Kazan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. With a population of 1,243,500, it is the sixth most populous city in Russia. Kazan lies at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia, about 715 kilometres east from Moscow. In the Late Middle Ages, Kazan was an important political center within the Golden Horde. In 1438, the city became the capital of the Khanate of Kazan. In 1552, Kazan became part of Russia; the city was destroyed during Pugachev's Rebellion, but was rebuilt during the reign of Catherine the Great. In the following centuries, Kazan grew to become a major industrial and religious center in Russia. Kazan is renowned for its vibrant mix of Russian cultures. In 2015, 2.1 million tourists visited Kazan, 1.5 million tourists visited the Kazan Kremlin, a World Heritage Site. In April 2009, the Russian Patent Office granted Kazan the right to brand itself as the "Third Capital" of Russia. In 2009 it was chosen as the "sports capital of Russia" and it still is referred to as such.

The origin of the name Kazan is uncertain. The most accepted legends derive it from the Bulgar word qazan, which means'boiler' or'cauldron'. Most appeal to the version of the boiling boiler: the sorcerer advised the Bulgars to build a city where, without any fire, a boiler dug into the ground would boil water; as a result, a similar place was found on the shore of Lake Kaban. One legend claims that the city was named after the river Kazanka, named after the son of a Bulgar governor who dropped a copper cauldron into it. Other local legends, including research by the Tatar scholar Shihabeddin Marjani, claim that the city was named for the resemblance of the hill on which it sits to an upturned cauldron. Qazan/Kazan was a choice name for the male Turkic/Mongol royalty, most notably that of the Ilkhanid Mongol king, Qazan Khan, it is that the city was named after a Mongol/Turkic khan by that name when the city was founded or soon thereafter. According to the official version adopted today, the city was founded more than 1,000 years ago.

The estimated date of the urban settlement on the site of Kazan is 1004–1005 years. The reason for this dating is found during excavations in the Kazan Kremlin Czech coin, dated by the Board of St. Wenceslaus and the earliest Czech coin, the remains of masonry and wooden city fence and utensils, as well as other artifacts with less obvious dating. According to official statements, experts from 20 cities of Russia and 22 countries of the world were involved in the study of findings related to the age of Kazan. Kazan was a border post between Volga Bulgaria and two Finno-Ugric peoples -- Udmurt. Another vexatious question is. Archaeological explorations have produced evidence of urban settlement in three parts of the modern city: in the Kremlin; the oldest of these seems to be the Kremlin. After the Mongols ravaged the Bolğar and Bilär territories in the 13th century, the surviving Bulgars recovered in numbers and a small number of Kipchaks were assimilated from which they adopted their language, or Kipchaks and Bulgars mixed to create a modern Kazan-Tatar population.

Some Tatars went to Lithuania, brought by Vytautas the great. Kazan became the center of the Principality, dependent on The Golden Horde. In the XIII—XIV centuries, Kazan was growing, becoming an important trade and political center within The Golden Horde; the growth of the city was promoted by the successful geographical location at the intersection of major trade routes connecting East and West. During the same period, the minting of currency began with the indication of the place of minting—"Bulgar al-Jadid", that is, a New Bulgar. In 1438, the Bulgar fortress Kazan was captured by the ousted Golden Horde Khan Ulugh Muhammad, who killed the local Prince Swan and moved the fortress to a modern place; the city became the capital of the Kazan Khanate. The city Bazaar, Taş Ayaq has become the most important shopping center in the region for furniture. Handicraft production flourished, as the city gained a reputation for its leather and gold products, as well as the wealth of its palaces and mosques.

Kazan had trade relations with Moscow, Crimea and other regions. As a result of the Siege of Kazan in 1552, Tsar Ivan the Terrible conquered the city and massacred the majority of the population. During the subsequent governorship of Alexander Gorbatyi-Shuisky, most of the Kazan's Tatar residents were forcibly Christianized or deported, the Kerashen Tatars. Mosques and palaces were ruined; the surviving Tatar population was moved to a place 50 kilometers away from the city and this place was forcibly settled by Russian farmers and soldiers. Tatars in the Russian service were settled in the Tatar Bistäse settlement near the city's wall. Tatar merchants and handicraft masters settled there. During this period, Kazan was destroyed as a result of several great fires. After one of them in 1579, the icon Our Lady of Kazan was discovered in the city. In the early 17th century, at the beginning of the Time of Troubles in Russia, the Tsardom of Kazan declared independence under the leadership of voyvoda Nikanor Shulgin with the help of the Russian population, but this independence was suppressed by Kuzma Minin in 1612.

In 1708, the Tsardom of Kazan was abolished, Kazan became the seat of Kazan Gover

Proxy voting is a form of voting whereby a member of a decision-making body may delegate his or her voting power to a representative, to enable a vote in absence. The representative may be another member of the same body, or external. A person so designated is called a "proxy" and the person designating him or her is called a "principal". Proxy appointments can be used to form a voting bloc that can exercise greater influence in deliberations or negotiations. Proxy voting is a important practice with respect to corporations; the United States parliamentary manual Riddick's Rules of Procedure notes that, under proxy voting, voting for officers should be done by ballot, due to the difficulties involved in authentication if a member calls out, "I cast 17 votes for Mr. X."Proxy voting is an important feature in corporate governance through the proxy statement. Companies use proxy solicitation agencies to secure proxy votes; the rules of some assemblies presently forbid proxy voting. For example, in both houses of the U.

S. Congress, as well as in most if not all state legislatures, each member must be present and cast his or her own vote for that vote to be counted; this can result, however, in the absence of a quorum and the need to compel attendance by a sufficient number of missing members to get a quorum. See call of the house, it is possible for automatic proxy voting to be used in legislatures, by way of direct representation. For example, it has been proposed that instead of electing members from single-member districts, members be elected at large, but when seated each member cast the number of votes he or she received in the last election. Thus, if, for example, a state were allocated 32 members in the U. S. House of Representatives, the 32 candidates who received the most votes in the at-large election would be seated, but each would cast a different number of votes on the floor and in committee; this proposal would allow for representation of minority views in legislative deliberations, as it does in deliberations at shareholder meetings of corporations.

Such a concept was proposed in a submission to the 2007 Ontario Citizens' Assembly process. Another example is Evaluative Proportional Representation located in Section 5.5.5 in Proportional Representation. It elects all the members of a legislative body; each citizen grades the fitness for office of as many of the candidates as they wish as either Excellent, Very Good, Acceptable, Poor, or Reject. Multiple candidates may be given the same grade by a voter; each citizen elects their representative at-large for a city council. For a large and diverse state legislature, each citizen chooses to vote through any of the districts or official electoral associations in the country; each grades any number of candidates in the whole country. Each elected representative has a different voting power in the legislative body; this number is equal to the total number of highest available grades counted for them from all the voters – no citizen’s vote is "wasted". Each voter is represented proportionately. Two real-life examples of weighted voting include the Council of Ministers of the European Union and the US Electoral College.

The Parliament of New Zealand allows proxy voting. Sections 155-156 of the Standing Orders of the New Zealand House of Representatives specify the procedures for doing so. A member can designate a party to cast his or her vote. However, a party may not exercise proxies for more than 25% of its members; the New Zealand Listener notes a controversial occurrence of proxy voting. The Labour Party was allowed to cast votes on behalf of Taito Phillip Field, absent. Theoretically, this was to be allowed only if a legislator was absent on parliamentary business, public business or pressing private business, such as illness or bereavement; until the Republican reforms of 1995 banished the practice, proxy voting was used in U. S. House of Representatives committees. Members would delegate their vote to the ranking member of their party in the committee. Republicans opposed proxy voting on the grounds that it allowed an indolent Democratic majority to move legislation through committee with antimajoritarian procedures.

According to this criticism, on days when Democratic committee members were absent, the Democratic leader in the committee would oppose the sitting Republican majority by wielding the proxies of absent Democrats. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein write, "In a large and fragmented institution in which every member has five or six places to be at any given moment, proxy voting is a necessary evil". Proxy voting is sometimes described as "the frequency with which spouses, union workers, friends of friends are in effect sent off to the polls with an assignment to complete." The potential for proxy voting exists in one voter out of five, it is about twice as high at the middle levels of the sophistication continuum. According to W. Russell Neuman, the net effect of the cues provided by friends and associates is not to be as significant as those of the political parties; the possibility of expanded use of proxy voting has been the subject of much speculation. Terry F. Buss et al. write that internet voting would result in de facto approval of proxy voting, since passwords could be shared with others: "Obviously, cost-benefit calculations around the act of voting could change as organizations attempt to identify and provide inducements to control proxy votes without violating vote-buying prohibitions in the law."One of the criticisms

Mikaribaba is a yōkai of a one-eyed old woman in stories and customs of the Kantō region. In Yokohama and Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, the Chiba Prefecture, Tokyo etc. they would visit people's homes on the eighth day of the 12th month and the eighth day of the second month on the lunisolar calendar, they are said to borrow sieves and human's eyes. They are said to visit people's home together with a hitotsume-kozō.。 In order to avoid a mikaribaba, one would leave a basket or zaru at the entrance of the home, it is said to be effective to put the tip of a rod into the bamboo basket and make it stand on the ridge of the house's roof. It is said that this is in order to make the one-eyed mikaribaba make it seem like as if there were plenty of eyes. At the Ura no Yato, Toriyama town, Kōhoku-ku, Yokohama, an avaricious mikaribaba would come to collect grains of rice that have fallen on the ground, would cause fires due to the fire in its mouth. In order to avoid this, there is the custom of making a dango called the "tsujoo dango" made from the rice left over from the garden, put it in the doorway, as a means of saying that there is no more rice to collect.

On the eighth day of the 12th month and the eighth day of the second month on the lunisolar calendar, there is a folk practice called Kotoyōka, in the past, there were many regions where people would not do any work and confine themselves in their homes. In the southern part of Chiba Prefecture, on the 26th day of the 11th month of the lunisolar calendar, as a period of about 10 days of seclusion in the home called "mikawari" or "mikari," when it would be taboo to go outside at night or enter the mountains and spend the time in the home avoiding any big noise, hairdressing, or entering bath. Outside of the Kantō region, at Nishinomiya Shrine in the Hyōgo Prefecture and Kito, Tokushima Prefecture, there is a practice of confinement to the house before the festival called "mikari." Rituals like these of secluding oneself in the home have been interpreted as seclusion at home due the appearance of a monster, it is thought that those monsters are the mikaribaba and the hitotsume-kozō. It is said that "mikari" comes from "mikawari", indicating a time different from usual when one observes the practice of confinement at home.

List of legendary creatures from Japan