title: NBA draft

text: From 2009 through 2015, the college underclassmen had until the day before the April signing period to withdraw their name from the draft and retain NCAA eligibility. Since 2016, players could enter the draft and participate in the NBA Draft Combine multiple times and retain NCAA eligibility by withdrawing from the draft within 10 days after the end of the mid-May NBA draft combine.


title: NBA draft

text: The NBA Draft Lottery is an annual event held by the NBA, where the teams who did not make the playoffs in the past year participate in a state-lottery style process in order to determine the first three picks of the draft, until 2018. The team with the worst record receives the best odds of receiving the first pick. The NBA introduced the lottery process in 1985. The league was attempting to counter accusations that certain teams were purposefully losing in order to gain a chance to participate in the annual coin flip, where the worst team in each division (each conference starting in 1971) flips a coin to see who will receive the first pick in the upcoming draft. Since 2019, the first four picks have been determined by the lottery.


title: NBA draft

text: In the lottery system, the league uses "a lottery-style ping-pong ball machine with 14 balls numbered 1–14, and 1,000 four-digit combinations are assigned to the 14 lottery teams." Until 2018, the worst team received 250 combinations, the second worst getting 199, the third worst team 156, and so on. The first three draft picks were determined. Starting in 2019, the three worst teams receive 140 combinations each, the fourth worst 125, and so on. Those three teams will have an equal chance of winning the top overall pick. After the first four picks are determined, the rest of the teams are ordered in reverse order based on their record in the previous season, like in the previous system.


title: NBA draft

text: The lottery is generally held in the third or fourth week of May. The NBA goes to great lengths in order to keep the selection process both fair and not tampered with in any way. "The actual Lottery procedure will take place in a separate room just prior to the national broadcast on ESPN. Select media members, NBA officials and representatives of the participating teams and the accounting firm of Ernst & Young will be in attendance for the drawing." Attendees are not allowed cell phone or any other electronic access until the number one pick is revealed on the television broadcast.


title: NBA draft

text: The NBA draft was initially dominated by collegiate players after the draft began in 1950, but in recent years high school seniors were having larger impacts on the draft, players like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard, Tracy McGrady and Amar'e Stoudemire. To counteract this, the NBA implemented an age requirement in 2005 that meant high school seniors were no longer eligible for the draft, unless they were declared as postgraduates by the league. This would not happen until 2015 with Indian prospect Satnam Singh Bhamara in the second round and again in 2016 with South Sudanese–Australian prospect Thon Maker in the first round.


title: NBA draft

text: Foreign players have made a large impact on how teams are now drafting. Early on, foreigners weren't part of the draft as NBA's appeal was limited to the United States, with the league not yet attempting to expand internationally. The first foreign player, in the sense of being a national of a country other than the U.S., to be chosen first overall in the draft was Bahamian Mychal Thompson in 1978. However, Thompson's selection was not a true harbinger of the game's globalization, as he had spent much of his childhood in Florida, and had played college basketball at Minnesota. One of the first foreign players selected in the draft to play in the NBA was Manute Bol out of the Sudan in 1983 in the 5th round by the San Diego Clippers. Bol's selection was later deemed ineligible by the NBA. Two years later Bol was drafted again by the NBA this time out of Division II University of Bridgeport in 1985 as the 31st pick overall in the second round. Although Bol did not have a stellar career, he is known for being one of the tallest players ever to play the game at 7 feet and 7 inches. He holds the record for being the tallest player ever to hit a 3-point field goal. The following two years saw two players born outside the U.S. selected first overall—Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon in 1984 (he would later gain U.S. citizenship) and Jamaica-born American Patrick Ewing in 1985.


title: NBA draft

text: By the 1999 draft, the number of foreign players being drafted dramatically increased. The top pick in the 1997 NBA draft, Tim Duncan, became the third international player picked number 1 overall—although his designation as "international" is a matter of semantics, as he is a native of the United States Virgin Islands and, like all USVI natives, is a U.S. citizen by birth. He also had played U.S. college basketball at Wake Forest. Including Duncan, 12 international players were selected in the two rounds of the draft—although half of them, including Duncan and the next two such players picked, had played college basketball. The 1998 draft saw another foreign player picked first overall, Nigerian Michael Olowokandi, but like Duncan he had played college basketball, in his case at Pacific. In 2001 the highest drafted foreign player, Pau Gasol, was selected 3rd overall by the Atlanta Hawks. That would all change the following season when Yao Ming became the first foreign player without U.S. college experience to be selected number 1 overall. Not only was the first overall pick an international player, but five more picks in the first round alone were also from overseas. In total, the 2002 draft produced 17 international players, with only three of them (all second-round picks) having U.S. college experience.


title: NBA draft

text: Four international players had gone first overall before 2002, although all had played college basketball in the U.S., and one of them was in fact a U.S. citizen by birth. It was not until 2002 that an international player without college experience went first overall—Yao Ming. His selection was not only a watershed moment for the NBA, but it also had a large impact in Yao's homeland of China. Hannah Beech (2003) wrote "Yao has single-handedly transformed his countrymen from nameless, faceless millions into mighty men who can jam with the very best". Yao has helped the NBA grow into a worldwide product. Beech (2003) goes on to write "Ratings for NBA games broadcast on Chinese TV have never been higher than this year as the nation keeps track of its new favorite team, Yao's Houston Rockets". For his career Yao averaged a solid 19.0 points per game, 9.2 rebounds per game, 1.89 blocks per game, and shot 82.6 percent from the free throw line. It had later gotten to a point where the last four drafts from 2013–2016 all held international prospects as No. 1 selections in their respective drafts before ending the run in 2017.


title: NBA draft

text: The 2002, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018 NBA drafts saw international players picked first overall. In 2002, the Houston Rockets selected Yao Ming from China first in the draft, the first ever Asian number 1 selection. In 2005, the Milwaukee Bucks picked Andrew Bogut, from Australia by way of the University of Utah, No. 1. The next year, the Toronto Raptors drafted Andrea Bargnani from Italy, making him the second foreign player without U.S. college experience and the first European to be selected number 1 overall. In 2011, Australian born Kyrie Irving was selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers after having played one year at Duke. In 2013, the Cleveland Cavaliers selected Anthony Bennett, who played at UNLV, first overall and making Bennett the first Canadian to be drafted at No. 1. In the 2014 NBA draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers, again picking No. 1, selected Canadian shooting guard/small forward Andrew Wiggins. During the 2015 NBA draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected U.S.-born center Karl-Anthony Towns, also born with Dominican Republic citizenship by way of his mother, as the first player from the latter country and therefore the first Latin American to become the No. 1 selection, teaming up with Andrew Wiggins in the process. During the 2016 NBA draft, the Philadelphia 76ers selected Australian forward Ben Simmons to be the No. 1 selection. In the 2018 NBA draft, the Phoenix Suns selected Bahamian center Deandre Ayton as their first ever No. 1 selection, with Ayton being the second Bahamian taken at No. 1 behind Mychal Thompson, and the third Caribbean-born player after Patrick Ewing and Thompson.


title: NBA draft

text: Some of the most noted NBA draft years are 1984, 1996 and 2003: each of those is often referred to as one of, if not the, best NBA draft ever. The 2003 NBA draft is now considered the best draft in the last 20 years, with superstars such as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh headlined. The draft of 1986 was also notable for the number of solid or outstanding players selected in later rounds, partly because of drug problems that claimed the life of second overall pick Len Bias and affected the careers of several other first-round picks.


title: NBA draft

text: On the other hand, the draft of 2000 has been regarded as the worst in NBA history, with "Sports Illustrated" calling its first round "a horrible group of players". The 2013 draft has also been called underwhelming, although Victor Oladipo and Rudy Gobert eventually became All-Stars, and Giannis Antetokounmpo later became a two time NBA MVP.


title: NBA draft

text: The NBA draft has been televised since 1980, the same year the NFL and NHL televised (or publicized) theirs. USA Network broadcast the draft as part of its contract with the NBA until 1984; starting in 1985, TBS did so as part of its "NBA on TBS" package. From 1990 to 2002, TNT took over the draft as more NBA properties moved to the network (the "NBA on TNT"). When ESPN acquired the rights to the NBA from NBC in 2002, ESPN began broadcasting the draft (starting in 2003) with the "NBA on ESPN", which it continues to do today. It was also televised on broadcast television for the first time on ABC in 2021. NBA TV has also produced its own coverage since coming under the purview of Turner Sports since 2008.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Lech Wałęsa (; ; born 29 September 1943) is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the President of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first democratically elected President of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish President elected in popular vote. A shipyard electrician by trade, Wałęsa became the leader of the Solidarity movement, and led a successful pro-democratic effort which in 1989 ended the Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: While working at the Lenin Shipyard (now Gdańsk Shipyard), Wałęsa, an electrician, became a trade-union activist, for which he was persecuted by the government, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, and arrested several times. In August 1980, he was instrumental in political negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gdańsk Agreement between striking workers and the government. He co-founded the Solidarity trade-union whose membership rose to over ten million people.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: After martial law in Poland was imposed and Solidarity was outlawed, Wałęsa was again arrested. Released from custody, he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the Round Table Agreement that led to the semi-free 1989 Polish legislative election and a Solidarity-led government. He presided over Poland's transition from Marxist–Leninist state socialism into a free-market capitalist liberal democracy, but his active role in Polish politics diminished after he narrowly lost the 1995 Polish presidential election. In 1995, he established the Lech Wałęsa Institute.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Since 1980, Wałęsa has received hundreds of prizes, honors and awards from many countries of the world. He was named the Time Person of the Year (1981) and one of (1999). He has received over forty honorary degrees, including from Harvard University and Columbia University, as well as dozens of the highest state orders, including: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and the French Grand Cross of Legion of Honour. In 1989, Wałęsa was the first foreign non-head of state to address the Joint Meeting of the U.S. Congress. The Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport has borne his name since 2004.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa was born in Popowo, Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, Germany (German-occupied Poland). His father, Bolesław Wałęsa (1908–1945), was a carpenter who was rounded up and interned in a forced labour camp at Młyniec (outpost of KL Stutthof) by the German occupying forces before Lech was born. Bolesław returned home after the war but died two months later from exhaustion and illness. Lech's mother, Feliksa Wałęsa (née Kamieńska; 1916–1975), has been credited with shaping her son's beliefs and tenacity.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: When Lech was nine, Feliksa married her brother-in-law, Stanisław Wałęsa (1916–1981), a farmer. Lech had three elder full siblings; Izabela (1934–2012), Edward (born 1937), and Stanisław (born 1939); and three younger half-brothers; Tadeusz (born 1946), Zygmunt (born 1948), and Wojciech (1951–1988). In 1973, Lech's mother and stepfather emigrated to the US for economic reasons. They lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Feliksa died in a car accident in 1975, and Stanisław died of a heart attack in 1981. Both of them were buried in Poland.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 1961, Lech graduated from primary and vocational school in nearby Chalin and Lipno as a qualified electrician. He worked as a car mechanic from 1961 to 1965, and then embarked on his two-year, obligatory military service, attaining the rank of corporal before beginning work on 12 July 1967 as an electrician at Lenin Shipyard (), now called Gdańsk Shipyard () in Gdańsk.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: From early in his career, Wałęsa was interested in workers' concerns; in 1968 he encouraged shipyard colleagues to boycott official rallies that condemned recent student strikes. He was a charismatic leader, who helped organize the illegal 1970 protests at the Gdańsk Shipyard when workers protested the government's decree raising food prices and he was considered for the position of chairman of the strike committee. The strikes' outcome, which involved the deaths of over 30 workers, galvanized Wałęsa's views on the need for change. In June 1976, Wałęsa lost his job at the Gdańsk Shipyard because of his continued involvement in illegal unions, strikes, and a campaign to commemorate the victims of the 1970 protests. Afterwards, he worked as an electrician for several other companies but his activism led to him continually being laid off and he was jobless for long periods. Wałęsa and his family were under constant surveillance by the Polish secret police; his home and workplace were always bugged. Over the next few years, he was arrested several times for participating in dissident activities.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa worked closely with the Workers' Defence Committee ("KOR"), a group that emerged to lend aid to people arrested after the 1976 labor strikes and to their families. In June 1978, he became an activist of the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast ("Wolne Związki Zawodowe Wybrzeża"). On 14 August 1980, another rise in food prices led to a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, of which Wałęsa was one of the instigators. Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard fence and quickly became one of the strike leaders. The strike inspired other similar strikes in Gdańsk, which then spread across Poland. Wałęsa headed the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, coordinating the workers at Gdańsk and at 20 other plants in the region. On 31 August, the government, represented by Mieczysław Jagielski, signed an accord (the Gdańsk Agreement) with the Strike Coordinating Committee. The agreement granted the Lenin Shipyard workers the right to strike and permitted them to form an independent trade union. The Strike Coordinating Committee legalized itself as the National Coordinating Committee of the "Solidarność" (Solidarity) Free Trade Union, and Wałęsa was chosen as chairman of the committee. The Solidarity trade union quickly grew, ultimately claiming over 10 million members—more than a quarter of Poland's population. Wałęsa's role in the strike, in the negotiations, and in the newly formed independent trade union gained him fame on the international stage.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: On 10 March 1981, through the introduction of his former superior in the army, Wałęsa met Wojciech Jaruzelski for the first time in the office building of the Council of Ministers for three hours. During the meeting, Jaruzelski and Wałęsa agreed that mutual trust was necessary if the problems of Poland were to be solved. Wałęsa said "It's not the case that the name of socialism is bad. Only some people spoiled the name of socialism". He also complained about and criticized the government. Jaruzelski informed Wałęsa of the coming war games of the Warsaw Pact from 16 to 25 March, hoping he could help maintain the social order and avoid anti-Soviet remarks. Jaruzelski also reminded Wałęsa that Solidarity had used foreign funds. Wałęsa joked "We don't have to take only dollars. We can take corn, fertilizer, anything is okay. I told Mr. Kania before that I would take everything from the enemy. The more the better, until the enemy was weakened no more".


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa held his position until 13 December 1981, when General Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland. Wałęsa and many other Solidarity leaders and activists were arrested; he was incarcerated for 11 months until 14 November 1982 at Chylice, Otwock, and Arłamów; eastern towns near the Soviet border. On 8 October 1982, Solidarity was outlawed. In 1983, Wałęsa applied to return to the Gdańsk Shipyard as an electrician. The same year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was unable to accept it himself, fearing Poland's government would not let him back into the country. His wife Danuta accepted the prize on his behalf.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Through the mid-1980s, Wałęsa continued underground Solidarity-related activities. Every issue of the leading underground weekly publication "Tygodnik Mazowsze" bore his motto, "Solidarity will not be divided or destroyed". Following a 1986 amnesty for Solidarity activists, Wałęsa co-founded the Provisional Council of NSZZ Solidarity ("Tymczasowa Rada NSZZ Solidarność"), the first overt legal Solidarity entity since the declaration of martial law. From 1987 to 1990, he organized and led the semi-illegal Provisional Executive Committee of the Solidarity Trade Union. In mid-1988, he instigated work-stoppage strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard. He was frequently hauled in for interrogations by the Polish secret police, the Security Service, during the 1980s. On many of these occasions, Danuta—who was even more anti-Communist than her husband—was known to openly taunt Security Service agents when they picked Lech up.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: After months of strikes and political deliberations, at the conclusion of the 10th plenary session of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR, the Polish communist party), the government agreed to enter into Round Table Negotiations that lasted from February to April 1989. Wałęsa was an informal leader of the non-governmental side in the negotiations. During the talks, he traveled throughout Poland giving speeches in support of the negotiations. At the end of the talks, the government signed an agreement to re-establish the Solidarity Trade Union and to organize semi-free elections to the Polish parliament; in accordance with the Round Table Agreement, only members of the Communist Party and its allies could stand for 65 percent of the seats in the lower house, the Sejm.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In December 1988, Wałęsa co-founded the Solidarity Citizens' Committee; this was ostensibly an advisory body but in practice a political party that won the parliamentary elections in June 1989. Solidarity took all the seats in the Sejm that were subject to free elections, and all but one seat in the newly re-established Senate. Wałęsa was one of Solidarity's most public figures; he was an active campaigner, appearing on many campaign posters, but did not run for parliament himself. Solidarity winners in the Sejm elections were referred to as "Wałęsa's team" or "Lech's team" because they had all appeared on their election posters with Wałęsa.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: While ostensibly only chairman of Solidarity, Wałęsa played a key role in practical politics. In August 1989, he persuaded leaders of parties formerly allied with the Communist Party to form a non-communist coalition government—the first non-Communist government in the Soviet Bloc. The parliament elected Tadeusz Mazowiecki as the first non-communist Prime Minister of Poland in over forty years.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Following the June 1989 parliamentary elections, Wałęsa was disappointed that some of his former fellow campaigners were satisfied to govern alongside former Communists. He decided to run for the newly re-established office of president, using the slogan, "I don't want to, but I have to" (""Nie chcę, ale muszę.""). On 9 December 1990, Wałęsa won the presidential election, defeating Prime Minister Mazowiecki and other candidates to become Poland's first freely elected head of state in 63 years, and the first non-Communist head of state in 45 years. In 1993, he founded his own political party, the Nonpartisan Bloc for Support of Reforms ("BBWR"); the grouping's Polish-language acronym echoed that of Józef Piłsudski's "Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government," of 1928–35, likewise an ostensibly non-political organization.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: During his presidency, Wałęsa saw Poland through privatization and transition to a free-market economy (the Balcerowicz Plan), Poland's 1991 first completely free parliamentary elections, and a period of redefinition of the country's foreign relations. He successfully negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Poland and won a substantial reduction in foreign debts.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa supported Poland's entry into NATO and the European Union, both of which occurred after his presidency, in 1999 and 2004, respectively. In the early 1990s, he proposed the creation of a sub-regional security system called "NATO bis". The concept was supported by right-wing and populist movements in Poland but garnered little support abroad; Poland's neighbors, some of which (e.g. Lithuania), had recently regained independence and tended to see the proposal as Polish neo-imperialism.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa has been criticized for a confrontational style and for instigating "war at the top", whereby former Solidarity allies clashed with one another, causing annual changes of government. This increasingly isolated Wałęsa on the political scene. As he lost political allies, he came to be surrounded by people who were viewed by the public as incompetent and disreputable. Mudslinging during election campaigns tarnished his reputation. Some thought Wałęsa, an ex-electrician with no higher education, was too plain-spoken and too undignified for the post of president. Others thought him too erratic in his views or complained he was too authoritarian and that he sought to strengthen his own power at the expense of the Sejm. Wałęsa's national security advisor Jacek Merkel credited the shortcomings of Wałęsa's presidency to his inability to comprehend the office of the president as an institution. He was an effective union leader capable of articulating what the workers felt but as president he had difficulty delegating power or navigating bureaucracy. Wałęsa's problems were compounded by the difficult transition to a market economy; in the long run it was seen as highly successful but it lost Wałęsa's government much popular support.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa's BBWR performed poorly in the 1993 parliamentary elections; at times his popular support dwindled to 10 percent and he narrowly lost the 1995 presidential election, winning 33.11 percent of the vote in the first round and 48.28 percent in the run-off against Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who represented the resurgent Polish post-Communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). Wałęsa's fate was sealed by his poor handling of the media; in televised debates he appeared incoherent and rude; in response to Kwaśniewski's extended hand at the end of the first of the two debates, he replied that the post-Communist leader could "shake his leg". After the election, Wałęsa said he was going into "political retirement" and his role in politics became increasingly marginal.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: After losing the 1995 election, Wałęsa announced he would return to work as an electrician at the Gdańsk Shipyard. Soon afterwards, he changed his mind and chose to travel around the world on a lecture circuit. Wałęsa developed a portfolio of three lectures ("The Impact of an Expanded NATO on Global Security", "Democracy: The Never-Ending Battle" and "Solidarity: The New Millennium"), and reads them at universities and public events with an appearance fee of around £50,000 ($70,000).


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 1995, he founded the "Lech Wałęsa Institute", a think tank with a mission "to popularize the achievements of Polish Solidarity, educate young generations, promote democracy, and build civil society in Poland and around the world". In 1997, he founded a new party, Christian Democracy of the 3rd Polish Republic, hoping it would help him to successfully run in future elections.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa's contention for the 2000 presidential election ended with a crushing defeat when he polled 1.01 percent of the vote. His humiliation was increased because Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who was re-elected in the first round with 54 percent of the vote, is a former Communist apparatchik. Wałęsa polled in seventh place, after which he announced his withdrawal from Polish politics.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2006, Wałęsa quit Solidarity in protest of the union's support of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party, and Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński—twin brothers who had been prominent in Solidarity and were now serving as the country's president and prime minister, respectively. The main point of disagreement was the Kaczyńskis' focus on rooting out those who had been involved in communist rule and their party's attempt to make public all the files of the former communist secret police. Until then only members of the government and parliament had to declare any connection with the former security services. Wałęsa and his supporters argued the so-called transparency legislation advocated by the government might turn into a witch hunt and the more than 500,000 Poles who had possibly collaborated with the communist secret police could face exposure.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2011, Wałęsa rejected Lithuania's Order of Vytautas the Great as a result of constant discrimination on the part of the Lithuanian government towards its Polish minority.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa was well known for his conservative stance on LGBT rights. In 2013, he said on Polish television that "he doesn't wish for this minority, which he tolerates and understands, to impose itself on the majority". Referring to Robert Biedroń, he argued that, considering that as they represent less than one percent of the Polish society, proportionally speaking, homosexual MPs should sit "in the last row of the parliament, or even behind its walls". After sharp international criticism, including City authorities of San Francisco's decision to rename Walesa Street as a result of those remarks, Wałęsa apologized for his comments, stressing that "being a man of old date, in his view one's sexual orientation should lie in one's intimate sphere". He said that "his intentions were distorted by the media" and "homosexuality should be respected". Over the last few years, Wałęsa has voiced his support for the introduction of same-sex marriage in Poland and has repeatedly met with Biedroń, whom he called "a talent" and "a future President of Poland".


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2014, in a widely publicized interview, Wałęsa expressed his disappointment in another Nobel laureate, US president Barack Obama: he told CNN, "When he was elected there was great hope in the world. We were hoping that Obama would reclaim moral leadership for America, but that failed ...  in terms of politics and morality America no longer leads the world". Wałęsa also accused Obama of not deserving his Nobel Peace Prize; during the 2012 US presidential campaign he endorsed Obama's opponent Mitt Romney. In September 2015, Wałęsa again hit the headlines after sharing his thoughts on the migrant crisis in Europe with media, saying, "watching the refugees on television, I noticed that ... they are well fed, well dressed and maybe even are richer than we are ... If Europe opens its gates, soon millions will come through and while living among us will start exercising their own customs, including beheading".


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In August 2017, ten Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Wałęsa, urged Saudi Arabia to stop the executions of 14 young people for participating in the 2011–12 Saudi Arabian protests.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Despite the 2000 ruling of a special lustration court affirming his innocence, for many years there have been allegations that Wałęsa was an informant of Security Service, the communist security services, in his twenties. While vehemently denying being a regular Security Service informer, Wałęsa admitted to "signing something under interrogation in the 1970s." In 2017, a handwriting study ordered by the government-controlled Institute of National Remembrance (INR), stated that signatures on several documents from the 1970s belonged to Wałęsa. The exact nature of Wałęsa's relationship with Security Service to this day remains a contentious question among historians.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The controversy resurfaced in 2008 with the publication of a book that purported to show that Wałęsa, codenamed "Bolek", had been an operative for the security services from 1970 to 1976.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The question resurfaced again in February 2016, when the Institute of National Remembrance seized materials from the widow of Chief of secret police gen. Czesław Kiszczak, that were said to document Wałęsa's role as a spy for the security services.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: On 12 August 2000, Wałęsa, who was running a presidential campaign at the time, was cleared by the special Lustration Court of charges that he collaborated with the Communist-era secret services and reported on the activities of his fellow shipyard workers, due to the lack of evidence. Anti-communists Piotr Naimski, one of the first members of the Workers' Defense Committee that led to the Solidarity trade union, and Antoni Macierewicz, Wałęsa's former Interior Minister, testified against him in the closed vetting trial. Naimski, who said he testified with a "heavy heart", expressed his disappointment that Wałęsa "made a mistake by not going openly to the public, and he has missed an important chance". According to Naimski, the court cleared Wałęsa on "technical grounds" because it did not find certain original documents—many of which had been destroyed since 1989—that offered sufficient proof that Wałęsa was lying.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 1992, Naimski, as a head of the State Protection Office, started the process of screening people suspected of being Communist collaborators in Poland. In June that year, he helped Antoni Macierewicz prepare a list of 64 members of the government and parliament who were named as spies in the police records; these included Wałęsa, then the Polish president. Wałęsa's name was included on the list after a wrenching internal debate about the virtues of honesty versus political discretion. In response to the publication of this list, President Wałęsa immediately engineered the fall of prime minister Jan Olszewski and the dismissal of Interior Minister Macierewicz. A parliamentary committee later concluded Wałęsa had not signed an agreement with the secret police.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: A 1997 Polish law made vetting a requirement for those seeking high public office. According to the law, it is not a crime to have collaborated, but those who deny it and are found to have lied are banned from political life for ten years. The 2000 presidential election was the first use of this law.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Despite helping Wałęsa in 2005 to receive the official status of a "victim of communist regime" from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), this court ruling did not convince many Poles. In November 2009, Wałęsa sued the president of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, over his repeated collaboration allegations. Five months later, Kaczyński failed to invite Wałęsa to the commemoration service at Katyn, which almost certainly saved Wałęsa's life because the presidential plane crashed, killing all on board. In August 2010, Wałęsa lost a libel case against Krzysztof Wyszkowski, his former fellow activist, who also publicly accused Wałęsa of being a communist agent in 1970s.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The most comprehensive analysis of Wałęsa's possible collaboration with secret police was provided in a 2008 book "SB a Lech Wałęsa" ("The Security Service and Lech Wałęsa"). The book was written by two historians from the Institute of National Remembrance, Sławomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, and included documents from the archives of the secret police that were inherited by the institute. Among the documents were registration cards, memos, notes from the secret police, and reports from the informant.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The book's authors said Wałęsa, working under the code name "Bolek", was a secret police informant from 1970 (after he was released from arrest) until 1976 (before he was fired from the shipyard). According to them, "he wrote reports and informed on more than 20 people and some of them were persecuted by the communist police. He identified people and eavesdropped on his colleagues at work while they were listening to Radio Free Europe for example". The book describes the fate of the seven of his alleged victims; information regarding others was destroyed or stolen from the files. According to them, Wałęsa received over 13,000 zlotys as remuneration for his services from the Security Service, while the monthly salary at the time was about 3,500 zlotys. The authors said oppositionist activity in Poland in the first half of 1970s was minimal and Wałęsa's role in it was quite marginal. However, according to the book, despite formally renouncing his ties with Security Service in 1976, Wałęsa went on to have contacts with communist officials.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The book also said that during his 1990–1995 presidency, Wałęsa used his office to destroy the evidence of his collaboration with the secret police by removing incriminating documents from the archives. According to the book, historians discovered that with the help of the state intelligence agency, Wałęsa, Interior Minister Andrzej Milczanowski, and other members of Wałęsa's administration had borrowed from the archives the secret police files that had connections to Wałęsa, and returned them with key pages removed. When it was discovered at the turn of 1995/96, the following prosecutorial inquiry was discontinued for political reasons despite the case attracting much public attention.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Sławomir Cenckiewicz also said that in 1983, when Wałęsa was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the secret police tried to embarrass him and leaked information about Wałęsa's previous collaboration with the government. By this time though, Wałęsa was already so popular that most Poles did not believe the official media and dismissed the allegations as a manipulation by the Communist authorities. The book's first print run sold out in Poland within hours. The book received substantial coverage in the media, provoked nationwide debate, and was noted by the international press. Wałęsa vowed to sue the authors but never did.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: On 18 February 2016, the government-affiliated INR in Warsaw announced it had seized a package of original documents that allegedly proved Wałęsa was a paid Security Service informant. The documents dated from the period 1970–1976; they were seized from the home of a recently deceased former interior minister, General Czesław Kiszczak. The documents' authenticity was confirmed by an archival expert, but the prosecutors demanded a handwriting examination. Eventually, the requested examination concluded that the documents were authentic, which suggest he was a paid informant. Wałęsa previously said that he had signed a commitment to inform document, but that he had never acted on it.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The dossier consists of two folders. The first is a "personal file" containing 90 pages of documents, including a handwritten commitment to cooperate with Polish Security Service dated 21 December 1970, and signed "Lech Wałęsa – Bolek" with a pledge he would never admit his collaboration with secret police "not even to family"; the file also contains the confirmations of having received funds. The second is a "work file" which contains 279 pages of documents, including numerous reports by "Bolek" on his co-workers at Gdańsk Shipyard, and notes by Security Service officers from meetings with him. According to one note, Wałęsa agreed to collaborate out of fear of persecution after the workers' protest in 1970. The documents also show that at first "Bolek" eagerly provided information on the opinions and actions of his co-workers and took money for the information, but his enthusiasm diminished and the quality of his information decreased until he was deemed no longer valuable and collaboration with him was terminated in 1976.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: The sealed dossier also contained a letter, hand-written by Kiszczak in April 1996, in which he informs the Director of the Polish Central Archives of Modern Records () about the accompanying files documenting the collaboration of Wałęsa with the Polish Security Service and asks him not to publish this information until five years after Wałęsa's death. In his letter, Kiszczak said he kept the documents out of reach: before the 1989 revolution, trying to protect Wałęsa's reputation; and afterwards to make sure they did not disappear or were used for political reasons. This letter and the accompanying documents had never been sent.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: On 16 February 2016, about three months after Kiszczak's death, his widow Maria approached the Institute of National Remembrance and offered to sell the documents to the archives for 90,000 zlotys ($23,000). However, according to Polish law, all documents of the political police must be handed in to the state. The administration of the institute notified the prosecutor's office, which conducted a police search of the Kiszczaks' house and seized all the historic documents. Maria Kiszczak later said she had not read her husband's letter and had "made a mistake".


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: For years, Wałęsa vehemently denied collaborating with the Polish Security Service and dismissed the incriminating files as forgeries created by the Security Service to compromise him. Wałęsa also denies that during his presidency he removed documents incriminating him from the archives. Until 2008, he denied having ever seen his Security Service file. After the publication of the book "SB a Lech Wałęsa" in 2008, he said that while he was president "I did borrow the file, but didn't remove anything from it. I saw there were some documents there about me and that they were clearly forgeries. I told my secretaries to tape up and seal the file. I wrote 'don't open' on it. But someone didn't obey, removed the papers, now casting suspicion on me." Wałęsa's interior minister Andrzej Milczanowski denied the cover-up and said he "had full legal rights to make those documents available to President Wałęsa" and that "no original documents were removed from the file", which contained only photocopies.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa has offered conflicting statements regarding the authenticity of the documents. Initially he appeared to come close to an admission, saying in 1992, "in December 1970, I signed three or four documents" to escape from the secret police. In his 1987 autobiography "A Way of Hope", Wałęsa said, "It is also the truth that I had not left that clash completely pure. They gave me a condition: sign! And then I signed." He denied he acted upon the collaboration agreement. However, in his later years Wałęsa said all the documents are forgeries and told the BBC in 2008, "you will not find any signature of mine agreeing to collaborate anywhere".


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2009, after the publication of another biography connecting him with the secret police ("Lech Wałęsa: Idea and History" by Pawel Zyzak), Wałęsa threatened to leave Poland if historians continue to question his past. He said that before revealing such information "a historian must decide whether this serves Poland". After the accusations against him resurfaced with the discovery of the Kiszczak dossier on 16 February 2016, Wałęsa called the files "lies, slander and forgeries", and said he "never took money and never made any spoken or written report on anyone". He said of the Polish public, which was about to believe in the allegations, "you have betrayed me, not me you" and "it was I who safely led Poland to a complete victory over communism". On 20 February 2016, Wałęsa wrote in his blog that a secret police officer had begged him to sign the financial documents in the 1970s because the officer had lost money entrusted to him to purchase a vehicle. Wałęsa appealed to the officer to step forward and clear him of the accusations.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: On 8 November 1969, Wałęsa married Mirosława Danuta Gołoś, who worked at a flower shop near the Lenin Shipyard where Wałęsa worked. Soon after they married, she began using her middle name more often than her first name, per Lech's request. The couple had eight children; Bogdan (born 1970), Sławomir (born 1972), Przemysław (1974–2017), Jarosław (born 1976), Magdalena (born 1979), Anna (born 1980), Maria-Wiktoria (born 1982), and Brygida (born 1985). , Anna is running her father's office in Gdańsk and Jarosław is a European MP.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2008, Wałęsa underwent a coronary artery stent placement and the implantation of a cardiac pacemaker at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. He underwent a heart operation in 2021. In January 2022, Wałęsa tested positive for COVID-19. He said he had received three doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 1983, Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, he has received more than 30 state decorations and more than 50 awards from 30 countries, including Order of the Bath (UK), Order of Merit (Germany), Legion of Honour (France) and European Human Rights Prize (EU 1989). In 2011, he declined to accept the Lithuanian highest order, citing his displeasure at Lithuania's policy towards the Polish diaspora. In 2008, he established the Lech Wałęsa Award.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 2004, Gdańsk International Airport was officially renamed Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport and Wałęsa's signature was incorporated into the airport's logo. A college hall in Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago), six streets, and five schools in Canada, France, Sweden and Poland also were named after Lech Wałęsa


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Wałęsa was named Man of the Year by "Time" magazine (1981), "Financial Times" (1980), "Saudi Gazette" (1989) and 12 other newspapers and magazines. He was awarded with over 45 honorary doctorates by universities around the world, including Harvard University and Sorbonne. He was named an honorary karate black belt by International Traditional Karate Federation. Wałęsa is also an honorary citizen of more than 30 cities, including London, Buffalo and Turin.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In the United States, Wałęsa was the first recipient of the Liberty Medal, in 1989. That year, he also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and became the first non-head-of-state to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress. In 2000, Wałęsa received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Wałęsa symbolically represented Europe by carrying the Olympic flag at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 2004, he represented ten newly acceded EU countries during the official accession ceremony in Strasbourg. In 1993, the heraldic authority of the Kingdom of Sweden assigned Wałęsa a personal coat of arms on the occasion of his admittance into the Royal Order of the Seraphim.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Lech Wałęsa has been portrayed, as himself or a character based on him, in a number of feature and television films. The two most notable of them are:


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Both of these films were produced in Poland. In December 1989, Warner Bros. intended to produce a "major" movie about Wałęsa, to be made in 1990 and released in 1991. The company paid Wałęsa a $1 million fee for the rights to produce a biopic. Although the movie was never made, this payment sparked controversy in Poland when five years later it emerged that Wałęsa concealed this income to avoid paying taxes on it. The Gdańsk tax office initiated a tax fraud case against Wałęsa but it was later dismissed because the five-year statute of limitations had already run out.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: In 1982, Bono was inspired by Wałęsa to write U2's first hit single, "New Year's Day". Coincidentally, the Polish authorities lifted martial law on 1 January 1983, the same day this single was released. Wałęsa also became a hero of a number of Polish pop songs, including a satirical 1991 hit titled "Nie wierzcie elektrykom" ("Don't Trust the Electricians") from the second studio album by the punk rock band Big Cyc which featured a caricature of Wałęsa on its cover.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Patrick Dailly's chamber opera "Solidarity", starring Kristen Brown as Wałęsa, was premiered by the San Francisco Cabaret Opera in Berkeley, California, in September 2009.


title: Lech Wałęsa

text: Sid Meier's "Civilization V" video game lists Lech Wałęsa amongst its world leader rankings. Wałęsa is ranked 11th on a scale of 1 to 21, with Augustus Caesar ranked as the best world leader of all time and Dan Quayle as the worst. Wałęsa is immediately outranked by Simon Bolivar and is ranked just above Ivan the Terrible. Lech Wałęsa ranks 9th out of 21 in Sid Meier's "Civilization VI", immediately outranked by Marcus Aurelius and ranked just above Hatshepsut.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The Aleutian Islands (; ; ,”Land of the Aleuts", possibly from Chukchi "aliat", "island"), also called the Aleut Islands or Aleutic Islands and known before 1867 as the Catherine Archipelago, are a chain of 14 large volcanic islands and 55 smaller islands. Most of the Aleutian Islands belong to the U.S. state of Alaska, but some belong to the Russian federal subject of Kamchatka Krai. They form part of the Aleutian Arc in the Northern Pacific Ocean, occupying a land area of 6,821 sq mi (17,666 km) and extending about westward from the Alaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and act as a border between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. Crossing longitude 180°, at which point east and west longitude end, the archipelago contains both the westernmost part of the United States by longitude (Amatignak Island) and the easternmost by longitude (Semisopochnoi Island). The westernmost U.S. island in real terms, however, is Attu Island, west of which runs the International Date Line. While nearly all the archipelago is part of Alaska and is usually considered as being in the "Alaskan Bush", at the extreme western end, the small, geologically related Commander Islands belong to Russia.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The islands, with their 57 volcanoes, form the northernmost part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Physiographically, they are a distinct section of the larger Pacific Border province, which in turn is part of the larger Pacific Mountain System physiographic division. The islands are considered to be among the most geographically isolated areas in the North Pacific.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Battles and skirmishes occurred on the islands during the Aleutian Islands campaign of World War II. The Japanese landing and occupation of Kiska and Attu in June 1942 were the only two invasions of the United States during that war.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Motion between the Kula Plate and the North American Plate along the margin of the Bering Shelf (in the Bering Sea north of the Aleutian arc) ended in the early Eocene. The Aleutian Basin, the ocean floor north of the Aleutian arc, is the remainder of the Kula Plate that was trapped when volcanism and subduction jumped south to its current location at 56 Ma.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The Aleutian island arc, then, formed in the Early Eocene (55–50 ) when the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the North American Plate began. The arc is made of separate blocks that have been rotated clockwise. The basement underlying the islands is made of three stratigraphic units: an Eocene layer of volcanic rock, an Oligocene—Miocene layer of marine sedimentary rock, and a Pliocene—Quaternary layer of sedimentary and igneous rock.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: All six are located between 51° and 55° N latitude and 172° E and 163° W longitude. The largest islands in the Aleutians are Attu (the farthest from the mainland), and Unalaska, Umnak, and Unimak in the Fox Islands. The largest of those is Unimak Island, with an area of 1,571.41 mi (4,069.9 km), followed by Unalaska Island, the only other Aleutian Island with an area over 1,000 square miles (2,600 km).


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The axis of the archipelago near the mainland of Alaska has a southwest trend, but at Tanaga Island (about 178° W) its direction changes to the northwest. This change of direction corresponds to a curve in the line of volcanic fissures that have contributed their products to the building of the islands. Such curved chains are repeated about the Pacific Ocean in the Kuril Islands, the Japanese chain, and in the Philippines. All these island arcs are at the edge of the Pacific Plate and experience much seismic activity, but are still habitable; the Aleutians lie between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. The general elevation is greatest in the eastern islands and least in the western. The island chain is a western continuation of the Aleutian Range on the mainland.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The great majority of the islands bear evident marks of volcanic origin, and there are numerous volcanic cones on the north side of the chain, some of them active; many of the islands, however, are not wholly volcanic, but contain crystalline or sedimentary rocks, and also amber and beds of lignite. The coasts are rocky and surf-worn, and the approaches are exceedingly dangerous, the land rising immediately from the coasts to steep, bold mountains.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: These volcanic islands reach heights of . Makushin Volcano () on Unalaska Island, is not quite visible from within the town of Unalaska, though the steam rising from its cone is visible on a (rare) clear day. Residents of Unalaska need only to climb one of the smaller hills in the area, such as Pyramid Peak or Mt. Newhall, to get a good look at the snow-covered cone. The volcanic Bogoslof and Fire Islands, which rose from the sea in 1796 and 1883 respectively, lie about west of Unalaska Bay.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: In 1906, a new volcanic cone rose between the islets of Bogoslof and Grewingk, near Unalaska, followed by another in 1907. These cones were nearly demolished by an explosive eruption on September 1, 1907. In 2017, the volcanic cone erupted sending ash and ice particles 30,000 feet (9000 m) into the air.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Alfred Russel Wallace's 1879 book "Australasia", Ian Todd's 1974 book "Island Realm: A Pacific Panorama" and Dean Kohlhoff's 2002 book "Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska" all associate the Aleutian Islands with the Oceania region due to their status as remote islands in the Pacific. The islands, having biogeographical and ethnocultural affinities to North America, are not ordinarily considered a part of the region.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The climate of the islands is oceanic, with moderate and fairly uniform temperatures and heavy rainfall. Fogs are almost constant. Summer weather is much cooler than Southeast Alaska (around Sitka), but the winter temperature of the islands and of the Alaska Panhandle is very nearly the same. According to the Köppen climate classification system, the area southwest of on Unalaska Island have a "Subpolar Oceanic Climate" (type "Cfc" as are Reykjavík, Tórshavn, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia and the Auckland Islands), characterized by the coldest month averaging above , 1–3 months averaging above , and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. To the northeast of that point, the climate becomes "Subarctic With Cool Summers And Year Around Rainfall" (type "Dfc" as are Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Murmansk, St. Moritz, and Labrador City), where it is similar but colder, with the coldest month averaging below . During the winter the islands become the center for a semi-permanent low-pressure area called the Aleutian Low.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The mean annual temperature for Unalaska, the most populated island of the group, is about 38 °F (3 °C), being about 30 °F (−1 °C) in January and about 52 °F (11 °C) in August. The highest and lowest temperatures recorded on the islands are 78 °F (26 °C) and 5 °F (−15 °C) respectively. The average annual rainfall is about , and Unalaska, with about 250 rainy days per year, is said to be one of the rainiest places within the U.S.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The growing season lasts approximately 135 days, from early in May until late in September, but agriculture is limited to the raising of few vegetables. With the exception of some stunted willows, the vast majority of the chain is devoid of native trees. On some of the islands, such as Adak and Amaknak, there are a few coniferous trees growing, remnants of the Russian period. While tall trees grow in many cold climates, Aleutian conifers — some estimated to be two hundred years old — rarely reach a height of even , and many of them are still less than tall. This is because the islands, much like the Falklands and other islands of similar latitudes, experience such strong winds that taller trees are vulnerable to snapping off.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Instead of trees, the islands are covered with a luxuriant, dense growth of herbage and shrubs, including crowberry, bluejoint, grasses, sedges, and many flowering plants. There are areas of peat bog near the coasts. Endemic plants include the endangered Aleutian shield fern.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The Aleutians are home to many large colonies of seabirds. Buldir Island has 21 breeding seabird species, including the Bering Sea-endemic red-legged kittiwake. Large seabird colonies are also present at Kiska, Gareloi, Semisopochnoi, Bogoslof, and others. The islands are also frequented by vagrant Asiatic birds, including the common rosefinch, Siberian rubythroat, bluethroat, lanceolated warbler, and the first North American record of the intermediate egret.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The habitats of the Aleutians are largely unspoiled, but wildlife is affected by competition from introduced species such as cattle, caribou, and foxes. Nearly all of the Aleutians are protected as part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and the Aleutian Islands Wilderness.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Observations have identified sea otters as a keystone species along the coasts of many of the Aleutian Islands. Their presence encourages the growth of kelp forests, as the otters control sea urchin populations (as large populations of sea urchins can create urchin barrens by clearing away kelp stands).


title: Aleutian Islands

text: On the less mountainous islands, the raising of sheep and reindeer was once believed to be practicable. There are bison on islands near Sand Point. Sheep raising seems to have died off with the advent of synthetic fibers, which lowered the value of wool. During the 1980s, there were some llama being raised on Unalaska. The current economy is primarily based on fishing, and the presence of U.S. military. The only crop is potato. Chickens are raised in barns under protection from the cold.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: In addition to a partial air service and a ferry service, the Alaska Marine Highway passes through many of the U.S. islands.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The native people refer to themselves as Unangan, and are now generally known by most non-natives as the "Aleut". The Aleut language is one of the two main branches of the Eskimo–Aleut language family. This family is not known to be related to any others. The 2000 U.S. Census recorded a population of 8,162 on the islands, of whom 4,283 were living in the main settlement of Unalaska.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: As they stretch like a broken bridge from the continent Asia to the continent North America, many anthropologists hypothesize they were a route of the first human occupants of the Americas. However, the earliest known evidence in public recorded history of human occupation in the Americas is found much farther south. The early human sites in the Bering Sea have probably been submerged by rising waters and sand during the current interglacial period. People living in or on the Aleutian Islands developed fine skills in hunting, fishing, and basketry. Hunters made their weapons, watercraft. The baskets found are noted for being finely woven with carefully shredded stalks of beach rye.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: In 1741 the Russian government sent Vitus Bering, a Dane in the service of Russia, and Aleksei Chirikov, a Russian, in the ships "Saint Peter" and "Saint Paul" on a voyage of discovery in the Northern Pacific. After the ships were separated by a storm; Chirikov discovered several eastern islands of the Aleutian group, and Bering discovered several of the western islands. Bering was shipwrecked and died in the Komandorski Islands (Commander Islands); one of which now bears his name (Bering Island), along with the surrounding Bering Sea. The survivors of Bering's party reached the Kamchatka Peninsula in a boat constructed from the wreckage of their ship, and reported the islands were rich in fur-bearing animals.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Siberian fur hunters flocked to the Commander Islands and gradually moved eastward across the Aleutian Islands to the mainland. In this manner, Russia gained a foothold on the northwestern coast of North America. The Aleutian Islands consequently belonged to Russia, until that country transferred all its possessions in North America to the U.S. in 1867.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: During the consolidation of the Russian-American Company there was sporadic conflict with the native population (frequently disastrous to the poorly armed and vastly outnumbered Russians). The colonies soon entered a relatively stable state based on cooperation, intermarriage, and official policies that provided social status, education, and professional training to children of mixed Aleut-Russian birth. Within a generation, the day-to-day administration of the Russian-American colonies was largely in the hands of native-born Alaskans. Reversing the usual trend in colonization where indigenous technologies are replaced, the Russians adopted the Aleut kayak, or baidarka, sea otter hunting techniques, and the working of native copper deposits. The Russians instituted public education, preservation of the Aleut language through transliteration of religious and other texts into Aleut via an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet, vaccination of the native population against smallpox, and science-based sea mammal conservation policies that were ahead of their time.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: By 1760 the Russian merchant Andrian Tolstykh had made a detailed census in the vicinity of Adak and extended Russian citizenship to the Aleuts.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: During his third and last voyage in 1778, Captain James Cook surveyed the eastern portion of the Aleutian archipelago, accurately determined the position of some of the more important islands, and corrected many errors of former navigators.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Among the first Christian missionaries to arrive in the Aleutian Islands was a party of ten Russian Orthodox monks and priests, who arrived in 1793. Within two years, a monk named Herman was the only survivor of that party. He settled on Spruce Island, near Kodiak Island, and often defended the rights of the Aleuts against the Russian trading companies. He is now known in the Orthodox Church as Saint Herman of Alaska.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: Another early Christian missionary of the Russian Orthodox Church was Father Veniaminov who arrived in Unalaska in 1824. He was named Bishop Innokentii in 1840 and moved to Sitka. He is now known in the Orthodox Church as Saint Innocent of Alaska.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The principal settlements were on Unalaska Island. The oldest was Iliuliuk (also called Unalaska), settled in 1760–1775, with a customs house and an Orthodox church.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: After the American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, further development took place. New buildings included a Methodist mission and orphanage, and the headquarters for a considerable fleet of United States revenue cutters, which patrolled the sealing grounds of the Pribilof Islands. The first public school in Unalaska opened in 1883.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The U.S. Congress extended American citizenship to all Native Americans (and this law has been held to include the indigenous peoples of Alaska) in 1924. A hospital was built in Unalaska in 1933 by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: During World War II, in what were the only two invasions of the United States during the war, small parts of the Aleutian islands were occupied by Japanese forces, when Attu and Kiska were invaded possibly to divert American forces away from the main Japanese attack at Midway Atoll. The U.S. Navy, having broken the Japanese naval codes, proceeded as if this was just a diversion, and it did not expend large amounts of effort in defending the islands. More than 90 Americans were taken to Japan as prisoners of war. Most of the civilian population (over 800) of the Aleutians and Pribilovians were detained by the United States in camps in the Alaska Panhandle. During the Aleutian Islands campaign, American forces invaded Japanese-held Attu and defeated the Japanese. American and Canadian troops later launched an invasion of Kiska, but Japanese forces had already withdrawn, ending the campaign in the islands.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: President Roosevelt visited Adak in 1944, meeting with commanders and eating with soldiers of the garrison. This was his first and only trip to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska as a whole. A rumor spread that FDR had accidentally left his Scottish Terrier "Fala" on one of the Islands and had to send a destroyer to retrieve the dog, costing taxpayers several million dollars. The President made fun of these rumors during a talk with the Teamsters Union in Washington DC, now known as the "Fala Speech". At this speech the President joked with the crowd saying, "Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them!"


title: Aleutian Islands

text: June 3, 2002 was celebrated as Dutch Harbor Remembrance Day. The governor of Alaska ordered state flags lowered to half-staff to honor the 43 Americans who died during the two-day Japanese air attack in 1942. The Aleutian World War II National Historic Area Visitors Center opened that month.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act became law in 1971. In 1977, the Ounalashka Corporation (from Unalaska) declared a dividend. This was the first village corporation to declare and pay a dividend to its shareholders.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The Aleutian Islands were designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1976. The Aleutians were one of 17 biosphere reserves in the United States withdrawn by request of the U.S. government from the programme in June 2017.


title: Aleutian Islands

text: The U.S. conducted underground tests of nuclear weapons on Amchitka Island from 1965 to 1971 as part of the Vela Uniform program. The final detonation, the Cannikin, was the largest underground nuclear explosion by the U.S.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, also known as the 2019 Hong Kong protests, or the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, were a series of demonstrations from 15 March 2019 in response to the introduction by the Hong Kong government of the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill on extradition. It is one of the largest series of demonstrations in the history of Hong Kong, with thousands arrested in violent scenes. By mid-2020, the Hong Kong government had declared the restoration of peace and stability with the imposition of the national security law.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The protests began with a sit-in at the government headquarters on 15 March 2019 and a demonstration attended by hundreds of thousands on 9 June 2019, followed by a gathering outside the Legislative Council Complex on 12 June which stalled the bill's second reading. On 16 June, just one day after the Hong Kong government suspended the bill, a larger protest took place to push for its complete withdrawal. The protest was also in response to the perceived excessive use of force by the Hong Kong Police Force on 12 June. As the protests progressed, activists laid out five key demands. Police inaction during the 2019 Yuen Long attack and brutality in 2019 Prince Edward station attack further escalated the protests.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Chief Executive Carrie Lam withdrew the bill on 4 September, but refused to concede to the other four demands. A month later, she invoked emergency powers to implement an anti-mask law, escalating the confrontations. The storming of the Legislative Council in July 2019, deaths of Chow Tsz-lok and Luo Changqing, two shooting incidents of protesters, one of whom was unarmed, and sieges of the Chinese University and the Polytechnic University in November 2019 were landmark events. The unprecedented landslide victory of the pro-democracy camp in the November local election was widely regarded as a "de facto" referendum on the city's governance.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 largely silenced the protests. Tensions mounted again in May 2020 after Beijing's decision to promulgate a national security bill for Hong Kong. More than a hundred people, including several prominent activists, have been arrested since the imposition of the law. The resulting political atmosphere, along with the crackdown on civil society, sparked a wave of mass emigration from the city.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The approval ratings of the government and the police plunged to their lowest points since the 1997 handover. The Central People's Government alleged that foreign powers were instigating the conflict, although the protests have been largely described as "leaderless". The United States passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act on 27 November 2019 in response to the movement. The tactics and methods used in Hong Kong inspired other protests that followed worldwide.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019 was first proposed by the government of Hong Kong in February 2019 in response to the 2018 murder of Poon Hiu-wing by her boyfriend Chan Tong-kai in Taiwan, which the two Hongkongers were visiting as tourists. As there is no extradition treaty with Taiwan (because the government of China does not recognise Taiwan's sovereignty), the Hong Kong government proposed an amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance () and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Ordinance () to establish a mechanism for case-by-case transfers of fugitives, on the order of the chief executive, to any jurisdiction with which the territory lacks a formal extradition treaty.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The inclusion of mainland China in the amendment was of concern to Hong Kong society; citizens, academics and the legal profession fear the removal of the separation of the region's jurisdiction from the legal system administered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would erode the "one country, two systems" principle in practice since the 1997 handover; furthermore, Hong Kong citizens lack confidence in China's judiciary system and human rights protection due to its history of suppressing political dissent. Opponents of the bill urged the Hong Kong government to explore other mechanisms, such as an extradition arrangement solely with Taiwan, and to sunset the arrangement immediately after the surrender of the suspect.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: After the failure of the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 and the 2017 imprisonment of Hong Kong democracy activists, citizens began to fear the loss of the "high degree of autonomy" as provided for in the Hong Kong Basic Law, as the government of the People's Republic of China appeared to be increasingly and overtly interfering with Hong Kong's affairs. Notably, the NPCSC saw fit to rule on the disqualification of six lawmakers; fears over state-sanctioned rendition and extrajudicial detention were sparked by the Causeway Bay Books disappearances. Xi Jinping's accession to General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the top position of paramount leader in 2012 marked a more hardline authoritarian approach, most notably with the construction of Xinjiang internment camps. The spectre that Hong Kong may similarly be brought to heel became an important element in the protests.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Anti-mainland sentiment had begun to swell in the 2010s. The daily quota of 150 immigrants from China since 1997, and the massive flows of mainland visitors strained Hong Kong's public services and eroded local culture; mainlanders' perceived arrogance drew the scorn of Hongkongers. The rise of localism and the pro-independence movement after the Umbrella Revolution was marked by the high-profile campaign for the 2016 New Territories East by-election by activist Edward Leung. Fewer and fewer young people in Hong Kong identified themselves as Chinese nationals, as found by pollsters at the University of Hong Kong. The younger respondents were, the more distrustful they were of the Chinese government. Scandals and corruption in China shook people's confidence of the country's political systems; the Moral and National Education controversy in 2012, the Express Rail Link project connecting Hong Kong with mainland cities and the subsequent co-location agreement proved highly controversial. Citizens saw these policies as Beijing's decision to strengthen its hold over Hong Kong. By 2019, almost no Hong Kong youth identified as Chinese.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The Umbrella Revolution provided inspiration and brought about a political awakening to some, but its failure and the subsequent split within the pro-democratic bloc prompted a re-evaluation of strategy and tactics. In the years that followed, a general consensus emerged that peaceful protests were ineffective in advancing democratic development, and became an example of what not to do in further protests. Media noted that protests in 2019 were driven by a sense of desperation rather than the optimism of 2014. The aims of the protests had evolved from withdrawing the bill, solidifying around achieving the level of freedom and liberties promised.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Initially, protesters demanded only the withdrawal of the extradition bill. Following an escalation in the severity of policing tactics on 12 June 2019, the protesters' objective was to achieve the following five demands (under the slogan "Five demands, not one less"):


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: After several minor protests in March and April 2019, the anti-extradition issue attracted more attention when pro-democratic lawmakers in the Legislative Council launched a filibuster campaign against the bill. In response, the Secretary of Security John Lee announced that the government would resume second reading of the bill in full council on 12 June 2019, bypassing the Bills Committee. With the possibility of a second reading of the bill, the Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF) launched their third protest march on 9 June. While police estimated attendance at the march on Hong Kong Island at 270,000, the organisers claimed that 1.03 million people had attended the rally, a number unprecedently high for the city. Carrie Lam insisted second reading and debate over the bill be resumed on 12 June. Protesters successfully stopped the LegCo from resuming second reading of the bill by surrounding the LegCo Complex. Police Commissioner Stephen Lo declared the clashes a "riot"; police were subsequently criticised for using excessive force, such as firing tear gas at protesters at an approved rally. Following the clashes, protesters began calling for an independent inquiry into police brutality; they also urged the government to retract the "riot" characterisation.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: On 15 June, Carrie Lam announced the bill's suspension but did not fully withdraw it. The same day, Marco Leung Ling-Kit, a 35-year-old man, fell to his death after slipping on scaffolding and plunging 17 metres to his death whilst protesting Lam's decision and claims of police brutality. Ruled by an inquest jury as "death by misadventure", this accident formed a rallying point for the movement and his anti-extradition slogans later became the foundations for the "five demands" of the protests, and his yellow raincoat became one of the symbols of the protests. A protest on the following day had almost 2 million people participating according to an CHRF estimate, while the police estimated that there were 338,000 demonstrators at its peak. While Lam offered a personal apology on 18 June, she dismissed calls for her resignation.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The CHRF claimed a record turnout of 550,000 for their annual march on 1 July 2019, while police estimated around 190,000 at the peak; an independent polling organisation estimated attendance at 260,000. The protest was largely peaceful. At night, partly angered by several more suicides since 15 June 2019, some radical protesters stormed into the Legislative Council; police took little action to stop them.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: After 1 July 2019, protests spread to different neighbourhoods in Hong Kong. CHRF held another anti-extradition protest on 21 July on Hong Kong Island. Instead of dispersing, protesters headed for the Liaison Office in Sai Ying Pun, where they defaced the Chinese national emblem. While a standoff between the protesters and the police occurred on Hong Kong Island, groups of white-clad individuals, suspected triad members, appeared and indiscriminately attacked people inside Yuen Long station. Police were absent during the attacks, and the local police stations were shuttered, leading to suspicion that the attack was coordinated with police. The attack was often seen as the turning point for the movement, as it crippled people's confidence in the police and turned a lot of citizens who were politically neutral or apathetic against the police.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: A call for a general strike on 5 August was answered by about 350,000 people according to the Confederation of Trade Unions; over 200 flights had to be cancelled. Various incidents involving alleged police brutality on 11 August prompted protesters to stage a three-day sit-in at Hong Kong International Airport from 12 to 14 August, forcing the Airport Authority to cancel numerous flights. On 23 August, an estimated 210,000 people participated in the "Hong Kong Way" campaign to draw attention to the movement's five demands. The chain extended across the top of Lion Rock.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Ignoring a police ban, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Hong Kong Island on 31 August following the arrests of high-profile pro-democracy activists and lawmakers the previous day. At night, the Special Tactical Squad (officially known as the Special Tactical Contingent) stormed Prince Edward station, where they beat and pepper-sprayed the commuters inside.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: On 4 September, Carrie Lam announced the formal withdrawal of the extradition bill once Legco reconvened in October and the introduction of additional measures to calm the situation. However, protests continued to push for the realisation of all five demands.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: On 1 October 2019, mass protests and violent conflict occurred between the protesters and police in various districts of Hong Kong during the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. This resulted in the first use of live rounds by police. One 18-year-old student protester was shot in the chest by police in Tsuen Wan after charging towards a riot policeman. Carrie Lam invoked the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to impose a law to ban wearing face masks in public gatherings, attempting to curb the ongoing protests on 4 October. The law's enactment was followed by continued demonstrations in various districts of Hong Kong, blocking major thoroughfares, vandalising shops considered to be pro-Beijing and paralysing the MTR system. Protests and citywide flash rallies persisted throughout the month.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Protesters clashed with the police late at night on 3 November 2019. Alex Chow Tsz-lok, a 22-year-old student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), was later found unconscious on the second floor of the estate's car park. He died on 8 November following two unsuccessful brain surgeries. After his death, protesters engaged in flash rallies against the police and attended vigils in various districts of Hong Kong. They blamed the police for his death, though the police denied any involvement. In response to Chow's death, protesters planned a city-wide strike starting on 11 November by disrupting transport in the morning in various districts of Hong Kong. That morning, a policeman fired live rounds in Sai Wan Ho, in response to an unarmed 21 year-old attempting to snatch his gun. On 14 November, an elderly man named Luo Changqing died from a head injury which he had sustained the previous day during a confrontation between two groups of anti-government protesters and residents in Sheung Shui.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: For the first time, during a standoff on 11 November, police shot numerous rounds of tear gas, sponge grenades and rubber bullets into the campuses of universities, while protesters threw bricks and petrol bombs in response. Student protesters from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) confronted the police for two consecutive days. After the conflict, protesters briefly occupied several universities. A major conflict between protesters and police took place in Hung Hom on 17 November after protesters took control of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and blockaded the Cross-Harbour Tunnel. Thus began the siege of PolyU by police which ended with them storming onto the campus and arresting several protesters and volunteer medics in the early morning of 18 November.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The 24 November 2019 District Council election, considered a referendum on the government and the protests, attracted a record high voter turnout. The results saw the pro-democracy camp win by a landslide, with the pro-Beijing camp suffering their greatest electoral defeat in Hong Kong's history. The unprecedented electoral success of the pro-democracy voters, the mass arrests during the PolyU siege, and faster response by police contributed to a decrease in the intensity and frequency of the protests in December 2019 and January 2020. Despite this, the CHRF organised two marches to maintain pressure on the government on 8 December 2019 and 1 January 2020.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China caused the number of large-scale rallies to dwindle further because of fears that they might facilitate the spread of the virus. Despite this, the pro-democratic movement's tactics were repurposed to pressure the government to take stronger actions to safeguard public health in the face of the pandemic's outbreak in Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 crisis escalated in February and March 2020, the scale of the protests dwindled further. Police have used COVID-19 laws banning groups of more than four, for example, to disperse protesters. On 18 April, police arrested 15 pro-democracy activists including Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee and Margaret Ng for their activities in 2019, drawing international condemnation.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: On 21 May 2020, state media announced that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC) would begin drafting a new law that covers "secession, foreign interference, terrorism and subversion against the central government", to be added into the Annex III of the Hong Kong Basic Law. This meant that the law would come into effect through promulgation, bypassing local legislation. Despite international pressure, the NPCSC passed the national security law unanimously on 30 June, without informing the public and the local officials of the content of the law. The law created a chilling effect in the city. Demosistō, which had been involved in lobbying for other nations' support, and several pro-independent groups announced that they had decided to disband and cease all operations, fearing that they would be the targets of the new law. Thousands of protesters showed up on 1 July to protest against the newly implemented law. On that day, the police arrested at least ten people for "breaching national security" for displaying protest art.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Following the implementation of the national security law, the international community reassessed their policies towards China. Major countries in the West (Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, Germany and New Zealand) suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong over the introduction of the national security law. The US Congress passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and president Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to revoke the city's special trade status after Mike Pompeo informed the Congress that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous from China and so should be considered the same country in trade and other such matters. On 7 August, the US announced that they would impose sanctions on eleven Hong Kong and Chinese top officials, including Carrie Lam, for undermining Hong Kong's freedom and autonomy. British Home Office announced that starting from early 2021, current and former holders of the BN(O) passport in Hong Kong can resettle in the UK along with their dependents for five years before they become eligible to apply for permanent citizenship.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Invigorated by its success in the November 2019 District Council election, the pro-democratic bloc was eyeing to win over half of the 70 seats in the Legislative Council in the election set to be held on 6 September. Unfazed by the national security law, more than 600,000 people cast their votes in the bloc's historic first primaries in mid July 2020. The Hong Kong government then disqualified twelve candidates on 30 July, nearly all of whom were winners from the pro-democratic primaries. The decision drew international condemnation for obstructing the election and the democratic process. On the following day, Carrie Lam, going against the public opinion, invoked emergency powers to delay the election, citing the pandemic as the reason. While the NPCSC allowed the four disqualified incumbent lawmakers to transition to the extended term in July, they decided to remove them from office in November 2020, resulting in the mass resignation of all of opposition lawmakers.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The police continued to use the law to target local activists and critics of Beijing, including business tycoon Jimmy Lai. In January 2021, the police arrested more than 50 individuals, all of whom were candidates in the primaries for "subverting state power". This meant that most of the active and prominent politicians in the opposite camp in Hong Kong have been arrested by the authorities using the national security law. Arrest warrants were issued to exiled activists for breaching the national security law, including former lawmakers Nathan Law, Baggio Leung and Ted Hui. Twelve Hong Kong activists who were released on bail were captured by China's Coast Guard Bureau while fleeing to Taiwan on a speedboat on 23 August. Detained in Yantian, Shenzhen, they were subsequently charged with crossing the Chinese border illegally and were prevented from choosing their lawyers and meeting their families.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: As protest activities dwindled, the government continued to tighten its control in Hong Kong, censoring school textbooks and removing any mention of the Tiananmen massacre, arresting organisers of vigils for the victims of the massacre, removing public examination questions which the authorities deemed politically inappropriate, deregistering "yellow-ribbon" teachers, and declaring that separation of powers never existed in Hong Kong despite previous comments by the city's top judges recognising its importance in Hong Kong. It also attempted to reshape the narrative of the Yuen Long attack by claiming that the attack had not been indiscriminate, changing the officially reported police response time, and arresting Lam Cheuk-ting, a pro-democracy lawmaker who was hurt in the attack, for "rioting".


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Civil society faced a crackdown by authorities, which triggered a massive exodus from Hong Kong. Pro-democracy activists and lawmakers were among the first to leave the territory; the first wave of emigres also included young professionals, as well as families whose parents wanted to have their children be schooled with emphasis on independent critical thinking. More than 89,000 Hongkongers left the city in a year after the national security law was imposed, and the city witnessed a record 1.2% drop in population. Schools were shrinking as parents feared "brainwashing" "patriotic" education be implemented, and tens of thousands applied for British National (Overseas) visas after the UK government unveiled a new immigration path for passport holders.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Clashes between protesters and counter-protesters had become more frequent since the movement began in June 2019. During a pro-police rally on 30 June, their supporters began directing profanities at their opposition counterparts and destroyed their Lennon Wall and the memorial for Marco Leung, leading to intense confrontations between the two camps. Pro-Beijing citizens, wearing "I love HK police" T-shirts and waving the Chinese national flag, assaulted people perceived to be protesters on 14 September in Fortress Hill. Lennon Walls became sites of conflict between the two camps, with pro-Beijing citizens attempting to tear down the messages or removing poster art. Some protesters and pedestrians were beaten and attacked with knives near Lennon Walls by a single perpetrator or by suspected gang members. A reporter was stabbed and a teenager distributing pro-protest leaflets had his abdomen slashed. Owners of small businesses seen to be supportive of the protests and their employees have been assaulted in suspected politically motivated attacks and their businesses vandalised.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Some civilians rammed their cars into crowds of protesters or the barricades they set up. In one instance, a female protester suffered severe thigh fractures. Protest organisers, including Jimmy Sham from the CHRF, and pro-democratic lawmakers such as Roy Kwong were assaulted and attacked. On 3 November, politician Andrew Chiu had his ear bitten off by a Chinese mainlander who had reportedly knifed three other people outside Cityplaza. Meanwhile, pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho was stabbed and his parents' grave was desecrated.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The 2019 Yuen Long attack occurred following a mass protest organised by the CHRF on 21 July. Suspected gangsters vowed that they would "defend" their "homeland" and warned all anti-extradition bill protesters not to set foot in Yuen Long. The perpetrators attacked people on Fung Yau Street North in Yuen Long before entering Yuen Long station, where they indiscriminately attacked commuters in the concourse and on the platform, as well as inside train compartments, resulting in a widespread backlash from the community. The Department of Justice has since been criticised by some lawyers for making "politically motivated" prosecutions. After the Yuen Long attack, no assailant was charged for weeks after the event, while young protesters were charged with rioting within several days. Protesters were also attacked with fireworks in Tin Shui Wai on 31 July, and then attacked by knife-wielding men in Tsuen Wan and suspected "Fujianese" gang members wielding long poles in North Point on 5 August, though they fought back against the attackers.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Amidst frustration that police had failed to prosecute pro-government violent counter-protesters and being increasingly distrustful of police because of this, hard-core protesters began to carry out vigilante attacks—described by protesters as "settling matters privately"—targeting individuals perceived to be foes. Pro-Beijing actress Celine Ma, plainclothed officers, and a taxi driver who drove into a crowd of protesters in Sham Shui Po on 8 October, were attacked. A middle-aged man was doused with flammable liquid and set on fire by a protester after he had an altercation with protesters at Ma On Shan station on 11 November. On 14 November, an elderly man died from head injuries sustained earlier during a violent confrontation between two groups of protesters and Sheung Shui residents.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The protests have been described as being largely "leaderless". Protesters commonly used LIHKG, an online forum similar to Reddit, as well as Telegram, an optionally end-to-end encrypted messaging service to communicate and brainstorm ideas for protests and to make collective decisions. Unlike previous protests, those of 2019 spread over 20 different neighbourhoods. Protesters and their supporters remained anonymous to avoid prosecutions or future potential retaliation from the authorities, employers who had a different political orientation, and corporations which kowtowed to political pressure.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: For the most part there are two groups of protesters, namely the "peaceful, rational and non-violent" protesters and the "fighters" group. Nonetheless, despite differences in methods, both groups have refrained from denouncing or criticising the other and provided tacit support. The principle was the "Do Not Split" praxis, which was aimed to promote mutual respect for different views within the same protest movement.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: The moderate group participated in different capacities. The peaceful group held mass rallies, and engaged in other forms of protest such as hunger strikes, forming human chains, launching petitions, labour strikes, and class boycotts. Lennon Walls were set up in various neighbourhoods to spread messages of support and display protest art. Protesters had set up pop-up stores that sold cheap protest gadgets, provided undercover clinics for young activists, and crowdfunded to help people in need of medical or legal assistance.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: To raise awareness of their cause and to keep citizens informed, artists supporting the protest created protest art and derivative works. Social media platforms were used to deliver information about the protests to raise awareness to users abroad and circulate images of police brutality. Protesters held "civil press conferences" to counter press conferences by police and the government. AirDrop was used to broadcast anti-extradition bill information to the public and mainland tourists. A protest anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong", was composed, its lyrics crowdsourced on the LIHKG online forum, and sung in flash protests in shopping centres. The Lady Liberty Hong Kong statue was also crowdfunded by citizens to commemorate the protests.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Protesters have attempted to gain international support. Activists organised and coordinated numerous rallies to this end. Joshua Wong, Denise Ho and several other democrats provided testimonies during the US congressional hearing for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. To increase the political pressure on China, they also advocated for the suspension of the United States–Hong Kong Policy Act, which grants Hong Kong's special status. Advertisements on the protesters' cause were financed by crowdfunding and placed in major international newspapers. At events, protesters waved the national flags of other countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, calling for their support.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Efforts were made to transform the protests into a long-lasting movement. Protesters have advocated a "Yellow Economic Circle". Supporters of the protesters labelled different establishments based on their political stance and chose to patronise only in businesses which are sympathetic to the movement, while boycotting businesses supporting or owned by mainland Chinese interests. Flash rallies were held in the central business districts as office workers used their lunch break to march on the street. The protests prompted various professions to set up labour unions that compete with pro-Beijing lobbies to pressure the government further. Newly elected District Council members put forward motions to condemn the police and used their power to assist the detained protesters.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Radical protesters adopted the "be water" strategy, inspired by Bruce Lee's philosophy, often moving in a fluid and agile fashion to confound and confuse the police. They often retreated when police arrived, only to re-emerge elsewhere. In addition, protesters adopted black bloc tactics to protect their identities. Frontliners' "full gear" consisted of umbrellas, face masks, hard hats and respirators to shield themselves from projectiles and teargas. Furthermore, protesters used laser pointers to distract police officers and interfere with the operation of their cameras. At protest scenes, protesters used hand gestures for nonverbal communication, and supplies were delivered via human chains. Different protesters adopted different roles. Some were "scouts" who shared real-time updates whenever they spotted the police, A mobile app was developed to allow crowdsourcing the location of police.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Starting in August 2019, radical protesters escalated the controversial use of violence and intimidation. They dug up paving bricks and threw them at police; others used petrol bombs, corrosive liquid and other projectiles against police. As a result of clashes, there were multiple reports of police injuries and the assault of officers throughout the protests. One officer was slashed in the neck with a box cutter, and a media liaison officer was shot in the leg with an arrow during the PolyU siege. Protesters also directed violence towards undercover officers suspected to be agents provocateurs. Several individuals were arrested for illegal possession of firearms or making homemade explosives.


title: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

text: Unlike other civil unrests, little random smashing and looting were observed, as protesters vandalised targets they believed embodied injustice. Corporations that protesters accused of being pro-Beijing and mainland Chinese companies were also vandalised, subject to arson or spray-painted. Protesters also directed violence at symbols of the government by vandalising government and pro-Beijing lawmakers' offices, and defacing symbols representing China. The MTR Corporation became a target of vandalism after protesters had accused the railway operator of kowtowing to pressure by Chinese media by closing several stations and not releasing the CCTV footage from the 2019 Prince Edward station incident amid fears that police may have beaten someone to death. Protesters also disrupted traffic by setting up roadblocks, damaging traffic lights, deflating the tires of buses, and throwing objects onto railway tracks. Protesters occasionally intimidated and assaulted mainlanders.