title: Mandingo (film)

text: Hammond returns to the plantation. A great deal of time has passed since Hammond and Blanche's marriage, and Warren Maxwell is eager for a grandchild. Sensing that the marriage is troubled, Warren locks Hammond and Blanche in a room together and refuses to let them out until they reconcile. They appear to do so. A short time later, Blanche announces she is pregnant, but when the baby is born, it is clear the child is mixed race. To avoid a scandal, the child, on doctor's orders, is allowed to bleed to death from its umbilical cord. Sickened at Blanche's sexual indiscretion, Hammond asks the doctor if he has the poison he uses on old slaves and horses. He pours the poison into a toddy for Blanche. An outraged Hammond seeks out Mede, intending to kill him. As Hammond attempts to force Mede into a boiling cauldron of water, Mede tries to tell him that Blanche blackmailed him into having sex with her. Hammond shoots Mede twice with a rifle and the second shot throws Mede into the boiling water. Hammond uses a pitchfork to drown Mede. In a fit of fury, the slave Agamemnon picks up the rifle and aims it at Hammond. When Warren calls him a "crazy nigger" and demands that he put the gun down, the slave shoots and kills Warren. As he runs away, Hammond kneels helpless next to Warren's lifeless body.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: The original novel sold over 4.5 million copies. Film rights were eventually bought by Dino de Laurentiis.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: A human, sociological story that's going to bring about a better understanding between the races ... We're faithful to the story of the book but not the spirit. I mean, the book's hackwork, isn't it? It's almost repulsive. A lot of people have read it, but they read it for the wrong reasons. It's really a story of love. We had the script rewritten three times. ... I hated that ending in the book where the guy boils the slave down and pours the soup over his wife's grave. I mean, we have the slave boiled but we cut out the part where he pours the soup on his grave. He just ... pulls away. And we know that tomorrow there's going to be a lot of trouble. It's really a very beautiful ending.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: Charlton Heston turned down the role of the father and the role of his son was rejected by Timothy Bottoms, Jan Michael Vincent, Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges. Boxer Ken Norton turned down a $250,000 gate to fight Jerry Quarry to make the film.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: The critical reception of "Mandingo" was predominantly negative upon release, with the film being seen as being campy by reviewers in 1975. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film only holds a 26% critical approval rating. Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" criticized the film, calling it "racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through in an audience made up largely of children, as I did last Saturday afternoon", giving it a "zero star" rating. Richard Schickel of "Time" magazine found the film boring and cliché-ridden. Leonard Maltin ranked the film as a "BOMB" and dismissed with the word "Stinko!"


title: Mandingo (film)

text: In the years following the film's initial release, the reception of the film became more favorable. "The Chicago Reader" writer Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in 1985 that "Mandingo" is "One of the most neglected and underrated Hollywood films of its era [...] it’s doubtful whether many more insightful and penetrating movies about American slavery exist." Movie critic Robin Wood was enthusiastic about the film, calling it "the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood." The "New York Times" columnist Dave Kehr called it "a thinly veiled Holocaust film that spares none of its protagonists", further describing it as "Fleischer's last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." The film has also been the subject of scholarly praise for its handling of race.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: In 1996, director Quentin Tarantino has cited "Mandingo" and "Showgirls" as the only two instances "in the last twenty years [that] a major studio made a full-on, gigantic, big-budget exploitation movie". In Tarantino's film "Django Unchained" (2012), the terminology of "Mandingo fighting" was inspired by the 1975 film.


title: Mandingo (film)

text: "Drum", the sequel to "Mandingo", was released the following year. Released by United Artists, it was once again produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Ken Norton, Brenda Sykes, and Lillian Hayman were the only actors from the first film to return for the sequel. Norton and Sykes played different characters, and Hayman returned in the role of Lucretia Borgia. Warren Oates took over for Perry King in the role of Hammond Maxwell. The story is set 15 years after the events of the first film.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Gayatri Devi (born as Princess Gayatri Devi of Cooch Behar; 23 May 1919 − 29 July 2009) was the third Maharani consort of Jaipur from 1940 to 1949 through her marriage to Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II. Following her husband's signature for the Jaipur State to become part of the Union of India and her step-son's assumption of the title in 1970, she was known as Maharani Gayatri Devi, Rajmata of Jaipur.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Born in the Hindu Royal family of Cooch Behar her father was Maharaja Jitendra Narayan of Cooch Behar in West Bengal, and her mother was Maratha Princess, Indira Raje of Baroda, the only daughter of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, and she was sister to Jagaddipendra Narayan, informally known as 'Bhaiya', who became the Maharajah of Cooch Behar.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Following India's independence and the abolition of the princely states, she became a successful politician in the Swatantra Party. Gayatri was also celebrated for her beauty and became something of a fashion icon in her adulthood. She served 12 years in Swatantra Party, during which she was a prominent critic of Indira Gandhi's government. After her departure from politics, she lived a quiet life in her large estate, spending time with her grandchildren and on hobbies and leisure.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: She died on 29 July 2009 in Jaipur, at the age of 90. She was suffering from paralytic ileus and a lung infection. She left an estate estimated at , which was passed on to her grandchildren.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Born in a Hindu Royal family, her father, Prince Jitendra Narayan of Cooch Behar, presently in West Bengal, was the younger brother of the Yuvaraja (Crown Prince). Her mother was Maratha Princess Indira Raje of Baroda, the only daughter of Maratha King, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, an extremely beautiful princess and a legendary socialite. Early in her life, her uncle's death led to her father ascending the throne (gaddi). Gayatri studied at Glendower Preparatory School in London, Patha Bhavana of Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan, and later in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she travelled with her mother and siblings, then studied secretarial skills in London School of Secretaries; Brillantmont and Monkey Club London.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: She first met Sawai Man Singh II when she was 12 and he had come to Calcutta to play polo and stayed with their family. She married Sawai Man Singh II Bahadur on 9 May 1940.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Gayatri was a particularly avid equestrienne. She was an excellent rider and an able Polo player. She was a good shot and enjoyed many days out on 'Shikars'. Gayatri was fond of cars and is credited with importing the first Mercedes-Benz W126, a 500 SEL to India which was later shipped to Malaysia. She also owned several Rolls-Royces and an aircraft. Gayatri had one child, Prince Jagat Singh of Jaipur, late Raja of Isarda, born on 15 October 1949, who was granted his uncle's fief as a subsidiary title. Jagat Singh was the half-brother to Bhawani Singh, who was the eldest son of his father born by his father's first wife. Gayatri was once included in "Vogue" magazine's Ten Most Beautiful Women list.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: She started two schools in Jaipur, Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ Public School established in 1943 and the other one being Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Vidyalaya, Jaipur which is a co-educational school opened in the memory of her husband Maharaja Sawai Man Singh of Jaipur. She revived and promoted the dying art of blue pottery.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: After partition and independence of India in 1947, Gayatri Devi ran for Parliament in 1962 and won the constituency in the Lok Sabha in the world's largest landslide, winning 192,909 votes out of 246,516 cast. She continued to hold this seat on 1967 and 1971 as a member of the Swatantra Party founded by C. Rajagopalachari, running against the Indian National Congress party.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: In 1965, during a meeting with Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gayatri was again asked to join Congress. This was the time when, despite the fact that her husband was being made ambassador to Spain, she stuck to her principles and decided not to join the party. In 1967 the Swatantra party joined hands with Jan Sangh that was led by Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. The alliance won a large number of seats in the 1967 election. In the assembly election Gayatri lost to Damodar Lal Vyas, in Malpura constituency, but won the Lok Sabha election.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: The privy purses were abolished in 1971, terminating all royal privileges and titles. Gayatri was arrested during the Emergency due to an alleged political vendetta on the false accusation of violating tax laws, and served 5 months in Tihar Jail. She retired from politics and published her biography, "A Princess Remembers", written by Santha Rama Rau, in 1976 (this biography also published in Marathi language as "A Princess Remembers: Gayatri Devi"). She was also the focus of the film "Memoirs of a Hindu Princess", directed by Francois Levie.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: There were rumours that she might re-enter politics as late as 1999, when the Cooch Behar Trinamool Congress nominated her as their candidate for the Lok Sabha elections, but she did not respond to the offer.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Gayatri Devi had one son, Prince Jagat Singh, Raja of Isarda (15 October 1949 – 5 February 1997), who was granted his paternal uncle's (father's elder brother) fief of Isarda as a subsidiary title. Jagat Singh was married on 10 May 1978 to Mom Rajawongse Priyanandana Rangsit (b. 1952), daughter of Prince Piyarangsit Rangsit and Princess Vibhavadi Rangsit (née Rajani) of Thailand. The married couple had two children:


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Today, they are her only surviving descendants, and as such, have claimed to be heirs of their paternal grandmother.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Maharaj Jagat Singh was, thus, half-brother to Bhawani Singh of Jaipur, the eldest son of the late Maharaja by his first wife, a Jodhpur princess.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Gayatri Devi was related to several other erstwhile royal families in India. She was herself not from the Rajput community, but from a dynasty native to Cooch Behar in Bengal, and was daughter of Maharaja Jitendra Narayan and Maharani Indira Raje, who was daughter of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III and Maharani Chimnabai, belonging to the Gaekwad dynasty of the Marathas. Her grand-nephew, along with his wife, Poonam Singh Mewar, and 2 sons died in a car crash.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Her paternal grandparents were Nripendra Narayan Bhup Bahadur and Sunity Devi of Cooch Behar. Maharani Sunity Devi was the daughter of the Brahmo social reformer Keshab Chandra Sen.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: She had two brothers, Jagaddipendra Narayan and Indrajitendra Narayan of whom Jagaddipendra Narayan became the Maharaja of Cooch Behar in his infancy after the death of their father in 1922.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: Thus, maternally, she was closely connected to Gaekwads of Baroda State. Further, her sister Ila Devi was married into the Tripura royal family, and her younger sister, Maneka Devi, was married into the royal family of Dewas State. Thus, through various interconnections, she was related to the royal houses of Kota, Sawantwadi, Akkalkot State, Jath State, Dewas Jr., Jasdan State, and Sandur, Tehri-Garhwal, Mayurbhanj, Dhar State, Kolhapur, Lunawada State, Baria and Raja of Payagpur, which was considered normal amongst the royalties of India.


title: Gayatri Devi

text: She was admitted at Santokba Durlabhji Memorial hospital (SDMH) on 17 July 2009. She died at the age of 90 on 29 July 2009, reportedly due to lung failure.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: Yordenis Ugás Hernández (born 14 July 1986) is a Cuban professional boxer. He held the WBA (Super) welterweight title from 2021 to April 2022, having previously held the WBA (Regular) title from 2020 until being elevated to Super champion. As an amateur, Ugás won a gold medal at the 2005 World Championships and bronze at the 2008 Olympics, both in the lightweight division. As of October 2021, he is ranked as the world's third-best active welterweight by the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, "The Ring" magazine and BoxRec. He is also ranked as the eighth-best active boxer, pound for pound, by BoxRec.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: Ugas' nickname, 54 Milagros, comes from two people: "54" refers to baseball player Aroldis Chapman who wears the number 54, and is Ugas' best friend; "Milagros" is the name of Ugas' mother.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: Ugás was U17 (cadets) world champion in 2003 but lost at the junior championships in 2004 to Amir Khan. On other occasions he lost twice to countryman Luis Franco at featherweight, he finished third at the nationals 2004 at featherweight.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: In 2005 he moved up to lightweight where he was more successful, winning the Cuban Championships from 2005 to 2008 and turning into a star.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: He won a tournament called PanAm Championships (not the PanAm Games) in 2005, however in other tournaments he lost twice to Kazach southpaw Serik Sapiyev.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: At the Senior World Championships 2005 he suffered two heavy knockdowns against Canadian southpaw Ibrahim Kamal in his third fight but managed to win.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: The Manila Times writes: "But for two fleeting moments Thursday, unheralded Canadian lightweight Ibrahim Kamal showed the world that the Cubans, arguably the number-one force in amateur boxing, may have jaws of glass after all.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: The University of Toronto student knocked down Yordanis Ugás in the first and second rounds with two sledgehammer lefts to the side of the chin.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: But then the Canadian southpaw hurt one knee as he and Ugás wrestled each other to the floor on the third round, leaving him effectively fighting on one leg." Later Ugás beat Russian Khabib Allakhverdiyev and in the final he outfought Romal Amanov from Azerbaijan. Cubanet.org writes "Yordenis Ugás, a sharp, technically accomplished fighter but with a suspect jaw, won the lightweight gold for Cuba after an explosive toe-to-toe clash with Romal Amanov of Azerbaijan." It describes him as "a tall, bony lightweight with a deceptively languid fighting style."


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: Later that year Ugás won the PanAm Games in Rio beating Darleys Pérez and Everton Lopes. Cuba didn't participate in the World Championships in Chicago.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: In 2008 he defended the national championships against old foe Luis Franco and won his Olympic qualifier.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: In March 2010, Ugás moved to the United States in the hope of beginning a professional career. On 9 July 2010, he made his pro debut.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: On 9 March 2019, Ugás fought his first career title fight against [[Shawn Porter]] for the [[World Boxing Council|WBC]] welterweight title. Ugás fought great and landed the cleaner shots throughout the fight. Porter had some success with his jab in the fourth round, but Ugás was the better man in the following round, after both fighters exchanged shots in the middle of the ring towards the end of the fifth. Ugás also had a stronger finish to the fight, and managed to cut Porter near his left eye in the tenth. After the final bell rang, Ugás' team already started celebrating, while Porter just stood and looked at his corner. To many of the fans' surprise, two of the judges scored the fight in favor of Porter, 116-112 and 115–113, while only one of the judges scored the fight in favor of Ugás, 117–111. The crowd was booing what seemed to many as a controversial [[split decision]] win for Porter.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: In his next fight, Ugás dominated former world champion [[Omar Figueroa Jr.|Omar Figueroa]] to a unanimous decision win, winning every round in the process. All three judges scored the fight 119-107 for the Cuban, who only had one point deducted for holding in the fifth round.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: In his following fight, Ugás fought [[Mike Dallas Jr.|Mike Dallas Jr]]. Ugás boxed well and managed to hurt Dallas Jr on multiple occasions. After the seventh round, Dallas Jr's corner had seen enough and informed the referee he would not be continuing the fight.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: On 6 September 2020, Ugás fought Abel Ramos for the vacant WBA (Regular) welterweight title. Ugás outboxed Ramos, dominating most of the rounds throughout the fight. This earned Ugás a split decision victory, with one judge scoring the fight 117-111 for Ramos, while the other two had it narrowly for Ugás, both scoring it 115–113.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: On 29 January 2021, Ugás was elevated to the status of WBA (Super) champion after the previous title-holder, [[Octuple champion|eight-division champion]] [[Manny Pacquiao]], was stripped of his title due to inactivity. The latter had been scheduled to face undefeated WBC and [[International Boxing Federation|IBF]] champion [[Errol Spence Jr.]] on 21 August 2021 at the [[T-Mobile Arena]] in Las Vegas, until Spence had to withdraw due to suffering an injury to his left eye. Subsequently, Ugás took Spence's place, and made the first defense of his WBA (Super) title against Pacquiao.


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: The bout was a competitive affair, with Ugás using his jab and looping right hand effectively to control the distance. While Pacquiao had moments of success throughout the night, he never truly settled into a rhythm and was noticeably stiffer than usual, not showcasing the deft footwork that he has been known for throughout his career. Pacquiao himself admitted after the fight that his legs were "tight". At the final bell, Ugás was awarded a unanimous decision victory with scores of 116–112, 116-112 and 115–113. According to [[CompuBox]], Pacquiao threw over double the number of punches compared to Ugás, but landed fewer, making the latter the far more accurate boxer on the night. Pacquiao landed 130 punches of 815 thrown (16%), while Ugás landed 151 punches of 405 thrown (37.3%).


title: Yordenis Ugás

text: After successfully defending his title against Pacquiao, Ugás petitioned the WBA for a special permit to bypass a mandatory defense against [[Eimantas Stanionis]] in order to face the IBF and WBC champion [[Errol Spence Jr.]] in a title unification bout. The petition was denied by the WBA on 20 October 2021, who stated: "...we are in special circumstances to resolve extraordinary situations, such as the champion reduction in every division to have only one champion". Accordingly, Ugás and Stanionis were given a 30-day period to negotiate the terms of their bout. As they were unable to come to terms, a purse bid was ordered for 9 December, with a minimal bid of $200,000. The winning bid would be split 75/25 in favor of Ugas as the reigning titlist. On 19 December 2021, WBA President Gilberto J. Mendoza has confirmed that the Spence-Ugas was approved as Stanionis was willing to step aside. The unification bout was officially announced on 8 February 2022. It was scheduled to headline a [[pay per view]] card on 16 April, which took place at the [[AT&T Stadium]] in [[Arlington, Texas]]. The PPV was distributed by [[Showtime (TV network)|Showtime]]. Ugás lost the fight by a tenth-round technical knockout. The fight was stopped on the advice of the ringside physician, due to Ugas’ severely swollen right eye. He was losing on all three of the judges' scorecards at the time of the stoppage, with scores of 88–82, 88–82 and 88–83. Ugás landed fewer total punches (216 to 96) and fewer power punches (192 to 77) than Spence Jr.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, was a highly contested proposed trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim economies, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. The proposal was signed on 4 February 2016 but not ratified, being opposed by many Democrats and Republicans, including both major-party presidential nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. After taking office, the newly elected President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from TPP in January 2017, therefore the TPP could not be ratified as required and did not enter into force. The remaining countries negotiated a new trade agreement called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which incorporates most of the provisions of the TPP and which entered into force on 30 December 2018.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The TPP began as an expansion of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPSEP or P4) signed by Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in 2005. Beginning in 2008, additional countries joined the discussion for a broader agreement: Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Vietnam, bringing the negotiating countries to twelve. In January 2017, the United States withdrew from the agreement. The other 11 TPP countries agreed in May 2017 to revive it and reached agreement in January 2018. In March 2018, the 11 countries signed the revised version of the agreement, called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. After ratification by six of them (Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore), the agreement came into force for those countries on 30 December 2018.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The original TPP contained measures to lower both non-tariff and tariff barriers to trade, and establish an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. The U.S. International Trade Commission, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the World Bank and the Office of the Chief Economist at Global Affairs Canada found the final agreement would, if ratified, lead to net positive economic outcomes for all signatories. Many observers have said the trade deal would have served a geopolitical purpose, namely to reduce the signatories' dependence on Chinese trade and bring the signatories closer to the United States.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Twelve countries participated in negotiations for the TPP: the four parties to the 2005 Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement and eight additional countries. All twelve signed the TPP on 4 February 2016. The agreement would have entered into force after ratification by all signatories, if this had occurred within two years. If the agreement had not been ratified by all before 4 February 2018, it would have entered into force after ratification by at least 6 states which together have a GDP of more than 85% of the GDP of all signatories. The withdrawal of the United States from the agreement in January 2017 effectively ended any prospect of the agreement entering into force. In response the remaining parties successfully negotiated a new version of the agreement that lacked the 85% GDP threshold, the CPTPP, which entered into force in December 2018.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: On 23 January 2017, US President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum to , making its ratification as it was in February 2016 virtually impossible.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: APEC members would have been able to accede to the TPP, as would any other jurisdiction to which existing TPP members would have agreed. After an application for membership is received, a commission of parties to the treaty would negotiate conditions for accession.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: South Korea did not participate in the 2006 agreement, but showed interest in entering the TPP, and was invited to the TPP negotiating rounds in December 2010 by the U.S. after the successful conclusion of its Free trade agreement between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea. South Korea already had bilateral trade agreements with some TPP members, but areas such as vehicle manufacturing and agriculture still needed to be agreed upon, making further multilateral TPP negotiations somewhat complicated.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Other countries that were interested in TPP membership include Taiwan, the Philippines, and Colombia as of 2010; Thailand as of 2012; and Indonesia, Bangladesh, and India as of 2013. According to law professor Edmund Sim in 2013, many of these countries would need to change their protectionist trade policies in order to join the TPP.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The largest economy in the Pacific Rim not involved in the negotiations was China. According to the Brookings Institution in 2013, the most fundamental challenge for the TPP project regarding China was that "it may not constitute a powerful enough enticement to propel China to sign on to these new standards on trade and investment. China reacted by accelerating its own trade initiatives in Asia." In 2013, it was thought China might still be interested in joining the TPP eventually. An academic analysis has shown that while the TPP would be more successful if China participated in it, the benefits to China are intangible.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In September 2021, China applied for membership of the CPTPP. Japan, the 2021 chair of the CPTPP, said that it would consult with member countries to respond to China's request.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Brunei, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand are parties to the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPSEP), which was signed in 2005, and entered into force in 2006. The original TPSEP agreement contains an accession clause and affirms the members' "commitment to encourage the accession to this Agreement by other economies". It is a comprehensive agreement, affecting trade in goods, rules of origin, trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, trade in services, intellectual property, government procurement and competition policy. Among other things, it called for a 90-percent reduction of all tariffs between member countries by 1 January 2006, and reduction of all trade tariffs to zero by the year 2015.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Although original and negotiating parties are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), TPSEP is not an APEC initiative. However, the TPP is considered to be a pathfinder for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), an APEC initiative.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In January 2008, the U.S. entered talks with the Pacific 4 (P4) members regarding trade liberalisation in financial services. This led to 19 formal negotiation rounds and a subsequent series of additional meetings, such as Chief Negotiators Meetings and Ministers Meetings, and resulted in the agreement announced on 5 October 2015.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Japan and its main competitor in the region, China, hold polar views on how South-East Asia's economy should develop. Prior to TPP, Japan tried to achieve dominance by proposing in September 1997 an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF), which never eventuated in the face of U.S opposition. By 2011 Japan managed to establish a cooperative agreement with China and Korea called the "PRC–Japan–Republic of Korea Free trade agreement", also known as the CJK FTA, which did not include the U.S. By this means Japan intended to use the People's Republic of China card in order to shift TPP negotiations away from China towards Japan's agendas with support of the United States. Ratification of the TPP in Japan required political reforms that shifted some authority from the agriculture ministry to the prime minister.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: On 9 December 2016 Japan's House of Councillors made a resolution of participation. Japan notified completion of domestic procedures for ratification to the depositary of the TPP treaty (New Zealand) as the first ratified country on 20 January 2017.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: New Zealand ratified the TPP on 11 May 2017. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (in office from October 2017) planned to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in Vietnam in November 2017 in time to allow the New Zealand government to ban foreign speculators from buying existing New Zealand homes. She said: "Our view is that it will be possible to balance our desire to make sure that we provide housing that's affordable, by easing demand and banning foreign speculators from buying existing homes, while meeting our trade goals."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: During a speech on the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump vowed to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership if elected. He argued that the agreement would "undermine" the U.S. economy and its independence. On 21 November 2016, in a video message, Trump introduced an economic strategy of "putting America first", stating that he would negotiate "fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores." As part of this plan, Trump confirmed his intent for the United States to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in office. McConnell affirmed that the TPP would not be considered during the lame-duck session of Congress preceding the inauguration of Trump.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: President Trump signed a presidential memorandum to withdraw the U.S. from the TPP on 23 January 2017. U.S. Senator John McCain criticized the withdrawal, saying "it will send a troubling signal of American disengagement in the Asia-Pacific region at a time we can least afford it." U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders applauded the move, saying "For the last 30 years, we have had a series of trade deals[...] which have cost us millions of decent-paying jobs and caused a ‘race to the bottom’ which has lowered wages for American workers."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In a 2018 study conducted on general foreign trade, researchers have found that a sizable majority of U.S. adults view foreign trade as conducive to U.S. growth rather than a foreign threat. In an international context, however, Americans generally are among the least likely to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A clear partisan divide exists among the U.S. public in supporting the trade deal, with those who identify as members of the Democratic Party or are politically independent being more likely to have a positive opinion of it than those who are members of the Republican Party. Moreover, younger people are more likely to support it than their elders.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: President Donald Trump has expressed opposition to the TPP as a tenet of his 2016 election platform, which contributed to his popularity. Critics complained that while Trump has worked to contain the economic and geostrategic influence of China, withdrawing from the TPP reduced the effectiveness of a treaty that was designed to do exactly that.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In any case, free trade has been a politically contentious issue in the U.S. Many Presidential candidates vigorously oppose it while those who initially stood behind it became a lot less vocal in their support. Following the 2020 Presidential election, there is little enthusiasm for the TPP among elected officials in the federal government.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: TPP's future was uncertain after the United States withdrew. Several signatories, however, signaled their intention to rework TPP without US participation.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In January 2018, the remaining eleven countries agreed on a revised TPP, now renamed the "Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership" (CPTPP). CPTPP is substantially the same as TPP, but omits 20 provisions that had been added to TPP at US insistence and that are now no longer binding. These provisions primarily relate to investment, government procurement and intellectual property.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: A version of the text of the agreement "subject to legal review" was released by prospective member parties on 5 November 2015. Portions of drafts of the full agreement were previously leaked to the public. Many of the provisions in the leaked documents are modeled on previous trade agreements.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The contents of the TPP go far beyond the standards drafted by the World Trade Organization. The TPP includes a negative-list of all sectors covered for the liberalizing trade, except for those clearly stated. The TPP includes new regulation for online commerce, treatment of foreign investors, far more comprehensive protection for intellectual property, labor codes, and an agreement for neutrality regarding state-owned enterprises.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: A 2016 study by University of Maryland political scientists Todd Allee and Andrew Lugg finds that out of the 74 previous trade agreements that TPP members signed since 1995, the text of the TPP most resembles that from earlier U.S. trade agreements. A 2017 study found that the TPP scored high relative to other trade agreements in terms of a government's ability to freely legislate and implement regulations in given public policy domains.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The agreement cuts over 18,000 tariffs. Tariffs on all U.S. manufactured goods and almost all U.S. farm products would be eliminated, with most eliminations occurring immediately. According to the Congressional Research Service, TPP "would be the largest U.S. FTA by trade flows ($905 billion in U.S. goods and services exports and $980 billion in imports in 2014)". Including the US, the signatories represent roughly 40% of global GDP, and one-third of world trade.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In addition, the agreement mandates expedited customs procedures for express shipments and prohibits customs duties from being applied to electronic transmissions. It also requires additional privacy, security, and consumer protections for online transactions and encourages the publication of online customs forms. These provisions are expected to be particularly beneficial to small businesses.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the "TPP includes the most robust enforceable environment commitments of any trade agreement in history". The USTR notes that the TPP requires signatories to fulfill their obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to protect and conserve iconic species. According to the USTR, TPP is the first trade agreement to prohibit harmful fisheries subsidies, such as those that contribute to overfishing. The USTR asserts that TPP signatories are required to "combat illegal fishing", "promote sustainable fisheries management practices", and "protect wetlands and important natural areas", "combat wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, and illegal fishing" and "protect the marine environment from ship pollution, including by implementing their obligations under MARPOL (an international agreement to prevent marine pollution)".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Morin and Baumier of the Canada Research Chair in International Political Economy (writing for the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development) argue that while the TPP contains an impressive number of environmental provisions and a wide range of environmental protection areas, very few of these standards are innovative, most of which being copied from previous US agreements, and that the TPP missed an opportunity to be an original and progressive contribution to the environmental agenda. However, the TPP is innovative in its utilization of a combination of the American and the European approaches in environmental protection. Indeed, in doing so, the TPP became much more detailed and specific than regular US agreements while being legally more enforceable than European agreements.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In 2013 when TPP was still being negotiated, Sierra Club's director of responsible trade, Ilana Solomon, argued that the TPP "could directly threaten our climate and our environment [including] new rights that would be given to corporations, and new constraints on the fossil fuel industry all have a huge impact on our climate, water, and land." Upon the release of a draft of the Environment Chapter in January 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wide Fund for Nature joined with the Sierra Club in criticizing the TPP. After the announcement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on 25 September 2015 and the finalisation of the TPP a week later, critics discussed the interactions between the SDGs and the TPP. While one critic sees the TPP as providing a mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks to the SDGs, another regards the TPP as being incompatible with the SDGs, highlighting that if the development provisions clash with any other aspect of the TPP, the other aspect takes priority. The Friends of the Earth have spoken out against the TPP.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The White House has cited supportive statements from the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the Humane Society, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Defenders of Wildlife, International Fund for Animal Welfare, World Animal Protection and other environmental groups in favor of the TPP. The Peterson Institute for International Economics argues that the TPP is "the most environmentally friendly trade deal ever negotiated." In regards to ISDS, PIIE analysts note that there is little evidence of constraints on environmental policies resulting from ISDS litigation.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: A September 2016 report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) predicts that "as countries take action to protect the climate, conflicts between trade rules and climate goals will escalate". The report goes on to say that trade agreements like the TPP set broad-reaching rules for the economy and government policy, thereby expanding trade, often in extractive sectors, and protecting corporations and financial firms from future measures to stabilize the climate.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, signatories are required to join the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC); criminalize bribery of public officials; have in place a code of conduct for public officials; take measures to decrease conflicts of interest; effectively enforce anti-corruption laws and regulations; and involve private organizations in the fight against corruption.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the TPP prohibits exploitative child labor and forced labor; ensures the right to collective bargaining; and prohibits employment discrimination. The USTR asserts that "research by the International Labor Organization and the World Trade Organization finds that combining expanded trade opportunities with strong protections for workers can help workers move from informal-sector jobs into formal work in wage-paying, regulated export industries which offer a minimum wage, benefits, and safety programs". The USTR asserts that "research also shows that trade improves human rights conditions by fostering pluralistic institutions and increasing open exchanges of information."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: "PolitiFact" rates President Obama's claim that due to the Trans-Pacific Partnership "we've got a country like Malaysia taking really serious efforts to crack down on human trafficking" as "mostly true". "PolitiFact" notes that Malaysia began to comply with the TPP in June 2015, amending its law to improve the treatment of trafficking victims. Among the changes, Malaysia gave victims better access to government shelters, transitional housing and more victim-friendly restitution procedures. Malaysia has also taken steps to stop human trafficking within the construction industry.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In August 2017, Reuters reported that the Vietnamese government was intensifying repression of human rights, in part because of the Trump administration's decision to drop the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Membership of the TPP had previously encouraged Vietnam to show a good human rights record.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The intellectual property section of a leaked draft of the TPP lays out a minimum level of protection parties to the Agreement must grant for trademarks, copyright, and patents. Copyright is granted at a length of life of the author plus 70 years, and requires countries to set criminal penalties for violating copyright protections such as Digital Rights Management.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the TPP will spur innovation by requiring signatories to establish strong patentability standard and adopt strong copyright protections.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Walter Park, Professor of Economics at American University, argues, based on the existing literature, that the pharmaceutical protections in TPP will potentially enhance unaffiliated licensing in developing countries, lead to tech transfers that contribute to local learning-by-doing, stimulate new drug launches in more countries, expand marketing and distribution networks, and encourage early-stage pharmaceutical innovations.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: As of December 2011, some provisions relating to the enforcement of patents and copyrights alleged to be present in the US proposal for the agreement had been criticised as being excessively restrictive, beyond those in the Korea–US trade agreement and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The Electronic Frontier Foundation was highly critical of the leaked draft chapter on intellectual property covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. In the US, they believed this was likely to further entrench controversial aspects of US copyright law (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law reform to meet the evolving intellectual property needs of American citizens and the innovative technology sector. Standardization of copyright provisions by other signatories would also require significant changes to other countries' copyright laws. These, according to EFF, include obligations for countries to expand copyright terms, restrict fair use, adopt criminal sanctions for copyright infringement that is done without a commercial motivation (ex. file sharing of copyrighted digital media), place greater liability on internet intermediaries, escalate protections for digital locks and create new threats for journalists and whistleblowers.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Both the copyright term expansion and the non-complaint provision (i.e., competent authorities may initiate legal action without the need for a formal complaint) previously failed to pass in Japan because they were so controversial. In early 2015, "a group of artists, archivists, academics, and activists ... in Japan [asked] their negotiators to oppose requirements in the TPP that would require their country, and five of the other 11 nations negotiating this secretive agreement, to expand their copyright terms to match the United States' already excessive length of copyright." The nonetheless sets a term of copyright equal to the one that obtains under U.S. law—life of the author plus 70 years.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Ken Akamatsu, creator of Japanese manga series "Love Hina" and "Mahou Sensei Negima!", expressed concern the agreement could decimate the derivative dōjinshi (self-published) works prevalent in Japan. Akamatsu argued that the TPP "would destroy derivative dōjinshi. And as a result, the power of the entire manga industry would also diminish."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In May 2015, Nobel Memorial prize winning economist Paul Krugman expressed concern that the TPP would tighten the patent laws and allow corporations such as big pharmaceutical companies and Hollywood to gain advantages, in terms of increasing rewards, at the cost of consumers, and that people in developing countries would not be able to access the medicines under the TPP regime. However, Walter Park, Professor of Economics at American University, argues that it is far from clear in economic research that this would necessarily happen: clarifying intellectual property rights on drugs, for some developing countries, has not led to greater prices and less access to drugs. Park also argues, based on the existing literature, that the pharmaceutical protections in TPP will potentially enhance unaffiliated licensing in developing countries, lead to tech transfers that contribute to local learning-by-doing, stimulate new drug launches in more countries, expand marketing and distribution networks, and encourage early stage pharmaceutical innovations. The Office of the United States Trade Representative notes that the TPP "aligns with the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health", which allows developing countries to circumvent patent rights for better access to essential medicines.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Pharmaceutical companies have criticized TPP for having too lenient intellectual property protections.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In July 2015, an editorial in the "New England Journal of Medicine" cited concerns by Médecins sans Frontières and Oxfam that a spike in drug prices caused by patent extensions could threaten millions of lives. Extending "data exclusivity" provisions would "prevent drug regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration from registering a generic version of a drug for a certain number of years." The article arugues that TPP could theoretically require corporations be paid compensation for any "lost profits" found to result from a nation's health regulations. The article argues that the provisions in the TPP concerning generic drugs directly target India's pharmaceutical industry. Doctors Without Borders said in November 2015 that it was "extremely concerned about the inclusion of dangerous provisions that would dismantle public health safeguards enshrined in international law and restrict access to price-lowering generic medicines for millions of people." The Australian Public Health Association (PHAA) published a media release in February 2014 that highlighted "the ways in which some of the expected economic gains from the TPPA may be undermined by poor health outcomes, and the economic costs associated with these poor health outcomes."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: A number of United States Congressional members, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Sander M. Levin, John Conyers, Jim McDermott and the now-retired Henry Waxman, as well as John Lewis, Charles B. Rangel, Earl Blumenauer, Lloyd Doggett and then-congressman Pete Stark, have expressed concerns about access to medicine. By protecting intellectual property in the form of the TPP mandating patent extensions, access by patients to affordable medicine in the developing world could be hindered, particularly in Vietnam. Additionally, they worried that the TPP would not be flexible enough to accommodate existing non-discriminatory drug reimbursement programs and the diverse health systems of member countries. In February 2015, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich stated he opposed the TPP because it would delay cheaper generic versions of drugs and because of its provisions for international tribunals that can require corporations be paid "compensation for any lost profits found to result from a nation's regulations."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The TPP agreement establishes an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which grants investors the right to sue foreign governments for treaty violations. For example, if an investor invests in country "A", a member of a trade treaty, and country A breaches that treaty, then the investor may sue country A's government for the breach. ISDS is meant to provide investors in foreign countries basic protections from foreign government actions such as "freedom from discrimination", "protection against uncompensated expropriation of property", "protection against denial of justice" and "right to transfer capital":


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: ISDS cannot ask governments to overturn local laws (unlike the World Trade Organization) which violate trade agreements, but can grant monetary damages to investors adversely affected by such laws. As pointed out by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, ISDS requires specific treaty violations, and does not allow corporations to sue solely over "lost profits".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The TPP specifically excludes tobacco industries from the ISDS process. The carve-out came as a response to concerns about ISDS cases against anti-smoking laws, including Philip Morris v. Uruguay. The exemption of tobacco from ISDS is a first for an international trade agreement.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: On the basis of leaks, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Adam S. Hersh criticized the ISDS provisions of the TPP for interfering with the ability of governments to prevent public harm, alleging that if asbestos been discovered today, governments would have been unable to impose regulations without creating grounds for an ISDS suit. Stiglitz also claimed that the TPP would give oil companies the right to sue governments for efforts to reduce carbon emissions and global warming.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In November 2015, Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs concluded that the ISDS system of the TPP grants huge power to investors, and damages the judicial systems of all the member countries. He alleges that ISDS has been already used by corporations to upset governments so as to weaken the regulations that have negative effects on their profits. In February 2016, Lise Johnson and Lisa Sachs of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute allege that foreign corporations can sue a national government in international arbitration over a government's actions if the measures (including those for public health, national security, environment, food and drug, and responses to economic crises) have a negative effect on their profits and economic interests. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch raised similar concerns while TPP was being negotiated.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In a February 2016 op-ed against the TPP, Senator Elizabeth Warren used the example of a French company suing Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage as an argument against the ISDS provisions of the TPP. "The Washington Post"s editorial board has, however, challenged this characterization of the case, noting that "Veolia of France, a waste management company, invoked ISDS to enforce a contract with the government of Alexandria, Egypt, that it says required compensation if costs increased; the company maintains that the wage increases triggered this provision. Incidentally, Veolia was working with Alexandria on a World Bank-supported project to reduce greenhouse gases, not some corporate plot to exploit the people. The case — which would result, at most, in a monetary award to Veolia, not the overthrow of the minimum wage — remains in litigation."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The Office of the United States Trade Representative challenges the notion that ISDS challenges "the sovereign ability of governments impose any measure they wish to protect labor rights, the environment, or other issues of public welfare". The International Bar Association (IBA) mirrors these sentiments, noting that "while investment treaties limit states’ ability to inflict arbitrary or discriminatory treatment, they do not limit (and, in fact, expressly safeguard) a state's sovereign right to regulate in the public interest in a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory manner." The White House notes that investment protections are a component of more than 3,000 trade agreements, the vast majority of which have some form of neutral arbitration. The United States is party to at least 50 such agreements, has only faced 13 ISDS cases and never lost an ISDS case. The White House asserts that the ISDS components of the TPP are an upgrade and improvement on ISDS in other trade agreements: TPP makes it absolutely clear that governments can regulate in the public interest (including with regard to health, safety and the environment); TPP includes the ability to dismiss frivolous claims quickly and award fees against the claimant to deter such suits; sham corporations will be prevented from accessing the investment protections; and arbitration proceedings under TPP will be open to the public and allow for inputs from non-parties.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The Peterson Institute for International Economics argues that "the ISDS provisions in the TPP are a significant improvement over those in previous agreements". PIIE notes that the ISDS mechanism in the TPP respects environmental, health, and safety regulation; ensures the transparency of dispute proceedings; and eliminates forum shopping. PIIE asserts that some of the innovations in the ISDS provisions of TPP "are generally disliked by the US business community." PIIE claims that ISDS provisions are necessary, as they boost investment: "empirical evidence has shown that treaties including these provisions have a positive effect on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows between signatory countries." PIIE challenges the claim that ISDS "arbitrators lack integrity", noting that arbitrators take an oath of impartiality and both sides of a case choose arbitrators. PIIE agrees "that secrecy has gone too far" in many ISDS cases, but notes that "TPP negotiators heeded this criticism" and opened up ISDS cases to greater transparency.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the International Bar Association (IBA), states have won a higher percentage of ISDS cases than investors, and that around one-third of all cases end in settlement. Claimant investors, when successful, recover on average less than half of the amounts claimed. IBA notes that "only 8 per cent of ISDS proceedings are commenced by very large multinational corporations." IBA challenges the notion that ISDS is biased against developing countries, noting that there is "no correlation between the success rates of claims against states and their income levels or development status." IBA notes that ISDS is necessary even in countries with sophisticated domestic legal systems because those domestic courts rule according to domestic laws, not international law. IBA notes that "increasingly, awards require the losing party to pay arbitration costs and legal fees to the winning party", which deters investors from initiating unmeritorious cases.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the TPP imposes "binding and fully enforceable obligations" on signatories to "protect the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively" and "eliminate exploitative child labor and forced labor protect against employment discrimination". The obligations include "laws on acceptable conditions of work related to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health." The USTR insists that if countries like Malaysia and Vietnam do not enforce provisions relating to forced labor, human trafficking and collective bargaining, they will cease to get the economic benefits of the TPP agreement.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The Peterson Institute for International Economics asserts that "the TPP includes more protections of labor rights than any previous US free trade agreement." In January 2016, Human Rights Watch said that the TPP side agreements with Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei "are a unique and significant step in efforts to protect labor rights in trade agreements" but noted that enforcement of these rules remains to be seen: "gauging compliance will require subjective assessments by the US that may take years to carry out and face obstacles arising from foreign policy objectives, commercial interests, and other political considerations."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Dartmouth economics Professor Emily J. Blanchard argues that while the TPP has been roundly criticized on the political left, progressives should actually be supportive of the TPP: "The TPP’s promise of a new progressive rule book – one that includes enforceable agreements against child labor and workplace discrimination, measures to punish illegal logging and trade in protected species, and protections against consumer fraud – would mark a substantial step forward in the progressive policy agenda on the global stage."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In May 2015, U.S. congressman Sander Levin argued that it is difficult to enforce trade deals, as he questioned Vietnam's willingness to meet the labour standards of TPP. A report by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said that there was a huge gap between the labor standards of past US free trade agreements and the actual enforcement of those provisions. However, PIIE analysts note that research shows that the presence of "sticks" (a possible suspension of trade benefits) and "carrots" (technical assistance) in trade deals increase the likelihood that labor obligations in trade deals have a positive effect; there are both sticks and carrots present in TPP.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Even though the TPP had not been passed, the agreement had already introduced forms of regulatory cooperation for agriculture beyond that found in the WTO. This means that regulators in different TPP signatories have been engaging with each other and building trust. Chad P. Bown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues that this regulatory cooperation meant that the US poultry industry was not as hard-hit by the 2015 bird flu outbreak, as regulators in TPP countries cooperated and continued to accept US exports of poultry.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The U.S. International Trade Commission, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the World Bank and the Office of the Chief Economist at Global Affairs Canada found that the final agreement would, if ratified, lead to net positive economic outcomes for all signatories.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In 2013, Nobel Memorial prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that, based on leaked drafts of the TPP, it "serves the interests of the wealthiest." Organised labour in the U.S. argued, during the negotiations, that the trade deal would largely benefit corporations at the expense of workers in the manufacturing and service industries. The Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research have argued that the TPP could result in job losses and declining wages in the U.S.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Economists Peter A. Petri and Michael G. Plummer challenge the view that TPP will primarily benefit the wealthy. Their analysis finds that "the gains from TPP appear to be fairly distributed—labour will gain relative to capital, and cost reductions will favour low-income households. Some workers will need to change jobs, but they constitute a small fraction of normal job churn in any given year, and the national benefits argue for generous compensation for their adjustment costs. The agreement will also benefit workers in TPP's poorest member countries." Research by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence finds that the "percentage gains for labor income from the TPP will be slightly greater than the gains to capital income. Households in all quintiles will benefit by similar percentages, but once differences in spending shares are taken into account, the percentage gains to poor and middle-class households will be slightly larger than the gains to households at the top." An opinion piece by Ed Gerwin in "The Wall Street Journal" argues that the TPP agreement benefits small businesses in the US.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson, who have extensively studied US labor markets adjustments to trade competition shocks caused by China, support TPP. They argue that TPP "would promote trade in knowledge-intensive services in which U.S. companies exert a strong comparative advantage", note that "killing the TPP would do little to bring factory work back to America" and argue that it would pressure China to raise regulatory rules and standards to those of TPP members.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, the TPP will have positive effects on the U.S. economy as a whole, with unskilled labor reaping 25% of the gains, skilled workers 41% and business owners 34%.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: World Bank found that if ratified by signatories, the TPP "agreement could raise GDP in member countries by an average of 1.1 percent by 2030. It could also increase member countries' trade by 11 percent by 2030, and represent a boost to regional trade growth, which had slowed to about 5 percent, on average, during 2010-14 from about 10 percent during 1990-07." The World Bank finds that the agreement will raise real wages in all signatories: "In the United States, for example, changes in real wages are expected to be small as unskilled and skilled wages increase by 0.4 and 0.6 percent, respectively, by 2030. In contrast, in Vietnam, TPP could increase the real wages of unskilled workers by more than 14 percent by 2030, as production intensive in unskilled labor (e.g. textiles) shifts to Vietnam."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that "TPP would have positive effects, albeit small as a percentage of the overall size of the U.S. economy". There will be 128,000 more full-time jobs. By 2032, U.S. annual real income would increase by 0.23%, real GDP would be $42.7 billion or 0.15% higher, employment would be 0.07% higher, US exports would increase 1%, and imports would increase 1.1%. The report added, "TPP would generally establish trade-related disciplines that strengthen and harmonize regulations, increase certainty, and decrease trade costs for firms that trade and invest in the TPP region." Vietnam is often seen as the biggest beneficiary of TPP. The U.S. International Trade Commission identifies the following US industries as net beneficiaries of TPP: Passenger cars; Apparel, Dairy production; Retailers and Wholesalers; and Business services; and as net losers: Auto parts; Textiles; Soybean production; Transportation and tourism; and Chemicals and drugs.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to a report by the Office of the Chief Economist at Global Affairs Canada, ratification of TPP would increase Canada's GDP by $4.3 billion by 2040. This is primarily due to the preferential access it would receive to markets in the Asia-Pacific rim. According to the report, ratification by the other TPP signatories but a failure by Canada to ratify the agreement would lead Canada to face estimated GDP losses of $5.3 billion by 2040.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Economists Peter A. Petri and Michael G. Plummer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics project that the TPP would increase incomes in the U.S. by $131 billion annually, or 0.5 percent of GDP. Exports from the U.S. would increase by $357 billion annually, or 9.1 percent, as a result of the agreement. However, two Tufts University economists argue that the research by Petri relies on unrealistic assumptions such as full employment: lost jobs will be immediately replaced in other industrial sectors. According to Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, "Petri and Plummer assume that labor markets are sufficiently flexible that job losses in adversely affected parts of the economy are necessarily offset by job gains elsewhere. Unemployment is ruled out from the start – a built-in outcome of the model that TPP proponents often fudge." Rodrik notes that "the Petri-Plummer model is squarely rooted in decades of academic trade modeling, which makes a sharp distinction between microeconomic effects (shaping resource allocation across sectors) and macroeconomic effects (related to overall levels of demand and employment). In this tradition, trade liberalization is a microeconomic "shock" that affects the composition of employment, but not its overall level."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Tufts University researchers project the TPP would have a negative impact on employment: 450,000 US jobs, 75,000 Japanese jobs, 58,000 Canadian jobs and 5,000 New Zealand jobs would be lost by 2025. According to the report, 771,000 jobs would be lost in total and positive economic effects would be negligible for participating countries.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence says that the model used by the Tufts researchers "is simply not suited for credibly predicting the effects of the TPP" and argues that the model used by Petri and Plummer is superior. Lawrence argues that the model used by the Tufts researchers "does not have the granularity that allows it to estimate variables such as exports, imports, foreign direct investment, and changes in industrial structure. As a result, its predictions ignore the benefits to the TPP economies that occur through increased specialization, the realization of scale economies, and improved consumer choice." Lawrence also notes that the model used by the Tufts researchers finds that the TPP will cause GDP to fall by 5.24% in non-TPP developing countries, such as China, India, and Indonesia, which Lawrence is highly skeptical of: "It is not believable that a trade agreement of this magnitude could cause the rest of the world to plummet into recession." Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, a well-known skeptic of globalization, says that the Tufts researchers do "a poor job of explaining how their model works, and the particulars of their simulation are somewhat murky... the Capaldo framework lacks sectoral and country detail; its behavioral assumptions remain opaque; and its extreme Keynesian assumptions sit uneasily with its medium-term perspective."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Fredrik Erixon and Matthias Bauer of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) write that the Tufts analysis has such serious flaws "that its results should neither be regarded reliable nor realistic." They write that Tufts model is "by and large a demand-driven model that does not make efforts to capture the supply-side effects of trade, which are the effects that are proven to be the core positive effects of trade liberalisation. Equally problematic, the model is not designed to assess the effect on trade from trade agreements – in fact, the model is profoundly ill suited for such an exercise. No trade economist, regardless what school of thought he or she comes from, has ever used this model to make estimates of trade. The reason is simple: if a model cannot predict the effects on the flows and profile of trade as a consequence of trade liberalisation, it is of no use at all." They add, "In Capaldo’s analysis, structural change and the emergence of new industries do not play a role at all. Capaldo implicitly assumes that an economy with its labour and capital does not respond and adjust to new circumstances. New competition only leads to new unemployment. In addition, the impact of lower barriers on international commerce on product and process innovation is neglected. Finally, Capaldo does not account for the impact of competition on the cost of production and final consumer prices."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to the Congressional Research Service, "The Tufts study has drawn particular criticism as an unconventional framework for analyzing trade agreements, whereas Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, such as that used in the Peterson study are standard in trade policy analysis." Fabio Ghironi, Professor in Economics at the University of Washington, describes the models used by the World Bank and the Peterson Institute in more favorable terms than the Tufts analysis.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The EU is trying to form trade agreements with each country that is part of the TPP: since 2013, there have been talks of a free trade agreement between the EU and Japan, and in 2015 the EU presented its new strategy to improve trade in the Asia-Pacific entitled "Trade for All."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to an analysis by the Cato Institute of the chapters of the TPP, 15 chapters have a liberalizing impact, 5 have a protectionist impact, and 2 have a neutral impact. Considered as a whole, the terms of the TPP are net liberalizing.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: There have been conflicting arguments on whether or not the TPP aims to increase the liberalization of trade. For arguments that propose that the TPP succeeds at liberalizing trade among the participating nations, there is a question of whether or not this causes a positive or a negative net change. Some scholars argue that participatory members of the TPP believe that such membership is a utilitarian and practical method toward new trade liberalization. Scholars Peter Petri and Michael Plummer describe the TPP as a "dynamic process - and example of competitive liberalization," and this liberalization described can result in a new type of governance for the Asia-Pacific, as well as transnational trade.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to analyst and economist B.R. Williams, the United States has a large role in the reduction of trade barriers and increased U.S. investment. Williams explains that the U.S. aims to create a "broader platform for trade liberalization, particularly throughout the Asia-Pacific region." Scholars C. Li and J. Whalley explore a numerical approach in explaining the liberalizing effects of the TPP. Li and Whalley uses a quantitative equilibrium simulation to explore the effects of the TPP on the liberalization of trade and new markets.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: According to a 2020 study, the TPP pushed China to introduce its own internal liberal market reforms. Reform-minded elites in China used the TPP to justify reform. In anticipation of China's exclusion from the agreement, exposed Chinese firms began investing in production in TPP member states.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In May 2020, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said that China has a positive and open attitude toward joining the CPTPP.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In November 2020, China and fourteen Asia-Pacific nations signed a trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: TPP would have increased the likelihood that Japan would undertake economic reforms to revive its economy, which coupled with potential South Korean accession to the TPP, could have had an economic impact on China. By making the Chinese economy less competitive and Chinese leadership less likely to write the rules of trade in East and Southeast Asia, the Chinese government would have been under great internal and external pressure to liberalize its economy. Japan's former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, believed that future Chinese accession to the TPP would have a major pacifying impact on the Asia-Pacific region. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said that a failure to ratify the TPP would give China the opportunity to boost its exports and set labor and environmental standards in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: South Korea did not participate in the TPP "largely out of a concern to maintain balance in its economic relations with China and the United States" but showed greater interest in joining after Japan, its biggest economic competitor, decided to participate. The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Taiwan also reportedly considered and implemented various domestic reforms to improve their prospects for eventually joining.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: swung from disdain to suspicion to cautious embrace... Conclusion of a TPP agreement in early October has sparked a lively debate in Beijing, with the weight of elite opinion seeming to tilt toward eventual membership; for example, the head of the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Jin Liqun, announced his support during a speech in Washington shortly after the TPP deal was announced.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The TPP may give renewed impetus to trade negotiations among China, Japan, and Korea, and increase the likelihood of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) which could provide a possible pathway to a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific. The 2017 decision by United States President Donald Trump to withdraw from the TPP strengthened China's alternative model of the RCEP.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In January 2016, the National Association of Manufacturers announced its support for TPP, saying "without such an agreement, the United States would be ceding economic leadership to other global powers, letting them set the rules of economic engagement in the region".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: A 2016 study by University of Maryland political scientists Todd Allee and Andrew Lugg suggested that if the TPP became standard legal text, it would shape future trade cooperation and agreements.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: An October 2016 survey of 746 international relations scholars showed that 71% supported the TPP, 18% opposed the TPP, 9% were neutral, and 2% were undecided.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The original TPP was thought by some to likely bring China's neighbours closer to the United States and reduce their dependence on Chinese trade. If ratified, the TPP would have strengthened American influence on future rules for the global economy. US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter claimed the passage of the TPP to be as valuable to the United States as the creation of another aircraft carrier. President Obama has argued "if we don't pass this agreement—if America doesn't write those rules—then countries like China will". According to the Congressional Research Service, "many Asian policymakers—correctly or not—could interpret a failure of TPP in the United States as a symbol of declining U.S. interest in the region and inability to assert leadership... failure to conclude TPP could, in effect, allow China to shape regional rules of commerce and diplomacy through its own trade and investment initiatives, potentially creating regional rules and norms less beneficial for U.S. interests." Michael J. Green and Matthew P. Goodman argue that "history will be unforgiving if TPP fails... If Congress rejects TPP, trying to negotiate a similar arrangement in Asia would reopen demands on the United States—and in the meantime, would likely give impetus to alternative arrangements like RCEP that exclude the United States. Momentum behind the U.S.-led international order would shift to momentum against it. Future generations of historians will take note of U.S. leadership at this moment." Dan Ikenson, director of Cato's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, argued in July 2016 that the "failure of Congress to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership this year would do more to subvert U.S. regional and global interests than anything China is capable of doing." Stephen M. Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University, writing after the Trump Administration abandoned the TPP, described the TPP as "a key institution that would have bound a number of Asian countries more tightly to the United States".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: On 30 January 2015 Philip Hammond, the former Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, described the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership as "potentially important liberalising steps forward".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: The European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), a think tank on European policies, predicted in 2012 that the TPP would be a "deadly threat to European exporters of agricultural products in TPP countries". ECIPE has said in 2014 that TPP "[would] be the first 'competing' economic integration that is large enough to have a considerable negative impact on Europe. In the long-term, the negative effects [would] come from dynamic impact, e.g. on investment, productivity and competitiveness".


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In 2014, Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said "there isn't a compelling case for this deal, from either a global or a national point of view."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In February 2016, United Nations' human rights expert Alfred de Zayas argued that the TPP was fundamentally flawed and was based on an outdated model of trade pacts, and that governments should not sign or ratify the TPP. According to de Zayas, the international human rights regime imposes binding legal obligations on countries, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and trade must be done under the human rights regime. Under the ISDS in the TPP, investors can sue a government, while a government cannot sue investors. De Zayas argued that this asymmetry made the system unfair. He added that international law, including accountability and transparency, must prevail over trade pacts.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Some critics and even supporters of the TPP wanted the deal to contain measures that would crack down on nations who engage in alleged currency manipulation, notably China. However, Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, has argued that the trade deal was never likely to include restrictions on currency manipulation, as it would have restricted U.S. monetary policy. Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel has argued that the inclusion of currency manipulation language in TPP would be a mistake. Frankel noted that currency manipulation would be hard to enforce (in part because it is impossible to tell whether a currency is overvalued or undervalued); "currency manipulation" can often be legitimate; China, often alleged to be a major currency manipulator, is not party to the TPP; currency manipulation accusations are often meritless; and because it would restrict U.S. monetary policy.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Donald Trump has criticized the TPP agreement for being too long and complicated, saying "[i]t's 5,600 pages long, so complex that nobody's read it." Senator Bernie Sanders has charged that the "TPP is much more than a 'free trade' agreement."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: However, Georgetown University Professor Marc L. Busch and McGill University Professor Krzysztof J. Pelc note that modern trade deals are long and complex because they often tackle non-tariff barriers to trade, such as different standards and regulations, in addition to tariffs. Due to steadily decreasing tariff barriers since WWII, countries have become increasingly likely to enact trade barriers in the form of non-tariff barriers. National firms often lobby their own governments to enact regulations that are designed to keep out foreign firms. The TPP addresses many of these "disguised restrictions on trade" by, for instance, "basing these measures on agreed-upon science; making the process of formulating regulations more transparent; and giving foreign exporters opportunities to offer substantive input in the formulation of these measures."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: As with many trade agreements, until being finalized, negotiations for the TPP were conducted with significant secrecy. Drafts of the agreement were kept classified during negotiations, and access to the working text was significantly restricted even for government officials, including the United States Congress; and business representatives involved in the talks. Despite this, some sections of TPP drafts were leaked to the public by WikiLeaks, which published an intellectual property chapter draft in 2013, an environmental chapter draft in 2014, and the final intellectual property chapter in 2014.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In 2012, critics such as Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a consumer advocacy group, called for more open negotiations in regard to the agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk responded that he believes the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) conducted "the most engaged and transparent process as we possibly could", but that "some measure of discretion and confidentiality" are needed "to preserve negotiating strength and to encourage our partners to be willing to put issues on the table they may not otherwise." He dismissed the "tension" as natural and noted that when the Free Trade Area of the Americas drafts were released, negotiators were subsequently unable to reach a final agreement.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: On 23 May 2012, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, introduced , which would have required the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to disclose its TPP documents to all members of Congress. Had it passed, Wyden said that the bill would increase Congressional access to information about USTR activity.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Michael R. Wessel, former commissioner on the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission claimed in May 2015 that "cleared advisors" like himself were "prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches". He claimed that only portions of the text had been provided, "to be read under the watchful eye of a USTR official", that access on secure government-run website did not contain the most-up-to-date information, and that for cleared advisors to get that information, he had "to travel to certain government facilities and sign in to read the materials" and "even then, the administration determines what we can and cannot review and, often, they provide carefully edited summaries rather than the actual underlying text, which is critical to really understanding the consequences of the agreement."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In June 2015, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, opposed the bill to fast-track the congressional ratification of the TPP on the basis of the trade agreement's secrecy.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has alleged that corporations and industry exert disproportionate influence on U.S. trade negotiators. She asserted in July 2016 that 85% of seats on U.S. trade advisory committees were held by "senior corporation executives or industry lobbyists", and that the members of the committees "whisper in the ear" of negotiators.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Michelle Ye Hee Lee, a fact-checker for "The Washington Post", wrote that Warren used "misleading language" in describing the TPP. While Warren implied that "28 trade advisory committees were formed" specifically to influence the TPP, the advisory committees were actually created as part of the Trade Act of 1974; only the membership of the trade committees had changed during the Obama administration and the early phases of the TPP. Regarding Warren's claim that trade advisers secretly "whisper in the ear of our trade negotiators", Lee wrote: "while the direct meetings take place in private, committees still have to submit written reports to Congress and provide written recommendations and advice that are made public." Furthermore, Lee wrote, "it is true that industry representatives make up a large number of the total membership, but it is worth noting that there is a labor committee in the second tier, labor representatives in the first tier and that the industry groups have a narrow focus (to give technical advice)."


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In response to criticisms about transparency and the large representation from industry representatives, USTR announced it would create a Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: Dean Baker argued that Article 18.78, under which countries should ensure that they protect trade secrets and impose criminal procedures for violators, could be used to enforce non-compete agreements. Baker points out that California's success can partly be attributed to the fact that the state did not allow for the enforcement of non-compete agreements, making it easy for tech workers to quit their jobs and start to work for another company.


title: Trans-Pacific Partnership

text: In 2014, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky warned that the TPP is "designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity." Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argues that trade agreements like the TPP "have ended up devastating working families and enriching large corporations."


title: Twilio

text: Twilio () is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis and was originally based in both Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio's first major press coverage, in November 2008, was the result of an application built by Jeff Lawson to rickroll people, which investor Dave McClure used on TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington as a prank. A few days later, on November 20, 2008, the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud. Twilio's text messaging API was released in February 2010, and SMS shortcodes were released in public beta in July 2011.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio raised approximately $103 million in venture capital growth funding. Twilio received its first round of seed funding in March 2009 for an undisclosed amount from Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, Dave McClure, David G. Cohen, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures and Jeff Fluhr. Twilio's first A round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures for $3.7 million and its second B round of funding, for $12 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures. In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million from Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Bessemer Venture Partners. In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E from Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition to Amazon and Salesforce.


title: Twilio

text: In March 2020, Twilio announced the appointment of Steve Pugh as Chief Security Officer and Glenn Weinstein as Chief Customer Officer.


title: Twilio

text: On August 4, 2022, an unknown attacker gained access to Twilio's internal network through an SMS phishing campaign targeting Twilio's employees. Twilio confirmed the breach three days later, clarifying that it affected only "a limited number" of customer accounts. On August 15, Signal announced that it had been affected by the breach, indicating that the 125 customers affected included at least some enterprise accounts.


title: Twilio

text: In September 2022, Twilio laid off 11% of its workforce to become profitable. In the company announcement, CEO Jeff Lawson claimed decisions of which employees to lay off were made through an "anti-racist/anti-oppression lens."


title: Twilio

text: Twilio is known for its use of platform evangelism to acquire customers. An early example is GroupMe, which was founded in May 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon and uses Twilio's text messaging product to facilitate group chat. GroupMe raised $10.6 million in venture funding in January 2011.


title: Twilio

text: Following the success of TechCrunch Disrupt, seed accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global) announced the Twilio Fund, a $250,000 "micro-fund" to provide seed money to startups using Twilio in September 2010.


title: Twilio

text: In February 2015, Twilio acquired Authy, a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers two-factor authentication services to end users, developers and enterprises.


title: Twilio

text: In September 2016, Twilio acquired Tikal Technologies, the development team behind the Kurento WebRTC open source project, for $8.5 million.


title: Twilio

text: In February 2017, Twilio acquired Beepsend, a Swedish-based SMS messaging provider, for an undisclosed amount.


title: Twilio

text: In September 2018, Twilio announced they were acquiring Ytica, a Prague, Czech Republic-based speech analytics firm, for an undisclosed amount.


title: Twilio

text: In October 2018, Twilio announced they were acquiring SendGrid, a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email, for $2 billion. In February 2019, the two companies were formally merged in a deal valued at $3 billion.


title: Twilio

text: In November 2018, Twilio acquired Core Network Dynamics GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based virtual evolved packet core company.


title: Twilio

text: In July 2020, Twilio announced they had acquired Electric Imp, an internet of things platform company, for an undisclosed amount. In October of that year, Twilio acquired Segment, a platform to collect, clean, and activate customer data, for $3.2 billion.


title: Twilio

text: In May 2021, Twilio announced that they were acquiring Ionic Security, a data security platform for $30.2 million, and Zipwhip, a toll-free messaging services provider, for $850 million.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio uses Amazon Web Services to host its communication infrastructure via APIs. Twilio follows a set of architectural design principles to protect against unexpected outages and received praise for staying online during the widespread Amazon Web Services outage in April 2011.


title: Twilio

text: Rather than using industry standard protocols such as SIP for call control Twilio uses a customized markup language known as TwIML to allow for direct integration with its services. Twilio and the customer typically exchange TwIML documents via HTTP Webhook.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio is known to support the development of open-source software. In June 2010 Twilio launched OpenVBX, an open-source product that lets business users configure phone numbers to receive and route phone calls. One month later, Twilio engineer Kyle Conroy released Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard written in the Python programming language that any API or software service can use to display whether their service is functioning properly.


title: Twilio

text: Twilio also sponsors Localtunnel, created by former engineer Jeff Lindsay, which enables software developers to expose their local development environment to the public Internet from behind a NAT.


title: Michael Massee

text: Michael Groo Massee (September 1, 1952 – October 20, 2016) was an American actor. Active on screen during a three decade career, he frequently portrayed villainous characters. His film roles include Funboy in the dark fantasy "The Crow" (1994), Newton in the horror anthology "Tales from the Hood" (1995), Andy in the neo-noir "Lost Highway" (1997), and the Gentleman in "The Amazing Spider-Man" (2012) and its 2014 sequel. Massee also voiced Bruce Banner in the first two entries of "Marvel Animated Features" in 2006. On television, he played Ira Gaines on the first season of the Fox action drama "24" (2001–2002), Isaiah Haden on the NBC fantasy mystery "Revelations" (2005), Dyson Frost on the ABC science fiction drama "FlashForward" (2009–2010), and sadistic serial killer "Dr." Charles Hoyt on the first two seasons of the TNT police procedural "Rizzoli & Isles" (2010–2013).


title: Michael Massee

text: Michael Groo Massee was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1952, the younger of two children born to Jack Groo Massee and his wife, Holly ( Hoover), of Prairie Village, Kansas.


title: Michael Massee

text: The family moved to Paris, France, where Massee grew up and, after high school, he came back to the United States settling in New York, where he graduated from Hunter College and studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.


title: Michael Massee

text: In 1993, Massee portrayed the character Funboy in the film "The Crow", starring Brandon Lee. Massee was the actor who fired the shot that killed Lee by accident on the set in 1993, due to an improperly prepared prop gun. Traumatized by the event, he returned to New York and took a year off from acting, and never saw the film. In an interview in 2005, 12 years after the incident, Massee revealed that he still had nightmares about it, stating, "I don't think you ever get over something like that."


title: Michael Massee

text: In 1995, Massee played the cop Newton in the film "Tales from the Hood". He provided the voice for the villain Spellbinder in "The Batman", as well as appearing on the television series "24" as the villain Ira Gaines. He provided the voice of Bruce Banner for the "Ultimate Avengers" animated film, as well as the sequel "Ultimate Avengers 2". He appeared in the film "Seven" alongside Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. He appeared in David Lynch's "Lost Highway" as Andy. He played the physical manifestation of Management (a.k.a. Lucius Belyakovin) on HBO's "Carnivàle". He guest-starred in "The X-Files" episode "The Field Where I Died". He also appeared in the 2005 NBC TV miniseries "Revelations" as the main antagonist. In 2006, he guest-starred in "Criminal Minds" as a serial killer on death row. He also guest-starred in the "" episode "Reunion" as a rock star. He appeared in the American TV series "FlashForward" as villain Dyson Frost. He appeared as a hunter, Kubrick, on the series "Supernatural" in 2007.


title: Michael Massee

text: Massee portrayed imprisoned serial killer "Dr." Charles Hoyt in the first two seasons of the TV series "Rizzoli & Isles". He played Gustav Fiers (alias The Gentleman) in 2012's "The Amazing Spider-Man" and reprised the role in the 2014 sequel, "The Amazing Spider-Man 2". In 2014, Massee, who spoke French, appeared in the French series "Interventions".


title: Michael Massee

text: Massee married Ellen Sussdorf in 1997, with whom he had two children: Jack and Lily. The couple owned a clothing boutique in Los Angeles. Massee died of stomach cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on October 20, 2016 at the age of 64.


title: Xavier Becerra

text: Xavier Becerra ( ; ; born January 26, 1958) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the 25th United States secretary of health and human services since March 2021. Becerra previously served as the attorney general of California from January 2017 until March 2021. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Downtown Los Angeles in Congress from 1993 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Becerra was Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2013 to 2017.


title: Xavier Becerra

text: Born in Sacramento, California, Becerra graduated from Stanford University and received his Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School. He worked as a lawyer at the Legal Assistance Corporation of central Massachusetts, before returning to California in 1986 to work as an administrative assistant for state senator Art Torres. He served as a deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice from 1987 to 1990 before he was elected to the California State Assembly, where he served one term from 1990 to 1992.


title: Xavier Becerra

text: Becerra was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1992. He represented California's 30th congressional district from 1993 to 2003, California's 31st congressional district from 2003 to 2013, and California's 34th congressional district from 2013 to 2017. He served as Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus from 1997 to 1999, Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2009 to 2013, and as a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.