title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2022, there have been continued reports of Biletsky interacting with the regiment, including his own claims that he is in daily contact with the current leader of Lt. Col Prokopenko and other Azov soldiers during the Siege of Mariupol. According to commentary by far right watcher Vyacheslav Likhachev, Biletsky's main goal is to exploit the Azov "trademark" in political life, and that although it is no secret that he was in touch with the regiment, his role is limited to an informal one.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In spring of 2015, veterans of the Azov volunteer battalion created the core of a non-military non-governmental organization Azov Civil Corps (), for the purpose of "political and social struggle".


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2016, veterans of the regiment and members of the Azov Civil Corps founded the political party National Corps. The party advocates for a stronger government control over politics and economy, completely breaking ties with Russia and opposes Ukraine joining both the European Union and NATO. The party's first leader was Andriy Biletsky. According to an expert in a 2022 article by Bayerischer Rundfunk, there is an "incompatibility resolution", which meant that active fighters could not become members of the National Corps.


title: Azov Regiment

text: During the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, the party formed a far-right political coalition alongside the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh, the Right Sector, and Svoboda parties. This coalition won a combined 2.15% of the nationwide electoral list vote but ultimately failed to win any seat in the Verkhovna Rada.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The Youth Corps ("Yunatskyy Korpus") is a non-governmental organization engaged in the "patriotic upbringing" of children, and to take them once they grow up, to the National Militia of "Azov movement". Many members of the Youth Corps, beginning in 2015, organized summer camps where children and teenagers receive combat training mixed with lectures on Ukrainian nationalism.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2017, a paramilitary group called the National Militia (), closely linked to the Azov movement, was formed. Its stated aim was to assist law enforcement agencies, which is allowed under Ukrainian law, and it has conducted street patrols. In March 2019, its membership was reportedly "in the low thousands". On 29 January 2018, members of the National Militia stormed a municipal council meeting in Cherkasy, and refused to let officials leave the building until they had approved the city's long-delayed budget. In 2018, the National Militia carried out a series of attacks on Romani settlements.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The National Militia ceased its activities in 2020 and has been inactive since then. According to Michael Colborne, the National Militia has been "de facto" replaced by the Centuria group.


title: Azov Regiment

text: According to Oleksiy Kuzmenko, in a piece published for George Washington University's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian studies, the leadership of Centuria – a self-described "European traditionalist" group of military officers that aims to "defend" the "cultural and ethnic identity" of European peoples against "Brussels' politicos and bureaucrats" — has ties to the Azov movement. The organization "has promoted Azov to Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National Army Academy (NAA) cadets, and credibly claimed that its members lectured in the Azov Regiment of the National Guard, the military wing of the Azov movement." similarly states that Centuria has "close connections with the Ukrainian neo-Nazi scene" while both Belltower and Colborne say that Centuria is the successor organization to the National Militia.


title: Azov Regiment

text: "The Jerusalem Post" carried an article in October 2021 that cited Kuzmenko's report on the group, which stated that it is "led by people with ties to" the Azov movement and that its members received training from Western countries while at the NAA.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2016, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch received several credible allegations of abuse and torture by the regiment. Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) documented looting of civilian homes and unlawful detention and torture of civilians between September 2014 and February 2015 "by Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne".


title: Azov Regiment

text: Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture, writing: "A man with a mental disability was subject to cruel treatment, rape and other forms of sexual violence by 8 to 10 members of the 'Azov' and 'Donbas' (another Ukrainian battalion) battalions in August–September 2014. The victim's health subsequently deteriorated and he was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital." A report from January 2015 stated that a Donetsk Republic supporter was detained and tortured with electricity and waterboarding and struck repeatedly on his genitals, which resulted in his confessing to spying for pro-Russian militants.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia, with connections to neo-Nazism and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The group's insignia features the "Wolfsangel" (or a mirrored variation of it), a German heraldic charge inspired by historic wolf traps adopted by the Nazi Party and by WW2 German military units. Its insignia also used to feature the Black Sun, both of which remain two popular neo-Nazi symbols. Azov soldiers have worn fascist or Nazi-associated symbols on their uniforms, including swastikas and SS symbols. In 2014, the German ZDF television network showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps". In 2015, Marcin Ogdowski, a Polish war correspondent, gained access to one of Azov's bases located in the former holiday resort "Majak"; Azov fighters showed him Nazi tattoos as well as Nazi emblems on their uniforms. According to political scientist Kacper Rekawek, an intention behind the use of such symbols during the War in Donbas especially in 2014 was to "intimidate, annoy, and provoke the Russians".


title: Azov Regiment

text: Members of the unit have stated that the inverted "Wolfsangel" (ꑭ), rather than connected to Nazism, represents the Ukrainian words for "united nation" or "national idea" (, Ideya Natsii). This symbol has been historically used by far-right Ukrainian groups: it was first used in 1991 by the Social-National Party of Ukraine until 2003 when the party purged their neonazi and other extremist elements rebranded itself into Svoboda, abandoning the symbol. It was used by the Patriot of Ukraine organization (many of whose members joined Azov in 2014) from 2003 to 2014 and the related Social-National Assembly party in 2014, both movements which claimed to continue the legacy of the original Social-National Party. It was also used by the minor party Ukrainian National Union in 2009. Andreas Umland, a scholar from the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies, told Deutsche Welle that though it had far-right connotations, the "Wolfsangel" was not considered a fascist symbol by the population in Ukraine. In 2022 political scientist Ivan Gomza wrote in "Krytyka" that the symbolism of the regiment had become associated with a "successful fighting unit that protects Ukraine", and wrote that other connotations are lost on most people in Ukraine.


title: Azov Regiment

text: "The Guardian" reported in 2014 that "many of [Azov's] members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials", citing swastika tattoos among the fighters and one who claimed to be a "national socialist". In March 2015, Andriy Diachenko, a spokesman for the Azov Regiment, told "USA Today" that "only 10% to 20%" of the group's members are Nazis, and that this is their personal ideology not the official ideology of the unit; one commander attributed neo-Nazi ideology to misguided youth. According to "The Daily Beast", some of the group's members are "neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and avowed anti-Semites", and (in 2017) "numerous swastika tattoos of different members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS insignias drawn on their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the group to plausibly deny any neo-Nazi affiliations." Ukrainian affairs writer Lev Golinkin wrote in "The Nation" in 2019 that "Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world's only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces."


title: Azov Regiment

text: "Bellingcat", an investigative journalist group, has traced ties between the Azov movement and American white supremacist groups. Michael Colborne of "Bellingcat", writing in "Foreign Policy" in 2019, called the Azov movement "a dangerous neo-Nazi-friendly extremist movement" with "global ambitions", citing similarities between the group's ideology and symbolism and that of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter, along with efforts by the group to recruit American right-wing extremists. In a 2020 Atlantic Council article, Bellingcat's Oleskiy Kuzmenko wrote that the far right in general significantly damaged Ukraine's international reputation creating a vulnerability to hostile narratives that exaggerate its role.


title: Azov Regiment

text: Since 2017, the official position of the Ukrainian government is that the unit has depoliticized itself. The then Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov claimed that "The shameful information campaign about the alleged spread of Nazi ideology (among Azov members) is a deliberate attempt to discredit the 'Azov' unit and the National Guard of Ukraine." In March 2022, in an open letter to Russia published through Russian journalist Alexander Nevzorov, Azov Regiment strongly denounced allegations of its neo-Nazi orientation, defining Nazism as a "tireless need to exterminate those who dared to be free" and noting that the regiment incorporated people of many ethnicities and religions, including Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Muslims, Greeks, Georgians, Crimean Tatars and Belarusians. According to the letter, Nazism, as well Stalinism, were "despised" by the regiment, since Ukraine greatly suffered from both.


title: Azov Regiment

text: Some commentators concur that the unit has depoliticised. A 2015 Reuters report noted that after the unit's inclusion in the National Guard and receipt of heavier equipment, Andriy Biletsky toned down his usual rhetoric, while most of the extremist leadership had left to focus on political careers in the National Corps party or the Azov Civil Corps. An article published by "Foreign Affairs" in 2017 argued that the group was relatively depoliticized and deradicalized after it was brought into the fold of the National Guard of Ukraine. The government started a process with the objective of ferreting out neo-nazis and foreign fighters, with background checks, observations during training, and a law requiring all fighters to accept Ukrainian citizenship. A former USAID official commented that the real danger was not the original paramilitary group, but the civil movement Azov had spawned. In the years following its integration into the National Guard a number of experts and commentators have stated that the radical right-wing ideology associated with the battalion has become more marginal, or that it does not make sense to describe it as a "neo-Nazi" regiment.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In February 2020, the Atlantic Council published an article by Anton Shekhovtsov, a scholar of right-wing extremism in Europe and expert on Russia's connections to Europe's far-right. Shekhovtsov argued that Azov should not be designated a foreign terrorist organization, for reasons including that it was a regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, and therefore was part of official structures and followed orders given by the Interior Ministry, and that some claimed extremist links to Brenton Tarrant, the Rise Above Movement, and American right-wing terrorists in general were poorly evidenced. He also told the "Financial Times" that though it was originally formed by leadership of a neo-nazi group, "It is certain that Azov [the battalion] has depoliticised itself. Its history linked to the far-right movement is pretty irrelevant today." In a 2020 article on the Atlantic Council's website, however, Oleksiy Kuzmenko of "Bellingcat" argued that "the Regiment has failed in its alleged attempts to 'depoliticize.'" Shekhovtsov, writing in the "Euromaidan Press" in 2022 reiterated his view that the Azov Regiment had become largely depoliticized and had lost most of its neo-Nazi and far-right views, describing it as "a highly professional detachment for specific operations. Neither a political organization, nor a militia, nor a far-right battalion".


title: Azov Regiment

text: Following the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, "The Washington Post" painted a picture of a group aware of its origins, and still with a far-right adherent commander and some extremist members, but much changed from its origins. Many recruits joining the regiment are well aware of its past, and join up for various reasons, including Azov's positive reputation for training new recruits. While extremist elements remain, it is less driven by ideology than it was at its formation, and the chief motivation now is patriotism, and anger at Russian provocations and the attack on Ukraine. People come from all over the world driven by outrage against Putin, and not because of a particular ideology. Michael Colborne wrote in 2022 that he "wouldn't call [Azov] explicitly a neo-Nazi movement" although there are "clearly neo-Nazis within its ranks".


title: Azov Regiment

text: In a similar vein, Andreas Umland said in 2022, that "In 2014 this battalion had indeed a far-right background, these were far-right racists that founded the battalion" but it had since become "de-ideologised" and a regular fighting unit. Its recruits now join not because of ideology but because "it has the reputation of being a particularly tough fighting unit," Umland said. Vyacheslav Likhachev, another leading expert on the far-right, writing for a blog called "The Ukrainian View", stated in May 2022 that there are no grounds for describing Azov as a neo-Nazi unit, underlining that "by the end of 2014, most far-right fighters left the regiment. The rest of the right-wing radicals who openly articulated their views were deliberately “cleansed” by the new regiment command in 2017" and that several Jewish members (including one Israeli citizen) are currently serving in the regiment.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In an interview with "The Kyiv Independent", Ilya Samoilenko, an Azov officer, stated that while he acknowledged the regiment's 'obscure past', he and other members had chosen to leave the past behind when they integrated with the mainstream Ukrainian military. Similarly, in an interview with Israeli newspaper "Haaretz", Azov deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar denied the regiment being a neo-Nazi formation and said: "“What is Nazism? When someone thinks that one nation is superior to another nation, when someone thinks he has a right to invade another country and destroy its inhabitants... We believe in our country’s territorial integrity. We have never attacked anyone, and we have not wanted to do that."


title: Azov Regiment

text: In April 2022, Israeli historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff dismissed the claims that allegations made against the Azov regiment are part of a Russian disinformation. He explained in an interview with the "Ottawa Citizen": "It's not Russian propaganda, far from it. These people are neo-Nazis. There is an element of the ultra-right in Ukraine and it's absurd to ignore it."


title: Azov Regiment

text: In June 2022, Colborne told "Haaretz" that the battalion has gone through changes over the years. After the first few years that the battalion was founded, only a small minority had far right connections. He noted that today, these numbers are even smaller and the use of neo-Nazi symbols among its members has been reduced greatly.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In late February 2022, the Ukrainian National Guard released a video appearing to show an Azov fighter greasing bullets in pig fat to be used against the Kadyrovites, the forces of Ramzan Kadyrov (since Chechens are often Muslim and pork consumption is forbidden by Islamic law). This followed the announcement from Kadyrov of their deployment in Ukraine and displays of their combat readiness.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The founder of the battalion, Andriy Biletsky, said in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation's mission is to ""lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen"". According to the Freedom House initiative, Reporting Radicalism, said Biletsky stopped making anti-Semitic statements after February 2014. But it said "anti-Semitism is sometimes manifested at the local level" of his political party.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2016 the Vaad, a Ukrainian Jewish communal body consisting of a number of different organizations, supported the lifting of a US ban on funding the Azov regiment. Representing the Vaad, antisemitism researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev told "The Jerusalem Post", "It must be clearly understood; there is no kind of 'neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia' now. Azov is a regular military unit subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is not irregular division neither a political group. Its commanders and fighters might have personal political views as individuals, but as an armed police unit Azov is a part of the system of the Ukrainian defense forces."


title: Azov Regiment

text: Some Ukrainian Jewish people support and serve in the Azov Regiment. A 2018 BBC report gave the example of one of its most prominent members, co-founder Nathan Khazin, a leader of the "Jewish hundreds" during the 2013 Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Khazin and his supporters in the regiment often display the flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army with a Star of David added onto it. Jewish-Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoyskyi was the main source of Azov's funding before it was incorporated into the National Guard.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2022, in a commentary published by the Center of Civil Liberties, antisemitism researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev said that despite Mariupol's fairly large Jewish community, there had not been any incidents between members of the Azov Regiment and the Jewish community since 2014. Colborne's June interview with "Haaretz" included mention that the Azov Battalion and the entire Azov movement are almost completely untainted by antisemitism. He said that not only for Azov, but for all the far-right movements in Ukraine, especially since 2014, antisemitism has lost its importance.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In March 2015, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in the Operation Fearless Guardian training mission. US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as the US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the regiment due to its neo-Nazi background. However, the amendment was later removed in November 2015, with James Carden writing in "The Nation" that an "official familiar with the debate" told him that the "House Defense Appropriations Committee came under pressure from the Pentagon to remove the Conyers-Yoho amendment from the text of the bill." The decision was opposed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center which stated that lifting the ban highlighted the danger of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine, and by a Likud MP, but supported by Ukraine's Jewish community.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives again passed a provision blocking any training of Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi connections.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In October 2019, members of the US House of Representatives from the Democratic Party requested that the Azov Regiment and two other far-right groups be classified as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US State Department, citing recent acts of right-wing violence such as the Christchurch mosque shootings earlier that year. The request spurred protests by Azov's supporters in Ukraine. Ultimately the regiment was not placed into the foreign terrorist organisation list. In June 2022, U.S. Representative Jason Crow, who signed the 2019 letter, told "The Wall Street Journal" that he was "not aware of any information that currently shows a direct connection [of Azov fighters] to extremism now", also adding "I am sensitive to the fact that the past isn’t necessarily prologue here, that groups can change and evolve and that the war might have changed the organization."


title: Azov Regiment

text: In early 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US continued to officially ban arms support to Azov via the yearly Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 following the 2018 provision. However, prominent lawmakers, when pressed about monitoring this rule, stated "our main goal is to aid the Ukrainians in their defense", according to Senator Richard Blumenthal of the US Senate Armed Services Committee.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In June 2015, the Canadian defense minister declared that Canadian forces would not provide training or support to the Azov Regiment.


title: Azov Regiment

text: There is mounting evidence that Canada helped train members of Centuria (a far-right group of military officers, tied to Azov movement and regiment). This was during Operation UNIFIER, a $890 million project to train the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In 2021, a report from George Washington University discovered that extremists from this group were bragging about being trained by Canadian forces. In addition, an investigation by Ottawa Citizen discovered that Canadian officials met with leaders from Azov Battalion in 2018, and that Canadian officials did not denounce the unit's neo-Nazi beliefs. Canadian officials were more concerned that the media would expose the meeting. Canadian officers and diplomats were photographed with battalion officials which was subsequently used as propaganda by Azov. CTV News found evidence on the social media account of an Azov leader training with Canadian instructors in 2019. The Canadian military has denied any knowledge that extremists were trained by Canadian forces.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In 2018, more than 40 Israeli human rights activists signed a petition to stop arms sales to Ukraine, saying there was evidence some of these arms might end up in the hands of the forces that the activists said openly espouse a neo-Nazi ideology, such as the Azov militia. In 2022, "The Jerusalem Post" raised concerns about the MATADOR small anti-armor missile, co-produced by Israel, being shown in videos fired by a fighter from what it characterized as "the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion".


title: Azov Regiment

text: In April 2022, a controversy occurred in Greece when Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared with a soldier from the Azov Regiment via video link to address the Hellenic Parliament. This soldier had allegedly been chosen to speak on the destruction of Mariupol because of his Greek ethnicity and knowledge of the language. The appearance caused outrage by opposition parties SYRIZA and KINAL and was labelled a "provocation" because of the association of the Azov Regiment with neo-Nazism. , spokesperson of the Greek Government, said the inclusion of the Azov Regiment message was “incorrect and inappropriate”, but criticized SYRIZA for using the incident for political gain.


title: Azov Regiment

text: The regiment, along with other similar groups, have been central to Russia's narrative that there is a Nazi influence that permeates Ukraine, justifying intervention by the Russian armed forces in efforts to "denazify" it. The unit is regularly singled out by Russia as proof the Ukrainian armed forces is plagued with neo-Nazism. This narrative has been a part of Russian propaganda since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, according to Russia scholar Izabella Tabarovsky of the Wilson Center, who said "there has been an intensive campaign of demonization, a certain resonance for Putin’s core supporters in Russia" because "there is a national historical memory formed around World War II and the victory over Nazis. It is a strong part of the [Russian] national identity."


title: Azov Regiment

text: During the early days of the War in Donbas, mostly in 2015–2017, Azov was featured in various fabricated videos by Russia and Russia-linked groups. Shortly before 2016 Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum, a video appeared of fighters supposedly from Azov. In it, the fighters burned a Dutch flag and threatened terrorist strikes if the referendum failed. They said "We will find you everywhere: in the cinema, at work, in your bedroom, public transport, we have our guys in the Netherlands, ready to follow any order." The video, according to a Bellingcat investigation, was produced and distributed by the Internet Research Agency and spread virally before being posted by the group that sponsored the referendum. In another instance, CyberBerkut, which portrayed itself as disgruntled Ukrainians but was later linked to the GRU, leaked a fabricated video portraying ISIS soldiers supposedly fighting in Azov. According to the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, this was part of a broader narrative surrounding Muslim soldiers in various of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, most notably the Crimean Tatars. In another video, a follow up to the atrocity propaganda Crucified boy-series of videos, acting as "punishers", members of Azov supposedly crucify and burn a separatist. Some of these resurfaced once again after the 2022 invasion on social media.


title: Azov Regiment

text: During the War in Donbas, the unit was represented as similar in composition to the unit in the 2014–2015 timeframe, despite international observers in Donbas and other people saying otherwise. Especially in parts of central/eastern Europe, this was potentiated with manipulated imagery on social media, and the appearance of pro-Kremlin propaganda that mirrored pejorative language used in Russian media that painted Ukraine as a fascist aggressor against a Russian minority. In addition, Azov was attributed as responsible for a significant portion of the civilian deaths in Donbas.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In justifying the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the narrative oriented around Ukrainian neo-Nazism continued, and the Azov Regiment has similarly played a central role under the pretext of "denazifying" Ukraine, with Russian media claiming its overwhelming presence and influence within Ukraine to paint a picture of the whole of the Ukrainian government and military as under Nazi control. In addition, another of Russia's claimed justifications for its invasion was that members of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol were responsible for war crimes. Chief Spokesman Igor Konashenkov of Russia's Ministry of Defence claimed: "It was these Azov Battalion Nazis who had been exterminating civilian population in Donetsk and Luhansk republics, deliberately and with exceptional cruelty, for eight years."


title: Azov Regiment

text: Russian leaders have sometimes made aggressive denouncements of Ukrainian nationalism, using the presence of "crazed nationalistic battalions" using rhetorical tactics reminiscent of tsarist or soviet era when Ukrainian identity was often depressed. For example, former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said "to dehumanise and denigrate Russia, “the crazed beasts of the nationalist and territorial defense battalions are ready to kill Ukrainian civilians”; all because “the very essence of Ukrainianness, fed by anti-Russian venom and lies about its identity, is one big sham”. Ukrainian identity does not exist and never has".


title: Azov Regiment

text: Azov has also featured in Chinese social media and news outlets in a similar fashion to Russian media. Azov's connections to neo-Nazism are often depicted as indicative of the views of Ukrainian society more widely despite Azov being a fringe group. After the war started, Chinese media attempted to link imagery of some Azov veterans in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests as proof the US was funding members of Azov to attend rallies and sow discord. According to radicalism researcher Vyacheslav Likhachev, these were people who participated as part of the group "Honor", which he no longer considers far right.


title: Azov Regiment

text: During the Siege of Mariupol, Russia was accused of using the presence of Azov in the battle as justification for war crimes. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov justified the Mariupol hospital airstrike claiming the Azov was using the hospital as a base and had previously evicted the patients and staff. On 16 March, the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre, which was sheltering almost 1,300 civilians, was struck and largely destroyed by an airstrike. Russia denied the bombings and claimed that the Azov Regiment took civilians as hostages inside the building and bombed the theater themselves to frame Russia. This was sharply disputed by Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of Donetsk region administration, who asserted that "the Russians are already lying, [saying] that the headquarters of the Azov Regiment was there. But they themselves are well aware that there were only civilians." Due to the increased prevalence of factchecking websites, Russia, in counter-disinformation, utilized fake fact checking websites to counter common narratives in the west. For example, in the case of the Mariupol theater bombing, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs started linking to a site that declared the images, videos and foreign news reports that attributed it to a Russian airstrike as fake, and instead, the site was used to add credence to the narrative Azov had mined the building.


title: Azov Regiment

text: After the discovery of the Bucha massacre following the end of the Battle of Kyiv, Russia and Russian media offered multiple contradictory explanations, in an approach disinformation experts called a “scattershot approach”. In one of these narratives, Russian media claimed people associated with Azov and/or Azov fighters killed anyone not wearing a pro-Ukrainian blue ribbon after Russian troops left. International media have disproved this timeline using other evidence. The Azov-Kyiv territorial defense unit had been in the Kyiv area, according to Maksym Zhorin.


title: Azov Regiment

text: In a post on 20 April 2022, Russian journalist wrote on his Telegram page, "Комиссар Исчезает" ("The Commissar Vanishes"), that following the Russian occupation of Mariupol, Azov leaders such as Prokopenko should be publicly executed and their bodies left to hang "as a reminder of who was in charge."


title: Azov Regiment

text: The Russian Supreme Court scheduled a hearing for 29 June 2022, on whether or not to classify the Azov regiment a terrorist organization, which was subsequently rescheduled to 2 August 2022. On 2 August, the Supreme Court declared the regiment as a terrorist organization. This allows for harsher penalties to be imposed on members of the Azov Regiment. Members face up to 10 years in jail while leaders face up to 20 years.


title: Male

text: Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.


title: Male

text: A male organism cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, but some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Most male mammals, including male humans, have a Y chromosome, which codes for the production of larger amounts of testosterone to develop male reproductive organs. Not all species share a common sex-determination system. In most animals, including humans, sex is determined genetically; however, species such as "Cymothoa exigua" change sex depending on the number of females present in the vicinity.


title: Male

text: In humans, the word "male" can also be used to refer to gender in the social sense of gender role or gender identity.


title: Male

text: The existence of separate sexes has evolved independently at different times and in different lineages, an example of convergent evolution. The repeated pattern is sexual reproduction in isogamous species with two or more mating types with gametes of identical form and behavior (but different at the molecular level) to anisogamous species with gametes of male and female types to oogamous species in which the female gamete is very much larger than the male and has no ability to move. There is a good argument that this pattern was driven by the physical constraints on the mechanisms by which two gametes get together as required for sexual reproduction.


title: Male

text: Accordingly, sex is defined across species by the type of gametes produced (i.e.: spermatozoa vs. ova) and differences between males and females in one lineage are not always predictive of differences in another.


title: Male

text: Male/female dimorphism between organisms or reproductive organs of different sexes is not limited to animals; male gametes are produced by chytrids, diatoms and land plants, among others. In land plants, "female" and "male" designate not only the female and male gamete-producing organisms and structures but also the structures of the sporophytes that give rise to male and female plants.


title: Male

text: The evolution of anisogamy led to the evolution of male and female function. Before the evolution of anisogamy, mating types in a species were isogamous: the same size and both could move, catalogued only as "+" or "-" types. In anisogamy, the mating type is called a gamete. The male gamete is smaller than the female gamete, and usually mobile. Anisogamy remains poorly understood, as there is no fossil record of its emergence. Numerous theories exist as to why anisogamy emerged. Many share a common thread, in that larger female gametes are more likely to survive, and that smaller male gametes are more likely to find other gametes because they can travel faster. Current models often fail to account for why isogamy remains in a few species. Anisogamy appears to have evolved multiple times from isogamy; for example female Volvocales (a type of green algae) evolved from the plus mating type. Although sexual evolution emerged at least 1.2 billion years ago, the lack of anisogamous fossil records make it hard to pinpoint when males evolved. One theory suggests male evolved from the dominant mating type (called mating type minus).


title: Male

text: A common symbol used to represent the male sex is the Mars symbol ♂, a circle with an arrow pointing northeast. The Unicode code-point is:


title: Male

text: The symbol is identical to the planetary symbol of Mars. It was first used to denote sex by Carl Linnaeus in 1751. The symbol is sometimes seen as a stylized representation of the shield and spear of the Roman god Mars. According to Stearn, however, this derivation is "fanciful" and all the historical evidence favours "the conclusion of the French classical scholar Claude de Saumaise (Salmasius, 15881683)" that it is derived from "θρ", the contraction of a Greek name for the planet Mars, which is "Thouros".


title: Male

text: In addition to its meaning in the context of biology, "male" can also refer to gender or a shape of connectors.


title: Male

text: Species that are divided into females and males are classified as gonochoric in animals, as dioecious in seed plants and as dioicous in cryptogams.


title: Male

text: Males can coexist with hermaphrodites, a sexual system called androdioecy. They can also coexist with females and hermaphrodites, a sexual system called trioecy.


title: Male

text: The sex of a particular organism may be determined by a number of factors. These may be genetic or environmental, or may naturally change during the course of an organism's life. Although most species have only two sexes (either male or female), hermaphroditic animals, such as worms, have both male and female reproductive organs.


title: Male

text: Most mammals, including humans, are genetically determined as such by the XY sex-determination system where males have an XY (as opposed to XX) sex chromosome. It is also possible in a variety of species, including humans, to be XX male or have other karyotypes. During reproduction, a male can give either an X sperm or a Y sperm, while a female can only give an X egg. A Y sperm and an X egg produce a male, while an X sperm and an X egg produce a female.


title: Male

text: The part of the Y-chromosome which is responsible for maleness is the sex-determining region of the Y-chromosome, the SRY. The SRY activates Sox9, which forms feedforward loops with FGF9 and PGD2 in the gonads, allowing the levels of these genes to stay high enough in order to cause male development; for example, Fgf9 is responsible for development of the spermatic cords and the multiplication of Sertoli cells, both of which are crucial to male sexual development.


title: Male

text: The ZW sex-determination system, where males have a ZZ (as opposed to ZW) sex chromosome may be found in birds and some insects (mostly butterflies and moths) and other organisms. Members of the insect order Hymenoptera, such as ants and bees, are often determined by haplodiploidy, where most males are haploid and females and some sterile males are diploid. However, fertile diploid males may still appear in some species such as "Cataglyphis cursor".


title: Male

text: In some species of reptiles, such as alligators, sex is determined by the temperature at which the egg is incubated. Other species, such as some snails, practice sex change: adults start out male, then become female. In tropical clown fish, the dominant individual in a group becomes female while the other ones are male.


title: Male

text: In many arthropods, sex is determined by infection with parasitic, endosymbiotic bacteria of the genus "Wolbachia". The bacterium can only be transmitted via infected ova, and the presence of the obligate endoparasite may be required for female sexual viability.


title: Male

text: Male animals evolved to utilize secondary sex characteristics as a method of displaying traits which display fitness, which is believed to be the product of sexual selection. Differences in physical size and fulfilling the needs of sexual selection have contributed significantly to the outcome of secondary sex characteristics of each species.


title: Male

text: In those species with two sexes, males may differ from females in ways other than the production of spermatozoa.


title: Male

text: In seed plants, which exhibit alternation of generations, the female and male parts are both included within the sporophyte sex organ of a single organism.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: Jupiter's Legacy is an American superhero television series that premiered on Netflix on May 7, 2021, based on the comic book series of the same name by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely, and published by Image Comics. Produced by Millarworld, Di Bonaventura Pictures, and DeKnight Productions, the show was developed for television by Steven S. DeKnight who initially served as showrunner, but was replaced by Sang Kyu Kim midway through production. It stars Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels, Leslie Bibb, Andrew Horton, Elena Kampouris, Mike Wade and Matt Lanter. The series received mixed reviews, and was canceled after one season, with a spin-off continuation, a live-action adaptation of "Supercrooks", ordered to series. "Super Crooks", an anime adaptation of "Supercrooks" set in the same fictional universe as "Jupiter's Legacy", preceding the additional live-action series, was released to Netflix in November 2021.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: Shortly after his father's suicide in 1929, triggered by Black Thursday, former businessman Sheldon Sampson travels to an uncharted island in the Atlantic Ocean, where he, his brother, Walter and four others received superpowers. He then creates a superhero team called the Union of Justice and his guiding ideals - never kill anyone, never interfere in political matters - remain unchanged over the near-century of his adventures as the Utopian.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: However, the next generation of superheroes, including his children, struggles to live up to his rigid ideals and high expectations. When Sheldon's son, Brandon seemingly kills one of their greatest foes, it ignites a public debate over whether those ideals are still relevant.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: On July 17, 2018, it was announced that Netflix had given the production a series order for an eight-episode first season. The series was developed by Steven S. DeKnight, who is credited as an executive producer alongside Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Dan McDermott. On September 16, 2019, it was confirmed that DeKnight departed the series as showrunner over creative differences in the midst of the production for the first season. In November 2019, it was announced that Sang Kyu Kim was taking over as showrunner, following DeKnight's exit from the series. On June 2, 2021, it was reported that series will not be an ongoing series as the cast has been released. Mark Millar, who is credited as an executive producer, also stated that he's confident they will "return to it later". Budget conflicts and replacing Knight as showrunner with Kim halfway through production were some factors in the series' decision to forgo a second season.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: In February 2019, it was announced that Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels, Leslie Bibb, Elena Kampouris, Andrew Horton, Mike Wade and Matt Lanter would star in the series. In April 2019, it was reported that Tenika Davis had been cast in a recurring role. In August 2019, it was reported that Chase Tang had been cast as a supervillain. In September 2020, Anna Akana was cast in a recurring role.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: Principal photography for the first season was scheduled to initially commence in May 2019. Filming for the first season commenced in Toronto on July 2, 2019 and ended on January 24, 2020. Additional reshoots occurred in January 2021.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: On February 24, 2021, a teaser trailer for the series was released. On April 7, 2021, Netflix released the official trailer for the series. The official trailer for the series features "Play God" by British artist Sam Fender. The series premiered on May 7, 2021.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes assessed 52 reviews and determined 38% of them to be positive, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Despite some truly epic fights, "Jupiter's Legacy" is simply too overstuffed and slow-moving to land many narrative punches." According to review aggregator Metacritic, the series received "mixed or average reviews", based on a weighted average score of 45 out of 100 from 15 critic reviews.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: David Griffin of IGN described "Jupiter's Legacy" as good, rating it a 7 out of 10, and writing that it "delivers plenty of exciting superhero action, compelling stories, and memorable characters."


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: "Jupiter's Legacy" was the most-watched show on any streaming service during the week of May 3–9, 2021, garnering 696 million minutes of viewing for the whole season per Nielsen Corporation. The runner-up was "The Handmaid's Tale" with 690 million minutes of viewing. The show however ranked below the premiere of Netflix's last major series "Shadow and Bone", which garnered 721 million minutes of viewership during the weekend it was released.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: "Jupiter's Legacy" also topped the week of May 10–16, 2021, with 1.019 billion minutes viewed. It was followed by "StartUp", which garnered 760 million minutes of viewing. The series suffered a decline of 60% for the week of May 17–23, with 405 million minutes being viewed. It was the third most-streamed original series and occupied the tenth spot overall in streaming rankings, including both films and TV shows.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: In the week from May 24–30, the series ranked seventh overall in streaming rankings for shows with 214 million minutes viewed.


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: In March 2019, Netflix announced that a "Supercrooks" anime adaptation was in production with Studio Bones in March 2019, and the series was ready for its world premiere at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2021. At its premiere, director Motonobu Hori revealed that the series would be set in the same fictional universe as the live-action series "Jupiter's Legacy".


title: Jupiter's Legacy (TV series)

text: In June 2021, simultaneously with the series' cancellation, a spin-off continuation of "Jupiter's Legacy", a live-action "Super Crooks" adaptation separate from the anime series of the same name, was ordered to series for a 2021–2022 release.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple, also called Somanātha temple or Deo Patan, is a Hindu temple located in Prabhas Patan, Veraval in Gujarat, India. It is one of the most sacred pilgrimage sites for Hindus and is believed to be first among the twelve "jyotirlinga" shrines of Shiva. The temple was reconstructed several times in the past after repeated destruction by multiple Muslim invaders and rulers, notably starting from an attack by Mahmud Ghazni in the 11th century. It is unclear when the first version of the Somnath temple was built with estimates varying between the early centuries of the 1st-millennium to about the 9th-century CE.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple was actively studied by colonial era historians and archaeologists in the 19th- and early 20th-century, when its ruins illustrated a historic Hindu temple in the process of being converted into an Islamic mosque. After India's independence, those ruins were demolished and the present Somnath temple was reconstructed in the Māru-Gurjara style of Hindu temple architecture. The contemporary Somnath temple's reconstruction was started under the orders of the first Home Minister of India Vallabhbhai Patel and completed in May 1951 after his death.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple is located along the coastline in Prabhas Patan near Veraval, Saurashtra region of Gujarat. It is about southwest of Ahmedabad, south of Junagadh – another major archaeological and pilgrimage site in Gujarat. It is about southeast of the Veraval railway junction, about southeast of the Porbandar airport and about west of the Diu airport.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple is located close to the ancient trading port of Veraval, one of three in Gujarat from where Indian merchants departed to trade goods. The 11th-century Persian historian Al-Biruni states that Somnath has become so famous because "it was the harbor for seafaring people, and a station for those who went to and fro between Sufala in the country of Zanj (east Africa) and China". Combined with its repute as an eminent pilgrimage site, its location was well known to the kingdoms within the Indian subcontinent. Literature and epigraphical evidence suggests that the medieval era Veraval-Patan area port was also actively trading with the Middle East and Southeast Asia. This brought wealth and fame to the Veraval area as well as the temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: The site of Prabhas Patan was occupied during the Indus Valley Civilisation, 2000–1200 BCE. It was one of very few sites in the Junagadh district to be so occupied. After abandonment in 1200 BCE, it was reoccupied in 400 BCE and continued into the historical period. Prabhas is also close to the other sites similarly occupied: Junagadh, Dwarka, Padri and Bharuch.


title: Somnath temple

text: Somnath means "Lord of the Soma" or "moon". The site is also called "Prabhasa" ("place of splendor"). Somnath temple has been a "jyotirlinga" site for the Hindus, and a holy place of pilgrimage ("tirtha" ). It is one of five most revered sites on the seacoast of India, along with the nearby Dvaraka in Gujarat, Puri in Odisha, Rameshvaram and Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu.


title: Somnath temple

text: Many Hindu texts provide a list of the most sacred Shiva pilgrimage sites, along with a guide for visiting and the mythology behind each site. The best known were the "Mahatmya" genre of texts. Of these, Somnatha temple tops the list of "jyotirlingas" in the "Jnanasamhita" – chapter 13 of the "Shiva Purana", and the oldest known text with a list of "jyotirlingas". Other texts include the "Varanasi Mahatmya" (found in "Skanda Purana"), the "Shatarudra Samhita" and the "Kothirudra Samhita". All either directly mention the Somnath temple as the number one of twelve sites, or call the top temple as "Somesvara" in Saurashtra – a synonymous term for this site in these texts. The exact date of these texts is unknown, but based on references they make to other texts and ancient poets or scholars, these have been generally dated between the 10th- and 12th-century, with some dating it much earlier and others a bit later.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple is not mentioned in ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism, but the "Prabhasa-Pattana" is mentioned as a "tirtha" (pilgrimage site). For example, the "Mahabharata" (c. 400 CE) in Chapters 109, 118 and 119 of the Book Three ("Vana Parva"), and Sections 10.45 and 10.78 of the "Bhagavata Purana" state Prabhasa to be a "tirtha" on the coastline of Saurashtra.


title: Somnath temple

text: According to the historian Romila Thapar, Somnath may have been linked to this Prabhasa Pattana through mythology in some later century. She proposes that this was done by inventing a "Triveni Sangam" where rivers Kapila and Hiran met mythical Sarasvati river. Here, Soma – the Moon god (Chandra deva) – after losing his lustre, bathed in the Sarasvati River and thus regained his "prabhasa" (brilliance). The town was therefore named "Prabhasa", meaning lustre. The alternative names "Someshvar" and "Somnath" ("the lord of the moon" or "the moon god") arise from this tradition.


title: Somnath temple

text: Alf Hiltebeitel – a Sanskrit scholar known for his translations and studies on Indic texts including the "Mahabharata", in contrast to Thapar, states that the appropriate context for the legends and mythologies in the "Mahabharata" are the Vedic mythologies which it borrowed, integrated and re-adapted for its times and its audience. The "Brahmana" layer of the Vedic literature already mention "tirtha" related to the Saraswati river. However, given the river was nowhere to be seen when the "Mahabharata" was compiled and finalized, the Saraswati legend was modified. It vanishes into an underground river, then emerges as an underground river at holy sites for "sangam" (confluence) already popular with the Hindus. The "Mahabharata" then integrates the Saraswati legend of the Vedic lore with the Prabhasa "tirtha", states Hiltebeitel. The critical editions of the "Mahabharata", in several chapters and books mentions that this "Prabhasa" is at a coastline near Dvaraka. It is described as a sacred site where Arjuna and Balarama go on "tirtha", a site where Lord Krishna chooses to go and spends his final days, then dies.


title: Somnath temple

text: Catherine Ludvik – a Religious Studies and Sanskrit scholar, concurs with Hiltebeitel. She states that the "Mahabharata" mythologies borrow from the Vedic texts but modify them from Brahmin-centered "sacrificial rituals" to "tirtha rituals" that are available to everyone – the intended audience of the great epic. More specifically, she states that the sacrificial sessions along the Saraswati river found in sections such as of "Pancavimsa Brahmana" were modified to "tirtha" sites in the context of the Saraswati river in sections of "Vana Parva" and "Shalya Parva". Thus the mythology of "Prabhasa" in the "Mahabharata", which it states to be "by the sea, near Dwaraka". This signifies an expanded context of pilgrimage as a "Vedic ritual equivalent", integrating "Prabhasa" that must have been already important as a "tirtha" site when the "Vana Parva" and "Shalya Parva" compilation was complete.


title: Somnath temple

text: The 5th-century poem "Raghuvamsa" of Kalidasa mentions some of revered Shiva pilgrimage sites of his times. It includes Banaras (Varanasi), Mahakala-Ujjain, Tryambaka, Prayaga, Pushkara, Gokarna and Somnatha-Prabhasa. This list of Kalidasa gives a "clear indication of tirthas celebrated in his day", states Diana Eck – an Indologist known for her publications on historic Indian pilgrimage sites.


title: Somnath temple

text: The site of Somnath has been a pilgrimage site from ancient times on account of being a "Triveni Sangam" (the confluence of three rivers: Kapila, Hiran and Saraswati). Soma, the Moon god, is believed to have lost his lustre due to a curse, and he bathed in the Sarasvati River at this site to regain it. The result is said to be the waxing and waning of the moon. The name of the town, "Prabhas", meaning lustre, as well as the alternative names "Someshvar" and "Somnath" ("the lord of the moon" or "the moon god"), arise from this tradition.


title: Somnath temple

text: The name "Someshvara" begins to appear starting in the 9th century. The Gurjara-Pratihara king Nagabhata II () recorded that he has visited "tirthas" in Saurashtra, including "Someshvara". Romila Thapar states that this does not imply the existence of a temple, but rather that it was a pilgrimage site ("tirtha"). The Chaulukya (Solanki) king Mularaja possibly built the first temple for "Soma" at the site sometime before 997 CE, even though some historians believe that he may have renovated a smaller earlier temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: The post-1950 excavations of the Somnath site have unearthed the earliest known version of the Somnath temple. The excavations showed the foundations of a 10th-century temple, notable broken parts and details of a major, well decorated version of a temple. Madhusudan Dhaky believes it to have been the one that was destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni.


title: Somnath temple

text: B.K. Thapar, the archaeologist who did the excavation, stated that there was definitely a temple structure at Somnath-Patan in the 9th-century, but none before.


title: Somnath temple

text: In 1026, during the reign of Bhima I, the Turkic Muslim ruler Mahmud of Ghazni raided and plundered the Somnath temple, broke its "jyotirlinga". He took away a booty of 20 million dinars. According to Romila Thapar, relying on a 1038 inscription of a Kadamba king of Goa, the condition of Somnath temple in 1026 after Ghazni's is unclear because the inscription is "puzzlingly silent" about Ghazni's raid or temple's condition. This inscription, states Thapar, could suggest that instead of destruction it may have been a desecration because the temple seems to have been repaired quickly within twelve years and was an active pilgrimage site by 1038.


title: Somnath temple

text: The raid of 1026 by the Turkic Muslim ruler Mahmud of Ghazni is confirmed by the 11th-century Persian historian Al-Biruni, who worked in the court of Mahmud, who accompanied Mahmud's troops between 1017 and 1030 CE on some occasions, and who lived in the northwest Indian subcontinent region – over regular intervals, though not continuously. The invasion of Somnath site in 1026 CE is also confirmed by other Islamic historians such as Gardizi, Ibn Zafir and Ibn al-Athir. However, two Persian sources – one by adh-Dhahabi and other by al-Yafi'i – state it as 1027 CE, which is likely incorrect and late by a year, according to Khan – a scholar known for his studies on Al-Biruni and other Persian historians. According to Al-Biruni:


title: Somnath temple

text: Al-Biruni states that Mahmud destroyed the Somnath temple. He states Mahmud's motives as, "raids undertaken with a view to plunder and to satisfy the righteous iconoclasm of a true Muslim... [he] returned to Ghazna laden with costly spoils from the Hindu temples." Al-Biruni obliquely criticizes these raids for "ruining the prosperity" of India, creating antagonism among the Hindus for "all foreigners", and triggering an exodus of scholars of Hindu sciences far away from regions "conquered by us". Mahmud launched many plunder campaigns into India, including one that included the sack of Somnath temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: According to Jamal Malik – a South Asian history and Islamic Studies scholar, "the destruction of Somnath temple, a well known place of pilgrimage in Gujarat in 1026, played a major role in creating Mahmud as an "icon of Islam", the sack of this temple became "a crucial topic in Persian stories of Islamic iconoclasm". Many Muslim historians and scholars in and after the 11th-century included the destruction of Somnath as a righteous exemplary deed in their publications. It inspired the Persian side with a cultural memory of Somnath's destruction through "epics of conquest", while to the Hindu side, Somnath inspired tales of recovery, rebuilding and "epics of resistance". These tales and chronicles in Persia elevated Mahmud as "the exemplary hero and Islamic warrior for the Muslims", states Malik, while in India Mahmud emerged as the exemplary "arch-enemy".


title: Somnath temple

text: Powerful legends with intricate detail developed in the Turko-Persian literature regarding Mahmud's raid, which "electrified" the Muslim world according to scholar Meenakshi Jain. According to historian Cynthia Talbot, a later tradition states that "50,000 devotees lost their lives in trying to stop Mahmud" during his sack of Somnath temple. According to Thapar, the "50000 killed" is a boastful claim that is "constantly reiterated" in Muslim texts, and becomes a "formulaic" figure of deaths to help highlight "Mahmud’s legitimacy in the eyes of established Islam".


title: Somnath temple

text: Kumarapala (r. 1143–72) rebuilt the Somnath temple in "excellent stone and studded it with jewels," according to an inscription in 1169. He replaced a decaying wooden temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: During its 1299 invasion of Gujarat, Alauddin Khalji's army, led by Ulugh Khan, defeated the Vaghela king Karna, and sacked the Somnath temple. Legends in the later texts "Kanhadade Prabandha" (15th century) and "Nainsi ri" "Khyat" (17th century) state that the Jalore ruler Kanhadadeva later recovered the Somnath idol and freed the Hindu prisoners, after an attack on the Delhi army near Jalore. However, other sources state that the idol was taken to Delhi, where it was thrown to be trampled under the feet of Muslims. These sources include the contemporary and near-contemporary texts including Amir Khusrau's "Khazainul-Futuh", Ziauddin Barani's "Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi" and Jinaprabha Suri's "Vividha-tirtha-kalpa". It is possible that the story of Kanhadadeva's rescue of the Somnath idol is a fabrication by the later writers. Alternatively, it is possible that the Khalji army was taking multiple idols to Delhi, and Kanhadadeva's army retrieved one of them.


title: Somnath temple

text: The temple was rebuilt by Mahipala I, the Chudasama king of Saurashtra in 1308 and the "lingam" was installed by his son Khengara sometime between 1331 and 1351. As late as the 14th century, Gujarati Muslim pilgrims were noted by Amir Khusrow to stop at that temple to pay their respects before departing for the Hajj pilgrimage.


title: Somnath temple

text: In 1395, the temple was destroyed for the third time by Zafar Khan, the last governor of Gujarat under the Delhi Sultanate and later founder of Gujarat Sultanate. In 1451, it was desecrated by Mahmud Begada, the Sultan of Gujarat.


title: Somnath temple

text: By 1665, the temple, one of many, was ordered to be destroyed by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. In 1702, he ordered that if Hindus revived worship there, it should be demolished completely.


title: Somnath temple

text: In 1842, Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough issued his "Proclamation of the Gates", in which he ordered the British army in Afghanistan to return via Ghazni and bring back to India the sandalwood gates from the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni in Ghazni, Afghanistan. These were believed to have been taken by Mahmud from Somnath. Under Ellenborough's instruction, General William Nott removed the gates in September 1842. A whole sepoy regiment, the 6th Jat Light Infantry, was detailed to carry the gates back to India in triumph. However, on arrival, they were found not to be of Gujarati or Indian design, and not of Sandalwood, but of Deodar wood (native to Ghazni) and therefore not authentic to Somnath. They were placed in the arsenal store-room of the Agra Fort where they still lie to the present day. There was a debate in the House of Commons in London in 1843 on the question of the gates of the temple and Ellenbourough's role in the affair. After much crossfire between the British Government and the opposition, all of the facts as we know them were laid out.


title: Somnath temple

text: In the 19th century novel "The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins, the diamond of the title is presumed to have been stolen from the temple at Somnath and, according to the historian Romila Thapar, reflects the interest aroused in Britain by the gates. Her recent work on Somnath examines the evolution of the historiographies about the legendary Gujarat temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: Before independence, Veraval was part of the Junagadh State, whose ruler had acceded to Pakistan in 1947. India contested the accession and annexed the state after holding a referendum. India's Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel came to Junagadh on 12 November 1947 to direct the stabilization of the state by the Indian Army, at which time he ordered the reconstruction of the Somnath temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: When Patel, K. M. Munshi and other leaders of the Congress went to Mahatma Gandhi with their proposal to reconstruct the Somnath temple, Gandhi blessed the move but suggested that the funds for the construction should be collected from the public, and the temple should not be funded by the state. He expressed that he was proud to associate himself to the project of renovation of the temple. However, soon both Gandhi and Sardar Patel died, and the task of reconstruction of the temple continued under Munshi, who was the Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, Government of India headed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.


title: Somnath temple

text: The ruins were pulled down in October 1950. The mosque present at that site was shifted few kilometres away by using construction vehicles. On 11 May 1951, Rajendra Prasad, the first President of the Republic of India, invited by K M Munshi, performed the installation ceremony for the temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: The floor plan and ruins of a pre-1000 CE temple were unearthed during the archaeological excavations led by B.K. Thapar. Most of the temple is lost, but the remains of the foundation, the lower structure as well as pieces of the temple ruins suggest an "exquisitely carved, rich" temple. According to Dhaky – a scholar of Indian temple architecture, this is the earliest known version of the Somnath temple. It was, what historic Sanskrit "vastu sastra" texts call the "tri-anga sandhara prasada". Its "garbhagriha" (sanctum) was connected to a "mukhamandapa" (entrance hall) and "gudhamandapa".


title: Somnath temple

text: The efforts of colonial era archaeologists, photographers and surveyors have yielded several reports on the architecture and arts seen at the Somnath temple ruins in the 19th century. The earliest survey reports of Somnath temple and the condition of the Somanatha-Patan-Veraval town in the 19th-century were published between 1830 and 1850 by British officers and scholars. Alexander Burnes surveyed the site in 1830, calling Somnath site as "far-famed temple and city". He wrote:


title: Somnath temple

text: The present temple is a Māru-Gurjara architecture (also called Chaulukya or Solanki style) temple. It has a "Kailash Mahameru Prasad" form, and reflects the skill of the Sompura Salats, one of Gujarat's master masons.


title: Somnath temple

text: The rebuilt temple as found in the ruined form in the 19th-century and the current temple used recovered parts of previous temple with significant artwork. The new temple has added and integrated the new panels with a few old ones, the color of the stone distinguishing the two. The panels and pillars with historic artwork were and are found in the south and southwest side of the Somnath temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: In general, the reliefs and sculpture is mutilated, to the point that it is difficult for most to "identify the few images that remain" on panels, states Cousens. An original Nataraja (Tandava Shiva), albeit with chopped arms and defaced, can be seen on the south side. A mutilated Nandi is to the right. To the left of this are traces of Shiva-Parvati, with the goddess seated in his lap. Towards the north-east corner, portions of panels in a band similar to "Ramayana" scenes in historic Hindu temples can be traced. Sections can be seen with "beautiful vertical mouldings, on either side of the main front doorway", states Cousens, and this suggests that the destroyed temple was "exceedingly richly carved". The temple likely had a galaxy of Vedic and Puranic deities, as one of the partially surviving relief shows Surya's iconography – two lotuses in his hand.


title: Somnath temple

text: The older temple featured an open plan, with great windows that allow light into the mandapa and circumambulation passage. The intricate and detailed artwork inside and on the pillars of Somnath temple were quite similar to those found in the Luna Vasahi temple at Mount Abu.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath-Prabhasa "tirtha" has been one of the revered "tirtha" (pilgrimage) site for the Hindus. It is the famed Prabhasa site found in Brahmi script inscriptions in Maharashtra sites. It is mentioned in the poems of Kalidasa. The new temple is the top pilgrimage site in Gujarat along with Dwarka.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple site and coastline has been excavated for archaeological evidence by Indian teams. The first major excavation was completed in 1950–51 just before the Somnath temple was reconstructed. It was led by B. K. Thapar, one of the Director General of Archaeological Survey of India, and a report published. This Thapar study yielded direct and substantial evidence of a 10th-century or earlier large temple. B. K. Thapar estimated the older temple to be from the 9th-century, while Dhaky states to more likely from the 10th-century, i.e. from 960 to 973 CE. The Thapar study also found artifacts and ruins with ancient scripts such as Brahmi and later scripts such as proto-Nagari and Nagari, thus confirming the antiquity of Somnath-Patan through at least much of the 1st-millennium.


title: Somnath temple

text: A few Somnath-Patan sites around the Somnath temple was excavated in the 1970s, led by M. K. Dhavalikar and Z. D. Ansari. They dug deeper at several locations, reported evidence of five periods of human settlement. In 1992, M. K. Dhavalikar and Gregory Possehl – an archaeologist known for his Indus Valley studies, reported their analysis of archaeological discoveries from Prabhas-Patan. According to them, the Somnath site shows evidence of ancient human settlement, from pre-2nd millennium BCE period. They date one period to "pre-Harappan phase". However, these discoveries are all ceramics, wares and jewelry (amulet), and they found no ancient "temple parts". According to Charles Herman's critical review, the evidence available so far does not allow any direct inferences about the society and culture in pre-1st millennium BCE era, but there is persuasive evidence that Prabhas-Patan was an early Harappan site with sedentary farming and cattle keeping and it is in the same league of significance as the Dholavira (Kutch) and Rojdi (Sorath-Harappan) archaeological sites. Further, the Prabhas-Patan mounds that have been excavated show evidence of continued post-Harappan settlement (c. 2000– 1800 BCE) along with several other Saurashtra sites. According to Herman, the archaeological excavations in Prabhas-Patan and Saurashtra region have been too few to make systematic conclusions.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple has inspired different narratives and legacies, for some a symbol of blessed conquest and victories, for some a symbol of fanatical intolerance and persecution. After the 1026 sack of the Somnath temple, states Mehrdad Shokoohy, the "sack of Somnath was not just yet another campaign of a medieval Sultan confined to histories, but a symbol of the revival of Iranian identity boosted by religious zeal, which was to echo in literature and folklore" for nearly one thousand years. The destruction of the Somnath temple – called "Sūmanāt" in Persian literature, and the killing of the infidels has been portrayed as a celebrated event in numerous versions of history, stories and poems found in Persia written over the centuries. The Persian literature has made mythical ahistorical connections of Somnath to Manat – the pre-Islamic Arab goddess, for example. The destruction of both has been celebrated by the Islamic scholars and elites.


title: Somnath temple

text: On the Indian side, the Somnath temple has been more than another house of worship. For Hindus, particularly Hindu nationalists, it is a question of their heritage, their sense of sacred time and space, states Peter van der Veer. Its history raises questions of tolerance and spiritual values to expect, and of a symbol of fanaticism and foreign oppression. The Somnath temple has been leveraged to revisit India's history and agitate over its sacred spaces including contested sites such as Ayodhya. Mahmud and Aurangzeb along with the ideology that inspired them are remembered as enemies of the ancient Hindu nation. They are asserted as two historical facts, the former as the first and the latter as the last systematic destroyers of Somnath temple.


title: Somnath temple

text: The Somnath temple was used as a cultural symbol and the starting point for a Rath yatra (chariot journey), states K.N. Pannikkar, by Lal Krishna Advani to begin his Ayodhya campaign in 1990. According to Donald Smith, the reconstruction efforts in the 1950s was not about restoring an ancient architecture, rather the Somnath temple was of religious significance. The rebuilding was a symbol, it was Hindu repudiation of almost a thousand years of Muslim domination, oppression, and reassertion of a safe haven for Hindus in post-partitioned India.


title: Somnath temple

text: The reconstructed Somnath temple has been the preferred pilgrimage site for Hindus in Gujarat, often combined with a pilgrimage to Dwarka. The site attracts Hindus from all over India, states David Sopher.


title: Somnath temple

text: In the modern era textbooks of Pakistan, the sack of Somnath temple is praised and the campaign of Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznavi is glorified as a "champion of Islam". According to Syed Zaidi – a scholar of Islamist Militancy, a school book in Pakistan titled "Our World" portrays Somnath temple as a "place where all the Hindu rajas used to get together" and think about "fighting the Muslims". Mahmud went to this temple and "blew the idol in pieces" and "this success was a source of happiness for the whole Muslim world". Another textbook for Pakistan's Middle School repeats a similar narrative, teaching its students that the Somnath temple was not really a Hindu temple but a political center. According to Ashok Behuria and Mohammad Shehzad, the Somnath legacy is narrated in this textbook as, "according to most historians Mahmud invaded India seventeen times to crush the power of the Hindu Rajas and Maharajas who were always busy planning conspiracies against him ... After the fall of Punjab, the Hindus assembled at Somnath — which was more of a political centre than a temple — to plan a big war against Mahmud. He took all the Rajas and Maharajas by surprise when he attacked Somnath and crushed the Hindu headquarter of political intrigue. With the destruction of Somnath he broke the backbone of the Hindus in the region and thus had no need to attack India again".


title: Somnath temple

text: In Islamic State nationalist literature of the modern era, Sultan Mahmud campaign in the 11th-century has been glorified as a historic "jihad against non-Muslims", his motive in destroying Somnath temple is described as "not driven by worldly gain [wealth]", but because he wanted to "end the worship of idols".


title: Somnath temple

text: In 1842, during the First Anglo-Afghan war, the Governor-General of India Lord Ellenborough ordered his troops to bring the wooden gates from the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni in Ghazni, Afghanistan back to India; it was believed Mahmud had taken them from Somnath Temple. However, there was nor there is any evidence that Somnath temple or its site ever had any wooden gates. Nor is there any evidence that Mahmud or later conquerors ever took any gates from Prabhas-Patan region as a part of the plunder. This order has been called the Proclamation of the Gates. The order, states Thapar, is best seen as an example of how "colonial intervention in India" was viewed in the 1840s.


title: Shades of brown

text: Shades of brown can be produced by combining red, yellow, and black pigments, or by a combination of orange and black—illustrated in the color box. The RGB color model, that generates all colors on computer and television screens, makes brown by combining red and green light at different intensities. Brown color names are often imprecise, and some shades, such as beige, can refer to lighter rather than darker shades of yellow and red. Such colors are less saturated than colors perceived to be orange. Browns are usually described as light or dark, reddish, yellowish, or gray-brown. There are no standardized names for shades of brown; the same shade may have different names on different color lists, and sometimes one name (such as beige or puce) can refer to several very different colors. The X11 color list of web colors has seventeen different shades of brown, but the complete list of browns is much longer.


title: Shades of brown

text: Brown colors are typically desaturated shades of reds, oranges, and yellows which are created on computer and television screens using the RGB color model and in printing with the CMYK color model. Browns can also be created by mixing two complementary colors from the RYB color model (combining all three primary colors). In theory, such combinations should produce black, but produce brown because most commercially available blue pigments tend to be comparatively weaker; the stronger red and yellow colors prevail, thus creating brown tones. Displayed here are some common brown shades.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color shown above at the top right at the head of this article (color #964B00) is the color normally and traditionally regarded as "brown"—a medium dark orange. Its h (hue) code is 30, which signifies a shade of orange. The color to the immediate right (color #A52A2A) that was chosen as the web color "brown"—a medium dark red—is the color traditionally called "red-brown". That this color is a shade of red and not orange can be easily ascertained by inspecting its h (hue) code, which is 0, signifying a shade of red.


title: Shades of brown

text: Displayed at right is the color that is called brown in the RYB color model. It is an equal mix of red, yellow and blue.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color name "rosy brown" first came into use in 1987, when this color was formulated as one of the X11 colors, which in the early 1990s became known as the X11 web colors.


title: Shades of brown

text: Burnt umber is made by heating raw umber, which dehydrates the iron oxides and changes them partially to the more reddish hematite. It is used for both oil and water color paint. At a hue of 9, it is classified as a red-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: Wenge refers to the distinctive color of the dark-colored wood that is the product of "Millettia laurentii", a legume tree from Africa. At a hue of 9, it is classified as a red-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: Displayed at right is the web color called "maroon" in HTML/CSS and it is a brownish crimson color that takes its name from the French word marron, or chestnut.[4] "Marron" is also one of the French translations for "brown".


title: Shades of brown

text: Displayed at right is the color smokey topaz. At a hue of exactly 15, it is classified as a red-brown or orange-brown. It can also be called a vermilion-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: Beaver is a shade of brown representative of the color of a beaver. At a hue of 22, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: Etymologically, it's believed that the words "brown" and "beaver" ultimately stem from the same root word.


title: Shades of brown

text: Russet is a dark brown color with a reddish-orange tinge. At a hue of 26, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: The name of the color derives from russet, a coarse cloth made of wool and dyed with woad and madder to give it a subdued gray or reddish-brown shade. By the statute of 1363, poor English people were required to wear russet.


title: Shades of brown

text: Russet, a color of fall, is often associated with sorrow or grave seriousness. Anticipating a lifetime of regret, Shakespeare's character Biron says: "Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd / In russet yeas and honest kersey noes." ("Love's Labour's Lost", Act V, Scene 1)


title: Shades of brown

text: Buff is a pale yellow-brown color that got its name from the color of buffed leather. At a hue of 28, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, buff as a descriptor of a color was first used in the "London Gazette" of 1686, describing a uniform to be "A Red Coat with a Buff-colour'd lining".


title: Shades of brown

text: The color kobicha (brown-nose) is displayed at right. At a hue of 28, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: It is one of the Japanese traditional colors that has been in use since 660 AD in the form of various dyes used in designing kimono.


title: Shades of brown

text: The name "kobicha" comes from the Japanese for the color of a type of kelp tea, but the word was often used as a synonym for a form of flattery in a curious parallel with the English usage "brown nosing".


title: Shades of brown

text: Sandy brown is a pale shade of brown. "Sandy brown" is one of the web colors. At a hue of 28, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color name "sandy brown" first came into use in 1987, when this color was formulated as one of the X11 colors, which in the early 1990s became known as the X11 web colors.


title: Shades of brown

text: This color was originally called "Peruvian brown" with the first recorded use in 1924 of "Peruvian brown" as a color name in English.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color name was changed to "peru" in 1987, when this color was formulated as one of the X11 colors, which in the early 1990s became known as the X11 web colors.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color taupe is a representation of the average color of the fur of the French mole. At a hue of 30, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color displayed at right matches the color sample called "taupe" referenced below in the 1930 book "A Dictionary of Color".


title: Shades of brown

text: The first use of "taupe" as a color name in English was in the early 19th century (exact year is not known).


title: Shades of brown

text: Walnut brown is a dark brown color; a representation of the color made from walnut hulls. At a hue of 30, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: Displayed at the right is one version of the color raw umber. At a hue of 33, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: The first recorded use of "wood brown" as a color name in English was in Robert Ridgway's 1886 book "Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists, Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists". Ridgway further refined the details of its color coordinates in his 1912 publication "Color Standards and Color Nomenclature".


title: Shades of brown

text: The for wood brown are identical to fallow, camel and desert, which were first recorded as color names in English in 1000, 1916, and 1920, respectively.


title: Shades of brown

text: This is the web color called "khaki" in HTML/CSS. At a hue of 37, it is classified as an orange-brown.


title: Shades of brown

text: The color shown at right matches the color designated as "khaki" in the 1930 book "A Dictionary of Color", the standard for color nomenclature before the introduction of computers.


title: Shades of brown

text: Beige is a light tan color representative of the color of unbleached wool. At a hue of 60, it is classified as a yellow-brown.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: Sticky Fingers is the 9th British and 11th American studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. The Stones released it on 23 April 1971 on their new, and own label Rolling Stones Records. They had been contracted by Decca Records and London Records in the UK and the US since 1963. On this album Mick Taylor made his second full-length appearance on a Rolling Stones album (after the live album "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!"). It was the first studio album without Brian Jones who died two years earlier. The original cover artwork, conceived by Andy Warhol and photographed and designed by members of his art collective, The Factory, showed a picture of a man in tight jeans, and had a working zip that opened to reveal underwear fabric. The cover was expensive to produce and damaged the vinyl record, so later re-issues featured just the outer photograph of the jeans.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: The album featured a return to basics for the Rolling Stones. The unusual instrumentation introduced several albums prior was absent; most songs featuring drums, guitar, bass, and percussion as provided by the key members: Mick Jagger (lead vocal, various percussion and rhythm guitar), Keith Richards (guitar and backing vocal), Mick Taylor (guitar), Bill Wyman (bass guitar), and Charlie Watts (drums). Additional contributions were made by long-time Stones collaborators including saxophonist Bobby Keys and keyboardists Billy Preston, Jack Nitzsche, Ian Stewart, and Nicky Hopkins. As with the other albums of the Rolling Stones late 1960s/early 1970s period, it was produced by Jimmy Miller.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" is considered one of the Rolling Stones' best albums. It was the band's first album to reach number one on both the UK albums and US albums charts, and has since achieved triple platinum certification in the US. "Brown Sugar” topped the "Billboard" Hot 100 in 1971. "Sticky Fingers" was voted the second best album of the year in "The Village Voice"s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1971, based on American critics' votes. The album is inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame and included in "Rolling Stone" magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: With the end of their Decca/London association at hand, the Rolling Stones were finally free to release their albums (cover art and all) as they pleased. However, their departing manager Allen Klein dealt the group a major blow when they discovered that they had inadvertently signed over their entire 1960s American copyrights to Klein and his company ABKCO, which is how all of their material from 1963's "Come On" to "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert" has since been released solely in America by ABKCO Records. The band later sued for their return but without success, settling in 1984. The band would remain incensed with Klein for decades for that act. Klein died in 2009.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: When Decca informed the Rolling Stones that they were owed one more single, the band submitted a track called "Cocksucker Blues", correctly assuming that this would be refused. Instead, Decca released the two-year-old "Beggars Banquet" track "Street Fighting Man" while Klein retained dual copyright ownership in conjunction with The Rolling Stones of "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses."


title: Sticky Fingers

text: Although sessions for "Sticky Fingers" began in earnest in March 1970, the Rolling Stones had been recording at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December 1969, where they cut "You Gotta Move," "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses." "Sister Morphine," cut during "Let It Bleed"'s sessions earlier in March of that year, had been held over from that release. Much of the recording for "Sticky Fingers" was made with the Rolling Stones' mobile studio in Stargroves during the summer and autumn of 1970. Early versions of songs that would eventually appear on "Exile on Main St." were also rehearsed during these sessions.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" originally included 10 tracks. The music has been characterised by commentators as hard rock, roots rock and rock and roll. According to "Rolling Stone" magazine, it is "the Stones' most downbeat, druggy album, with new guitarist Mick Taylor stretching into jazz and country".


title: Sticky Fingers

text: The album's artwork emphasises the suggestive innuendo of the "Sticky Fingers" title, showing a close-up of a jeans-clad male crotch with the visible outline of a penis; the cover of the original (vinyl LP) release featured a working zipper and perforations around the belt buckle that opened to reveal a sub-cover image of white briefs. The vinyl release displayed the band's name and album title along the image of the belt; behind the zipper the underpants were seemingly rubber stamped in gold with the stylized name of American pop artist Andy Warhol, below which read "THIS PHOTOGRAPH MAY NOT BE—ETC." While the artwork was conceived by Warhol, photography was by Billy Name and design was by Craig Braun. Braun and his team had other ideas, such as wrapping the album in rolling paper – a concept later used by Cheech & Chong in "Big Bambu" – but Jagger was enthused by Warhol's cover with a zipper. Execution was then handled as Warhol sent Braun Polaroid pictures of a model in tight jeans.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: The cover photo of a male model's crotch clad in tight blue jeans was assumed by many fans to be an image of Mick Jagger, but the people actually involved at the time of the photo shoot claim that Warhol had several different men photographed (Jagger was not among them) and never revealed which shots he used. Among the candidates, Jed Johnson, Warhol's lover at the time, denied it was his likeness, although his twin brother Jay is a possibility. Those closest to the shoot, and subsequent design, name Factory artist and designer Corey Tippin as the likeliest candidate. Warhol "superstar" Joe Dallesandro claims to have been the model.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: After retailers complained that the zipper was causing damage to the vinyl (from stacked shipments of the record), the zipper was "unzipped" slightly to the middle of the record, where damage would be minimised.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: For the initial vinyl release the album title and band name is smaller and at the top on the American release. For the UK release, the title and band name are in bigger letters and on the left.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: The album features the first usage of the tongue and lips logo of Rolling Stones Records, originally designed by John Pasche in 1970. Jagger suggested to Pasche that he copy the outstuck tongue of the Hindu goddess Kali, and while Pasche first felt it would date the image back to the Indian culture craze of the 1960s, seeing Kali made him change his mind. Before the end of that year his basic version was faxed to Craig Braun by Marshall Chess. The black & white copy was then modified by Braun and his team, resulting in today's most popular red version, the slim one with the two white stripes on the tongue. Critic Sean Egan has said of the logo, "Without using the Stones' name, it instantly conjures them, or at least Jagger, as well as a certain lasciviousness that is the Stones' own ... It quickly and deservedly became the most famous logo in the history of popular music." The tongue and lips design was part of a package that, in 2003, VH1 named the "No. 1 Greatest Album Cover" of all time.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In Spain, the original cover was censored by the Franco regime and replaced with a "Can of fingers" cover, designed by John Pasche and Phil Jude, and "Sister Morphine" was replaced by a live version of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock." This track was later included on the CD compilation "Rarities 1971–2003" in 2005.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In 1992, the LP release of the album in Russia featured a similar treatment as the original cover; but with Cyrillic lettering for the band name and album name, a colourised photograph of blue jeans with a zipper, and a Soviet Army uniform belt buckle that shows a hammer and sickle inscribed in a star. The model appears to be female.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" was released on 23 April 1971 and hit the number one spot on the British charts in May 1971, remaining there for four weeks before returning at number one for a further week in mid June. In the US, the album hit number one within days of release, and stayed there for four weeks. The album spent a total of 69 weeks on the "Billboard" 200. According to "Billboard"s Top 200 list, it was one of many albums that topped the German chart that year.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In a contemporary review for the "Los Angeles Times", music critic Robert Hilburn said that although "Sticky Fingers" is one of the best rock albums of the year, it is only "modest" by the Rolling Stones' standards and succeeds on the strength of songs such as "Bitch" and "Dead Flowers," which recall the band's previously uninhibited, furious style. Jon Landau, writing in "Rolling Stone", felt that it lacks the spirit and spontaneity of the Rolling Stones' previous two albums and, apart from "Moonlight Mile", is full of "forced attempts at style and control" in which the band sounds disinterested, particularly on formally correct songs such as "Brown Sugar." Writing for "Rolling Stone" in 2015, David Fricke called it "an eclectic affirmation of maturing depth" and the band's "sayonara to a messy 1969". In a positive review, Lynn Van Matre of the "Chicago Tribune" viewed the album as the band "at their raunchy best" and wrote that, although it is "hardly innovative," it is consistent enough to be one of the year's best albums. Writing for "Slate", Jack Hamilton praised the album in a retrospective review, stating that it was "one of the greatest albums in rock 'n' roll history."


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" was voted the second best album of the year in "The Village Voice"s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1971. Lester Bangs voted it number one in the poll and said that it was his most played album of the year. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked the album 17th on his own year-end list. In a 1975 article for "The Village Voice", Christgau suggested that the release was "triffling with decadence", but might be the Rolling Stones' best album, approached only by "Exile on Main St." (1972). In "" (1981), he wrote that it reflected how unapologetic the band was after the Altamont Free Concert and that, despite the concession to sincerity with "Wild Horses", songs such as "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" and "I Got the Blues" are as "soulful" as "Good Times," and their cover of "You Gotta Move" is on-par with their previous covers of "Prodigal Son" and "Love in Vain."


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In 1994, "Sticky Fingers" was remastered and reissued by Virgin Records. This remaster was initially released in a Collector's Edition CD, which replicated in miniature many elements of the original vinyl album packaging, including the zipper. "Sticky Fingers" was remastered again in 2009 by Universal Music Enterprises and in 2011 by Universal Music Enterprises in a Japanese-only SHM-SACD version.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In June 2015, the Rolling Stones reissued "Sticky Fingers" (in its 2009 remastering) in a variety of formats to coincide with a new concert tour, the Zip Code Tour. The Deluxe and Super Deluxe versions of the reissue featured previously unreleased bonus material (depending on the format): alternative takes of some songs, live tracks recorded on 14 March 1971 at the Roundhouse (venue), London, and the complete 13 March 1971 show at Leeds University. It re-entered the UK Albums chart at number 7, extending their UK Top 10 album chart span beyond 51 years and 2 months since their self-titled debuted at number 7 on 23 April 1964.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: It also re-entered the US Albums chart at number 5, extending their US Top 10 album chart span beyond 50 years and 6 months since "12 x 5" on 14 December 1964.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" was the first album released by the group in the post-Klein era and was listed among the 1999 class of Grammy Hall of Fame inductees. According to Acclaimed Music, it is the 53rd most celebrated album in popular music history.


title: Sticky Fingers

text: In 1994, "Sticky Fingers" was ranked number ten in Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums". He stated, "Dirty rock like this has still to be bettered, and there is still no rival in sight." In a retrospective review, "Q" magazine said that the album was "the Stones at their assured, showboating peak ... A magic formula of heavy soul, junkie blues and macho rock." "NME" wrote that it "captures the Stones bluesy swagger" in a "dark-land where few dare to tread." "Record Collector" magazine said that it showcases Jagger and Richards as they "delve even further back to the primitive blues that first inspired them and step up their investigations into another great American form, country." In his review for "Goldmine" magazine, Dave Thompson wrote that the album still is superior to "most of The Rolling Stones' catalog."


title: Sticky Fingers

text: "Sticky Fingers" was listed as No. 63 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's 2003 list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, No. 64 in a 2012 revised list, and No. 104 in a 2020 reboot of the list. In a 2018 retrospective review, "The Guardian"'s Alexis Petridis ranked it the best album the band had ever produced, stating "their claim to be The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World has no more compelling evidence than the flawless 46 minutes of music here."


title: Sticky Fingers

text: David Hepworth wrote in his 2016 book "Never a Dull Moment" that the contributions of guest performers like Keys, Jim Dickinson, and Preston made the album contain "more musical range than any other Rolling Stones album," such as "Dickinson's honky-tonk piano on 'Wild Horses'" and "Preston's churchy organ solo on 'I Got the Blues'." Hepworth also suggested that Taylor's "Latin-flavored guitar solo" on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" was influenced by Santana's 1970 album "Abraxas".


title: Binomial coefficient

text: In mathematics, the binomial coefficients are the positive integers that occur as coefficients in the binomial theorem. Commonly, a binomial coefficient is indexed by a pair of integers and is written formula_1 It is the coefficient of the term in the polynomial expansion of the binomial power ; this coefficient can be computed by the multiplicative formula


title: Binomial coefficient

text: Arranging the numbers formula_6 in successive rows for formula_7 gives a triangular array called Pascal's triangle, satisfying the recurrence relation


title: Binomial coefficient

text: The binomial coefficients occur in many areas of mathematics, and especially in combinatorics. The symbol formula_9 is usually read as " choose " because there are formula_9 ways to choose an (unordered) subset of elements from a fixed set of elements. For example, there are formula_11 ways to choose 2 elements from formula_12 namely formula_13 and formula_14


title: Binomial coefficient

text: The binomial coefficients can be generalized to formula_15 for any complex number and integer , and many of their properties continue to hold in this more general form.


title: Binomial coefficient

text: Andreas von Ettingshausen introduced the notation formula_16 in 1826, although the numbers were known centuries earlier (see Pascal's triangle). The earliest known detailed discussion of binomial coefficients is in a tenth-century commentary, by Halayudha, on an ancient Sanskrit text, Pingala's "Chandaḥśāstra". The second earliest description of binomial coefficients is given by Al-Karaji. In about 1150, the Indian mathematician Bhaskaracharya gave an exposition of binomial coefficients in his book "Līlāvatī".


title: Binomial coefficient

text: Alternative notations include , , , , , and in all of which the stands for "combinations" or "choices". Many calculators use variants of the because they can represent it on a single-line display. In this form the binomial coefficients are easily compared to -permutations of, written as , etc.


title: Binomial coefficient

text: For natural numbers (taken to include 0) "n" and "k", the binomial coefficient formula_16 can be defined as the coefficient of the monomial "X" in the expansion of . The same coefficient also occurs (if ) in the binomial formula