting from: injury 10096; permanent disability 10096; death 10096. Average days lost to labour stoppages per 1,000 employee workdays: 34. Social participation. Eligible voters participating in last national election (May 2005): 61.3%. Population age 16 and over participating in voluntary work (2001)*: 3996. Trade union membership in total workforce (2003) c. 27%. Percentage of population attending weekly church services (2001) 8%. Social deviance (2004-05)8. Offense rate per 100,000 population for: theft and handling stolen goods 3,822.1; criminal damage 2,234.7; violence against the person 1,951.1; burglary 1,281.9; fraud and forgery 525.8; drug offenses 268.3; robbery 167.2. Leisure (2004). Favourite leisure activities: watching television, videos, and DVDs, listening to the radio, watching sporting events, and attending the cinema; the common free-time activity outside of the home isa visit to the pub; favourite sporting activities: for men—walking, golf, snooker, and billiards, for women—walking, swimming, fitness classes, and yoga. Material well-being (2005-06). Households possessing: automobile 74%; telephone 92%; refrigerator/freezer 97%; washing machine 95%; central heating 94%; video recorder 86%; digital, cable, or satellite television receiver 65%.

National economy Budget (2005-06). Revenue: £485,400,000,000 (income tax 26.9%; production and import taxes 24.9%; social security contributions 17.6%). Expenditures: £500,700,000,000 (social protection 34.2%; health 17.7%; education 13.9%;

defense 6.1%; public order 6.0%).

Gross national income (at current market prices; 2006): U.S.$2,425,690,000,000

(U.S.$40,086 per capita).

Demography Population (2007): 60,863,000. Area: 93,628 sq mi, 242,495 sq km, of which England 50,301 sq mi, 130,279 sq km; Wales 8,005 sq mi, 20,733 sq km; Scotland 30,080 sq mi, 77,907 sq km; Northern Ireland 5,242 sq mi, 13,576 sq km.

Density (2007): persons per sq mi 650.1, persons per sq km 251.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 89.7%; rural 10.3%.

Ethnic composition (2002-03): white 89.2%; black 2.0%, of which Caribbean 1.2%;

Religious affiliation (2001): Christian 71.8%, of which Anglican-identified 29%, other Protestant-identified (significantly Presbyterian) 14%, Roman Catholic-identified 1096; Muslim 2.896; Hindu 1.096; Sikh 0.6%; Jewish 0.5%; nonreligious 15.0%; other 0.5%; unknown 7.8%.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

2004

Agriculture, fishing

Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 17.9%; 15-29, 19.3%; 30-44, 22.3%; 45-59, 19.3%; 60-74, 13.6%; 75-84, 5.7%; 85 and over, 1.9%. origin 1.0%, African origin 0.9%; Asian Indian 1.7%; Pakistani Bangladeshi 0.5%; Chinese 0.3%; other and not stated 5.1%.

Structure of gross domestic product and labour force

Mining1° Manufacturing Construction

Public utilities Transp. and commun. Trade, hotels, restaurants Finance, real estate Pub. admin., defense

Services Other TOTAL

2005

in value

% of total

labour

% of labour

£000,000

value

force?

force?

9,381

0.8

383,700

1.3

29,849 154,636

2.6 13.3

102,800 3,723,000

0.3 12.6

67,619

5.8

2,201,700

7.5

16,322

1.4

176,300

0.6

78,279 162,139 324,927 53,483

or 13.9 27.9 4.6

1,932,200 5,507,700 4,396,000 1,988,400

6.5 18.7 149 6.7

186,154 81,6511! 1,164,4393

16.0 7.011 100.0

7,684,600 1,420,800 29,517,200

26.0 48 100.03

724

Britannica World Data

Public debt (2005): U.S.$960,000,000,000.

Production (metric tons except as noted). Agriculture, forestry, fishing (2006): wheat 14,735,000, sugar beets 7,150,000, potatoes 5,684,000, barley 5,239,000, rapeseed 1,870,000, carrots 832,600, oats 728,000, onions 383,400, cabbages 308,200, apples 218,500; livestock (number of live animals) 34,722,000 sheep, 10,159,910 cattle, 4,933,000 pigs; roundwood (2005) 8,589,000 cu m, of which

fuelwood 4%; fisheries production (2005) 842,271 (from aquaculture 21%). Mining and quarrying (2005): sand and gravel 90,000,000; dolomite

13,000,000; chalk 8,000,000; china clay (kaolin) 2,148,000. Manufacturing (value added in £'000,000; 2004): food, beverages, and tobacco 22,570; paper products, printing, and publishing 20,020; transport equipment 18,864; electrical and optical equipment 16,881; chemicals and chemical products 15,645; base metals and fabricated metal products 15,644; machinery and equipment 11,962; rubber and plastic products 8,003.

Household income and expenditure. Average household size (2003-04) 2.4; average annual disposable income per household (2004-05) £25,360 (U.S.$46,447); sources of income (2005-06): wages and salaries 67.3%, social security benefits 12.7%, income from self-employment 8.2%, transfers 7.4%; expenditure (2005-06): food and beverages 18.7%, recreation and culture 18.7%, housing 18.3%, transportation 14.5%, household furnishings 7.6%,

clothing and footwear 5.1%. Selected balance of payments data. Receipts from (U.S.$’000,000): tourism (2005) 25,959; remittances (2006) 7,339; foreign direct investment (FDI; 2001-05 avg.) 62,835. Disbursements for (U.$.$'000,000): tourism (2005) 58,617; remittances (2006) 3,425; FDI (2001-05 avg.) 73,461. Land use as % of total land area (2003): in temporary crops 23.4%, in permanent crops 0.2%, in pasture 46.5%; overall forest area (2005) 11.8%.

Foreign trade!2

Financial aggregates 2000 Exchange rate (end of year) U.S. dollar per£ SDRs per£ Intemational reserves (U.S.$) Total (excl. gold; '000,000,000) SDRs ('000,000,000) Reserve pos. in IMF (000,000) Foreign exchange Gold (000,000 fine troy oz) % world reserves Interest and prices Central bank discount (%) Govt. bond yield (%) long term Industrial share prices

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2001 1.49 145

1.45 145

1.61 1.19

1.78 1.20

1.93 1.24

172 1.20

1.96 1.30

38.77 0.33

3419 0.29

37.55 0.36

35.35 0.38

39.94 0.33

38.47 0.29

40.70 0.40

4.28 3416 15.67 1.6

5.05 28.84 11.42 1.2

6.21 3098 10.09 1.31

6.32 28.65 10.07 14

5.53 34.08 10.04 14

2.33 3585 9.99 14

1.41 3889 9.97 14

m 468

im 4.78

zs 4.83

ees 4.64

iss 4.77

cus 4.39

ass 427

(1995 = 100)

Balance of payments (U.S.$000,000,000,000) Balance of visible trade Imports, f.o.b. Exports, f.o.b. Balance of invisibles Balance of payments, current account

Balance of trade (current prices)

49.85 —334.23 284.38 41249

-59.29 -331.57 272.28 427.87

-71.77 -351.64 279.87 447.16

-79.45 -387.25 307.80 454.98

—11.47 —461.13 349.66 476.20

—125.07 —509.40 384.33 472.35

—153.98 —603.33 449.35 +74.01

-37.36

—31.42

-24.61

-24.47

-35.18

-5272

-79.97

£000,000 % of total

—40,648 9.7%

2002 | —47,087 11.2%

2003

2004

2005

2006

—47,864 11.3%

—60,414 13.7%

-65,520 13.5%

-83,691 14.6%

Imports (2005): £274,828,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 27.2%, of which electrical machinery 19.3%, nonelectrical machinery 7.9%; transport equipment 14.3%, of which motor vehicles and parts 11.4%, aircraft and other

transport equipment 2.9%; chemicals and chemical products 10.6%; petroleum and petroleum products 7.4%; food products 6.7%). Major import sources: Germany 13.9%; U.S. 7.9%; France 7.9%; The Netherlands 7.3%;

Belgium-Luxembourg 5.4%; China 4.7%; Italy 4.5%; Norway 4.4%; Spain 3.8%; Ireland 3.7%; Japan 3.1%.

Exports (2005): £209,308,000,000 (machinery and apparatus 29.4%, of which electrical machinery 17.2%, nonelectrical machinery 12.2%; chemicals and chemical products 15.8%, of which pharmaceuticals 5.8%; transport equipment 12.6%, of which motor vehicles and parts 9.2%, aircraft and other trans-

port equipment 3.4%; crude petroleum and petroleum products 9.5%; food products 3.1%). Major export destinations: U.S. 14.7%; Germany 11.0%; France 9.4%; Ireland 7.8%; The Netherlands 5.9%; Belgium-Luxembourg 5.3%; Spain 4.8%; Italy 4.1%; Switzerland 2.4%; Sweden 2.2%; Japan 1.9%;

Canada 1.6%. Manufacturing, mining, and construction enterprises (2001)

no. of enterprises

no. of employees

annual costs asa % of avg. of employment costs

annual value added (£000,000)

Manufacturing 7,706

515,000

86.6

20,370

Paper and paper products; printing and publishing

Food, beverages, and tobacco

32,493

475,000

101.5

19,444

Chemical products Metal manufacturing Machinery and equipment Mineral products (nonmetallic) Electrical and optical equipment Transport equipment Rubber and plastics

3,864 31,629 13,650 5,439 16,141 5,665 7,021

251,000 487,000 355,000 134,000 475,000 390,000 233,000

138.8 92.3 104.3 93.7 118.3 120.0 92.3

14,850 15,269 11,696 4,852 16,070 17,411 7,632

11,310

210,000

66.5

5,147

8,444 20,155

89,000 229,000

68.2 76.8

2,345 6,452

444

39,000

20,629

1,224 192,000

33,000 1,367,000

1,798 47,969

Textiles Wood and wood products Other manufacturing

Mining Extraction of coal, mineral oil, and natural gas

Extraction of minerals other than fuels Construction

Food, beverages, and tobacco

no. of employees

27,074

of which meats Household goods,

weekly wage as a % of all wages

annual turnover (£000,000)

993,000

85,534

8,485

46,000

2,216

23,553

319,000

29,151

of which electronics, appliances

furniture Clothing and footwear Pharmaceuticals and cosmetics Business services,

7,157

101,000

10,821

10,592

119,000

8,784

17,869 6,915 534,956

446,000 110,000 4,273,000

25,963 9,543 265,631

30,779 81,154 118,988 35,622

79,000 1,621,000 1,792,000 1,026

32,779 181,669 49,902 16,233

9,683

453,000

7,575

of which real estate Transp. and commun. Hotels, restaurants Social services,

of which health

43,211,000,000; metric ton-km cargo? 22,000,000,000. Roads

(2005)?: total

length 241,097 mi, 388,008 km (paved 100%). Vehicles (2004): passenger cars 27,765,100, trucks and buses 3,522,424. Air transport (2006): passenger-km 231,515,000,000; metric ton-km cargo 6,215,000,000.

Communications Medium Televisions Telephones Cellular

Landline

units number

per 1,000

date

in '000s

persons

2003

56,576

2006

69,65714

2006

33,603

950

units Medium

date

PCs

1,16414

Dailies Internet users

562

Broadband

2005 2004 2006 2006

number

per 1,000

in '000s

persons

45,659 17,48518 33,534 12,99514

765 29213 560 21514

Education and health Literacy (2006): total population literate, virtually 100%. Education (2005-06)15 Primary (age 5-10) Secondary (age 11-19) Voc., teacher tr. Higher

Retail trade and service enterprises (2001) no. of enterprises

Transport and communications Transport. Railroads (2005-06): length (2005) 17,156 km; passenger-km?

student/ schools

teachers

students

22,156 4,206 481 642

226,600 248,500 157,75116 120,80016

4,831,900 3,987,100 5,801,75116 2,374,90016

teacher ratio 21.3 16.0 33.616 19.716

Health (2005): physicians 122,345 (1 per 492 persons); hospital beds (2004) 233,223 (1 per 257 persons); infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births (2006) 5.0. Food (2005): daily per capita caloric intake 3,449 (vegetable products 72%, animal products 28%).

Military Total active duty personnel (November 2006): 191,030 (army 55.0%, navy 21.4%, air force 23.6%); U.K. troops deployed abroad (March 2006) 42,900; U.S. troops in the U.K. (March 2006) 10,300. Military expenditure as percentage of GDP (2005): 2.7%; per capita expenditure U.S.$1,000.

Energy production (consumption): electricity (kW-hr; 2004) 395,853,000,000 (403,343,000,000);

61,800,000);

crude

hard

coal (metric tons; 2005-06)

petroleum

(barrels;

2005-06)

20,600,000

([2005

565,400,000

([2005

598,900,000); petroleum products (metric tons; 2005) 86,003,000 (80,977,000);

natural gas (cu m; 2005-06) 99,037,000,000 ([2004] 115,230,000,000).

Population economically active (2006): total 30,613,000; activity rate of total population 50.6% (participation rates: ages 16 and over 60.1%; female 45.9%; unemployed [June 2007-August 2007] 5.496). Price and earnings indexes (2000 = 100) Consumer price index Monthly earnings index

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

100.0 100.0

101.8 104.5

103.5 108.2

106.5 111.9

109.7 116.7

112.8 121.5

116.4 126.5

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

1As of December 2007 including 92 hereditary peers, 632 life peers, and 26 archbishops and bishops. Church of England “established” (protected by the state but not “official”); Church of Scotland “national” (exclusive jurisdiction in spiritual matters per Church of Scotland Act 1921); no established church in Northern Ireland or Wales. 3Detail does not add to total given because of rounding. ^Only unitary district with county status. "Has administrative authority from July 2000. 5Formerly Western Isles. 7Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) only. SEngland and Wales only. ?March-May. Includes petroleum extraction. VAT and other taxes less subsidies and less imputed bank service charges. Imports c.i.f.; exports f.o.b. PCirculation of daily newspapers. Subscribers. 15Public sector only. 162002-03.

Internet resources for further information: * Office for National Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.uk

Nations of the World

United States

Components of population change (2000-05)7

Official name: United States of America. Form of government: federal republic with two legislative houses (Senate [100]; House of Representatives [4351]). Head of state and government: President. Capital: Washington, D.C. Official language: none. Official religion: none. Monetary unit: dollar (U.S.$); valuation (Sept. 5, 2007)

Area and population area

Alabama

Alaska Arizona Arkansas California

Capitals Montgomery

Juneau Phoenix Little Rock Sacramento

sq mi

population sq km

2006 estimate

51,700

133,902

4,599,030

589,194 113,999 53,178

1,526,005 295,256 137,730

670,053 6,166,318 2,810,872

158,633

410,858

36,457,549

104,094

269,602

4,753,377

5,006 2,026

12,966 5,247

3,504,809 853,476

Colorado

Denver

Connecticut Delaware

Hartford Dover

Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois

Tallahassee Atlanta Honolulu Boise Springtield

58,599 58,922 6,461 83,570 57,915

151,771 152,607 16,734 216,445 149,999

18,089,888 9,363,941 1,285,498 1,466,465 12,831,970

Indiana lowa Kansas

Indianapolis Des Moines Topeka

36,418 56,271 82,277

94,322 145,741 213,096

6,313,520 2,982,085 2,764,075

Kentucky

40,409

104,659

4,206,074

Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts

Baton Rouge Augusta Annapolis Boston

47,716 33,126 10,454 8,263

123,584 85,795 27,076 21,401

4,287,768 1,321,574 5,615,727 6,437,193

Michigan Minnesota

Lansing St. Paul

96,716 86,939

250,493 225,171

10,095,643 5,167,101

47,692 69,704 147,042

123,522 180,533 380,837

2,910,540 5,842,713 944,632

Mississippi Missouri Montana

Nebraska

Frankfort

Jackson Jefferson City Helena

Lincoln

77,353

200,343

1,768,331

110,561 9,282 7,813 121,590

286,352 24,040 20,236 314,917

2,495,529 1,314,895 8,724,560 1,954,599

Albany Raleigh

53,097 52,671

137,521 136,417

19,306,183 8,856,505

Bismarck

70,700

183,112

635,867

44,825 69,898 97,047

116,096 181,035 251,351

11,478,006 3,579,212 3,700,758

Harrisburg Providence Columbia

46,056 1,223 31,118

119,284 3,168 80,595

12,440,621 1,067,610 4,321,249

South Dakota

Pierre

77,117

199,732

781,919

Tennessee

Nashville

42,143

109,150

6,038,803

266,853 84,899

691,146 219,887

23,507,783 2,550,063

Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico

Carson City Concord Trenton Santa Fe

New York North Carolina North Dakota

Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina

Texas Utah Vermont

Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Columbus Oklahoma City Salem

Austin Salt Lake City Montpelier

9,615

24,903

623,908

Richmond

40,600

105,154

7,642,884

Olympia Charleston Madison Cheyenne

68,097 24,230 65,498 97,813

176,370 62,755 169,639 253,334

6,395,798 1,818,470 5,556,506 515,004

68

176

581,530

District District of Columbia

—

TOTAL

3,676,4862,3

9,522,055?

299,398,4844

Demography Population (2007): 302,633,000. Density (2006)5: persons per sq mi 85.6, persons per sq km 33.0. Urban-rural (2005): urban 80.8%; rural 19.2%. Sex distribution (2005): male 49.26%; female 50.74%. Age breakdown (2005): under 15, 20.5%; 15-29, 20.9%; 30-44, 21.6%; 45-59, 20.2%; 60-74, 10.7%; 75-84, 4.4%; 85 and over, 1.7%. Population projection: (2010) 311,407,000; (2020) 338,973,000. Doubling time: not applicable; doubling time exceeds 100 years. Population by race and Hispanic® origin (2005): non-Hispanic white 66.9%; Hispanic 14.4%; non-Hispanic black 12.8%; Asian and Pacific Islander 4.5%; American Indian and Eskimo 1.0%; other 0.4%.

Religious affiliation (2005): Christian 83.3%, of which independent Christian 23.2%, Roman Catholic 19.6%, Protestant (including Anglican) 18.9%, unaffiliated Christian 16.5%, Orthodox 1.8%, other Christian (primarily Mormon

and Jehovah’s Witness) 3.3%; Jewish 1.9%; Muslim 1.6%; Buddhist 0.9%; New Religionists 0.5%; Hindu 0.4%; traditional beliefs 0.496; Baha'1 0.396; Sikh 0.1%; nonreligious 9.8%; atheist 0.5%; other 0.3%.

Mobility (2005). Reported gross % of population living in the same residence as in 2004: c. 86%; different residence, same county c. 8%; different county, same state c. 3%; different state c. 3%; moved from abroad c. 1%.

Households (2006). Total households 116,011,000 (married-couple families 58,945,000 [50.8%]). Average household size (2005) 2.6; 1 person 26.6%, 2 persons 33.0%, 3 persons 16.5%, 4 persons 14.0%, 5 or more persons 9.9%. Family households: 78,425,000 (67.6%); nonfamily 37,587,000 (32.4%), of which 1-person 83.1%. Place ofbirth (2005): native-born 255,999,000 (87.9% ); foreign-born 35,157,000 (12.1%), of which (2004) Mexico 10,011,000, the Philippines 1,222,000, China

and Hong Kong 1,067,000, India 1,007,000, Cuba 952,000, Vietnam 863,000, El Salvador 765,000, South Korea 701,000.

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

net change in population

States

1 U.S.$ = €0.74; 1 U.S.$ — £0.50.

States

725

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana lowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming District District of Columbia TOTAL/RATE

net domestic/ international migration

percentage change

births

110,457 36,730 808,660 105,756 2,260,494 363,162 104,695 59,924 1,807,040 885,760 63,657 135,140 343,724 191,456 39,952 55,863 131,120 54,670 46,582 303,882 49,638 182,380 213,307 76,432 203,627 33,475 47,522 416,550 74,154 303,578 109,338 277,809 636,751 -5,527 110,897 97,232 219,620 148,562 27,870 243,267 21,093 273,697 2,008,176 236,387 14,223 488,435 393,619 8,506 172,486 15,512

2.5 5.9 15.8 4.0 6.7 8.4 3.1 7.6 11.3 10.8 53 10.4 2.8 3.1 1.4 24 3.2 1.2 3.7 57 0.8 1.8 43 21 3.6 3.7 28 20.8 6.0 3.6 6.0 1.5 7.9 -0.9 1.0 2.8 6.4 1.2 ar 6.1 2.8 4.8 9.6 10.6 23 6.9 6.7 05 3.2 3.1

319,544 53,132 462,739 198,800 2,781,539 353,091 222,222 58,699 1,115,565 718,764 96,028 111,131 959,470 451,681 197,163 204,663 287,222 350,818 71,276 395,775 426,232 691,897 358,012 228,849 401,148 58,001 132,394 170,451 75,060 604,110 143,617 1,345,482 627,309 40,890 789,312 264,324 236,557 761,887 66,973 295,425 56,247 414,305 1,948,398 254,433 33,606 531,476 418,055 108,292 361,534 33,704

242,126 16,542 221,007 146,586 1,224,427 147,770 154,795 36,721 869,507 342,659 47,917 52,247 553,045 292,193 143,457 128,525 210,066 220,929 64,863 230,068 294,903 456,137 196,760 148,116 285,745 44,327 80,290 88,790 51,188 383,890 69,220 817,606 379,212 30,607 571,435 183,571 161,361 674,287 51,753 197,710 37,048 297,102 793,216 68,022 26,458 300,421 237,895 111,588 242,187 21,539

36,457 1,181 576,238 57,611 751,419 159,957 41,718 39,118 1,585,704 425,510 16,956 75,795 63,011 38,656 —11,754 —19,541 59,604 —69,373 41,808 118,724 -73,741 —42,183 54,032 75 69,669 21,074 —4,007 337,043 51,968 95,293 37,501 —334,093 390,672 —14,881 —102,008 21,128 150,084 74,458 14,001 151,485 3,222 159,680 881,883 16,173 7,889 243,498 215,216 14,209 60,701 4,035

—21,538 14,985,802

-3.8 53

42,502 21,329,804

30,109 12,667,943

-53,550 Su

deaths

Major cities (2006): New York 8,214,426; Los Angeles 3,849,378; Chicago 2,833,321; Houston 2,144,491; Phoenix 1,512,986; Philadelphia 1,448,394; San Antonio 1,296,682; San Diego 1,256,951; Dallas 1,232,940; San Jose 929,936. Other principal cities (2006) population

population

Akron Albuquerque Anaheim

209,704 504,949 334,425

Garland (Tex.) Glendale (Ariz.) Glendale (Calif.)

Anchorage

278,700

Greensboro

Arlington (Tex.) Atlanta

367,197 486,411

Henderson (Nev) Hialeah (Fla.)

Aurora (Col.) Austin Bakersfield

303,582 709,893 308,392

Baltimore Baton Rouge

631,366 229,553

Birmingham Boston Buffalo

229,424 590,763 276,059

Chandler (Ariz.) Charlotte

240,595 630,478

Chesapeake (Va.) 220,560 Chula Vista Cincinnati Cleveland Colorado Springs Columbus Corpus Christi Denver Detroit El Paso Fort Wayne Fort Worth Fremont (Calif.) Fresno

212,756 332,252 444,313 372,437 733,203 285,267 566,974 871,121 609,415 248,637 653,320 201,691 466,714

Honolulu Indianapolis Jacksonville

Jersey City Kansas City (Mo. Laredo Las Vegas Lexington-

Fayette (Ky.) Lincoln

Long Beach Louisville— Jefferson county Lubbock Madison Memphis Mesa (Ariz.) Miami Milwaukee Minneapolis Modesto Montgomery NashvilleDavidson

population

217,963 246,531 199,463

New Orleans Newark Norfolk

223,388 281,402 229,112

236,865

Oakland

397,067

— 240,614 217,141

Oklahoma City Omaha

537,734 419,545

377,357 785,597 794,555

Orlando Pittsburgh Plano (Tex.)

220,186 312,819 255,009

241,789 447,306

Portland (Ore.) Raleigh

537,081 356,321

215,484 552,539

Reno Riverside Rochester

210,255 293,761 208,123

270,789

Sacramento

453,781

241,167

St. Louis

353,837

472,494

St. Paul

273,535

554,496 212,169 223,389 670,902 447,541 404,048 573,358 372,833 205,721 201,998 552,120

St. Petersburg San Francisco Santa Ana Scottsdale Seattle Stockton Tampa Toledo Tucson Tulsa Virginia Beach Washington, D.C. Wichita

248,098 744,041 340,024 231,127 582,454 290,141 332,888 298,446 518,956 382,872 435,619 581,530 357,698

Immigration (2005): permanent immigrants admitted 1,122,400, from Mexico 14.4%, India 7.6%, Africa 7.6%, China 6.2%, the Philippines 5.4%, Cuba 3.2%, Vietnam 2.9%, Dominican Republic 2.5%, South Korea 2.4%, Ukraine 2.0%, El Salvador 1.9%, Jamaica 1.6%, Poland 1.4%, Haiti 1.3%, Bosnia and

Herzegovina 1.3%, other 38.3%. Refugees (2005) 380,000. Asylum seekers (end of 2000) 386,330.

Vital statistics Birth rate per 1,000 population (2006): 14.3 (world avg. 20.3); within marriage 64.2%; outside of marriage 35.8%. Death rate per 1,000 population (2006): 8.1 (world avg. 8.6). Natural increase rate per 1,000 population (2006): 6.2 (world avg. 11.7). Marriage rate per 1,000 population (2006): 7.3; median age at first marriage (2005): men 27.1 years, women 25.8 years.

726

Britannica World Data

Divorce rate per 1,000 population (2006): 3.6.

Vital statistics (2004) (continued)

Marriages and divorces (2004) marriages States

total ('000)

rate

total (000)

9.4 8.5 6.6 13.4 6.3 7.4 5.8 6.1 9.0 ER 22.9 10.7 6.1 7.8 6.9 7.0 8.8 8.1 8.5 6.9 6.5 6.1 6.0 6.1 7.1 7.5 7.1 62.5 8.0 5.8 74 6.8 7.3 7.0 6.6 65 8.1 5.9 7.6 8.2 8.4 11.4 7.9 9.8 94 8.3 65 7.5 6.2 9.4

22.4 2.8 24.4 16.9 se 20.2 10.9 34 82.7 ey ius 6.9 33.1 vem 83 9.1 20.3 vet 5.7 17.8 14.1 34.7 14.2 13.1 21.7 3.5 6.0 148 5.1 26.0 8.8 57.8 35.9 2.0 40.8 174 148 36.7 3.3 13.4 2.4 28.9 81.3 9.8 24 29.4 26.7 9.1 16.8 27

25

1.0

1.0

1.9

2,279.0

7.8

o

ar

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana lowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming District District of Columbia

42.5 5.6 37.9 36.8 227.5 33.8 20.2 5.1 156.4 68.9 28.8 15.0 77.8 48.4 20.5 19.1 36.4 36.3 11.2 38.3 41.5 61.9 30.4 17.7 40.8 6.9 12.5 145.8 10.4 50.7 14.1 130.8 62.2 44 75.3 228 29.0 73.6 8.2 34.5 6.5 67.1 178.5 23.8 58 62.0 40.2 13.6 34.1 47

TOTAURATE

birth rate

divorces rate

States

5.0 4.3 43 6.1 ane 4.4 3.1 3.7 48 ku xus 5.0 2.6 $us 2.8 3.3 49 P 4.3 3.2 22 3.4 2.8 45 3.8 3.8 3.4 6.4 3.9 3.0 4.6 3.0 42 3.1 3.6 4.9 4.1 3.0 3.0 3.2 3.1 49 3.6 4.1 3.9 3.9 43 5.0 3.1 5.3

Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming District District of Columbia TOTALRATE

States Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana lowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas

death rate

live

per 1,000

per 1,000

births

population

population

13.1 15.8 16.3 14.0 15.2 14.9 12.0 13.6 12.5 15.7 14.5 16.2 14.2 13.9 13.0 14.5 13.1 14.5 10.6 13.4 12.2 12.8 13.8 14.7 13.5 12.4 154 154 11.2 13.2 14.9 13.0 14.0 12.9 13.0 14.6 12.7 TAL. 11.8 13.5 14.7 13.5 17.1

10.2 46 75 10.0 mes 6.1 8.4 8.6 9.7 7.4 74 7.2 8.7 9.1 8.7 9.3 9.4 9.4 7.8 8.5 8.4 7.3 9.6 9.4 8.7 8.4 7.6 7.8 uas 75 7.9 8.5 8.8 9.3 9.8 8.4 10.3 9.0 8.9 8.9 9.5 6.8

59,549 10,338 93,672 38,602 545,071 68,520 42,099 11,299 218,034 138,851 18,280 22,527 180,934 86,733 38,439 39,581 54,451 65,399 13,945 74,605 78,566 129,768 70,615 42,810 77,780 11,525 26,331 35,188 14,566 114,916 28,386 250,894 119,851 8,189 149,154 51,283 45,693 145,768 12,778 56,592 11,340 79,641 384,389

© 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

abortion rate per

1,000

1,000

208 — 122 142 — 113 321 405 428 256 224 40 260 129 166 299 65 161 171 185 313 225 209 87 109 203 149 306 — 286 183 509 249 157 241 129 291 249 430 122 77 230 215

1,000

per 1,000

per 1,000

population

population

50,669 6,565 103,915 81,740 20,855 70,154 6,807

21.2 10.6 13.9 13.2 11.5 12.7 13.4

5.6 8.0 7.6 7:2 11.4 8.3 7.8

44 6.1 7.2 5.0 8.2 6.6 5.8

72 256 251 318 99 153 "T

78.7 78.2 76.9 78.2 75.0 78.1 77.

7,932

14.3 14.0

9.8 82

10.2 6.4

735 246

72.6 77.0

4,115,589

life

live births? live births? expectancy?

atherosclerosis 4.0; malignant neoplasms (cancers) 188.6; diseases of the respiratory system 82.1, of which pneumonia 20.6; accidents and adverse effects 38.8, of which motor-vehicle accidents 16.2; diabetes mellitus 26.2; kidney disease 14.7; suicide 10.7; chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 9.2; AIDS (2004) 4.4.

Adult population (ages 15-49) living with HIV (2005): 0.6% (world avg. 1.0%). Death rates by major causes (2003)

hues

(per 100,000 population)

States

life

live births? live births? expectancy? 9.1 52 6.9 75 54 65 5.4 7.6 7.2 7.8 6.9 6.7 74 7.7 5,2 6.9 6.5 9.7 68 7.9 54 7.9 5.2 11.0 7.4 6.3 5.7 58 52 54 6.2 6.0 8.6 6.3 8.2 8.1 5.8 7.2 5.9 8.9 65 9.0 6.4

1,000

live

births

287.8, of which ischemic heart disease 149.8, cerebrovascular diseases 48.4,

Vital statistics (2004) birth rate

abortion rate per

Major causes of death per 100,000 population (2005): cardiovascular diseases

Total fertility rate (avg. births per childbearing woman; 2006): 2.09. Life expectancy at birth (2004): male 75.2 years, of which white male 75.7 years, black male 69.8 years; female 80.4 years, of which white female 80.8 years, black female 76.5 years. infant mortality rate per

death rate

infant mortality rate per

74.6 76.7 775 75.1 78.3 78.4 78.4 76.6 775 75.3 79.8 78.0 76.7 76.2 78.5 77.5 75.3 74.4 776 76.3 78.4 76.5 79.1 73.7 76.2 77.3 78.3 75.9 78.5 775 77.3 77.9 75.8 78.7 76.4 75.3 77.9 76.8 78.2 74.9 78.0 75.0 76.7

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana lowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming District District of Columbia U.S. RATE

totaldeath rate per 100,000

diseases of the heart

cerebrovascular diseases

1,038.0 490.1 777.5 1,024.2 674.6 648.4 850.5 864.8 991.0 765.5 713.9 759.7 832.4 903.3 953.2 903.0 977.2 950.1 960.4 807.8 875.0 860.4 743.6 988.8 974.4 922.7 889.2 796.8 753.9 853.0 789.8 812.3 873.8 960.8 954.1 1,017.2 868.4 1,049.4 932.8 919.0 933.1 981.1 700.2 570.4 827.0 789.1 748.9 1,176.9 843.8 832.3

292.2 96.5 195.1 285.6 194.1 142.8 240.8 248.0 282.9 197.9 195.7 187.8 235.6 249.6 266.3 238.3 274.9 256.7 237.9 220.8 227.5 258.0 161.0 301.4 287.7 216.2 227.3 205.2 211.6 255.2 181.5 288.0 222.1 257.5 268.2 315.0 198.0 307.9 279.8 229.3 254.2 2725 188.9 128.3 217.9 199.8 182.4 341.7 228.0 194.5

67.3 28.5 43.5 77.3 4