title: Laurie Strode

text: Laurie Strode's first literary appearance was in October 1979, in Curtis Richards' novelization of "Halloween", which largely follows the events of the film. She also appeared in the 1981 adaptation of "Halloween II" written by Jack Martin; it was published alongside the first film sequel, with the novel following the film events, with an additional victim, a reporter, added to the novel.


title: Laurie Strode

text: Laurie appears in the twist ending of the comic book "Halloween III: The Devil's Eyes". While examining Loomis' diaries in the hopes of finding out more about Michael Myers, an adult Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace are attacked by a person dressed as Michael. They unmask the figure to reveal Laurie Strode, who has taken on her brother's mantle. At the conclusion of the book, Laurie kills Tommy (losing an eye in the process) and is subsequently incarcerated in Smith's Grove, where Dr. Terence Wynn takes an interest in her. This story follows on from "Halloween H20", but is set in a non-canon timeline contradicted by the release of "Halloween: Resurrection".


title: Laurie Strode

text: The anthology one-shot comic "Halloween: 30 Years of Terror" includes a Laurie Strode storyline entitled "Visiting Hours". Set between "H20" and "Resurrection", it shows Laurie in the Grace Anderson Sanitarium, where she wonders how her life could have been if Michael hadn't found her in 1978. In this alternate universe, she lives a happy life in which her friends are still alive, but the memory of Michael invades her fantasy world and leaves her with nothing. Laurie concludes that "I can't even dream of a normal life without [Michael] killing it", and can do nothing but wait for her brother's inevitable "visit" to set her free. Laurie appears prominently in the comic book limited series "Halloween: The First Death of Laurie Strode"; set after "Halloween II", it depicts the events which led to her faking her death. In the novelization of Halloween Kills, the Shape views her as "She Who Will Not Die".


title: Laurie Strode

text: Strode made her video game debut with the 1983 Atari video game "Halloween". The game is rare to find, often being played on emulators. No characters from the films are specifically named, with the goal of the game focusing on the player, who is a babysitter, protecting children from a "homicidal maniac [who] has escaped from a mental institution". Laurie Strode was added as a playable character, alongside Michael Myers, in downloadable content for "Dead by Daylight" released in October 2016. Her biography states:


title: Laurie Strode

text: In 2019, NECA released an action figure based on her appearance in "Halloween" (2018). In 2020, NECA released a figure of Strode alongside Samuel Loomis based on their appearance in "Halloween II" (1981). The same year, Super7 released a reaction figure of her "Halloween II" appearance.


title: Laurie Strode

text: Curtis's manager submitted a photograph of her to the filmmakers who initially didn't want to cast her as they didn't believe her to embody the looks of Laurie, Annie, or Lynda (the virgin, the smart aleck, and the cheerleader). Her manager was persistent on the filmmakers meeting her. After a few meetings, she got cast in the role of the chaste Laurie. Curtis describes Laurie as a fulfilling character due to them being opposites — allowing her to act. In an interview, Carpenter admits that Curtis wasn't the first choice as he didn't know who she was at the time. He originally wanted to cast Anne Lockhart, the daughter of June Lockhart from "Lassie", as Laurie. Lockhart, however, had commitments to several other film and television projects. Debra Hill stated upon learning that Curtis was the daughter of "Psycho" star Janet Leigh, "I knew casting Jamie Lee would be great publicity for the film because her mother was in "Psycho"."


title: Laurie Strode

text: Laurie has been compared to the character of Sally Hardesty from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" by a variety of scholars. James Rose notes the parallels between Laurie and Sally, stating:


title: Laurie Strode

text: Italian magazine editor Stefano Lo Verme, wrote that the 23-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis was the undisputed "scream queen" of American horror in 1978. He compared Curtis' performance as Laurie to the performances of Sandra Peabody as Mari Collingwood in "The Last House on the Left" (1972) and Marilyn Burns as Sally in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974).


title: Davina McCall

text: Davina Lucy Pascale McCall (born 16 October 1967) is an English television presenter. She was the presenter of the reality show "Big Brother" during its run on Channel 4 between 2000 and 2010. She also hosted Channel 4's "Streetmate" (1998–2001, 2016), "The Million Pound Drop" (2010–2015), "Five Minutes to a Fortune" (2013), and "The Jump" (2014–2017), as well as ITV's "The Biggest Loser" (2011–2012), "Long Lost Family" (2011–present), and "This Time Next Year" (2016–2019). McCall was a regular co-presenter of the "Comic Relief" annual telethons from 2005 to 2015.


title: Davina McCall

text: From 2010 to 2014, McCall presented the Sky One dance competition show "Got to Dance". Since 2020, she has been a judge on the ITV musical competition show "The Masked Singer," and since 2021, a spin-off of the show, "The Masked Dancer".


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall was born on 16 October 1967 in Wimbledon, London, to a French mother, Florence (née Hennion) and an English father, Andrew McCall, a graphic designer and events organiser for Portsmouth Harbour Authority. At the age of three she went to live with her paternal grandparents in Surrey after the break-up of her parents' marriage.


title: Davina McCall

text: Her mother Florence—whom McCall has described as something of a "wild child" and later, specifically as "an alcoholic"—returned to Paris, and McCall saw her only when on holidays.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall attended St Catherine's School, Bramley near Guildford, Surrey and Godolphin and Latymer Girls School, an independent school in Hammersmith, West London. At secondary level, McCall studied for nine O levels and two A levels.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall's first career was as a singer, and she had been performing in a band, Lazy Bear, while still at school. By age 19, she had decided to pursue a professional career as a solo classical artist, and briefly commenced classical vocal coaching.


title: Davina McCall

text: Dissatisfied with her lack of success in the music industry, McCall gave up singing and took a job at Models 1 on the men's desk as a booker. Later she ran a restaurant for two years before a brief spell in Paris as a "Moulin Rouge"-style cabaret performer. On her return to London she worked on the nightclub scene as a hostess. Work in this period also included an appearance as a dancer in the video for the 1991 Kylie Minogue single "Word Is Out", wearing a striped sweater and beret in a nod to her French ancestry.


title: Davina McCall

text: In 1994, McCall was hired as a presenter on Ray Cokes' "Most Wanted" on MTV Europe. She then presented "Hitlist UK". In 1995, she went on to host the ITV late night game show "God's Gift".


title: Davina McCall

text: In 1998, McCall hosted cult dating show "Streetmate" in which she toured the country meeting single people and matching them up.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall was chosen as the presenter of the inaugural series of "Big Brother", in which ten housemates entered a sealed house for up to nine weeks and their every move was filmed and then broadcast as a daily highlights television show. McCall hosted the weekly live eviction show, where one contestant would be removed from the house, until the last housemate became the winner. McCall also hosted the celebrity version "Celebrity Big Brother", the first series of which ran for eight days in March 2001.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall's performance on the final night of the sixth series in 2005 attracted press attention and some complaints for her treatment of housemate Makosi Musambasi. In December 2007, McCall presented a New Year's edition of "The Friday Night Project", entitled "The Friday Night New Year Project 2007".


title: Davina McCall

text: By the ninth series of "Big Brother" in 2008, McCall was earning a reported £85,000 per episode. Responding to tabloid claims before the series that she was about to quit "Big Brother" she said, "I'm not leaving ... They would have to kill me before I'd stop doing it". The ninth series proved to be a low point, however, becoming the least watched summer series in the show's history.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall became the regular presenter of the live "Big Brother" companion show "Big Brother's Big Mouth" for the tenth and eleventh series, after it was re-formatted into an hour-long show after the weekly live eviction show, having previously occupied the slot after each daily highlights show.


title: Davina McCall

text: With audience figures falling, Channel 4 decided that the eleventh series in summer 2010 would be the last "Big Brother" broadcast on their channel, although the show's future was in the hands of the rights holder Endemol. After presenting the seventh and final series of "Celebrity Big Brother" in January 2010, she fronted her eleventh and final regular edition over the summer. As a finale to the series on Channel 4, McCall also presented the "Ultimate Big Brother" show, which started immediately after the main series, and featured selected past celebrity and non-celebrity housemates.


title: Davina McCall

text: Having made the decision to leave the show after "Ultimate Big Brother", McCall confirmed she would not be returning as host when Channel 5 announced in April 2011 that they had secured the rights to relaunch "Big Brother" in summer 2011. She gave her backing to Emma Willis as her replacement, stating she still believed the show had potential. "Big Brother 2" and "Ultimate Big Brother" winner Brian Dowling was ultimately chosen to take over McCall's role as presenter of the Channel 5 version, though in 2013 Emma Willis became his successor as the new presenter.


title: Davina McCall

text: In between the final celebrity and regular editions of "Big Brother" on Channel 4, McCall began presenting a new game show, "The Million Pound Drop". The final episode aired on 20 March 2015, with the primetime series axed in 2016. On 14 July 2017, it was announced that the format would return as a daytime series under the name "The £100K Drop".


title: Davina McCall

text: From 2012 to 2016, McCall co-hosted charity telethon "Stand Up to Cancer" with Alan Carr, Christian Jessen and Adam Hills. As part of the 2014 telethon, McCall and Carr also hosted a companion series "Stars at Your Service".


title: Davina McCall

text: From January 2014 to March 2017, McCall presented reality competition "The Jump" which was broadcast live from Innsbruck and Kühtai in Austria. In 2016, McCall presented "Make My Body Better" on Channel 4.


title: Davina McCall

text: Davina co-presented the first series of "Prickly Heat" alongside Julian Clary on Sky1. She was replaced by Denise van Outen for further two series.


title: Davina McCall

text: On 20 December 2009, McCall began hosting reality programme "Got to Dance". On 24 October 2014, it was confirmed that the show had been axed after five series. In 2015, McCall presented "One Hundred and Eighty", a darts-based game show for Sky1.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall co-presented the six part series "Birthrace 2000" with Lisa Riley in 1999, which featured couples trying to have the first baby of the millennium.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall co-presented four series of "Don't Try This at Home" for ITV. Her co-presenters were Kate Thornton, Paul Hendy and Darren Day.


title: Davina McCall

text: When "Don't Try This at Home" ended in 2001, McCall continued with the channel, presenting series such as "" and "The Vault" (1st series) in 2002, "Reborn in the USA" in 2003 and "Love on a Saturday Night" in 2004. She also hosted the British Academy Television Awards 2004 for ITV and again in 2006.


title: Davina McCall

text: In 2011, McCall began hosting "The Biggest Loser" and "Long Lost Family". After just two series, it was announced that "The Biggest Loser" had been axed by ITV in September 2012. "Long Lost Family", however, is still being broadcast on the channel, with McCall and Nicky Campbell as hosts.


title: Davina McCall

text: In 2013, McCall presented "Stepping Out" which was seen as a rival to BBC One's "Strictly Come Dancing".


title: Davina McCall

text: In 2016, Davina presented a four-part factual series for ITV called "Davina McCall: Life at the Extreme". From 2016 to 2019, she has presented three series of "This Time Next Year" for the channel.


title: Davina McCall

text: In January 2017, McCall guest presented three episodes of "This Morning" alongside Phillip Schofield. She returned to guest present an episode in February 2018 with Ore Oduba.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall guest presented five episodes of "The Nightly Show" in March 2017. In 2018, she was the host of "A&E Live", a three part series to commemorate 70 years of the NHS. On 9 September 2019, McCall was announced as a judge for "The Masked Singer", the UK version of the international music game show "Masked Singer". Series 1 aired in January 2020, and series 2 began airing in December 2020. On 4 March 2021, it was announced by ITV that McCall would be appearing as a judge on the brand new spin off show of "The Masked Singer UK, The Masked Dancer UK," which is set to air in spring 2021.


title: Davina McCall

text: During 2005, McCall presented "He's Having a Baby", where she followed and advised eight young men who were to become first-time fathers at various stages during the show's ten-week run. It received poor ratings.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall has been one of the co-presenters of the annual British charity telethons that are organised by Comic Relief on BBC One. Organised on an alternating comedy/sport theme and televised live in March, Red Nose Day has been co-hosted by McCall since 2005. She had previously presented or appeared on various related Comic Relief shows, including: "The Record Breaker" (1999), "Naked Red Nose Ground Force in Practice" and "Say Pants to Poverty" (2001), "The Big Hair Do" (2003) and "Comic Relief Does Fame Academy" (2005).


title: Davina McCall

text: From early 2006, McCall fronted her own prime-time chat show, "Davina". Receiving scathing reviews and with viewing figures falling to below half of the six million watching "The Bill" on ITV at the same time, the show was axed in April for not reaching expectations with McCall herself saying that the programme was "the worst mistake of her life".


title: Davina McCall

text: In 2001, McCall appeared with Ed Byrne, Tristan Gemmill and Tameka Empson as the title character in "Sam's Game", a Friends-style sitcom. Slammed by the critics, it aired just once. McCall has voiced the android Davina McCall in the 2005 "Doctor Who" episode "Bad Wolf", and in 2008 she played herself as both a human and a zombie in "Dead Set", a five-part horror parody of "Big Brother" set in the house.


title: Davina McCall

text: In documentary television, McCall has fronted "Let's Talk Sex" about sex education and how it is taught in the United Kingdom (which then had one of the countries of Europe with the highest teenage pregnancy levels). She also published a companion book to the series. McCall has also appeared in a video for schools called "Watch Over Me," talking about her drug addiction and peer pressure.


title: Davina McCall

text: In August 2014, McCall was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to "The Guardian" expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.


title: Davina McCall

text: In June 2000 McCall married her second husband Matthew Robertson, presenter of "Pet Rescue", at Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire. Together they had three children: two daughters, Holly and Tilly, and a son, Chester. In November 2017 the couple separated.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall's previous partners included family friend Eric Clapton. He also helped her when in her early 20s she developed a drug problem; it was only after overcoming this that she gained her own television show on MTV. She gave up smoking when she was 24.


title: Davina McCall

text: McCall's ancestry was examined for a 2009 episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?". With the help of historians Jean-Marc Berliere and Simon Kitson, McCall learned that she is the great-granddaughter of onetime Prefect of Police Célestin Hennion (1862–1915), and the great-great-great-granddaughter, on her father's side, of James Thomas Bedborough (1787–1860), a stonemason, councillor, Mayor, property developer and entrepreneur, who worked on Windsor Castle and Upton Park in Slough. Bedborough was said to be an illegitimate son of George IV according to a story told by McCall's grandmother, but this was neither proved nor disproved on the show.


title: Davina McCall

text: Participants in the programme included Françoise Hennion (Hennion's granddaughter and McCall's mother's cousin) and Pierre, Hennion's son and McCall's grandfather. Pierre gave McCall his father's Royal Victorian Order medal. McCall met Alfred Dreyfus's great-granddaughter, Yael Ruiz, after learning of the part her ancestor Célestin Hennion played in the Dreyfus affair.


title: Davina McCall

text: In February 2014, McCall undertook a BT Sport Relief challenge called 'Davina – Beyond Breaking Point', seven days of either running, swimming or cycling across the UK to raise money for the UK charity Sport Relief. This challenge was filmed by the BBC as a one-off 60-minute documentary which aired on 20 March 2014 at 21:00 on BBC One. During the live telethon, it was announced that McCall had raised over £2.2 million for Sport Relief 2014.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Calvin Kattar (born March 26, 1988) is an American professional mixed martial artist. He currently competes in the Featherweight division in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). A professional competitor since 2007, Kattar formerly competed for EliteXC. As of November 8, 2022, he is #7 in the UFC featherweight rankings.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: The son of James and Sandra Kattar, Calvin was born and raised in Methuen, Massachusetts. He has two brothers and a sister. After initiating in the sport in ninth grade, Kattar was a standout wrestler at Methuen High School, being ranked as high as eighth in the state (160 pounds) and placing fifth at the Division I MIAA state championships as a senior in 2006. After graduating, he was unsure whether he should wrestle in college or not, and ended up opting to pursue a career in mixed martial arts. He went on to earn an associate degree at Middlesex Community College. In an interview, Kattar expressed that he got a chance to train with Nick and Nate Diaz when he was 19 years old, and how that influenced his way of training, stating:


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar won eight consecutive bouts and was unbeaten in over seven years competing on the regional circuit primarily in his native New England prior to his UFC career.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar made his UFC debut replacing Choi Doo-ho against Andre Fili on July 29, 2017 at UFC 214. Kattar won the fight by unanimous decision.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced undefeated prospect Shane Burgos on January 20, 2018 at UFC 220. Kattar won the fight via technical knock out in round three. The fight was awarded the Fight of the Night bonus.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced promotional newcomer Chris Fishgold on October 27, 2018 at UFC Fight Night 138. He won the fight via technical knockout in the first round. By the bout, Kattar fulfilled his first four-fight contract with the UFC.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced Ricardo Lamas at UFC 238 on June 8, 2019. He won the fight via knockout in the first round.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar was scheduled to face Zabit Magomedsharipov on October 18, 2019 at UFC on ESPN 6. However, Magomedsharipov was removed from the card due to injury on September 13 and the pairing was rescheduled for the following month at UFC on ESPN+ 21. He lost the fight via unanimous decision. This fight earned him the "Fight of the Night" award.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar was scheduled to face Jeremy Stephens on April 18, 2020 at UFC 249. However, on April 9, Dana White, the president of UFC announced that this event was postponed and the bout eventually took place on May 9, 2020. At the weigh-ins on May 8, Stephens missed weight, weighing in at 150.5 pounds, 4.5 pounds over the non-title featherweight limit. As a result, the bout proceeded as a catchweight bout and Stephens was fined 20% of his purse which went to Kattar. Kattar won the fight via technical knockout in round two.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: The first bout of his new six-fight contract came against Dan Ige on July 16, 2020 at . Kattar won the fight via by unanimous decision.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Next, Kattar faced former UFC Featherweight Champion Max Holloway, while headlining UFC on ABC 1 on January 16, 2021. In a one-sided fight where Kattar suffered plenty of physical trauma due to Holloway's strikes, which set multiple UFC records, he was defeated by unanimous decision. Despite being a one-sided fight, both competitors earned the "Fight of the Night award" as Kattar was able to land powerful strikes of his own, despite all the damage he received.""


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced Giga Chikadze on January 15, 2022 at UFC on ESPN 32. He won the fight via unanimous decision after knocking down and almost finishing Chikadze in the final seconds of the bout. This fight earned him the Fight of the Night award.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced Josh Emmett on June 18, 2022 in the main event at UFC on ESPN 37. He lost the close bout via split decision. 14 of 19 MMA media outlets scored the bout in favor of Kattar. This fight earned him his third consecutive Fight of the Night award.


title: Calvin Kattar

text: Kattar faced Arnold Allen on October 29, 2022 at UFC Fight Night 213, losing via technical knockout following a knee injury.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Prostitution in Japan has existed throughout the country's history. While the Prostitution Prevention Law of 1956 states that "No person may either do prostitution or become the customer of it", loopholes, liberal interpretations and a loose enforcement of the law have allowed the Japanese sex industry to prosper and earn an estimated 2.3 trillion yen ($24 billion) per year.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Sex trade and sex services may be referred to as , which also means "manners", "customs" or "public morals".


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Since Japanese law defines prostitution as "intercourse with an unspecified person in exchange for payment", most services offer specifically non-coital services, such as conversation, dancing or bathing, sometimes accompanied by sexual acts that legally are not defined as "intercourse", in order to remain legal.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: This practice later continued among visitors from "the Western regions", mainly European traders who often came with their South Asian lascar crew (in addition to African crew members in some cases). This began with the arrival of Portuguese ships to Japan in the 1540s, when the local Japanese people assumed that the Portuguese were from , the ancient Chinese name (and later Japanese name) for the Indian subcontinent, and thus assumed that Christianity was a new Indian religion. These mistaken assumptions were due to the Indian state of Goa being a central base for the Portuguese East India Company at the time, and due to a significant portion of the crew on Portuguese ships being Indian Christians.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: More than hundreds of Japanese people, especially women, were sold as slaves. Portuguese visitors and their South Asian and African crew members (or slaves) often engaged in slavery in Japan. They bought or captured young Japanese women and girls, who were either used as sexual slaves on their ships or taken to Macau and other Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and India, where there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders in Goa by the early 17th century. Anti-Portuguese propaganda and exaggerations were actively promoted by the Japanese, particularly with regards to the Portuguese purchases of Japanese women for sexual purposes.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: In 1505, syphilis started to appear in Japan, likely because of Japanese prostitutes having sex with Chinese sailors. In Sakai and Hakata ports, Japanese brothels had already been patronized by Chinese visitors far before Europeans came to Japan. When the Europeans () came to Japan, they too patronized Japanese prostitutes. Traders of the various European East India Companies, including those of the Dutch and British, engaged the services of prostitutes while visiting or staying in Japan.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: In 1617, the Tokugawa Shogunate issued an order restricting prostitution to certain areas on the outskirts of cities, known as . The most famous of these were Yoshiwara in Edo (present-day Tokyo), Shinmachi in Osaka, and Shimabara in Kyoto.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Pleasure quarters were walled and guarded for taxation and access control. Prostitutes and courtesans were licensed as and ranked according to an elaborate hierarchy, with and later at the apex. The women were not allowed outside of the walls except to visit dying relatives and, once a year, for (viewing cherry blossoms).


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Japanese women engaged in sexual relations with foreign men like Chinese and Europeans at port cities like Hirado. In 1609, a post was set up in Hirado by the Dutch East India Company. Unmarried women could be rented from their parents for a few months or weeks by foreign sailors who were stranded there during typhoons. After several summers, she would retire from prostitution and then marry after getting a trousseau from the money she earned from sex work. In some cases, Japanese women would marry the foreign traders or enter into a long-term relationship as their permanent concubine.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: How Japanese women and foreign men engaged in sexual relations varied by situation and could lead to some strange cases. Once, two Japanese women bore daughters at the same time to Cornelis van Nijenroode, a Dutch merchant who was made the trading posts' chief factor in 1623. Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga), a Chinese Ming loyalist that would eventually become Prince of Yanping, was born from relations between a Japanese woman and the Chinese Hokkien trader Zheng Zhilong. One of Tokugawa Ieyasu's key advisors, Englishman William Adams, was married to the daughter of the Honshu headman and also had a Japanese concubine while living in Hirado.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Chinese men visiting Edo period Japan also patronized Japanese sex workers in brothels designated for them. Japanese women designated for Chinese male customers were known as , while Japanese women designated for Dutch men at Dejima were known as , and Japanese women servicing Japanese men were called . was the term used for all Japanese women serving foreigners in sexual capacities during the Meiji period. The price of the girls offered to Japanese and Chinese customers was significantly lower than the price of the girls designated for Dutch customers. This disparity was likely not noticed by the Dutch, as their traders were confined to the designated post of Dejima where prostitutes were sent. Many prostitutes were sent to Dejima after they serviced the Chinese at Maruyama; they were paid for by the Commissioners for Victualing.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Initially, Chinese men were much less restricted than the Dutch were at Dejima. They could live all over Nagasaki and, from 1635, could have sex with both the Japanese prostitutes and ordinary Japanese women, unlike Dutch men who were limited to prostitutes. Eventually, however, the rules that applied to Dutch were applied to the Chinese. They were put into Chinese settlements like Jūzenji-mura and Tōjun-yashiki in 1688 and were allowed only to have sex with the prostitutes sent to them. Some Chinese men developed long term romances with the Japanese girls: Chinese Suzhou (Su-chou) merchant Chen Renxie (Ch'ên Jên-hsieh) and Japanese Azuyama woman Renzan committed suicide together in 1789 as a result of a lover's pact; the Chinese He Minde (Ho Min-tê) pledged eternal love in Yoriai-machi with the Chikugoya Japanese girl Towa, who later killed herself to join him in death when he was executed for forgery in 1690.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The Chinese men were very generous with their gifts to Japanese women and were in turn praised for it. This long-term patronage was possible because the Japanese prostitutes would violate laws stating that they were only permitted each to spend one night in the Chinese settlement. After reporting to the guards by the settlement gates in the morning that they were leaving, the women would then retrace their steps and return inside.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Under the laws and regulations of the Shōtoku era (1711–1716), children of Japanese women and foreign (either Dutch or Chinese) men born in Maruyama were considered mixed race. These children had to stay in Japan and could not be taken back to their father's country, but their fathers could fund their education. This happened quite frequently. For example, Nanking Chinese captain Huang Zheqing (Huang Chê-ch'ing) fathered a son named Kimpachi with Yakumo, a Japanese woman from Iwataya. When he came back to Nagasaki in 1723 at the age of 71, he requested a permit from the Chief Administrator's Office of Nagasaki to trade goods to create a fund for his son to live on for all his life.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Aspects of 17th- and 18th-century Chinese culture were introduced to Japan because of these relations. Chinese dishes and other delicacies became mainstream favourites because of Chinese men teaching Japanese prostitutes how to make them. In the Genroku era (1688-1704), a Chinese man instructed the Japanese prostitute Ume how to make , a soft sweet made from sugar and rice flour that is shaped like a plum blossom. Her name also meant plum blossom.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The Japanese prostitutes of Maruyama who served the Chinese men in Nagasaki were taught many songs and dances of Chinese origin. For example, the Kagetsu Entertainment (Kagetsu yokyō) booklet contained information about songs the Chinese men taught to their Japanese lovers, describing how they were sung in Tōsō-on with instruments like (two-stringed violin), (seven-stringed dulcimer), and (lute). The () were used to play Kyūrenhwan songs. The Kankan-odori dance accompanied one of these songs which spread in Edo and Kyoto as it gained fame. Exhibitions of the original Chinese style dance were also arranged by Takahashi Kageyasu (1785–1829), the court astronomer of the Shogunate, to be performed in Edo. He sent for the Nagasaki officials managing the Chinese settlements and requested that the geisha come to perform.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The opening of Japan and the subsequent flood of Western influences into Japan brought about a series of changes in the Meiji period. Japanese novelists, notably Higuchi Ichiyō, started to draw attention to the confinement and squalid existence of the lower-class prostitutes in the red-light districts. In 1872, the María Luz Incident led Government of Meiji Japan to make a new legislation, emancipating outcasts, prostitutes and other forms of bonded labor in Japan. The emancipating law for prostitution was named . In 1900, the Japanese Government promulgated Ordinance No. 44, , restricting the labor conditions of prostitution. The restriction neither reduced the total number of prostitution nor granted more liberty to women. Instead, prostitution thrived under the Meiji government. The name was to describe Japan during the Meiji Period. Due to the development of the modern transportation system, the demand and the supply of prostitution increased, and the population of the female population drastically increased. The government, therefore, with the legislation, could legally collect taxation from prostitution. Rather than improving human rights or liberty, the legislation intended to facilitate government revenue. The prostitution industry contributed a large part of government revenue from the late Tokugawa period to the Meiji period.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Immediately after World War II, the Recreation and Amusement Association was formed by Naruhiko Higashikuni's government to organize brothels to serve the Allied armed forces occupying Japan. On 19 August 1945, the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish a prostitution service for Allied soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the Japanese race. This prostitution system was similar to the comfort system, because the Japanese police force was responsible for mobilizing the women to serve in these stations similarly to the way that Japanese Military during the Pacific War mobilized women. The police forces mobilized both licensed and unlicensed prostitutes to serve in these camps. The official declaration stated that "Through the sacrifice of thousands of 'Okichis' of the Shōwa era, we shall construct a dike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future." Such clubs were soon established by cabinet councilor Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: SCAP abolished the licensed prostitution system (including the RAA) in 1946, which led to the so-called system, under which licensed nightlife establishments offered sexual services under the guise of being an ordinary club or cafe. Local police authorities traditionally regulated the location of such establishments by drawing red lines on a map. In other areas, so-called "blue line" establishments offered sexual services under the guise of being restaurants, bars or other less strictly-regulated establishments. In Tokyo, the best-known "red line" districts were Yoshiwara and Shinjuku 2-chome, while the best-known "blue line" district was Kabuki-cho.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: In 1947, Imperial Ordinance No. 9 punished persons for enticing women to act as prostitutes, but prostitution itself remained legal. Several bills were introduced in the Diet to add further legal penalties for soliciting prostitutes but were not passed due to disputes over the appropriate extent of punishment.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: On 24 May 1956, the Diet of Japan passed the Anti-Prostitution Law, which came into force in April 1958. The Anti-Prostitution Law criminalized the act of committing sexual intercourse in exchange for actual or promised compensation. This eliminated the "red line" and "blue line" systems and allowed a number of paid sexual services to continue under "sexual entertainment" regulations, such as "soaplands" and "fashion health" parlors.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: In 2013, Toru Hashimoto, co-leads the Japan Restoration Party proposed "There are places where people can legally release their sexual energy in Japan", and "Unless they make use of these facilities, it will be difficult to control the sexual energies of the wild Marines." The U.S. Department of State later criticized Hashimoto's remarks.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The Shinto faith does not regard sex as a taboo. During the Kamakura period, many shrines and temples, which provided for , fell into bankruptcy. Some started travelling in search of livelihood and came to be known as . While primarily provided religious services, they were also widely associated with prostitution. However, no religious reasons for prostitution are known, and hence the act might be unrelated to sacred prostitution.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Buddhist teachings regarding sex are quite reserved: "It is true to say that Buddhism, in keeping with the principle of the Middle Way, would advocate neither extreme puritanism nor extreme permissiveness." Buddhism has rules and protocols for those that are to live the Buddhist principles in the monasteries and the secular part of the [Shanga]. For the Buddhist monks or nuns, chastity is mandatory since they live on the premise of getting rid of any feelings of attachment. Their way of living is regulated by very strict rules concerning behavior and this includes sex.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: As for the secular Buddhists, there are no specific rules to be followed about sex; although any kind of abuse is regarded as "misconduct".


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Article 3 of the of 1956 states that "No person may either do prostitution or become the customer of it", but no judicial penalty is defined for this act. Instead, the following are prohibited on pain of penalty: soliciting for purposes of prostitution, procuring a person for prostitution, coercing a person into prostitution, receiving compensation from the prostitution of others, inducing a person to be a prostitute by paying an "advance", concluding a contract for making a person a prostitute, furnishing a place for prostitution, engaging in the business of making a person a prostitute, and the furnishing of funds for prostitution.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The definition of prostitution is strictly limited to coitus with an "unspecified person". This means sale of numerous acts such as oral sex, anal sex, mammary intercourse and other non-coital sex acts are legal. Paid sex between "specified persons" (acquaintances) is not prohibited. Soaplands exploit this by providing a massage, during which the prostitute and client become "acquainted", as a preliminary to sexual services.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The , also known as the "Law to Regulate Adult Entertainment Businesses", amended in 1985, 1999 and 2005, regulates these businesses.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: The sex industry in Japan uses a variety of names. Soaplands are bath houses where customers are soaped up and serviced by staff. Fashion health shops and pink salons are notionally massage or esthetic treatment parlors; image clubs are themed versions of the same. Call girls operate via delivery health services. Freelancers can get in contact with potential customers via deai sites (Internet dating sites).


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Tokyo is the business and trade center of Japan, and therefore also a thriving market for sex work of all varieties. Kabukicho, an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, measures only 0.34 km, and has approximately 3,500 sex parlors, strip theaters, peep shows, "soaplands", 'lovers' banks, porno shops, sex telephone clubs, karaoke bars and clubs, etc.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: It was reported in 2003 that as many as 150,000 non-Japanese women were then involved in prostitution in Japan. According to National Police Agency records, out of 50 non-Japanese people arrested for prostitution offences in 2013, 31 (62%) were mainland Chinese, 13 (26%) were Koreans and 4 (8%) were Thai.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: According to National Police Agency records, out of 224 non-Japanese people arrested for prostitution offences in 2018, 160 (71%) were mainland Chinese, 19 (8%) were Thai.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Many businesses related to prostitution voluntarily (i.e., despite there being no regulation requiring it) ban entry to foreigners, including tourists, people who cannot speak Japanese, and even people who do not have Asian traits. However in recent years, several businesses have been set up to specifically cater to the foreigner market.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Japan is a destination, source, and transit country for men, women and children subjected to sex trafficking. Men, women, and children from Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia, East Europe, South America, and Africa travel to Japan for employment or fraudulent marriage and are subjected to sex trafficking. Traffickers use fraudulent marriages between foreign women and Japanese men to facilitate the entry of women into Japan for forced prostitution in bars, clubs, brothels, and massage parlors. Traffickers keep victims in forced prostitution using debt bondage, threats of violence or deportation, blackmail, passport retention, and other psychologically coercive methods. Brothel operators sometimes arbitrarily impose "fines" on victims for alleged misbehavior as a tactic to extend their indebtedness. Trafficking victims reportedly transit Japan before being exploited in onward destinations, including East Asia and North America.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: Japanese citizens, particularly runaway teenage girls, are also subjected to sex trafficking. , or "compensated dating", and variants of the JK business continue to facilitate the sex trafficking of Japanese children. Highly organized prostitution networks target vulnerable Japanese women and girls—often living in poverty or with cognitive disabilities—in public spaces such as subways, popular youth hangouts, schools, and online, and subject them to sex trafficking. Private Japanese immigration brokers help Japanese-Filipino children and their Filipina mothers move to Japan and acquire citizenship for a significant fee, which the mothers often incur large debts to pay; upon arrival, some of these women and their children are subjected to sex trafficking to pay off the debts.


title: Prostitution in Japan

text: , the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons ranks Japan as a 'Tier 2' country.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: Girls Gone Wild (GGW) is an adult entertainment franchise created by Joe Francis in 1997, who occasionally appears as the host of the videos.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: Girls Gone Wild was known for its early use of direct-response marketing techniques, including its late-night infomercials that began airing in 1997. The videos typically involve camera crews at party locations engaging young college-aged women who expose their bodies or act "wild", especially during Spring break. Since 2008, the Girls Gone Wild products have been sold primarily through their website as streaming videos, downloads, and DVDs.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: The first Girls Gone Wild film was released in 1997. In 2001 the company sold 4.5 million videos and DVDs. By the end of 2002, the company had produced 83 different titles and had begun airing 30-minute infomercials on E! Entertainment Television, Fox Sports Net, BET, Comedy Central, Tech TV, Style, and all other major U.S. networks. The infomercials targeted a late-night channel-surfing demographic that Joe Francis had identified in the late 1990s. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Girls Gone Wild spent more than $21 million in advertising in 2003, becoming the largest advertiser for programs on the E! channel. In 2008, Francis' net worth was approximately $150 million.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: Instances of Girls Gone Wild in popular culture include the appearance of Eminem and Snoop Dogg in the company's videos, as well as various references and parodies of the show in popular television series and movies. MGM announced in 2002 that it would release a feature-length film based on the Girls Gone Wild concept.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: Most Girls Gone Wild videos follow a common formula in which a film crew interacts with a large crowd of people either at a party, club, or other event. Women willingly take off their clothes, engage in sexual activities, or participate in wet T-shirt contests. Compensation for taking part in a Girls Gone Wild video often consists of a free hat, T-shirt, or money. Occasionally, participants are invited to be filmed on a Girls Gone Wild tour bus.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: At its inception, Girls Gone Wild marketed its product, namely videos, through direct-distribution channels such as infomercials, pay-per-view, and video on demand. This distribution was followed in 2008 by the launch of a Girls Gone Wild magazine, a clothing line, and a compilation record released on Jive Records.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In September 2005, Girls Gone Wild announced that it would donate all proceeds of Mardi Gras–themed DVDs and videos to the Red Cross. Proceeds from the video sales, which included a title featuring Snoop Dogg, were intended to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In 2004, Girls Gone Wild began soliciting men for participation in their videos. "Guys Gone Wild" was a video series and male analogue of "Girls Gone Wild" targeted at young women. These video tapes and DVDs featured much the same content as the "Girls" equivalent, only instead showing young men performing for the camera—e.g., in the shower, playing football naked, etc.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In an article, Bill Horn, spokesman for Mantra Entertainment which produced the videos, notes a gender-related double standard in these videos. In the "Girls Gone Wild" series, sometimes the young women kiss, while the guys' series does not have that feature. Horn explains: "Let's face it, there's a double standard when it comes to guy-on-guy as opposed to girl-on-girl. It's sexy to see two girls making out. It's not considered sexy to see two guys making out. That's just the reality, and, we were there to capture the reality."


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: The hour-long "Guys Gone Wild" productions featured women camera operators who encouraged men to get naked and perform strip teases.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Girls Gone Wild alleging that the company failed to notify customers when they purchased subscriptions under a continuity program, rather than single DVDs. In 2004, GGW settled for $1.1 million and agreed to disclose all terms and get consent for recurring charges.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In 2006, Girls Gone Wild marketer MRA Holdings pleaded guilty to charges for failing to record the ages of its subjects 2002 and 2003. The parties agreed to pay $2.1 million in restitution and fines.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In 2008, Ashley Dupré filed against Joe Francis and other defendants claiming that they filmed her without consent. Dupré dropped the suit after Francis released footage of her consent.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In 2008, a Missouri woman claimed that she was filmed without consent when a Girls Gone Wild contractor removed her halter top at a St. Louis bar. A jury found that she consented. On re-trial, a judge awarded the woman $5.77 million after the defense failed to show at court. On appeal, the judge upheld the verdict.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: In March 2008, four women claimed that they suffered emotional distress by being shown in Girls Gone Wild film. In April 2011, an all-female jury declined to award damages to the plaintiffs. However, in January 2015, Francis agreed to settle a separate 2003 lawsuit which involved allegations of him taping the exposed breasts of underage girls as part of Girls Gone Wild content. The 2015 civil settlement also involved Francis agreeing to serve 336 days in jail after accepting a no contest plea to criminal charges of child abuse and prostitution.


title: Girls Gone Wild (franchise)

text: An episode of the TNT true crime anthology series "Rich & Shameless" called "Girls Gone Wild Exposed" aired on TNT on April 23, 2022, and featured accounts from alleged victims of Joe Francis who were employed for Girls Gone Wild.


title: Perl

text: Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was officially changed to Raku in October 2019.


title: Perl

text: Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Raku, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, eventually evolved into a separate language. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from each other.


title: Perl

text: The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, sh, AWK, and sed; They provide text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities.


title: Perl

text: In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for system administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics, and other applications, such as for GUIs. It has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" because of its flexibility and power, and also what some consider ugliness due to its utilization of more special characters than many other languages. In 1998, it was also referred to as the "duct tape that holds the Internet together," in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance.


title: Perl

text: Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for a given algorithm can be short and highly compressible.


title: Perl

text: Perl was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations. Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name.


title: Perl

text: When referring to the language, the name is capitalized: "Perl". When referring to the program itself, the name is uncapitalized ("perl") because most Unix-like file systems are case-sensitive. Before the release of the first edition of "Programming Perl", it was common to refer to the language as "perl". Randal L. Schwartz, however, capitalized the language's name in the book to make it stand out better when typeset. This case distinction was subsequently documented as canonical.


title: Perl

text: The name is occasionally expanded as a backronym: "Practical Extraction and Report Language" and Wall's own "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" which is in the manual page for perl.


title: Perl

text: Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys, and version 1.0 on December 18, 1987. The language expanded rapidly over the next few years. The original purpose of Wall's general-purpose language was to simplify text manipulation.


title: Perl

text: Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a better regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for binary data streams.


title: Perl

text: Originally, the only documentation for Perl was a single lengthy man page. In 1991, "Programming Perl", known to many Perl programmers as the "Camel Book" because of its cover, was published and became the "de facto" reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a major change in the language but to identify the version that was well documented by the book.


title: Perl

text: Perl 4 went through a series of maintenance releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993, whereupon Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5. Initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The "perl5-porters" mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms. It remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and it added many new features to the language, including objects, references, lexical (my) variables, and modules. Importantly, modules provided a mechanism for extending the language without modifying the interpreter. This allowed the core interpreter to stabilize, even as it enabled ordinary Perl programmers to add new language features. Perl 5 has been in active development since then.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.001 was released on March 13, 1995. Perl 5.002 was released on February 29, 1996 with the new prototypes feature. This allowed module authors to make subroutines that behaved like Perl builtins. Perl 5.003 was released June 25, 1996, as a security release.


title: Perl

text: One of the most important events in Perl 5 history took place outside of the language proper and was a consequence of its module support. On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules; as of December 2022, it carries over 211,850 modules in 43,865 distributions, written by more than 14,324 authors, and is mirrored worldwide at more than 245 locations.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.004 was released on May 15, 1997, and included, among other things, the UNIVERSAL package, giving Perl a base object from which all classes were automatically derived and the ability to require versions of modules. Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998. This release included several enhancements to the regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the codice_1 modules, the codice_2 regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, and added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, support for files over 2 GiB, and the "our" keyword. When developing Perl 5.6, the decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers.


title: Perl

text: In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community. The process resulted in 361 RFC (request for comments) documents that were to be used in guiding development of Perl 6. In 2001, work began on the "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl. They were presented as a digest of the RFCs, rather than a formal document. At this point, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, and had nearly yearly updates since then. Perl 5.8 improved Unicode support, added a new I/O implementation, added a new thread implementation, improved numeric accuracy, and added several new modules. As of 2013 this version still remains the most popular version of Perl and is used by Red Hat 5, Suse 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31 and AIX 5


title: Perl

text: In 2004, work began on the "Synopses"documents that originally summarized the Apocalypses, but which became the specification for the Perl 6 language. In February 2005, Audrey Tang began work on Pugs, a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell. This was the first concerted effort toward making Perl 6 a reality. This effort stalled in 2006.


title: Perl

text: PONIE is an acronym for Perl On New Internal Engine. The PONIE Project existed from 2003 until 2006 and was to be a bridge between Perl 5 and Perl 6. It was an effort to rewrite the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine. The goal was to ensure the future of the millions of lines of Perl 5 code at thousands of companies around the world. The PONIE project ended in 2006 and is no longer being actively developed. Some of the improvements made to the Perl 5 interpreter as part of PONIE were folded into that project.


title: Perl

text: On December 18, 2007, the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released. Perl 5.10.0 included notable new features, which brought it closer to Perl 6. These included a switch statement (called "given"/"when"), regular expressions updates, and the "smart match operator" (~~).


title: Perl

text: Around this same time, development began in earnest on another implementation of Perl 6 known as Rakudo Perl, developed in tandem with the Parrot virtual machine. As of November 2009, Rakudo Perl has had regular monthly releases and now is the most complete implementation of Perl 6.


title: Perl

text: A major change in the development process of Perl 5 occurred with Perl 5.11; the development community has switched to a monthly release cycle of development releases, with a yearly schedule of stable releases. By that plan, bugfix point releases will follow the stable releases every three months.


title: Perl

text: On April 12, 2010, Perl 5.12.0 was released. Notable core enhancements include new codice_3 syntax, the Yada Yada operator (intended to mark placeholder code that is not yet implemented), implicit strictures, full Y2038 compliance, regex conversion overloading, DTrace support, and Unicode 5.2.


title: Perl

text: On May 20, 2012, Perl 5.16 was released. Notable new features include the ability to specify a given version of Perl that one wishes to emulate, allowing users to upgrade their version of Perl, but still run old scripts that would normally be incompatible. Perl 5.16 also updates the core to support Unicode 6.1.


title: Perl

text: On May 18, 2013, Perl 5.18 was released. Notable new features include the new dtrace hooks, lexical subs, more CORE:: subs, overhaul of the hash for security reasons, support for Unicode 6.2.


title: Perl

text: On May 27, 2014, Perl 5.20 was released. Notable new features include subroutine signatures, hash slices/new slice syntax, postfix dereferencing (experimental), Unicode 6.3, using consistent random number generator.


title: Perl

text: Some observers credit the release of Perl 5.10 with the start of the Modern Perl movement. In particular, this phrase describes a style of development that embraces the use of the CPAN, takes advantage of recent developments in the language, and is rigorous about creating high quality code. While the book "Modern Perl" may be the most visible standard-bearer of this idea, other groups such as the Enlightened Perl Organization have taken up the cause.


title: Perl

text: In late 2012 and 2013, several projects for alternative implementations for Perl 5 started: Perl5 in Perl6 by the Rakudo Perl team, ' by Stevan Little and friends, ' by the Perl11 team under Reini Urban, "" by , and "," a Kickstarter project led by Will Braswell and affiliated with the Perll11 project.


title: Perl

text: In June 2020, Perl 7 was announced as the successor to Perl 5. Perl 7 was to initially be based on Perl 5.32 with a release expected in first half of 2021, and release candidates sooner.


title: Perl

text: This plan was revised in May 2021, without any release timeframe or version of Perl 5 for use as a baseline specified. When Perl 7 is released, Perl 5 will go into long term maintenance. Supported Perl 5 versions however will continue to get important security and bug fixes.


title: Perl

text: "Programming Perl", published by O'Reilly Media, features a picture of a dromedary camel on the cover and is commonly called the "Camel Book". This image has become an unofficial symbol of Perl as well as a general hacker emblem, appearing on T-shirts and other clothing items.


title: Perl

text: O'Reilly owns the image as a trademark but licenses it for non-commercial use, requiring only an acknowledgement and a link to www.perl.com. Licensing for commercial use is decided on a case-by-case basis. O'Reilly also provides "Programming Republic of Perl" logos for non-commercial sites and "Powered by Perl" buttons for any site that uses Perl.


title: Perl

text: The Perl Foundation owns an alternative symbol, an onion, which it licenses to its subsidiaries, Perl Mongers, PerlMonks, Perl.org, and others. The symbol is a visual pun on pearl onion.


title: Perl

text: Sebastian Riedel, the creator of Mojolicious, created a logo depicting a raptor dinosaur, which is available under a CC-SA License, Version 4.0. The analogue of the raptor comes from a series of talks given by Matt S Trout beginning in 2010.


title: Perl

text: According to Wall, Perl has two slogans. The first is "There's more than one way to do it," commonly known as TMTOWTDI. The second slogan is "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible".


title: Perl

text: The overall structure of Perl derives broadly from C. Perl is procedural in nature, with variables, expressions, assignment statements, brace-delimited blocks, control structures, and subroutines.


title: Perl

text: Perl also takes features from shell programming. All variables are marked with leading sigils, which allow variables to be interpolated directly into strings. However, unlike the shell, Perl uses sigils on all accesses to variables, and unlike most other programming languages that use sigils, the sigil doesn't denote the type of the variable but the type of the expression. So for example, while an array is denoted by the sigil "@" (for example codice_4), an individual member of the array is denoted by the scalar sigil "$" (for example codice_5). Perl also has many built-in functions that provide tools often used in shell programming (although many of these tools are implemented by programs external to the shell) such as sorting, and calling operating system facilities.


title: Perl

text: Perl takes hashes ("associative arrays") from AWK and regular expressions from sed. These simplify many parsing, text-handling, and data-management tasks. Shared with Lisp is the implicit return of the last value in a block, and all statements are also expressions which can be used in larger expressions themselves.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5 added features that support complex data structures, first-class functions (that is, closures as values), and an object-oriented programming model. These include references, packages, class-based method dispatch, and lexically scoped variables, along with compiler directives (for example, the codice_6 pragma). A major additional feature introduced with Perl 5 was the ability to package code as reusable modules. Wall later stated that "The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core."


title: Perl

text: All versions of Perl do automatic data-typing and automatic memory management. The interpreter knows the type and storage requirements of every data object in the program; it allocates and frees storage for them as necessary using reference counting (so it cannot deallocate circular data structures without manual intervention). Legal type conversions — for example, conversions from number to string — are done automatically at run time; illegal type conversions are fatal errors.


title: Perl

text: The design of Perl can be understood as a response to three broad trends in the computer industry: falling hardware costs, rising labor costs, and improvements in compiler technology. Many earlier computer languages, such as Fortran and C, aimed to make efficient use of expensive computer hardware. In contrast, Perl was designed so that computer programmers could write programs more quickly and easily.


title: Perl

text: Perl has many features that ease the task of the programmer at the expense of greater CPU and memory requirements. These include automatic memory management; dynamic typing; strings, lists, and hashes; regular expressions; introspection; and an codice_7 function. Perl follows the theory of "no built-in limits," an idea similar to the Zero One Infinity rule.


title: Perl

text: Wall was trained as a linguist, and the design of Perl is very much informed by linguistic principles. Examples include Huffman coding (common constructions should be short), good end-weighting (the important information should come first), and a large collection of language primitives. Perl favors language constructs that are concise and natural for humans to write, even where they complicate the Perl interpreter.


title: Perl

text: Perl's syntax reflects the idea that "things that are different should look different." For example, scalars, arrays, and hashes have different leading sigils. Array indices and hash keys use different kinds of braces. Strings and regular expressions have different standard delimiters. This approach can be contrasted with a language such as Lisp, where the same basic syntax, composed of simple and universal symbolic expressions, is used for all purposes.


title: Perl

text: Perl does not enforce any particular programming paradigm (procedural, object-oriented, functional, or others) or even require the programmer to choose among them.


title: Perl

text: There is a broad practical bent to both the Perl language and the community and culture that surround it. The preface to "Programming Perl" begins: "Perl is a language for getting your job done." One consequence of this is that Perl is not a tidy language. It includes many features, tolerates exceptions to its rules, and employs heuristics to resolve syntactical ambiguities. Because of the forgiving nature of the compiler, bugs can sometimes be hard to find. Perl's function documentation remarks on the variant behavior of built-in functions in list and scalar contexts by saying, "In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency."


title: Perl

text: No written specification or standard for the Perl language exists for Perl versions through Perl 5, and there are no plans to create one for the current version of Perl. There has been only one implementation of the interpreter, and the language has evolved along with it. That interpreter, together with its functional tests, stands as a "de facto" specification of the language. Perl 6, however, started with a specification, and several projects aim to implement some or all of the specification.


title: Perl

text: Perl has many and varied applications, compounded by the availability of many standard and third-party modules.


title: Perl

text: Perl has chiefly been used to write CGI scripts: large projects written in Perl include cPanel, Slash, Bugzilla, RT, TWiki, and Movable Type; high-traffic websites that use Perl extensively include Priceline.com, Craigslist, IMDb, LiveJournal, DuckDuckGo, Slashdot and Ticketmaster.


title: Perl

text: It is also an optional component of the popular LAMP technology stack for Web development, in lieu of PHP or Python. Perl is used extensively as a system programming language in the Debian Linux distribution.


title: Perl

text: Perl is often used as a glue language, tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate, and for "data munging," that is, converting or processing large amounts of data for tasks such as creating reports. In fact, these strengths are intimately linked. The combination makes Perl a popular all-purpose language for system administrators, particularly because short programs, often called "one-liner programs," can be entered and run on a single command line.


title: Perl

text: Perl code can be made portable across Windows and Unix; such code is often used by suppliers of software (both COTS and bespoke) to simplify packaging and maintenance of software build- and deployment-scripts.


title: Perl

text: Perl is implemented as a core interpreter, written in C, together with a large collection of modules, written in Perl and C. , the interpreter is 150,000 lines of C code and compiles to a 1 MB executable on typical machine architectures. Alternatively, the interpreter can be compiled to a link library and embedded in other programs. There are nearly 500 modules in the distribution, comprising 200,000 lines of Perl and an additional 350,000 lines of C code (much of the C code in the modules consists of character encoding tables).


title: Perl

text: The interpreter has an object-oriented architecture. All of the elements of the Perl language—scalars, arrays, hashes, coderefs, file handles—are represented in the interpreter by C structs. Operations on these structs are defined by a large collection of macros, typedefs, and functions; these constitute the Perl C API. The Perl API can be bewildering to the uninitiated, but its entry points follow a consistent naming scheme, which provides guidance to those who use it.


title: Perl

text: The life of a Perl interpreter divides broadly into a compile phase and a run phase. In Perl, the phases are the major stages in the interpreter's life-cycle. Each interpreter goes through each phase only once, and the phases follow in a fixed sequence.


title: Perl

text: Most of what happens in Perl's compile phase is compilation, and most of what happens in Perl's run phase is execution, but there are significant exceptions. Perl makes important use of its capability to execute Perl code during the compile phase. Perl will also delay compilation into the run phase. The terms that indicate the kind of processing that is actually occurring at any moment are compile time and run time. Perl is in compile time at most points during the compile phase, but compile time may also be entered during the run phase. The compile time for code in a string argument passed to the codice_8 built-in occurs during the run phase. Perl is often in run time during the compile phase and spends most of the run phase in run time. Code in codice_9 blocks executes at run time but in the compile phase.


title: Perl

text: At compile time, the interpreter parses Perl code into a syntax tree. At run time, it executes the program by walking the tree. Text is parsed only once, and the syntax tree is subject to optimization before it is executed, so that execution is relatively efficient. Compile-time optimizations on the syntax tree include constant folding and context propagation, but peephole optimization is also performed.


title: Perl

text: Perl has a Turing-complete grammar because parsing can be affected by run-time code executed during the compile phase. Therefore, Perl cannot be parsed by a straight Lex/Yacc lexer/parser combination. Instead, the interpreter implements its own lexer, which coordinates with a modified GNU bison parser to resolve ambiguities in the language.


title: Perl

text: It is often said that "Only perl can parse Perl," meaning that only the Perl interpreter ("codice_10") can parse the Perl language ("Perl"), but even this is not, in general, true. Because the Perl interpreter can simulate a Turing machine during its compile phase, it would need to decide the halting problem in order to complete parsing in every case. It is a longstanding result that the halting problem is undecidable, and therefore not even Perl can always parse Perl. Perl makes the unusual choice of giving the user access to its full programming power in its own compile phase. The cost in terms of theoretical purity is high, but practical inconvenience seems to be rare.


title: Perl

text: Other programs that undertake to parse Perl, such as source-code analyzers and auto-indenters, have to contend not only with ambiguous syntactic constructs but also with the undecidability of Perl parsing in the general case. Adam Kennedy's PPI project focused on parsing Perl code as a document (retaining its integrity as a document), instead of parsing Perl as executable code (that not even Perl itself can always do). It was Kennedy who first conjectured that "parsing Perl suffers from the 'halting problem'," which was later proved.


title: Perl

text: Perl is distributed with over 250,000 functional tests for core Perl language and over 250,000 functional tests for core modules. These run as part of the normal build process and extensively exercise the interpreter and its core modules. Perl developers rely on the functional tests to ensure that changes to the interpreter do not introduce software bugs; additionally, Perl users who see that the interpreter passes its functional tests on their system can have a high degree of confidence that it is working properly.


title: Perl

text: Perl is dual licensed under both the Artistic License 1.0 and the GNU General Public License. Distributions are available for most operating systems. It is particularly prevalent on Unix and Unix-like systems, but it has been ported to most modern (and many obsolete) platforms. With only six reported exceptions, Perl can be compiled from source code on all POSIX-compliant, or otherwise-Unix-compatible, platforms.


title: Perl

text: Because of unusual changes required for the classic Mac OS environment, a special port called MacPerl was shipped independently.


title: Perl

text: The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network carries a complete list of supported platforms with links to the distributions available on each. CPAN is also the source for publicly available Perl modules that are not part of the core Perl distribution.


title: Perl

text: Users of Microsoft Windows typically install one of the native binary distributions of Perl for Win32, most commonly Strawberry Perl or ActivePerl. Compiling Perl from source code under Windows is possible, but most installations lack the requisite C compiler and build tools. This also makes it difficult to install modules from the CPAN, particularly those that are partially written in C.


title: Perl

text: ActivePerl is a closed-source distribution from ActiveState that has regular releases that track the core Perl releases. The distribution previously included the Perl package manager (PPM), a popular tool for installing, removing, upgrading, and managing the use of common Perl modules; however, this tool was discontinued as of ActivePerl 5.28. Included also is PerlScript, a Windows Script Host (WSH) engine implementing the Perl language. Visual Perl is an ActiveState tool that adds Perl to the Visual Studio .NET development suite. A VBScript-to-Perl converter, as well as a Perl compiler for Windows, and converters of awk and sed to Perl have also been produced by this company and included on the "ActiveState CD for Windows", which includes all of their distributions plus the Komodo IDE and all but the first on the Unix/Linux/Posix variant thereof in 2002 and subsequently.


title: Perl

text: Strawberry Perl is an open-source distribution for Windows. It has had regular, quarterly releases since January 2008, including new modules as feedback and requests come in. Strawberry Perl aims to be able to install modules like standard Perl distributions on other platforms, including compiling XS modules.


title: Perl

text: The Cygwin emulation layer is another way of running Perl under Windows. Cygwin provides a Unix-like environment on Windows, and both Perl and CPAN are available as standard pre-compiled packages in the Cygwin setup program. Since Cygwin also includes gcc, compiling Perl from source is also possible.


title: Perl

text: A Perl executable is included in several Windows Resource kits in the directory with other scripting tools.


title: Perl

text: Implementations of Perl come with the MKS Toolkit, Interix (the base of earlier implementations of Windows Services for Unix), and UWIN.


title: Perl

text: Perl's text-handling capabilities can be used for generating SQL queries; arrays, hashes, and automatic memory management make it easy to collect and process the returned data. For example, in Tim Bunce's Perl DBI application programming interface (API), the arguments to the API can be the text of SQL queries; thus it is possible to program in multiple languages at the same time (e.g., for generating a Web page using HTML, JavaScript, and SQL in a here document). The use of Perl variable interpolation to programmatically customize each of the SQL queries, and the specification of Perl arrays or hashes as the structures to programmatically hold the resulting data sets from each SQL query, allows a high-level mechanism for handling large amounts of data for post-processing by a Perl subprogram.


title: Perl

text: In early versions of Perl, database interfaces were created by relinking the interpreter with a client-side database library. This was sufficiently difficult that it was done for only a few of the most-important and most widely used databases, and it restricted the resulting codice_10 executable to using just one database interface at a time.


title: Perl

text: In Perl 5, database interfaces are implemented by Perl DBI modules. The DBI (Database Interface) module presents a single, database-independent interface to Perl applications, while the DBD (Database Driver) modules handle the details of accessing some 50 different databases; there are DBD drivers for most ANSI SQL databases.


title: Perl

text: DBI provides caching for database handles and queries, which can greatly improve performance in long-lived execution environments such as mod_perl, helping high-volume systems avert load spikes as in the Slashdot effect.


title: Perl

text: In modern Perl applications, especially those written using web frameworks such as Catalyst, the DBI module is often used indirectly via object-relational mappers such as , Class::DBI or Rose::DB::Object that generate SQL queries and handle data transparently to the application author.


title: Perl

text: The Computer Language Benchmarks Game compares the performance of implementations of typical programming problems in several programming languages. The submitted Perl implementations typically perform toward the high end of the memory-usage spectrum and give varied speed results. Perl's performance in the benchmarks game is typical for interpreted languages.


title: Perl

text: Large Perl programs start more slowly than similar programs in compiled languages because Perl has to compile the source every time it runs. In a talk at the YAPC::Europe 2005 conference and subsequent article "A Timely Start," Jean-Louis Leroy found that his Perl programs took much longer to run than expected because the perl interpreter spent significant time finding modules within his over-large include path. Unlike Java, Python, and Ruby, Perl has only experimental support for pre-compiling. Therefore, Perl programs pay this overhead penalty on every execution. The run phase of typical programs is long enough that amortized startup time is not substantial, but benchmarks that measure very short execution times are likely to be skewed due to this overhead.


title: Perl

text: A number of tools have been introduced to improve this situation. The first such tool was Apache's mod_perl, which sought to address one of the most-common reasons that small Perl programs were invoked rapidly: CGI Web development. ActivePerl, via Microsoft ISAPI, provides similar performance improvements.


title: Perl

text: Once Perl code is compiled, there is additional overhead during the execution phase that typically isn't present for programs written in compiled languages such as C or C++. Examples of such overhead include bytecode interpretation, reference-counting memory management, and dynamic type-checking.


title: Perl

text: The most critical routines can be written in other languages (such as C), which can be connected to Perl via simple Inline modules or the more complex, but flexible, XS mechanism.


title: Perl

text: Perl 5, the language usually referred to as "Perl", continues to be actively developed. Perl 5.12.0 was released in April 2010 with some new features influenced by the design of Perl 6, followed by Perl 5.14.1 (released on June 17, 2011), Perl 5.16.1 (released on August 9, 2012.), and Perl 5.18.0 (released on May 18, 2013). Perl 5 development versions are released on a monthly basis, with major releases coming out once per year.


title: Perl

text: The relative proportion of Internet searches for "Perl programming", as compared with similar searches for other programming languages, steadily declined from about 10% in 2005 to about 2% in 2011, and to about 0.7% in 2020.


title: Perl

text: At the 2000 Perl Conference, Jon Orwant made a case for a major new language-initiative. This led to a decision to begin work on a redesign of the language, to be called Perl 6. Proposals for new language features were solicited from the Perl community at large, which submitted more than 300 RFCs.


title: Perl

text: Wall spent the next few years digesting the RFCs and synthesizing them into a coherent framework for Perl 6. He presented his design for Perl 6 in a series of documents called "apocalypses"numbered to correspond to chapters in "Programming Perl". , the developing specification of Perl 6 was encapsulated in design documents called Synopsesnumbered to correspond to Apocalypses.


title: Perl

text: Thesis work by Bradley M. Kuhn, overseen by Wall, considered the possible use of the Java virtual machine as a runtime for Perl. Kuhn's thesis showed this approach to be problematic. In 2001, it was decided that Perl 6 would run on a cross-language virtual machine called Parrot. This will mean that other languages targeting the Parrot will gain native access to CPAN, allowing some level of cross-language development.


title: Perl

text: In 2005, Audrey Tang created the Pugs project, an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell. This acted as, and continues to act as, a test platform for the Perl 6 language (separate from the development of the actual implementation)allowing the language designers to explore. The Pugs project spawned an active Perl/Haskell cross-language community centered around the Libera Chat #raku IRC channel. Many functional programming influences were absorbed by the Perl 6 design team.


title: Perl

text: In 2013, MoarVM (“Metamodel On A Runtime”), a C language-based virtual machine designed primarily for Rakudo was announced.


title: Perl

text: Perl 7 was announced on 24 June 2020 at "The Perl Conference in the Cloud" as the successor to Perl 5. Based on Perl 5.32, Perl 7 was planned to be backward compatible with modern Perl 5 code; Perl 5 code, without boilerplate (pragma) header needs adding codice_12 to stay compatible, but modern code can drop some of the boilerplate.


title: Perl

text: The plan to go to Perl 7 brought up more discussion, however, and the Perl Steering Committee canceled it to avoid issues with backward compatibility for scripts that were not written to the pragmas and modules that would become the default in Perl 7. Perl 7 will only come out when the developers add enough features to warrant a major release upgrade.


title: Perl

text: Perl's culture and community has developed alongside the language itself. Usenet was the first public venue in which Perl was introduced, but over the course of its evolution, Perl's community was shaped by the growth of broadening Internet-based services including the introduction of the World Wide Web. The community that surrounds Perl was, in fact, the topic of Wall's first "State of the Onion" talk.


title: Perl

text: State of the Onion is the name for Wall's yearly keynote-style summaries on the progress of Perl and its community. They are characterized by his hallmark humor, employing references to Perl's culture, the wider hacker culture, Wall's linguistic background, sometimes his family life, and occasionally even his Christian background.


title: Perl

text: In email, Usenet, and message board postings, "Just another Perl hacker" (JAPH) programs are a common trend, originated by Randal L. Schwartz, one of the earliest professional Perl trainers. In the parlance of Perl culture, Perl programmers are known as Perl hackers, and from this derives the practice of writing short programs to print out the phrase "Just another Perl hacker". In the spirit of the original concept, these programs are moderately obfuscated and short enough to fit into the signature of an email or Usenet message. The "canonical" JAPH as developed by Schwartz includes the comma at the end, although this is often omitted.


title: Perl

text: Perl "golf" is the pastime of reducing the number of characters (key "strokes") used in a Perl program to the bare minimum, much in the same way that golf players seek to take as few shots as possible in a round. The phrase's first use emphasized the difference between pedestrian code meant to teach a newcomer and terse hacks likely to amuse experienced Perl programmers, an example of the latter being JAPHs that were already used in signatures in Usenet postings and elsewhere. Similar stunts had been an unnamed pastime in the language APL in previous decades. The use of Perl to write a program that performed RSA encryption prompted a widespread and practical interest in this pastime. In subsequent years, the term "code golf" has been applied to the pastime in other languages. A Perl Golf Apocalypse was held at Perl Conference 4.0 in Monterey, California in July 2000.


title: Perl

text: As with C, obfuscated code competitions were a well known pastime in the late 1990s. The Obfuscated Perl Contest was a competition held by The Perl Journal from 1996 to 2000 that made an arch virtue of Perl's syntactic flexibility. Awards were given for categories such as "most powerful"—programs that made efficient use of space—and "best four-line signature" for programs that fit into four lines of 76 characters in the style of a Usenet signature block.


title: Perl

text: Perl poetry is the practice of writing poems that can be compiled as legal Perl code, for example the piece known as Black Perl. Perl poetry is made possible by the large number of English words that are used in the Perl language. New poems are regularly submitted to the community at PerlMonks.


title: Perl

text: There are also many examples of code written purely for entertainment on the CPAN. codice_13, for example, allows writing programs in Latin. Upon execution of such a program, the module translates its source code into regular Perl and runs it.


title: Perl

text: The Perl community has set aside the "Acme" namespace for modules that are fun in nature (but its scope has widened to include exploratory or experimental code or any other module that is not meant to ever be used in production). Some of the Acme modules are deliberately implemented in amusing ways. This includes codice_14, one of the first modules in the codice_15 namespace, which allows the program's source code to be "whitened" (i.e., all characters replaced with whitespace) and yet still work.


title: Perl

text: The Perl interpreter can also be used for one-off scripts on the command line. The following example (as invoked from an sh-compatible shell, such as Bash) translates the string "Bob" in all files ending with .txt in the current directory to "Robert":


title: Perl

text: Perl has been referred to as "line noise" and a write-only language by its critics. The earliest such mention was in the first edition of the book "Learning Perl", a Perl 4 tutorial book written by Randal L. Schwartz, in the first chapter of which he states: "Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise with a mission in life." He also stated that the accusation that Perl is a write-only language could be avoided by coding with "proper care". The Perl overview document ' states that the names of built-in "magic" scalar variables "look like punctuation or line noise". However, the English module provides both long and short English alternatives. ' document states that line noise in regular expressions could be mitigated using the codice_16 modifier to add whitespace.


title: Perl

text: According to the "Perl 6 FAQ", Perl 6 was designed to mitigate "the usual suspects" that elicit the "line noise" claim from Perl 5 critics, including the removal of "the majority of the punctuation variables" and the sanitization of the regex syntax. The "Perl 6 FAQ" also states that what is sometimes referred to as Perl's line noise is "the actual syntax of the language" just as gerunds and prepositions are a part of the English language. In a December 2012 blog posting, despite claiming that "Rakudo Perl 6 has failed and will continue to fail unless it gets some adult supervision", chromatic stated that the design of Perl 6 has a "well-defined grammar" as well as an "improved type system, a unified object system with an intelligent metamodel, metaoperators, and a clearer system of context that provides for such niceties as pervasive laziness". He also stated that "Perl 6 has a coherence and a consistency that Perl 5 lacks."


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: Alexander Vladimirovich "Sasha" Povetkin (; born 2 September 1979) is a Russian former professional boxer who competed from 2005 to 2021. He held the WBA (Regular) heavyweight title from 2011 to 2013, the WBC interim heavyweight title from 2020 to 2021, and challenged twice for the unified heavyweight championship.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: As an amateur, Povetkin won gold medals in the super-heavyweight division at the 2002 and 2004 European Championships, 2003 World Championships, and 2004 Olympics. After turning professional in 2005, he defeated Ruslan Chagaev to claim the vacant WBA (Regular) title in 2011. He challenged unified champion Wladimir Klitschko for the WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO, "The Ring", and lineal titles in 2013, suffering his first professional career loss by unanimous decision. Povetkin fought unified champion Anthony Joshua for the WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, and IBO titles in 2018, and suffered a seventh-round technical knockout loss.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: He was rated in the top ten annual heavyweights by BoxRec from 2006 to 2020, and rated in the top five annual heavyweights from 2007 to 2020, except for 2019.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: He is a one-time winner of the WBC KO of the Year (2020) and Premier Boxing Champions Knockout of the Year (2020).


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: After a successful amateur kickboxing career that included winning World Junior championship in 1997, World title in 1999 and a European professional kickboxing title in 2000, Povetkin won his first major boxing tournament at the Russian Championships in 2000 at the age of 21. This would be the beginning of several major amateur tournaments Povetkin would go on to win including; the Good Will Games in Brisbane, Australia in 2001; the 34th European Championship in 2002; the XII World Championship in 2003 held in Thailand; and the 35th European Championship in 2004. His amateur success would culminate in winning the gold medal at super-heavyweight (>91 kg) boxing at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, in a walkover match over Egyptian Mohamed Aly.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: After taking Olympic Gold, he concluded his amateur career with a record of 125–7, with all losses avenged.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: Povetkin's early career was without renown. He first pulled notice when, after compiling a perfect record of 12–0, he defeated veteran Larry Donald on 30 June 2007 by unanimous decision in Moscow in his 13th professional fight.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: The win over Donald was considered solid, and Povetkin continued his emergence as a promising heavyweight boxing contender.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: On 27 October 2007 Povetkin met Chris Byrd, who had lost his title to Klitschko the year before. Povetkin won by way of an 11th-round TKO victory. Byrd put up more resistance than Donald, but ultimately was overwhelmed, and his corner threw in the towel.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: Less than a week later, Eddie Chambers won a split decision victory over former title challenger Calvin Brock. This advanced Povetkin and Chambers to the final round of the tournament. On 26 January 2008, after initial problems Povetkin defeated Chambers by unanimous decision to become the mandatory challenger for Klitschko. On 19 July 2008, Povetkin knocked out Taurus Sykes in the fourth round.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: After Wladimir Klitschko unified his WBO and IBF titles with David Haye's WBA title, Klitschko was upgraded to "Super Champion" by the WBA, thus making the "Regular Champion" title vacant. On 6 July 2011 negotiations for Povetkin to fight former WBA champion Ruslan Chagaev (27-1-1, 17 KOs) for the vacant title began between Sauerland, who promote Povetkin, and Chagaev's promoter Universum. Two days later, Povetkin's trainer confirmed the fight would take place on 27 August. At the time of the bout, Povetkin was ranked No.3 heavyweight contender by "The Ring", while Chagaev was ranked No.4 contender by the same publication. There were concerns about Chagaev's health state, due to him being diagnosed with hepatitis B and the possibility of him infecting Povetkin. Chagaev, however, insisted that the medical examination had confirmed that his opponents (Povetkin included) weren't in danger of being infected. Most observers expected the fight to be close, giving Povetkin the edge in youth and athletic ability, while also giving Chagaev an advantage in terms of experience. Both fighters were given an even chance to win. Former WBA world champion Nikolai Valuev predicted Povetkin to win by decision or knockout in the championship rounds. The card was televised by Das Erste.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: With Teddy Atlas in his corner, Povetkin bested Chagaev by unanimous decision to capture the WBA (Regular) heavyweight title. Both fighters were active from the opening bell, with Povetkin appearing to have the upper hand in the first half of the fight, frequently closing the distance and working Chagaev's body, while blocking most Chagaev's shots with arms and gloves. Povetkin staggered Chagaev with an uppercut in the third round. Chagaev regained composure in the middle rounds, hurting tired Povetkin several times with clubbing left hooks. Povetkin withstood Chagaev's attacks and re-established his pressure going into the championship rounds, while Chagaev appeared to be saving energy for the last rounds. The twelfth round saw both fighters trading shots.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: Following the fight, 48 year old former world champion Evander Holyfield entered the ring to congratulate Povetkin. Holyfield also attended the post-fight press conference and made the intention of challenging Povetkin for the WBA's secondary title. Povetkin announced his first defence would be in December 2011, possibly in Zurich, Switzerland.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: On 16 October 2011, a fight between Povetkin and 42 year old American heavyweight contender Cedric Boswell (35-1, 26 KOs) was close to being confirmed for 3 December at the Hartwall Arena in Helsinki. Boswell was on a 14-fight win streak since his sole defeat to former four-time world title challenger Jameel McCline. The fight was originally offered to former WBC champion Hasim Rahman, who asked for more money than Sauerland Event's could offer. Povetkin's team then spoke to the WBA about possible opponents. Most of the ranked fighters were not willing to travel to fight Povetkin, where as some contenders were not available. French heavyweight Jean Marc Mormeck turned down the opportunity to fight Povetkin because he was being lined up to challenge then-unified world champion Wladimir Klitschko. On 21 October, Boswell confirmed that he had signed the deal and a day later, a heavyweight double-header was announced for 3 December, with the other fight being Robert Helenius vs. Derek Chisora. Povetkin already started his training with Kostya Tszyu and cruiserweight contender Denis Lebedev and in mid-October, Teddy Atlas joined the training camp. Povetkin won the fight by 8th-round KO. At the time of the stoppage, Povetkin was ahead 70–63, 69–64, and 70–63 on the scorecards. Povetkin came alive in the fight at the midway point, rocking Boswell a few times with some hard punches. In the 8th round, Povetkin connected with a combination that dropped Boswell and eventually counted out. Boswell managed to get to his feet after the count had finished, only to fall back down.


title: Alexander Povetkin

text: In December 2011, a deal was reached for Povetkin to make his second defence against then WBO cruiserweight champion Marco Huck (34-1, 25KOs) on 25 February 2012 at Porsche Arena in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg. Huck made the challenge in the post fight press conference of Povetkin's win over Boswell. It was noted that Huck would not vacate his WBO title, until after the fight, where he would assess the situation. Huck stated if he was to win the title, he would likely remain at heavyweight to challenge one of the Klitschko brothers, but would be given 10 days by the WBO to decide. Huck reached out to David Haye and Evander Holyfield to help with sparring. In January 2012, the promoters of Huck, Povetkin and Rahman attended a meeting where they discussed the winner of Povetkin vs. Huck would defend the WBA title against Rahman next. During this time, trainer Teddy Atlas was in contract for Povetkin to come train in the USA but Povetkin refused, then Teddy Atlas announced he had parted ways with Povetkin. Russian trainer Alexander Zimin stepped in on short notice. For his debut at heavyweight, Huck weighed 209.4 pounds and Povetkin weighed 229.2 pounds.