Euro
The euro is the official currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union. This group of states is known as the eurozone or euro area, counts about 343 million citizens as of 2019; the euro is the second largest and second most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar. The euro is subdivided into 100 cents; the currency is used by the institutions of the European Union, by four European microstates that are not EU members, as well as unilaterally by Montenegro and Kosovo. Outside Europe, a number of special territories of EU members use the euro as their currency. Additionally, 240 million people worldwide as of 2018 use currencies pegged to the euro; the euro is the second largest reserve currency as well as the second most traded currency in the world after the United States dollar. As of August 2018, with more than €1.2 trillion in circulation, the euro has one of the highest combined values of banknotes and coins in circulation in the world, having surpassed the U.
S. dollar. The name euro was adopted on 16 December 1995 in Madrid; the euro was introduced to world financial markets as an accounting currency on 1 January 1999, replacing the former European Currency Unit at a ratio of 1:1. Physical euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation on 1 January 2002, making it the day-to-day operating currency of its original members, by March 2002 it had replaced the former currencies. While the euro dropped subsequently to US$0.83 within two years, it has traded above the U. S. dollar since the end of 2002, peaking at US$1.60 on 18 July 2008. In late 2009, the euro became immersed in the European sovereign-debt crisis, which led to the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility as well as other reforms aimed at stabilising and strengthening the currency; the euro is managed and administered by the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank and the Eurosystem. As an independent central bank, the ECB has sole authority to set monetary policy; the Eurosystem participates in the printing and distribution of notes and coins in all member states, the operation of the eurozone payment systems.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty obliges most EU member states to adopt the euro upon meeting certain monetary and budgetary convergence criteria, although not all states have done so. The United Kingdom and Denmark negotiated exemptions, while Sweden turned down the euro in a 2003 referendum, has circumvented the obligation to adopt the euro by not meeting the monetary and budgetary requirements. All nations that have joined the EU since 1993 have pledged to adopt the euro in due course. Since 1 January 2002, the national central banks and the ECB have issued euro banknotes on a joint basis. Euro banknotes do not show. Eurosystem NCBs are required to accept euro banknotes put into circulation by other Eurosystem members and these banknotes are not repatriated; the ECB issues 8% of the total value of banknotes issued by the Eurosystem. In practice, the ECB's banknotes are put into circulation by the NCBs, thereby incurring matching liabilities vis-à-vis the ECB; these liabilities carry interest at the main refinancing rate of the ECB.
The other 92% of euro banknotes are issued by the NCBs in proportion to their respective shares of the ECB capital key, calculated using national share of European Union population and national share of EU GDP weighted. The euro is divided into 100 cents. In Community legislative acts the plural forms of euro and cent are spelled without the s, notwithstanding normal English usage. Otherwise, normal English plurals are sometimes used, with many local variations such as centime in France. All circulating coins have a common side showing the denomination or value, a map in the background. Due to the linguistic plurality in the European Union, the Latin alphabet version of euro is used and Arabic numerals. For the denominations except the 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, the map only showed the 15 member states which were members when the euro was introduced. Beginning in 2007 or 2008 the old map is being replaced by a map of Europe showing countries outside the Union like Norway, Belarus, Russia or Turkey.
The 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, keep their old design, showing a geographical map of Europe with the 15 member states of 2002 raised somewhat above the rest of the map. All common sides were designed by Luc Luycx; the coins have a national side showing an image chosen by the country that issued the coin. Euro coins from any member state may be used in any nation that has adopted the euro; the coins are issued in denominations of €2, €1, 50c, 20c, 10c, 5c, 2c, 1c. To avoid the use of the two smallest coins, some cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents in the Netherlands and Ireland and in Finland; this practice is discouraged by the Commission, as is the practice of certain shops of refusing to accept high-value euro notes. Commemorative coins with €2 face value have been issued with changes to the design of the national side of the coin; these include both issued coins, such as the €2 commemorative coin for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, nationally i
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, author and humanitarian. He is best known as the principal founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, while being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen launched Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. Gates led the company as chief executive officer until stepping down in January 2000, but he remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation that he and his wife, Melinda Gates, established in 2000, he transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He has been criticized for his business tactics; this opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings. Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people, an index of the wealthiest documented individuals and ranking against those with wealth, not able to be ascertained. From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years, held it from March 2014 to July 2017, with an estimated net worth of US$89.9 billion as of October 2017. However, on July 27, 2017, since October 27, 2017, he has been surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion at the time. As of August 6, 2018, Gates had a net worth of $95.4 billion, making him the second-richest person in the world, behind Bezos. In his career and since leaving Microsoft, Gates pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, he donated large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported to be the world's largest private charity.
In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy. The foundation works to save lives and improve global health, is working with Rotary International to eliminate polio. Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955, he is the son of Mary Maxwell Gates. His ancestry includes English, German and Scots-Irish, his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, a younger sister, Libby, he is the fourth of his name in his family, but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home, once damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old. Early on in his life, Gates observed; when Gates was young, his family attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.
The family encouraged competition. There was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing". At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school and wrote his first software program; when Gates was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, was excused from math classes to pursue his interest, he wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine; when he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation, which banned four Lakeside students – Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, Kent Evans – for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in Fortran and machine language; the arrangement with CCC continued until 1970. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's student information system software to schedule students in classes, he modified the code so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of interesting girls." He stated that "it
World population
In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans living, was estimated to have reached 7.6 billion people as of May 2018. It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion. World population has experienced continuous growth since the end of the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death in 1350, when it was near 370 million; the highest population growth rates – global population increases above 1.8% per year – occurred between 1955 and 1975, peaking to 2.06% between 1965 and 1970. The growth rate has declined to 1.18% between 2010 and 2015 and is projected to decline further in the course of the 21st century. However, the global population is still growing and is projected to reach about 10 billion in 2050 and more than 11 billion in 2100. Total annual births were highest in the late 1980s at about 139 million, as of 2011 were expected to remain constant at a level of 135 million, while deaths numbered 56 million per year and were expected to increase to 80 million per year by 2040.
The median age of the world's population was estimated to be 30.4 years in 2018. Six of the Earth's seven continents are permanently inhabited on a large scale. Asia is the most populous continent, with its 4.54 billion inhabitants accounting for 60% of the world population. The world's two most populated countries and India, together constitute about 36% of the world's population. Africa is the second most populated continent, with around 1.28 billion people, or 16% of the world's population. Europe's 742 million people make up 10% of the world's population as of 2018, while the Latin American and Caribbean regions are home to around 651 million. Northern America consisting of the United States and Canada, has a population of around 363 million, Oceania, the least populated region, has about 41 million inhabitants. Though it is not permanently inhabited by any fixed population, Antarctica has a small, fluctuating international population based in polar science stations; this population tends to rise in the summer months and decrease in winter, as visiting researchers return to their home countries.
Estimates of world population by their nature are an aspect of modernity, possible only since the Age of Discovery. Early estimates for the population of the world date to the 17th century: William Petty in 1682 estimated world population at 320 million. More refined estimates, broken down by continents, were published in the first half of the 19th century, at 600 to 1000 million in the early 1800s and at 800 to 1000 million in the 1840s, it is difficult for estimates to be better than rough approximations, as modern population estimates are fraught with uncertainties on the order of 3% to 5%. Estimates of the population of the world at the time agriculture emerged in around 10,000 BC have ranged between 1 million and 15 million. Earlier, genetic evidence suggests humans may have gone through a population bottleneck of between 1,000 and 10,000 people about 70,000 BC, according to the Toba catastrophe theory. By contrast, it is estimated that around 50–60 million people lived in the combined eastern and western Roman Empire in the 4th century AD.
The Plague of Justinian, which first emerged during the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian, caused Europe's population to drop by around 50% between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. The population of Europe was more than 70 million in 1340; the Black Death pandemic of the 14th century may have reduced the world's population from an estimated 450 million in 1340 to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. The population of China decreased from 123 million in 1200 to 65 million in 1393 due to a combination of Mongol invasions and plague. Starting in AD 2, the Han Dynasty of ancient China kept consistent family registers in order to properly assess the poll taxes and labor service duties of each household. In that year, the population of Western Han was recorded as 57,671,400 individuals in 12,366,470 households, decreasing to 47,566,772 individuals in 9,348,227 households by AD 146, towards the End of the Han Dynasty. At the founding of the Ming Dynasty in 1368, China's population was reported to be close to 60 million.
England's population reached an estimated 5.6 million in 1650, up from an estimated 2.6 million in 1500. New crops that were brought to Asia and Europe from the Americas by Portuguese and Spanish colonists in the 16th century are believed to have contributed to population growth. Since their introduction to Africa by Portuguese traders in the 16th century and cassava have replaced traditional African crops as the most important staple food crops grown on the continent; the pre-Columbian North American population numbered somewhere between 2 million and 18 million. Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. According to the most extreme scholarly claims, as many as 90% of the Native American population of the New World died due to Old World diseases such as smallpox and influenza. Over the centuries, the Europeans had developed high degrees of immunity to these diseases, while the indigenous peoples had no such immunity.
During the European Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The percentage of the children born in London who died before the age of five decreased from 74.5% in
Russia
Russia the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres, Russia is by far or by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77 % of the population live in the European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, China and North Korea, it shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U. S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus' disintegrated into a number of smaller states; the Grand Duchy of Moscow reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and achieved independence from the Golden Horde. By the 18th century, the nation had expanded through conquest and exploration to become the Russian Empire, the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east. Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world's first constitutionally socialist state; the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War.
The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world's second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve independent republics emerged from the USSR: Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Lithuania, it is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic. Russia's economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2018. Russia's extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the leading producers of oil and natural gas globally; the country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and an active global partner of ASEAN, as well as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Trade Organization, as well as being the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and one of the five members of the Eurasian Economic Union, along with Armenia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan; the name Russia is derived from Rus', a medieval state populated by the East Slavs. However, this proper name became more prominent in the history, the country was called by its inhabitants "Русская Земля", which can be translated as "Russian Land" or "Land of Rus'". In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus' by modern historiography.
The name Rus itself comes from the early medieval Rus' people, Swedish merchants and warriors who relocated from across the Baltic Sea and founded a state centered on Novgorod that became Kievan Rus. An old Latin version of the name Rus' was Ruthenia applied to the western and southern regions of Rus' that were adjacent to Catholic Europe; the current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Rus', Ρωσσία Rossía—spelled Ρωσία in Modern Greek. The standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are commonly
U.S. News & World Report
U. S. News & World Report is an American media company that publishes news, consumer advice and analysis. Founded as a newsweekly magazine in 1933, U. S. News transitioned to web-based publishing in 2010. U. S. News is best known today for its influential Best Colleges and Best Hospitals rankings, but it has expanded its content and product offerings in education, money, careers and cars; the rankings are popular in North America but have drawn widespread criticism from colleges and students for their dubious and arbitrary nature. The ranking system by U. S. News is contrasted with the Washington Monthly and Forbes rankings. United States News was founded in 1933 by David Lawrence, who started World Report in 1946; the two magazines covered national and international news separately, but Lawrence merged them into U. S. News & World Report in 1948, he subsequently sold the magazine to his employees. The magazine tended to be more conservative than its two primary competitors and Newsweek, focused more on economic and education stories.
It eschewed sports and celebrity news. Important milestones in the early history of the magazine include the introduction of the "Washington Whispers" column in 1934 and the "News You Can Use" column in 1952. In 1958, the weekly magazine's circulation passed one million and reached two million by 1973. Since 1983, it has become known for its influential ranking and annual reports of colleges and graduate schools, spanning across most fields and subjects. U. S. News & World Report is America's oldest and best-known ranker of academic institutions, covers the fields of business, medicine, education, social sciences and public affairs, in addition to many other areas, its print edition was included in national bestseller lists, augmented by online subscriptions. Additional rankings published by U. S. News & World Report include medical specialties and automobiles. In October 1984, publisher and real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman purchased U. S. News & World Report. Zuckerman is formerly the owner of the New York Daily News.
In 1993, U. S. News & World Report entered the digital world by providing content to CompuServe and in 1995, the website usnews.com was launched. In 2001, the website won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence Online. In 2007, U. S. News & World Report published its first list of the nation's best high schools, its ranking methodology includes state test scores and the success of poor and minority students on these exams, schools' performance in Advanced Placement exams. Starting in June 2008, the magazine reduced its publication frequency in three steps. In June 2008, citing the decline overall magazine circulation and advertising, U. S. News & World Report announced that it would become a biweekly publication, starting January 2009, it hoped advertisers would be attracted to the schedule, which allowed ads to stay on newsstands a week longer. However, five months the magazine changed its frequency again, becoming monthly. In August 2008, U. S. News revamped its online opinion section.
The new version of the opinion page included daily new op-ed content as well as the new Thomas Jefferson Street blog. An internal memo was sent on November 5, 2010, to the staff of the magazine informing them that the "December issue will be our last print monthly sent to subscribers, whose remaining print and digital replica subscriptions will be filled by other publishers." The memo went on to say that the publication would be moving to a digital format but that it would continue to print special issues such as "the college and grad guides, as well as hospital and personal finance guides." Prior to going defunct, U. S. News was the lowest-ranking news magazine in the U. S. after Time and Newsweek. A weekly digital magazine, U. S. News Weekly, introduced in January 2009, continued to offer subscription content until it ceased at the end of April 2015; the company is owned by U. S. News & World Report, L. P. a held company based in the Daily News building in New York City. The editorial staff is headquartered in Washington, D.
C. The company's move to the Web made it possible for U. S. News & World Report to expand its service journalism with the introduction of several consumer-facing rankings products; the company returned to profitability in 2013. The editorial staff of U. S. News & World Report is based in Washington, D. C. and Brian Kelly has been the chief content officer since April 2007. The company is owned by media proprietor Mortimer Zuckerman; the first of the U. S. News & World Report's famous rankings was its "Who Runs America?" surveys. These ran in the spring of each year from 1974 to 1986; the magazine would have a cover featuring persons selected by the USN & WR as being the ten most powerful persons in the United States. Every single edition of the series listed the President of the United States as the most powerful person, but the #2 position included such persons as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Federal Reserve Chairmen Paul Volcker and Arthur Burns and US Senator Edward Kennedy. While most of the top ten each year were officials in government others were included, including TV anchormen Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, AFL-CIO leader George Meany, consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
The only woman to make the top ten list was First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1980. In addition to these overall top ten persons, the publication included top persons in each of several fields, including Education, Finance and many other areas; the surv
Business magnate
A business magnate or industrialist is an entrepreneur of great influence, importance, or standing in a particular enterprise or field of business. The term characteristically refers to a wealthy entrepreneur or investor who controls, through personal business ownership or dominant shareholding position, a firm or industry whose goods or services are consumed; such individuals may be called czars, proprietors, taipans, barons, or oligarchs. The word magnate derives from the Latin magnates, meaning "a great man" or "great nobleman"; the word tycoon derives from the Japanese word taikun, which means "great lord", used as a title for the shōgun. The word entered the English language in 1857 with the return of Commodore Perry to the United States. U. S. President Abraham Lincoln was humorously referred to as the Tycoon by his aides John Nicolay and John Hay; the term spread to the business community, where it has been used since. The word mogul is an English corruption of mughal, Persian or Arabic for "Mongol".
It alludes to emperors of the Mughal Empire in the Medieval India, who possessed great power and storied riches capable of producing wonders of opulence such as the Taj Mahal. Modern business magnates are entrepreneurs that amass on their own or wield substantial family fortunes in the process of building or running their own businesses; some are known in connection with these entrepreneurial activities, others through highly-visible secondary pursuits such as philanthropy, political fundraising and campaign financing, sports team ownership or sponsorship. The terms mogul and baron were applied to late 19th and early 20th century North American business magnates in extractive industries such as mining and petroleum, transportation fields such as shipping and railroads, manufacturing such as automaking and steelmaking, in banking, as well as newspaper publishing, their dominance was known as the Second Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, or the Robber Baron Era. Examples of well-known business magnates in the western world include historical figures such as oilman John D. Rockefeller, automobile pioneer Henry Ford and railroad veterans Aristotle Onassis, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, James J. Hill, steel innovator Andrew Carnegie, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, retail merchant Sam Walton, banker J. P. Morgan.
Contemporary industrial tycoons include e-commerce entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffett, computer programmer Bill Gates, technology innovator Steve Jobs, steel investor Lakshmi Mittal, telecommunications investor Carlos Slim, airline owner Sir Richard Branson, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, Formula 1 manager Bernie Ecclestone, media entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch, poultry technologist Frank Perdue. Bourgeoisie Oligarchy Business oligarch Businessperson Captain of industry Entrepreneur Financier Investor Magnate Media proprietor Plutocracy Real estate entrepreneur Robber baron ListsThe World's Billionaires Sunday Times Rich List Media related to Business magnate at Wikimedia Commons Lewis, Mark. "The Famous 15: America's Most Fascinating Tycoons". Forbes. "25 Tycoons Who Run the World". Business Pundit. October 6, 2010
