The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the Greek and Anatolian peninsulas. The sea has an area of some 215,000 square kilometres. In the north, the Aegean is connected to the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea by the straits of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus; the Aegean Islands are located within the sea and some bound it on its southern periphery, including Crete and Rhodes. The sea reaches a maximum depth of 3,544 meters, to the east of Crete; the Aegean Islands can be divided into several island groups, including Dodecanese, the Cyclades, the Sporades, the Saronic islands and the North Aegean Islands, as well as Crete and its surrounding islands. The Dodecanese, located to the southeast, includes the islands of Rhodes and Patmos. Lesbos is part of the North Aegean Islands. Euboea, the second largest island in Greece, is located in the Aegean, despite being administered as part of Central Greece. Nine out of twelve of the Administrative regions of Greece border the sea, along with the Turkish provinces of Edirne, Balıkesir, Aydın and Muğla to the east of the sea.

Various Turkish islands in the sea are Imbros, Cunda Island, the Foça Islands. The Aegean Sea has been important in regards to the civilization of Ancient Greece, who inhabited the area around the coast of the Aegean and the Aegean islands; the Aegean islands facilitated contact between Europe and Asia. Along with the Greeks, Thracians lived among the northern coast; the Romans conquered the area under the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire held it against advances by the First Bulgarian Empire. The Fourth Crusade weakened Byzantine control of the area, it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Crete, a Venetian colony until 1669; the Greek War of Independence allowed a Greek state on the coast of the Aegean from 1829 onwards. The Ottoman Empire held a presence over the sea for over 500 years until their dissolution, when it was replaced by modern Turkey; the sea was traditionally known as the Archipelago, but in English the meaning of archipelago has changed to refer to the Aegean Islands and to any island group.

The rocks making up the floor of the Aegean are limestone, though greatly altered by volcanic activity that has convulsed the region in recent geologic times. Of particular interest are the richly coloured sediments in the region of the islands of Santorini and Milos, in the south Aegean. Notable cities on the Aegean coastline include Thessaloniki and Heraklion in Greece, İzmir and Bodrum in Turkey. A number of issues concerning sovereignty within the Aegean Sea are disputed between Greece and Turkey; the Aegean dispute has had a large effect on Greek-Turkish relations since the 1970s. Issues include the delimitation of territorial waters, national airspace, exclusive economic zones and flight information regions, it is believed that the Greek name Aegean is linked to the mythological figure Aegeus, the father of Theseus, the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Aegeus had told Theseus to put up white sails when returning if he was successful in killing the Minotaur; when Theseus returned, he forgot these instructions, Aegeus subsequently drowned himself in the sea when he thought his son had died.

The sea was known in Latin as Aegaeum mare under the control of the Roman Empire. The Venetians, who ruled many Greek islands in the High and Late Middle Ages, popularized the name Archipelago, a name that held on in many European countries until the early modern period. In some South Slavic languages, the Aegean is called White Sea; the Turkish name for the sea is Ege Denizi, most a phonetic transliteration of the Greek name. The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea, covers about 214,000 square kilometres in area, measuring about 670 kilometres longitudinally and 390 kilometres latitudinal; the sea's maximum depth is 3,543 metres, located at a point east of Crete. The Aegean Islands are found within its waters, with the following islands delimiting the sea on the south from west to east: Kythera, Crete, Kasos and Rhodes; the Anatolian peninsula marks the eastern boundary of the sea, while the Greek mainland marks the west. Several seas are contained within the Aegean Sea.

The Greek regions that border the sea, in alphabetical order, are Attica, Central Greece, Central Macedonia, Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, North Aegean, South Aegean, Thessaly. The historical region of Macedonia borders the sea, to the north; the Aegean Islands, which all belong to Greece, can be divided into seven groups: Northeastern Aegean Islands, which lie in the Thracian Sea East Aegean Islands Northern Sporades Cyclades Saronic Islands Dodecanese CreteThe word archipelago was applied to the Aegean Sea and its islands. Many of the Aegean Islands, or chains of islands, are extensions of the mountains on the mainland. One chain extends across the sea to Chios, another extends across Euboea to Samos, a third extends across the Peloponnese and Crete to Rhodes, dividing the A

Richard "Rick" Speare was an Australian public health physician and veterinary surgeon. He is best known for his research on animal diseases his work on chytridiomycosis in amphibians. Speare worked clinically as both a veterinarian, he joined James Cook University in 1988 as a research fellow, was appointed an associate professor in 1991. His research covered a suite of diseases, including paramphistomid trematodes of the agile wallaby, head lice and Australian bat lyssavirus. However, he is best known for his work on amphibian diseases such as salmonella and ranaviruses in cane toads, Mucor amphibiorum in the Australian green tree frog, most notably, chytridiomycosis. Rick completed his PhD on the helminth parasite Strongyloides in 1986, he published an important book chapter on the morphology of Strongyloides spp. in "Strogyloidiasis: A Major Roundworm Infection of Man", edited by David Grove. Rick performed significant work on the public health control of human strongyloidiasis caused by Strongyloides stercoralis in Australian aboriginal communities.

He was the founder of the Australian National Working Group on Strongyloidiasis. Speare was Director of the JCU School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine from 2009 to 2012 and taught numerous subjects in the University's Masters of Public Health program, including Human Parasitology, he undertook guest lecturing roles at Universities such as Tufts in the United States of America. In 2005, Speare and two colleagues infected themselves with hookworms to study the body's response to the parasites. Speare was instrumental in founding the Atoifi Health Research Group in the Solomon Islands, to help improve public health in the region. Speare retired from James Cook University in 2012, was made a member of the Order of Australia in the same year, he continued to publish research. He was a director of the private company Tropical Health Solutions Pty Ltd, whose aims were to "improve health in the tropics through undertaking applied research to generate evidence for decisions and through building research capacity in local researchers."

Speare died in a car accident in the Atherton Tablelands on 5 June 2016. He was survived by his wife Kerry, three sons, two daughters and five grandchildren

Tax protesters in the United States have advanced a number of arguments asserting that the assessment and collection of the federal income tax violates statutes enacted by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President. Such arguments claim that certain statutes fail to create a duty to pay taxes, that such statutes do not impose the income tax on wages or other types of income claimed by the tax protesters, or that provisions within a given statute exempt the tax protesters from a duty to pay; these statutory arguments are distinguished from, although related to, constitutional and general conspiracy arguments. Statutory arguments presuppose that Congress has the constitutional power to assess a tax on incomes, but that the Congress has failed to levy the tax by enacting a specific statute. In connection with various arguments that the Federal income tax should not apply to citizens or residents within the fifty states, some tax protesters have argued about the meanings of the terms "state" and "includes".

One argument is that the definitions of "state" and "United States" in most subparts and the general definition in the Internal Revenue Code are what other amending code sections refer to as "a special definition of'state'", where the statutory definitions include the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, some other territories, without mentioning the 50 states. Under this argument, the definition of "state" within the Code in general, or within those certain subparts of the Code, refers only to territories, or the possessions of the federal government, or the District of Columbia. Alaska and Hawaii were included in the "special" definition of a "state" until each was removed from that general definition by the Alaska Omnibus Act and the Hawaii Omnibus Act when they were admitted to the Union. Under the following tax protester argument, the term "state" is used in an international meaning of "nation" or "sovereign." The argument is that this meaning refers to the foreign status of each state to every other state including the federal state, under private international law.

Under this argument, all court opinions on the subject of states being foreign to each other have upheld this concept, have distinguished between meanings of foreignness by using the terms private international law and public international law. Under this argument, the latter term deals with the authority the 50 States delegated to the United States government to represent American interests outside of America, grouping all those that are bound by the United States Constitution as one body, relative to those that are not bound, such as France or Britain. Under this argument, the term "private international law" signifies the foreignness of the sovereign states, or nations, of the United States system to each other, within the system. Tax protesters argue that the importance of the definition applies where the term "state" is the reference to the federal state as defined within a subpart or then when "state" is referenced in other definitions within relevant places, it has the same meaning.

There are two Code sections that define "employee" within the whole of the Internal Revenue Code and both are found in parts of the Title where "state" is governed by this "special" definition. Tax protesters argue that each section defines the term "employee" as being limited to someone who works within or in the employ of a state, or, an officer of a corporation, while the courts have ruled that the term "employee" is not limited to those persons; the definition of "wages" is that remuneration, earned by an "employee." Tax protesters argue that normal income taxes are taxes on wages and some laws that require things like filing a return are only required of employees. Tax protesters argue that there are no conflicting definitions of "state" or "United States" to this interpretation in Title 26 of the United States Code -- that both of the two times either of these terms are defined as "the 50 states," the terms are localized to the subpart. Under this argument, in those two subparts that define "state" as the 50 states, there is no mention of the District of Columbia or any territories in that definition.

The Internal Revenue Code general definition of the term "state" in section 7701 is as follows: The term "State" shall be construed to include the District of Columbia, where such construction is necessary to carry out provisions of this title. Some tax protesters argue that, in connection with the phrase "to include the District of Columbia," the term "include" should have the meaning of exclusivity of whatever is being listed if the list is made in a certain way. In such situations, of which the definition of "State" is an example, the argument goes that no things not in the list are included with what is included. Other subparts of the Internal Revenue Code list the District of Columbia and territories of the United States in response to the definition of "State," or geographically, the "United States" The Internal Revenue Code general definition of the terms "includes" and "including" is as follows: The terms "includes" and "including" when used in a definition contained in this title shall not be deemed to exclude other things otherwise within the meaning of the term defined.

Some tax protesters argue that in the 1911 case of Montello Salt Co. v. Utah, the Supreme Court stated that the term "including" is interchangeable with "also" but not and can sometimes have a meaning of exclusivity; the Montello Salt case was not a Federal tax case, no issues involving the meaning of the terms "state" or "includes" or "including" as used in the Internal Revenue Code were