text:
North Africa during classical antiquity

The history of North Africa during the period of classical antiquity (c. 8th century BCE – 5th century CE) can be divided roughly into the history of Egypt in the east, the history of ancient Libya in the middle and the history of Numidia and Mauretania in the west.

Initially, in the east, Egypt was under Persian rule during the early phase of classical antiquity, passing to the Ptolemaic dynasty in the Hellenistic era. Libya was inhabited by Berber tribes, while along the coast Phoenician and Greek colonies were set up.

The Roman Republic established the province of Africa in 146 BCE after the defeat of Carthage. The Roman Empire eventually controlled the entire Mediterranean coast of Africa, adding Egypt in 30 BCE, Crete and Cyrenaica in 20 BCE, and Mauretania in CE 44.

The Western Roman Empire lost most parts of Africa to the Vandals in the 5th century. They were reincorporated into the Roman realm by the Eastern Roman Empire in the 6th century. Later, the empire finally lost all control of Africa as the region fell to the Umayyad conquest of North Africa by the close of the 7th century.

Late Period of ancient Egypt
The Late Period of ancient Egypt refers to the last flowering of native Egyptian rulers after the Third Intermediate Period from the Saite Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt into Persian conquests and ending with the fall of the Thirty-First (Second Persian) Dynasty to the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, Egypt fell to Ptolemy I Soter who eventually established the Ptolemaic Kingdom in 305 BCE.

In 2013, the first genetic analysis utilizing next-generation sequencing was conducted to ascertain the ancestral lineage of an Ancient Egyptian individual. DNA was extracted from the heads of five Egyptian mummies. All the specimens were dated to between 806 BC and 124 AD, a timeframe corresponding with the Late Dynastic and Ptolemaic periods. The researchers observed that one of the mummified individuals likely belonged to the mtDNA haplogroup I2, a maternal clade believed to have originated in Western Asia.

Ancient Libya and the Phoenicians
Phoenician traders arrived on the North African coast around 900 BC and established Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) around 800 BCE. By the 6th century BCE, a Punic presence existed at Tipasa (east of Cherchell in Algeria). From their principal center of power at Carthage, the Carthaginians expanded and established small settlements (called emporia in Greek) along the North African coast; these settlements eventually served as market towns as well as anchorages. Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) and Rusicade (modern Skikda) are among the towns of Carthaginian origin on the coast of present-day Algeria.

As Carthaginian power grew, its involvement in the indigenous population increased dramatically. Berber civilization was already at a stage in which agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and political organization supported several states. Trade links between Carthage and the Berbers in the interior grew and thus created a new Punic society speaking Punic, but territorial expansion also resulted in the enslavement or military recruitment of some Berbers and in the extraction of tribute from others.

Ptolemaic Egypt
Egypt was not considered part of Libya (Africa) in Hellenistic geography. The boundary between Africa and Asia was at Catabathmus Magnus, separating Libya proper (or Marmarica) from the "Libyan Nomos" (Λιβύης νόμος) of western Egypt.

Carthage and the Punic Wars
In the Mercenary War, Berber soldiers participated from 241 to 238 BCE after being unpaid following the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War. Berbers succeeded in obtaining control of much of Carthage's North African territory, and they minted coins bearing the name Libyan, used in Greek to describe natives of North Africa. The Carthaginian state declined because of successive defeats by the Romans in the Punic Wars; in 146 BCE the city of Carthage was destroyed.

Berber kingdoms
As Carthaginian power waned, the influence of Berber leaders in the hinterland grew. By the 2nd century BCE, several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. Two of them were established in Numidia, behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage. West of Numidia lay Mauretania, which extended across the Moulouya River in Morocco to the Atlantic Ocean. The high point of Berber civilization, unequaled until the coming of the Almohads and Almoravids more than a millennium later, was reached during the reign of Masinissa in the 2nd century BCE. After Masinissa's death in 148 BC, the Berber kingdoms were divided and reunited several times. Masinissa's line survived until CE 24, when the remaining Berber territory was annexed to the Roman Empire.

Roman era
Roman domination of the northern Mediterranean coasts of Africa began when Carthage was defeated. The Roman Empire in the following century controlled all the coasts from the Nile valley to the Atlantic Ocean of modern Morocco.

The Roman military presence of North Africa was relatively small if related to other areas of the empire, consisting of about 28,000 troops and auxiliaries in Numidia and the two Mauretanian provinces. Starting in the 2nd century CE, these garrisons were manned mostly by local inhabitants, because the area was considered fully pacified and nearly totally romanised.

Aside from Carthage, urbanization in North Africa came in part with the establishment of settlements of veterans under the Roman emperors Claudius, Nerva, and Trajan.

In what is now Algeria, such settlements included Tipasa, Cuicul or Curculum (modern Djemila, northeast of Sétif), Thamugadi (modern Timgad, southeast of Sétif), and Sitifis (modern Setif). The prosperity of most towns depended on agriculture. Called the "granary of the empire," North Africa was one of the largest exporters of grain in the empire, which was exported to other provinces, like Italy and Greece. Other crops included fruit, figs, grapes, and beans. By the 2nd century CE, olive oil rivaled cereals as an export item. ''

The beginnings of the decline were less serious in North Africa than elsewhere. There were uprisings, however. In CE 238, landowners rebelled unsuccessfully against the emperor's fiscal policies. Sporadic tribal revolts in the Mauretanian mountains followed from 253 to 288. The towns also suffered economic difficulties, and building activity almost ceased.

The towns of Roman North Africa had a substantial Jewish population. Some Jews had been deported from Judea or Palestine in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE for rebelling against Roman rule; others had come earlier with Punic settlers. In addition, a number of Berber tribes had converted to Judaism.

Christianity
Early Christianity arrived in the 2nd century and soon gained converts in the towns and among slaves. More than eighty bishops, some from distant frontier regions of Numidia, attended the Council of Carthage in 256. By the end of the 4th century, the settled areas had become Christianized, and some Berber tribes had converted en masse.

A division in the church that came to be known as the Donatist controversy began in 313 among Christians in North Africa. The Donatists stressed the holiness of the church and refused to accept the authority to administer the sacraments of those who had surrendered the scriptures when they were forbidden under the Emperor Diocletian. The Donatists also opposed the involvement of Emperor Constantine in church affairs in contrast to the majority of Christians who welcomed official imperial recognition.

The occasionally violent controversy has been characterized as a struggle between opponents and supporters of the Roman system. The most articulate North African critic of the Donatist position, which came to be called a heresy, was Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius. Augustine maintained that the unworthiness of a minister did not affect the validity of the sacraments because their true minister was Christ. In his sermons and books Augustine, who is considered a leading exponent of Christian dogma, evolved a theory of the right of orthodox Christian rulers to use force against schismatics and heretics. Although the dispute was resolved by a decision of an imperial commission in Carthage in 411, Donatist communities continued to exist as late as the 6th century.

Devastation and decline
In the summer of 365 AD, a massive tsunami struck North Africa, causing massive damage and thousands of deaths. The cities were devastated and coastal farmlands ruined by seawater. Almost total crop failure precipitated a steep decline in trade. This decline in trade weakened Roman control. Independent kingdoms emerged in mountainous and desert areas, towns were reconquered by Berbers. Then the Vandals took over most of Africa Proconsularis in the early 5th century and stayed for a hundred years.

Belisarius, general of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I based in Constantinople, landed in North Africa in 533 with 16,000 men and within a year destroyed the Vandal kingdom. Many rural areas reverted to Berber rule and Byzantine North Africa as a whole was lost during the Muslim conquests.

title: North Africa during classical antiquity


text:
Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia is a fear of confined spaces. It is triggered by many situations or stimuli, including elevators, especially when crowded to capacity, windowless rooms, and hotel rooms with closed doors and sealed windows. Even bedrooms with a lock on the outside, small cars, and tight-necked clothing can induce a response in those with claustrophobia. It is typically classified as an anxiety disorder, which often results in panic attacks. The onset of claustrophobia has been attributed to many factors, including a reduction in the size of the amygdala, classical conditioning, or a genetic predisposition to fear small spaces.

One study indicates that anywhere from five to ten percent of the world population is affected by severe claustrophobia, but only a small percentage of these people receive some kind of treatment for the disorder.

The term claustrophobia comes from Latin claustrum "a shut in place" and Greek φόβος, phóbos, "fear".

Signs and symptoms
Claustrophobia is classified as an anxiety disorder. Symptoms generally develop during childhood or adolescence. Claustrophobia is typically thought to have one key symptom: fear of suffocation. In at least one, if not several, of the following areas: small rooms, MRI or CAT scan apparatus, cars, buses, airplanes, trains, tunnels, underwater caves, cellars, elevators and caves.

Being enclosed or thinking about being enclosed in a confined space can trigger fears of not being able to breathe properly, and running out of oxygen. It is not always the small space that triggers these emotions, but it's more the fear of the possibilities of what could happen while confined to that area. When anxiety levels start to reach a certain level, the person may start to experience:

Symptoms depend on how severe your phobia is.
 * sweating and/or chills
 * accelerated heart rate and a rise in blood pressure
 * dizziness, fainting spells, lightheadedness and frozen in fear
 * dry mouth
 * hyperventilation
 * hot flashes
 * shaking or trembling and a sense of "butterflies" in the stomach
 * nausea
 * headache
 * numbness
 * a choking sensation
 * tightness in the chest/chest pain and difficulty breathing
 * an urge to use the bathroom
 * confusion or disorientation
 * fear of harm or illness
 * feeling nauseated
 * dizziness

Causes
The fear of enclosed spaces is an irrational fear. Most claustrophobic people who find themselves in a room without windows consciously know that they aren't in danger, yet these same people will be afraid, possibly terrified to the point of incapacitation, and many do not know why. However, claustrophobia may not always be the case. You could have PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-disorder) in small, enclosed spaces.

Amygdala

The amygdala is one of the smallest structures in the brain, but also one of the most powerful. The amygdala is needed for the conditioning of fear, or the creation of a fight-or-flight response. A fight-or-flight response is created when a stimulus is associated with a grievous situation. Cheng believes that a phobia's roots are in this fight-or-flight response.

In generating a fight-or-flight response, the amygdala acts in the following way: The amygdala's anterior nuclei associated with fear each other. Nuclei send out impulses to other nuclei, which influence respiratory rate, physical arousal, the release of adrenaline, blood pressure, heart rate, behavioral fear response, and defensive responses, which may include freezing up. These reactions constitute an 'autonomic failure' in a panic attack.

A study done by Fumi Hayano found that the right amygdala was smaller in patients who suffered from panic disorders. The reduction of size occurred in a structure known as the corticomedial nuclear group which the CE nucleus belongs to. This causes interference, which in turn causes abnormal reactions to aversive stimuli in those with panic disorders. In claustrophobic people, this translates as panicking or overreacting to a situation in which the person finds themselves physically confined.

Classical conditioning
Claustrophobia results as the mind comes to connect confinement with danger. It often comes as a consequence of a traumatic childhood experience, although the onset can come at any point in an individual's life. Such an experience can occur multiple times, or only once, to make a permanent impression on the mind. The majority of claustrophobic participants in an experiment done by Lars-Göran Öst reported that their phobia had been "acquired as a result of a conditioning experience. " In most cases, claustrophobia seems to be the result of past experiences.

Conditioning experiences
A few examples of common experiences that could result in the onset of claustrophobia in children (or adults) are as follows:
 * A child (or, less commonly, an adult) is shut into a pitch-black room and cannot find the door or the light-switch.
 * A child gets shut into a box.
 * A child is locked in a closet or wardrobe.
 * A child falls into a deep swimming pool and cannot swim.
 * A child gets separated from their parents in a large crowd and gets lost.
 * A child sticks their head between the bars of a fence and then cannot get back out.
 * A child crawls into a hole and gets stuck, or cannot find their way back.
 * A child is left in their parent's car, truck, or van.
 * A child is placed inside a room that has no window such as a classroom, elevator or basement. Possibly as a means of punishment.

The term 'past experiences', according to one author, can extend to the moment of birth. In John A. Speyrer's "Claustrophobia and the Fear of Death and Dying", the reader is brought to the conclusion that claustrophobia's high frequency is due to birth trauma, about which he says is "one of the most horrendous experiences we can have during our lifetime", and it is in this helpless moment that the infant develops claustrophobia.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can trigger claustrophobia. An MRI scan entails lying still for some time in a narrow tube. In a study involving claustrophobia and MRI, it was reported that 13% of patients experienced a panic attack during the procedure. The procedure has been linked not only to the triggering of 'preexisting' claustrophobia, but also to the onset of the condition in some people. Panic attacks experienced during the procedure can stop the person from adjusting to the situation, thereby perpetuating the fear.

S.J. Rachman tells of an extreme example, citing the experience of 21 miners. These miners were trapped underground for 14 days, during which six of the miners died of suffocation. After their rescue, ten of the miners were studied for ten years. All but one were greatly affected by the experience, and six developed phobias to "confining or limiting situations". The only miner who did not develop any noticeable symptoms was the one who acted as leader.

Another factor that could cause the onset of claustrophobia is "information received. " As Aureau Walding states in "Causes of Claustrophobia", many people, especially children, learn who and what to fear by watching parents or peers. This method does not only apply to observing a teacher, but also observing victims. Vicarious classical conditioning also includes when a person sees another person exposed directly to an especially unpleasant situation. This would be analogous to observing someone getting stuck in a tight space, suffocated, or any of the other examples that were listed above.

Prepared phobia
There is research that suggests that claustrophobia is not entirely a classically conditioned or learned phobia. It is not necessarily an inborn fear, but it is very likely what is called a prepared phobia. As Erin Gersley says in "Phobias: Causes and Treatments", humans are genetically predisposed to become afraid of things that are dangerous to them. Claustrophobia may fall under this category because of its "wide distribution… early onset and seeming easy acquisition, and its non-cognitive features". The acquisition of claustrophobia may be part of a vestigial evolutionary survival mechanism, a dormant fear of entrapment and/or suffocation that was once important for the survival of humanity and could be easily awakened at any time. Hostile environments in the past would have made this kind of pre-programmed fear necessary, and so the human mind developed the capacity for "efficient fear conditioning to certain classes of dangerous stimuli".

Rachman provides an argument for this theory in his article: "Phobias". He agrees with the statement that phobias generally concern objects that constitute a direct threat to human survival, and that many of these phobias are quickly acquired because of an "inherited biological preparedness". This brings about a prepared phobia, which is not quite innate, but is widely and easily learned. As Rachman explains in the article: "The main features of prepared phobias are that they are very easily acquired, selective, stable, biologically significant, and probably [non-cognitive]." 'Selective' and 'biologically significant' mean that they only relate to things that directly threaten the health, safety, or survival of an individual. 'Non-cognitive' suggests that these fears are acquired unconsciously. Both factors point to the theory that claustrophobia is a prepared phobia that is already pre-programmed into the mind of a human being.

Diagnosis
Claustrophobia is the fear of being closed into a small space. It is typically classified as an anxiety disorder and often results in a rather severe panic attack. It is also sometimes confused with Cleithrophobia (the fear of being trapped).

Diagnosis of claustrophobia usually transpires from a consultation about other anxiety-related conditions. Certain criteria have to be met to be diagnosed with specific phobias. These criteria include:

 * an interminable obstructive or excessive fear caused by the existence or anticipation of a specific situation
 * anxiety response when stimulus is exhibited; can result in panic attacks in adults or, for children, an outburst, clinging, crying, etc.
 * acknowledgment by adult patients that their fear stems from the anticipated threat or danger
 * engaging in procedures to evade dreaded object or situation, or proneness to face the situation but with discomfort or anxiety
 * the person's evasion of the object or situation impedes with everyday life and relationships
 * the phobia is continuous, usually for 6 months or longer
 * symptoms cannot be ascribed to other underlying mental conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Scale
This method was developed in 1979 by interpreting the files of patients diagnosed with claustrophobia and by reading various scientific articles about the diagnosis of the disorder. Once an initial scale was developed, it was tested and sharpened by several experts in the field. Today, it consists of 20 questions that determine anxiety levels and desire to avoid certain situations. Several studies have proved this scale to be effective in claustrophobia diagnosis.

Questionnaire
This method was developed by Rachman and Taylor, two experts in the field, in 1993. This method is effective in distinguishing symptoms stemming from fear of suffocation. In 2001, it was modified from 36 to 24 items by another group of field experts. This study has also been proven very effective by various studies.

Cognitive therapy
Cognitive therapy is a widely accepted form of treatment for most anxiety disorders. It is also thought to be particularly effective in combating disorders where the patient doesn't actually fear a situation but, rather, fears what could result from being in such a situation. The ultimate goal of cognitive therapy is to modify distorted thoughts or misconceptions associated with whatever is being feared; the theory is that modifying these thoughts will decrease anxiety and avoidance of certain situations. For example, cognitive therapy would attempt to convince a claustrophobic patient that elevators are not dangerous but are, in fact, very useful in getting you where you would like to go faster. A study conducted by S.J. Rachman shows that cognitive therapy decreased fear and negative thoughts/connotations by an average of around 30% in claustrophobic patients tested, proving it to be a reasonably effective method.

In vivo exposure
This method forces patients to face their fears by complete exposure to whatever fear they are experiencing. This is usually done in a progressive manner starting with lesser exposures and moving upward towards severe exposures. For example, a claustrophobic patient would start by going into an elevator and work up to an MRI. Several studies have proven this to be an effective method in combating various phobias, claustrophobia included. S.J. Rachman has also tested the effectiveness of this method in treating claustrophobia and found it to decrease fear and negative thoughts/connotations by an average of nearly 75% in his patients. Of the methods he tested in this particular study, this was by far the most significant reduction.

Interoceptive exposure
This method attempts to recreate internal physical sensations within a patient in a controlled environment and is a less intense version of in vivo exposure. This was the final method of treatment tested by S.J. Rachman in his 1992 study. It lowered fear and negative thoughts/connotations by about 25%. These numbers did not quite match those of in vivo exposure or cognitive therapy, but still resulted in significant reductions.

Other forms of treatment that have also been shown to be reasonably effective are psychoeducation, counter-conditioning, regressive hypnotherapy and breathing re-training. Medications often prescribed to help treat claustrophobia include anti-depressants and beta-blockers, which help to relieve the heart-pounding symptoms often associated with anxiety attacks.

MRI procedure
Because they can produce a fear of both suffocation, MRI scans often prove difficult for claustrophobic patients. In fact, estimates say that anywhere from 4–20% of patients refuse to go through with the scan for precisely this reason. One study estimates that this percentage could be as high as 37% of all MRI recipients. The average MRI takes around 50 minutes; this is more than enough time to evoke extreme fear and anxiety in a severely claustrophobic patient.

This study was conducted with three goals: 1. To discover the extent of anxiety during an MRI. 2. To find predictors for anxiety during an MRI. 3. To observe psychological factors of undergoing an MRI. Eighty patients were randomly chosen for this study and subjected to several diagnostic tests to rate their level of claustrophobic fear; none of these patients had previously been diagnosed with claustrophobia. They were also subjected to several of the same tests after their MRI to see if their anxiety levels had elevated. This experiment concludes that the primary component of anxiety experienced by patients was most closely connected to claustrophobia.

This assertion stems from the high Claustrophobic Questionnaire results of those who reported anxiety during the scan. Almost 25% of the patients reported at least moderate feelings of anxiety during the scan and 3 were unable to complete the scan at all. When asked a month after their scan, 30% of patients (these numbers are taken of the 48 that responded a month later) reported that their claustrophobic feelings had elevated since the scan. The majority of these patients claimed to have never had claustrophobic sensations up to that point. This study concludes that the Claustrophobic Questionnaire (or an equivalent method of diagnosis) should be used before allowing someone to have an MRI.

Use of virtual reality distraction to reduce claustrophobia
The present case series with two patients explored whether virtual reality (VR) distraction could reduce claustrophobia symptoms during a mock magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scan. Two patients who met DSM-IV criteria for specific phobia, situational type (i.e., claustrophobia) reported high levels of anxiety during a mock 10-min MRI procedure with no VR, and asked to terminate the scan early. The patients were randomly assigned to receive either VR or music distraction for their second scan attempt. When immersed in an illusory three-dimensional (3D) virtual world named SnowWorld, patient 1 was able to complete a 10-min mock scan with low anxiety and reported an increase in self-efficacy afterwards. Patient 2 received "music only" distraction during her second scan but was still not able to complete a 10-min scan and asked to terminate her second scan early. These results suggest that immersive VR may prove effective at temporarily reducing claustrophobia symptoms during MRI scans and music may prove less effective.

Another case study investigated the effectiveness of virtual reality subjection in the case of a patient who was diagnosed with two particular phobias (claustrophobia and storms). Participant met DSM-IV criteria for two specific phobias, situational type (claustrophobia) and natural environment type (storms). She suffered from fear of closed spaces, such as buses, elevators, crowds, and planes, which began after a crowd trampled her in a shopping mall 12 years prior. In response to this event, she developed the specific phobia, natural environment type (storms) because the cause of the stampede was the racket of a big storm. Participant was assigned to two individual VR environments to distinguish the levels of difficulty in a "claustrophobic" environment, with one setting being a house and the other being an elevator. There was a total of eight sessions that were carried out over the span of 30 days, with each session lasting between 35 and 45 minutes. The results from this treatment proved to be successful in reducing the fear of enclosed spaces and additionally improved over the course of 3 months.

Separating the fear of restriction and fear of suffocation
Many experts who have studied claustrophobia claim that it consists of two separable components: fear of suffocation and fear of restriction. In an effort to fully prove this assertion, a study was conducted by three experts in order to clearly prove a difference. The study was conducted by issuing a questionnaire to 78 patients who received MRIs.

The data was compiled into a "fear scale" of sorts with separate subscales for suffocation and confinement. Theoretically, these subscales would be different if the contributing factors are indeed separate. The study was successful in proving that the symptoms are separate. Therefore, according to this study, in order to effectively combat claustrophobia, it is necessary to attack both of these underlying causes.

However, because this study only applied to people who were able to finish their MRI, those who were unable to complete the MRI were not included in the study. It is likely that many of these people dropped out because of a severe case of claustrophobia. Therefore, the absence of those who suffer the most from claustrophobia could have skewed these statistics.

A group of students attending the University of Texas at Austin were first given an initial diagnostic and then given a score between 1 and 5 based on their potential to have claustrophobia. Those who scored a 3 or higher were used in the study. The students were then asked how well they felt they could cope if forced to stay in a small chamber for an extended period of time. Concerns expressed in the questions asked were separated into suffocation concerns and entrapment concerns in order to distinguish between the two perceived causes of claustrophobia. The results of this study showed that the majority of students feared entrapment far more than suffocation. Because of this difference in type of fear, it can yet again be asserted that there is a clear difference in these two symptoms.

Probability ratings in claustrophobic patients and non-claustrophobics
This study was conducted on 98 people, 49 diagnosed claustrophobics and 49 "community controls" to find out if claustrophobics' minds are distorted by "anxiety-arousing" events (i.e. claustrophobic events) to the point that they believe those events are more likely to happen. Each person was given three events—a claustrophobic event, a generally negative event, and a generally positive event—and asked to rate how likely it was that this event would happen to them. As expected, the diagnosed claustrophobics gave the claustrophobic events a significantly higher likelihood of occurring than did the control group. There was no noticeable difference in either the positive or negative events. However, this study is also potentially flawed because the claustrophobic people had already been diagnosed. Diagnosis of the disorder could likely bias one's belief that claustrophobic events are more likely to occur to them.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Claustrophobia


text:
History of Algeria (1962–1999)

The History of Algeria from 1962 to 1999 includes the period starting with preparations for independence and the aftermath of the independence war with France in the 1960s to the Civil War and the 1999 presidential election.

Independence
In preparation for independence, the CNRA (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne) had met in Tripoli in May 1962 to work out a plan for the FLN's (Front de Libération Nationale) transition from a liberation movement to a political party. The Tripoli Program called for land reform, the large-scale nationalization of industry and services, and a strong commitment to nonalignment and anti-colonialism in foreign relations. The platform also envisioned the FLN as a mass organization broad enough to encompass all nationalist groups. Adoption of the Tripoli Program notwithstanding, deep personal and ideological divisions surfaced within the FLN as the war drew to a close and the date for independence approached. Competition and confrontation among various factions not only deprived the FLN of a leadership that spoke with a single voice, but also almost resulted in full-scale civil war. According to historian John Ruedy, these factions, or "clans" did not embody "family or regional loyalties, as in the Arab East, because the generations-long detribalization of Algeria had been too thorough. Rather, they represented relationships based on school, wartime or other networking."

The Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) commanders and the GPRA (Gouvernement Provisionel de la République Algérienne) struggled for power, including an unsuccessful attempt to dismiss Colonel Houari Boumédiènne, chief of staff of the ALN in Morocco. Boumédiènne formed an alliance with Ahmed Ben Bella, who together with Mohamed Khider and Rabah Bitat, announced the formation of the Political Bureau (Bureau Politique) as a rival government to the GPRA, which had installed itself in Algiers as the "Provisional Executive". Boumédiènne's forces entered Algiers in September, where he was joined by Ben Bella, who quickly consolidated his power. Ben Bella purged his political opponents from the single slate of candidates for the forthcoming Algerian National Assembly elections. However, underlying opposition to the Political Bureau and to the absence of alternative candidates was manifested in an 18 percent abstention rate nationwide that rose to 36 percent of the electorate in Algiers.

The creation of the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria was formally proclaimed at the opening session of the National Assembly on September 25, 1962. Ferhat Abbas, a moderate unconnected with the Political Bureau, who had previously headed the GPRA, was elected president of the assembly by the delegates, and Ben Bella was named prime minister. On the following day, Ben Bella formed a cabinet that was representative of the Political Bureau but that also included Boumédiènne as defense minister as well as other members of the so-called Oujda Group, who had served under him with the external forces in Morocco. Ben Bella, Boumédiènne, and Khider initially formed a triumvirate linking the leadership of the three power bases — the army, the party, and the government, respectively. However, Ben Bella's ambitions and authoritarian tendencies were to lead the triumvirate to unravel and provoke increasing discontent among Algerians.

Aftermath of the war
The war of national liberation and its aftermath severely disrupted Algeria's society and economy. In addition to the physical destruction, the exodus of the colons deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers — all occupations which colonial policy had prevented or discouraged the Muslim population from pursuing. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the workforce unemployed. Distribution of goods was at a standstill. Departing colons destroyed or carried off public records and utility plans, leaving public services in shambles. So, not only were the Algerian countryside and infrastructure destroyed, but also, almost half the rural population was forcibly displaced. Algerians now faced the task of replacing the colonial administration, which had been run by European settlers who left en masse after independence in 1962. Staffing these positions was especially difficult due to the fact that 86% of Algerians were illiterate in 1954. In 1962, the year of independence, not many Algerians had a university education, and although the number of university graduates increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it was still not enough to avoid certain political and social consequences. Given the low number of educated Algerians in 1962, the few university graduates had to carry the burden of helping rebuild a country following years of colonial occupation. They had to attempt to come up with solutions to issues like access to healthcare, transportation, and the eradication of illiteracy.

Along with the help of Algerian university graduates, the solutions to these problems were often found through international assistance from actors like France, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and the Arab world. Rather than commit to being part of a single world bloc (whether that be the US-led capitalist bloc or the Soviet-led communist bloc), Algeria remained non-aligned, focusing on organized, state-led development, investing in healthcare, education, agriculture, oil, and petrol. The role of university students in helping rebuild post-independence Algeria is often ignored, however. Projects like Generation Independence, a series of documentaries about Algerian university graduates in the 1960s and 1970s, attempt to rectify that.

Another challenge the newly sovereign Algerian government faced in the aftermath of the war was resettling the millions of displaced Algerians, both within Algeria's borders and outside of them. When neighboring countries Tunisia and Morocco became independent in 1956 (two years after the Algerian war for independence began), many Algerians fled to them to escape the violence within their borders. Later in the war, when the French army began to create 'forbidden zones' in the mountainous regions of the country, the number of Algerians fleeing their home country sharply increased, as they sought to avoid being sent to regroupment camps (camp de regroupement.)

While before the end of the war, the FLN struggled to exercise sovereignty within Algerian borders, it found diplomatic strength in interacting with international organizations dealing with refugees, most notably the UNHCR. In claiming responsibility for the Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunisia, the FLN assumed state-like responsibilities. In tandem, through accepting Algerian refugees, newly independent Morocco and Tunisia were able to assert their "new-found sovereignty in the international sphere." In the war's aftermath, repatriating refugees from Tunisia and Morocco to Algeria would require considerable effort on the part of all three states and the UNHCR, and in determining which populations qualified for international assistance to return to Algeria (or which were really Moroccan or Tunisian subjects), formal and documented national identities were formed and enforced in the "previously fluid and intermingled populations of French north Africa." While some nomadic tribes during French colonization flowed easily through the now hardened national borders, independence for Morocco, Tunisia, and now Algeria, meant that these tribes would have to remain inside the borders of one state. In all, the refugee crisis created by the war for independence presented the Algerian state with considerable challenges as a newly established government, while also providing them a channel to establish their statehood through diplomacy in north Africa and with international aid organizations.

The months immediately following independence witnessed a pell-mell rush of Algerians, their government, and its officials to claim the lands, houses, businesses, automobiles, bank accounts, and jobs left behind by the departed Pieds-Noirs. By the 1963 March Decrees, Ben Bella declared that all agricultural, industrial, and commercial properties previously operated and occupied by Pieds-Noirs were vacant, thereby legalizing their confiscation by the state. The term "nationalization" was not used in the decrees, presumably to avoid indemnity claims.

The FLN called its policy of widespread state involvement in the economy "Algerian socialism". Public-sector enterprises were gradually organized into state corporations that participated in virtually every aspect of the country's economic life. Although their activities were coordinated by central authorities, each state corporation was supposed to retain a measure of autonomy within its own sphere.

The departure of European owners and managers from factories and agricultural estates gave rise to a spontaneous, grass-roots phenomenon, later termed autogestion, which saw workers take control of the enterprises to keep them operating. Seeking to capitalize on the popularity of the self-management movement, Ben Bella formalized autogestion in the March Decrees. As the process evolved, workers in state-owned farms and enterprises and in agricultural cooperatives elected boards of managers that directed production activities, financing, and marketing in conjunction with state-appointed directors. The system proved to be a failure, however. The crucial agricultural sector suffered particularly under self-management, partly as result of bureaucratic incompetence, graft, and theft.

Ben Bella and the FLN
Whereas Ben Bella could count on the support of an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly, an opposition group led by Hocine Ait Ahmed soon emerged. Opponents outside the government included the supporters of Messali Hadj, the PCA, and the left-wing Party of the Socialist Revolution (Parti de la Révolution Socialiste, PRS) led by Mohamed Boudiaf. The communists, who were excluded from the FLN and therefore from any direct political rule, were particularly influential in the postindependence press. The activities of all these groups were subsequently banned, and Boudiaf was arrested. When opposition from the General Union of Algerian Workers (Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens, UGTA) was perceived, the trade union organization was subsumed under FLN control.

Contrary to the intent of the Tripoli Program, Ben Bella saw the FLN as an elite vanguard party that would mobilize popular support for government policies and reinforce his increasingly personal leadership of the country. Because Khider envisioned the FLN as playing a more encompassing, advisory role, Ben Bella forced him from office in April 1963 and replaced him as party secretary general. Khider later absconded with the equivalent of US$12 million in party funds into exile in Switzerland. In August 1963, Abbas resigned as assembly president to protest what he termed the FLN's usurpation of the legislature's authority. He was subsequently put under house arrest. A new constitution drawn up under close FLN supervision was approved by nationwide referendum in September, and Ben Bella was confirmed as the party's choice to lead the country for a five-year term. Under the new constitution, Ben Bella as president combined the functions of chief of state and head of government with that of supreme commander of the armed forces. He formed his government without needing legislative approval and was responsible for the definition and direction of its policies. There was no effective institutional check on its powers.

Ait Ahmed quit the National Assembly to protest the increasingly dictatorial tendencies of the regime, which had reduced the functions of the legislature to rubber-stamping presidential directives. The Kabyle leaders also condemned the government for its failure to carry through on reconstruction projects in war-ravaged Kabylie, but Ait Ahmed's aims went beyond rectifying regional complaints. He formed a clandestine resistance movement, the Socialist Forces Front (Front des Forces Socialistes, FFS), based in the Kabylie and dedicated to overthrowing the Ben Bella regime by force. Late summer 1963 saw sporadic incidents attributed to the FFS and required the movement of regular troops into the Kabylie.

More serious fighting broke out a year later in the Kabylie as well as in the southern Sahara. The insurgent movement was organized by the National Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (Comité National pour la Défense de la Révolution, CNDR), which joined the remnants of Ait Ahmed's FFS and Boudiaf's PRS with the surviving regional military leaders. Khider was believed to have helped finance the operation. The army moved quickly and in force to crush the rebellion. Ait Ahmed and Colonel Mohamed Chabaani, a wilaya commander leading insurgents in the Sahara, were captured and sentenced to death in 1965, after a trial in which Khider and Boudiaf were similarly condemned in absentia. Chabaani was executed, but Ait Ahmed's sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. In 1966 he escaped from prison and fled to Europe where he joined the two other chefs historiques in exile.

As minister of defense, Boumédiènne had no qualms about sending the army to crush regional uprisings because he felt they posed a threat to the state. However, when Ben Bella attempted to co-opt allies from among some of the same regionalists whom the army had been called out to suppress, tensions increased between Boumediene and Ben Bella. In April 1965, Ben Bella issued orders to local police prefects to report directly to him rather than through normal channels in the Ministry of Interior. The minister, Ahmed Medeghri, one of Boumediene's closest associates in the Oujda Group, resigned his portfolio in protest and was replaced by a Political Bureau loyalist. Ben Bella next sought to remove Abdelaziz Bouteflika, another Boumediene confidant, as minister of foreign affairs and was believed to be planning a direct confrontation with Boumediene to force his ouster. On June 19, however, Boumediene deposed Ben Bella in a military coup d'état that was both swift and bloodless. The ousted president was taken into custody and held incommunicado.

Boumédiènne Regime
Boumédiènne described the military coup as a "historic rectification" of the Algerian War of Independence. Boumédiènne dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the 1963 constitution, disbanded the militia, and abolished the Political Bureau, which he considered an instrument of Ben Bella's personal rule.

Until a new constitution was adopted, political power resided in the Council of the Revolution, a predominantly military body intended to foster cooperation among various factions in the army and the party. The council's original twenty-six members included former internal military leaders, former Political Bureau members, and senior officers of the Armée Nationale Populaire (ANP, People's National Army) closely associated with Boumédiènne in the coup. They were expected to exercise collegial responsibility for overseeing the activities of the new government, which was conducted by the largely civilian Council of Ministers, or cabinet, appointed by Boumédiènne. The cabinet, which shared some functions with the Council of the Revolution, was also inclusive; it contained an Islamic leader, technical experts, FLN regulars, as well as others representing a broad range of Algerian political and institutional life.

Boumédiènne showed himself to be an ardent nationalist, deeply influenced by Islamic values, and he was reportedly one of the few prominent Algerian leaders who expressed himself better in Arabic than in French. He seized control of the country not to initiate military rule, but to protect the interests of the army, which he felt were threatened by Ben Bella. Boumédiènne's position as head of government and of state was not secure initially, partly because of his lack of a significant power base outside the armed forces. This situation may have accounted for his deference to collegial rule as a means of reconciling competing factions. Nonetheless, FLN radicals criticized Boumédiènne for neglecting the policy of autogestion and betraying "rigorous socialism"; in addition, some military officers were unsettled by what they saw as a drift away from collegiality. There were coup attempts and a failed assassination in 1967—68, after which opponents were exiled or imprisoned and Boumediene's power consolidated.

Agricultural production, meanwhile, still failed to meet the country's food needs. The so-called agricultural revolution that Boumédiènne launched in 1971 called for the seizure of additional property and the redistribution of the newly acquired public lands to cooperative farms.

A significant regional event was Boumédiènne's 1975 pledge of support for an independent Western Sahara, admitting Sahrawi bedouin refugees and the Polisario Front guerrilla movement to construct refugee camps in the Tindouf Province of western Algeria, as their home country was overrun by Morocco and Mauritania. The Western Sahara conflict came to completely dominate Moroccan-Algerian relations, already sour after the 1963 Sand war, as well as transnational Maghrebi politics. The reasons for this were twofold: the strong anticolonial sentiment left behind by the liberation war, as well as the need to find an effective proxy force to counter Moroccan ambitions. Polisario proved an effective outlet for both. With Algerian backing, its leader El-Ouali on February 27, 1976 announced the formation of a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a government-in-exile for Western Sahara, which took autonomous control over the refugee camps south of Tindouf, and the interests of which became a pillar of Algerian foreign policy.

Eleven years after he took power, in April 1976, Boumediene set out in a draft document called the National Charter the principles on which the long-promised constitution would be based. After much public debate, the constitution was promulgated in November 1976, and Boumédiènne was elected president with 95 percent of the votes. Boumédiènne's death on December 27, 1978, set off a struggle within the FLN to choose a successor. As a compromise to break a deadlock between two other candidates, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, a relative outsider, was sworn in on February 9, 1979.

Chadli Bendjedid
Bendjedid, who had collaborated with Boumediene in the plot that disposed of Ben Bella, was regarded as a moderate, not identified with any group or faction. He did, however, command wide support within the military establishment. In June 1980, he summoned an extraordinary FLN Party Congress to examine the draft of the five-year development plan for 1980–84. The resultant First Five Year Plan liberalized the economy and broke up unwieldy state corporations.

The Benjedid regime was also marked by the Berber Spring protests from Kabyle university students who objected to Arabization measures in government and especially in education. Although Bendjedid reaffirmed the government's long-term commitment to Arabization, he upgraded Berber studies at the university level and granted media access to Berber-language programs. These concessions, however, provoked counterprotests from Islamists (also seen as fundamentalists).

Islamists gained increasing influence in part because the government was unable to keep its economic promises. In the late 1970s, Muslim activists engaged in isolated and relatively small-scale assertions of their will: harassing women whom they felt were inappropriately dressed, smashing establishments that served alcoholic beverages, and evicting official imams from their mosques. The Islamists escalated their actions in 1982, when they called for the abrogation of the National Charter and the formation of an Islamic government. Amidst an increasing number of violent incidents on campuses, Islamists killed one student. After police arrested 400 Islamists, about 100,000 demonstrators thronged to Friday prayers at the university mosque. The arrests of hundreds more activists, including prominent leaders of the movement, Shaykh Abdelatif Sultani and Shaykh Ahmed Sahnoun resulted in a lessening of Islamist actions for several years. Nonetheless, in light of the massive support the Islamists could muster, the authorities henceforth viewed them as a potentially grave threat to the state and alternately treated them with harshness and respect. In 1984, for example, the government opened in Constantine one of the largest Islamic universities in the world. In the same year, acceding to Islamist demands, the government passed the Algerian Family Code, making family law conform closely to sharia and considering women as wards of their families before marriage and of their husbands after marriage.

The 1980s oil glut deepened the country's economic crisis after the mid-decade, resulting in, among other things, increased unemployment, a lack of consumer goods, and shortages in cooking oil, semolina, coffee, and tea. Women waited in long lines for scarce and expensive food; young men milled in frustration on street corners unable to find work. An already bad situation was aggravated by the huge drop in world oil prices in 1986. Dismantling Algeria's socialist system seemed to Bendjedid the only way to improve the economy. In 1987 he announced reforms that would return control and profits to private hands, starting with agriculture and continuing to the large state enterprises and banks.

Notwithstanding the introduction of reform measures, incidents indicating social unrest increased in Algiers and other cities as the economy foundered from 1985 to 1988. The alienation and anger of the population were fanned by the widespread perception that the government had become corrupt and aloof. The waves of discontent crested in October 1988 when a series of strikes and walkouts by students and workers in Algiers degenerated into rioting by thousands of young men, who destroyed government and FLN property. When the violence spread to Annaba, Blida, Oran, and other cities and towns, the government declared a state of emergency and began using force to quell the unrest. By October 10, the security forces had restored a semblance of order; unofficial estimates were that more than 500 people were killed and more than 3,500 arrested.

The stringent measures used to put down the riots of "Black October" engendered a ground swell of outrage. Islamists took control of some areas. Unsanctioned independent organizations of lawyers, students, journalists, and physicians sprang up to demand justice and change. In response, Bendjedid conducted a house cleaning of senior officials and drew up a program of political reform. In December he was offered the chance to implement the reforms when he was reelected, albeit by a reduced margin. A new constitution, approved overwhelmingly in February 1989, dropped the word "socialist" from the official description of the country; guaranteed freedoms of expression, association, and meeting; and withdrew the guarantees of female rights that appeared in the 1976 constitution. The FLN was not mentioned in the document at all, and the army was discussed only in the context of national defense, reflecting a significant downgrading of its political status.

Politics were reinvigorated in 1989 under the new laws. Newspapers became the liveliest and freest in the Arab world, while political parties of nearly every stripe vied for members and a voice. In February 1989, Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj founded the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut, FIS). Although the constitution prohibited religious parties, the FIS came to play a significant role in Algerian politics. It handily defeated the FLN in local and provincial elections held in June 1990, in part because most secular parties boycotted the elections. The FLN's response was to adopt a new electoral law that openly aided the FLN. The FIS, in turn, called a general strike, organized demonstrations, and occupied public places. Bendjedid declared martial law on June 5, 1991, but he also asked his minister of foreign affairs, Sid Ahmed Ghozali, to form a new government of national reconciliation. Although the FIS seemed satisfied with Ghozali's appointment and his attempts to clean up the electoral law, it continued to protest, leading the army to arrest Belhadj, Madani, and hundreds of others. The state of emergency ended in September.

Algeria's leaders were stunned in December 1991 when FIS candidates won absolute majorities in 188 of 430 electoral districts, far ahead of the FLN's fifteen seats. Some members of Bendjedid's cabinet, fearing a complete FIS takeover, forced the president to dissolve parliament and to resign on January 11, 1992. Leaders of the takeover included Ghozali, and generals Khaled Nezzar (minister of defense) and Larbi Belkheir (minister of interior). After they declared the elections void, the takeover leaders and Mohamed Boudiaf formed the High Council of State to rule the country. The FIS, as well as the FLN, clamored for a return of the electoral process, but police and troops countered with massive arrests. In February 1992, violent demonstrations broke out in many cities, and on February 9 the government declared a one-year state of emergency and the next month banned the FIS.

1990s
Despite occasional efforts to restore the political process, violence and terrorism characterized the Algeria landscape during the 1990s. In 1994, Liamine Zéroual was appointed Head of State for a 3-year term. During this period, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) launched terrorist campaigns against government figures and institutions to protest the banning of the Islamist parties. When it took to massacring civilians not involved in politics, a faction based in the east-central region broke away in protest, establishing the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which continued fighting for some time after the effective demise of the GIA. Some government officials estimate that more than 100,000 Algerians died during this period.

Zeroual called for presidential elections in 1995, though some parties objected to holding elections that excluded the FIS. Zeroual was elected president with 75% of the vote. In 1997, the pro-Zeroual Rassemblement National Democratique (RND) party was formed by a group of FLN members who rejected the FLN's advocacy of negotiation with FIS. Zeroual announced that presidential elections would be held in early 1999, nearly 2 years ahead of the scheduled time.

Algerians went to the polls in April 1999, following a campaign in which seven candidates qualified for election. On the eve of the election, all candidates except Abdelaziz Bouteflika pulled out amid charges of widespread electoral fraud. Bouteflika, the candidate who appeared to enjoy the backing of the military, as well as FLN and RND party regulars, won with an official vote count of 70% of all votes cast. He was inaugurated on April 27, 1999 for a 5-year term.

Lack of Historiography
The historiography on this period, particularly for the 1960s and 1970s, is fairly limited. Most of the history on Algeria focuses on its anti-colonial struggle, with detailed events being discussed until 1962, when Algeria became independent. The literature on Algerian history typically considers its colonisation, the war of independence, and the civil violence of the 1990s.

Compared to the dates and events which are present in the historiography on Algeria’s war of independence or the 1990s, there is not much literature on the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that this period was also packed with various events. The Revue Algérienne des Sciences Juridiques, Politiques et Economiques, published for 1964 and the first two months of 1965, is 23 pages long, and contains almost daily happenings.

The work of historians varies considerably between the colonial and post-colonial periods of Algerian history. This is both in quantity- since less historians study post-1962 Algeria- and quality, as research on this period is typically not carried out by experienced academics.

Various factors contribute to this lack of historiography, as history for the years following 1962 is often difficult to research. This is due to several aspects of post-independence Algeria. One such feature is state propaganda. The Front de Libération nationale (FLN) shaped the national narrative in Algeria as a way of anchoring its legitimacy. This narrative encouraged the adoption of the morals and attitudes of the FLN, and was assimilated into official texts, such as the 1963, 1976, and 1989 constitutions. The FLN also excluded its opposing political forces from this imposed narrative. Their determination to control the rendering of events influenced the questions which historians could ask, as well as the material available to them. As a result, it contributed to the lack of historiography on post-1962 Algeria.

Another reason for the insufficient literature on Algeria following independence is the destruction of documents. Following 1962, archives became very difficult to access, as the national archives on Algerian territory were no longer created by the French colonial administration, but by the newly independent state. This resulted in a switch from a period with a relative abundance of sources to one with nearly no national archives. It had a large effect on the experience of historians when writing works on this period. Also, while the state archives of the colonial period are available in Algeria and France to a certain extent, the Algerian National Archives never gave access to state archives for the independence period, once again creating disparities between the studies of the different periods. Another barrier in the study of post-independence documents is Arabization. Nowadays, whereas most of the relevant archives are in French, history students are typically Arabophones. There was also a gap between university students and their professors, who preferred writing in French, which affected their ability to instruct their students on the necessary skills for studying contemporary history. Also, although there is an international academic community that studies colonial Algeria, there is no such group for independent Algeria.

The difficulty in accessing written sources made witness stories more important when it came to researching contemporary Algerian history. This was not helped by the hesitation of most witnesses to recount their experiences, however, which also played a role in limiting the historiography of post-1962 Algeria. The accounts of witnesses were reported to have become more unsure once the threshold of 1962 was passed, once again hinting at the overshadowing of more contemporary Algerian history by its colonial past. Moreover, some interviewees expressed regional points of view on the war of independence, ignoring both the post-1962 period and certain regions of Algeria. Some historians have also remarked that “after 1962, the past is not history,” diminishing the importance of that time. Although recollections of this period are starting to become more willingly shared, it is still difficult to find evidence to support the memories of its witnesses. The FLN’s ‘memorial context of post-independence Algeria’ even impacted historians’ ability to locate witnesses of pre-independence Algeria and its political events, and it also explains why witnesses were often so hesitant to tell stories of post-1962 Algeria- for fear of contradicting the FLN-imposed narrative. Therefore, many historians working on the history of Algeria view 1962 as ‘the end of history.’ This is also the case with actors of that period, who, for a long time after independence was achieved, did not speak of their experiences.

title: History of Algeria (1962–1999)


text:
Brazil nut

The Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) is a South American tree in the family Lecythidaceae, and it is also the name of the tree's commercially harvested edible seeds. It is one of the largest and longest-lived trees in the Amazon rainforest. The fruit and its nutshell – containing the edible Brazil nut – are relatively large and weigh as much as 2 kg in total. As food, Brazil nuts are notable for diverse content of micronutrients, especially a high amount of selenium. The wood of the Brazil nut tree is prized for its quality in carpentry, flooring, and heavy construction.

Common names
In Portuguese-speaking countries, like Brazil, they are variously called "castanha-do-brasil" (meaning "chestnuts from Brazil" in Portuguese), "castanha-do-pará" (meaning "chestnuts from Pará" in Portuguese), with other names: castanha-da-amazônia, castanha-do-acre, "noz amazônica" (meaning "Amazonian nut" in Portuguese), noz boliviana, tocari ("probably of Carib origin" ), and tururi (from Tupi turu'ri ) also used.

In various Spanish-speaking countries of South America, Brazil nuts are called castañas de Brasil, nuez de Brasil, or castañas de Pará (or Para).

In North America, as early as 1896, Brazil nuts were sometimes known by the slang term "nigger toes",  a vulgarity that fell out of use after the racial slur became socially unacceptable.

Description

The Brazil nut is a large tree, reaching 50 m tall, and with a trunk 1 to 2 m in diameter, making it among the largest of trees in the Amazon rainforest. It may live for 500 years or more, and can often reach a thousand years of age. The stem is straight and commonly without branches for well over half the tree's height, with a large, emergent crown of long branches above the surrounding canopy of other trees.

The bark is grayish and smooth. The leaves are dry-season deciduous, alternate, simple, entire or crenate, oblong, 20-35 cm long, and 10 – broad. The flowers are small, greenish-white, in panicles 5 – long; each flower has a two-parted, deciduous calyx, six unequal cream-colored petals, and numerous stamens united into a broad, hood-shaped mass.

Reproduction
Brazil nut trees produce fruit almost exclusively in pristine forests, as disturbed forests lack the large-bodied bees of the genera Bombus, Centris, Epicharis, Eulaema, and Xylocopa, which are the only ones capable of pollinating the tree's flowers, with different bee genera being the primary pollinators in different areas, and different times of year. Brazil nuts have been harvested from plantations, but production is low and is currently not economically viable.

The fruit takes 14 months to mature after pollination of the flowers. The fruit itself is a large capsule 10 – in diameter, resembling a coconut endocarp in size and weighing up to 2 kg. It has a hard, woody shell 8 – thick, which contains eight to 24 wedge-shaped seeds 4 – long (the "Brazil nuts") packed like the segments of an orange, but not limited to one whorl of segments. Up to three whorls can be stacked onto each other, with the polar ends of the segments of the middle whorl nestling into the upper and lower whorls (see illustration above).

The capsule contains a small hole at one end, which enables large rodents like the agouti to gnaw it open. They then eat some of the seeds inside while burying others for later use; some of these are able to germinate into new Brazil nut trees. Most of the seeds are "planted" by the agoutis in caches during wet season, and the young saplings may have to wait years, in a state of dormancy, for a tree to fall and sunlight to reach it, when it starts growing again. Capuchin monkeys have been reported to open Brazil nuts using a stone as an anvil.

Taxonomy
The Brazil nut family, the Lecythidaceae, is in the order Ericales, as are other well-known plants such as blueberries, cranberries, sapote, gutta-percha, tea, phlox, and persimmons. The tree is the only species in the monotypic genus Bertholletia, named after French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet.

Distribution and habitat
The Brazil nut is native to the Guianas, Venezuela, Brazil, eastern Colombia, eastern Peru, and eastern Bolivia. It occurs as scattered trees in large forests on the banks of the Amazon River, Rio Negro, Tapajós, and the Orinoco. The fruit is heavy and rigid; when the fruits fall, they pose a serious threat to vehicles and potential for traumatic brain injury of people passing under the tree.

Production
In 2020, global production of Brazil nuts (in shells) was 69,658 tonnes, most of which derive from wild harvests in tropical forests, especially the Amazon regions of Brazil and Bolivia which produced 92% of the world total (table).

Environmental effects of harvesting
Since most of the production for international trade is harvested in the wild, the business arrangement has been advanced as a model for generating income from a tropical forest without destroying it. The nuts are most often gathered by migrant workers known as castañeros (in Spanish) or castanheiros (in Portuguese). Logging is a significant threat to the sustainability of the Brazil nut-harvesting industry.

Analysis of tree ages in areas that are harvested shows that moderate and intense gathering takes so many seeds that not enough are left to replace older trees as they die. Sites with light gathering activities had many young trees, while sites with intense gathering practices had nearly none.

European Union import regulation
In 2003, the European Union imposed strict regulations on the import of Brazilian-harvested Brazil nuts in their shells, as the shells are considered to contain unsafe levels of aflatoxins, a potential cause of liver cancer.

Toxicity
Brazil nuts are susceptible to contamination by aflatoxins, produced by fungi, once they fall to the ground. Aflatoxins can cause liver damage, including possible cancer, if consumed. Aflatoxin levels have been found in Brazil nuts during inspections that were far higher than the limits set by the EU. However, mechanical sorting and drying was found to eliminate 98% of aflatoxins; a 2003 EU ban on importation was rescinded after new tolerance levels were set.

The nuts often contain radium, a radioactive element, with a kilogram of nuts containing an activity between 1 and 7 nCi. This level of radium is small, although it can be about 1,000 times higher than in other common foods. According to Oak Ridge Associated Universities, elevated levels of radium in the soil does not directly cause the concentration of radium, but "the very extensive root system of the tree" can concentrate naturally occurring radioactive material, when present in the soil. Radium can be concentrated in nuts only if it is present in the soil.

Brazil nuts also contain barium, a metal with a chemical behavior quite similar to radium. While barium, if ingested, can have toxic effects, such as weakness, vomiting, or diarrhea, the amount present in Brazil nuts is orders of magnitude too small to have noticeable health effects.

Nutrition
Brazil nuts are 3% water, 14% protein, 12% carbohydrates, and 66% fats (table). The fat components are 16% saturated, 24% monounsaturated, and 24% polyunsaturated (see table for USDA source).

In a 100 g reference amount, Brazil nuts supply 659 calories, and are a rich source (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV) of dietary fiber (30% DV), thiamin (54% DV), vitamin E (38% DV), magnesium (106% DV), phosphorus (104% DV), manganese (57% DV), and zinc (43% DV). Calcium, iron, and potassium are present in moderate amounts (10-19% DV, table).

Selenium
Brazil nuts are a particularly rich source of selenium, with just 28 g supplying 544 micrograms of selenium or 10 times the DV of 55 micrograms (see table for USDA source). However, the amount of selenium within batches of nuts may vary considerably.

The high selenium content is used as a biomarker in studies of selenium intake and deficiency. Consumption of just one Brazil nut per day over 8 weeks was sufficient to restore selenium blood levels and increase HDL cholesterol in obese women.

Oil
Brazil nut oil contains 48% unsaturated fatty acids composed mainly of oleic and linoleic acids, the phytosterol, beta-sitosterol, and fat-soluble vitamin E.

The following table presents the composition of fatty acids in Brazil nut oil (see USDA source in nutrition table):

Wood
The lumber from Brazil nut trees (not to be confused with Brazilwood) is of excellent quality, having diverse uses from flooring to heavy construction. Logging the trees is prohibited by law in all three producing countries (Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru). Illegal extraction of timber and land clearances present continuing threats. In Brazil, cutting down a Brazil nut tree requires previous authorization from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources.

Other uses
Brazil nut oil is used as a lubricant in clocks and in the manufacturing of paint and cosmetics, such as soap and perfume. Because of its hardness, the Brazil nutshell is often pulverized and used as an abrasive to polish materials, such as metals and ceramics, in the same way as jeweler's rouge. The charcoal from the nut shells may be used to purify water.

title: Brazil nut


text:
MOV

MOV may refer to:

 * MOV (x86 instruction), a mnemonic for the copying of data from one location to another in the x86 assembly language
 * .mov, filename extension for the QuickTime multimedia file format
 * Metal oxide varistor, an electronic component with a significant non-ohmic current-voltage characteristic
 * Marconi-Osram Valve, a former British manufacturer of vacuum tubes
 * The Merchant of Venice, a play by William Shakespeare
 * MOV (TV channel), a Portuguese television channel operated by ZON Multimédia
 * Member of the Order of the Volta, one of the highest national awards of Ghana
 * MOV (album), a 1999 album by R&B group Men of Vizion
 * Motor-operated valve, a style of valve actuator for controlling flow in pipes
 * MOV, an abbreviation of mother of vinegar, the colony of yeast and bacteria in a bottle of vinegar
 * Moranbah Airport, IATA airport code "MOV"
 * Moshassuck Valley Railroad, reporting mark MOV

title: MOV


text:
Aiud

Aiud (Brucla, Nagyenyed, Hungarian pronunciation : ; Straßburg am Mieresch) is a city located in Alba County, Transylvania, Romania. The city's population is 21,307 (2021). It has the status of municipiu. The city derives its name ultimately from Saint Giles (Aegidius), to whom the first church in the settlement was dedicated when built.

Administration
The municipality of Aiud is made up of the city proper and of ten villages. These are divided into four urban villages and six villages which are located outside the city proper but belong to the municipality. The four urban villages are: Aiudul de Sus, Gâmbaș, Măgina, and Păgida. The rural villages are: Ciumbrud (0.81 km2), Sâncrai (0.65 km2), Gârbova de Jos (1.04 km2), Țifra (0.06 km2), Gârbova de Sus (0.52 km2) and Gârbovița (0.28 km2).

Demographics
At the 2021 census, Aiud had a population of 21,307. In 2016, the total population was 26,296, of which 12,900 were male and 13,396 female.

Localities
The municipality comprises the city proper and the ten villages it administers, in order of population:

 * Aiud city proper
 * Aiudul de Sus (Felenyed)
 * Ciumbrud (Csombord)
 * Sâncrai (Enyedszentkirály)
 * Măgina (Muzsnaháza)
 * Gâmbaș (Marosgombás)
 * Gârbova de Jos (Alsóorbó)
 * Gârbova de Sus (Felsőorbó)
 * Păgida (Kisapahida)
 * Gârbovița (Középorbó)
 * Țifra (Cifrafogadó)

Ethnicity
At the 2011 census, the ethnic composition of the city was:
 * Romanians - 16,955 (79.7% of total population for which data are available)
 * Hungarians - 3,364 (15.8%)
 * Romani - 930 (4.4%)
 * Germans - 15 (0.07%)

Religion

 * Orthodox - 76.3% of the total population
 * Reformed - 13.1%
 * Greek-Catholic - 4.1%
 * Roman Catholic - 2.1%
 * Unitarian - 1.1%
 * Other - 3.3%

Climate
Aiud has a humid continental climate (Cfb in the Köppen climate classification). The city is located in the Aiud River valley and therefore has a mountain-type climate. It has a characteristic Transylvanian continental temperate climate. The average winter temperature is -2.6 °C and the average summer temperature is 19.2 °C.

Education
The education infrastructure in Aiud is very good for a city of its size. There are many schools, with many students, due to fact that it is renowned as the education hub for the area, with students pouring in from other communities in the area. The first school was opened in Măgina in 1611, with Romanian language courses. Today, the following primary and secondary schools operate in the municipality:

 * Titu Maiorescu National College (605 students; 46 staff)
 * Bethlen National College (1,011 students; 81 staff)
 * Avram Iancu Technical College (505 students; 37 staff)
 * Alexandru Borza Agricultural Technological High School (487 students; 51 staff)
 * General School 1 (1,306 students; 63 staff)
 * General School 2 (189 students; 13 staff)
 * General School 3 (1,089 students; 58 staff)

Tourism
Aiud is an important tourism centre in terms of agrotourism, ecotourism and cultural tourism.

Cultural Attractions
The city centre is historical and is home to many landmarks, such as the Aiud Citadel, City Hall, museums, and churches.

Aiud Citadel
The Aiud Citadel (Cetatea Aiudului) is located in the center of Aiud; built during medieval times (14th century), it comprises many buildings. It is the main tourist attraction of Aiud. The citadel is fairly small, with a perimeter of 350 m, and it is in the form of an irregular pentagon. The earliest documented evidence of the citadel extant today dates from 7 November 1293, a privilege issued by King Ladislaus IV of Hungary (1272–1290), but local tradition holds that the first stone watch tower was finished during the Mongol invasion of Europe in 1241. Other important events for the citadel: the serfs uprisings from 1437; the conquest of Michael the Brave; the Habsburg attacks in 1704 and 1717; the Christian uprising - Religious war in 1758–1761; the peasant movement from 1784, and the Revolutionary wave of 1848–1849.

The Students' Monument
Due to its strong educational culture, which dates back to the founding of the city, the Students' Monument (Monumentul studentesc) is the oldest monument in Aiud. It is located in the beautiful City Park, and was erected in memory of the students who fought against the Habsburg invasion in 1704. The monument was erected in 1904, 200 years after the invasion.

The "Calvarul Aiudului" Monument
The "Calvarul Aiudului" Monument is a modern monument in remembrance of the suffering and deaths during the Communist regime of Romania. The monument, started in 1992, is made up of many crosses (6 metres tall), symbolising the traditions of Romania. In the Communist era, Aiud was an important centre where the elite of the Communist resistance were buried, and the "Calvarul Aiudului" monument seeks to remember those. The monument is located just outside the city centre, in the southwest.

City Hall
The City Hall of Aiud is located right in the centre of the city, at No. 1 Consiliul Europei street, close to the Aiud Citadel. The edifice, built in the 1890s, is built in the majestic style of those times, with balconies, statues, decorations and wonderful interiors.

Museums
Aiud is home to two major public museums. They are the Museum of History (temporarily closed due to renovations starting in 2013) and the Museum of Natural Science. The history museum was built in 1796 and is housed in a historical building. There is a large collection of coins, as well as medieval and pre-medieval artifacts. The collection of the Museum of Natural Sciences dates back from 1720. It is based mainly on zoology, as well as botany, paleontology, and geology.

Churches
Most of Aiud's population are Christian, but they also come from a variety of denominations, including Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and well as Reformed, Unitarian, Baptist, and Evangelical faiths. Therefore, there are places of worship for all these religions.

The Orthodox Cathedral is located in the southeast of the city, and is an impressive building with high ceilings and wonderful domes. It was built after the unification of Transylvania with the rest of Romania (Wallachia and Moldavia) on 1 December 1918. The construction started in 1927 and went on for some decades. The architecture was inspired from the St. Sofia Church in Istanbul, and is built in Byzantine style.

The Roman Catholic Church, albeit being smaller and less imposing that the Orthodox Cathedral, is still very beautiful, built in baroque style. Also, it is situated in Cuza Vodă Square, surrounding the medieval Aiud Citadel, making the Church very ideal in terms of surroundings. The church contains a large organ as well as stained glass windows which were painted by an artist from Budapest.

The Reformed Church mainly serves the Hungarian minority of Aiud, which played a big role in the identity of the city in terms of education, art, architecture and more. Their church is arguably the most memorable of the three main churches, because it is located right in the Aiud Citadel, and is medieval in architecture style, being the oldest church in Aiud.

Monasteries
The most famous monastery in the Aiud area is the Râmeț monastery, which was built in the 15th century. Its architecture is classically Romanian, resembling the painted monasteries of Moldavia such as Voronet. In the monastery there is also a museum. In addition to Râmeț monastery, there are also monasteries at Magina and Cicau.

Historical Colleges
The Bethlen Gabor College, with 1011 students today has a rich history. The college, named after Gabriel Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania (1613–1629), was founded in 1622 in Alba-Iulia, the capital city of Alba County, and it was then moved to Aiud. Later on, it was also moved to Cluj-Napoca for a short time. Today, the institution is located in a 19th-century historical building, and it is also home to an important library.

Kemény - Zeyk mansion
Center of political life in Aiud in the 19th century.

Natural Attractions
As well as rich culture, Aiud is also littered with wonderful scenic tourist attractions in terms of the environment. There are also many activities available throughout the year, especially in fishing and hunting. This provides a strong base for ecotourism in the area, as there are beautiful forests, hills and mountains and fresh air.

Accessibility and Transport
Aiud is easily accessible from all parts of Romania due to its position in the centre of the country and its road network. The city is located on the national road running from Bucharest to Oradea and then crossing the Hungarian border to Budapest. Therefore, most public coach services running between Budapest and Bucharest via Oradea stop at Aiud.

Railways
Aiud is an important railway hub and is served frequently by CFR national trains. It is located on the main line from Oradea to Bucharest via Cluj-Napoca. Consequently, there are 46 trains passing daily through Aiud (with very frequent connections to main cities), to and from the following main cities:

 * Cluj-Napoca - 18 trains daily
 * Alba Iulia - 10 trains daily
 * Brașov, Sighișoara, and Ploiești - 5 trains daily
 * Bucharest, Deva, Târgu Mureș, and Timișoara - 4 trains daily
 * Sibiu - 3 trains daily
 * Oradea, Huedin, Arad, Satu Mare, Constanța, Mangalia, Suceava, Iași - 2 trains daily
 * Craiova and Sighetu Marmației - 1 train daily

(The number of trains daily indicates trains in both directions. For example, to Cluj-Napoca there are 18 trains daily, meaning there are 18 trains to Cluj-Napoca and 18 trains from Cluj-Napoca, for a total of 36 services.)

Health
In Aiud municipality, there is a new hospital built in 1993. It has 318 beds and 15 sections. There are also radiology services, 24-hour emergency services and a large ambulance station, making the hospital one of the better-equipped in the region. Nearby, there is also a medical centre with 14 specialised cabinets. There is also a tuberculosis sanatory in Aiud, and it is situated in the southeast of the city. This hospital was built in 1914 and currently has 220 beds.

title: Aiud


text:
TED

TED may refer to:

Economics and finance

 * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar

Education

 * Türk Eğitim Derneği, the Turkish Education Association
 * TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey
 * Transvaal Education Department (TED)

Entertainment and media

 * TED (conference) (Technology, Entertainment, and Design)
 * Tenders Electronic Daily, a journal on government procurement in the European Union
 * Turner Field (The Ted), of the Atlanta Braves until 2017

Technology and computing

 * MOS Technology TED, an integrated circuit
 * TED Notepad, a freeware portable plain-text editor
 * Television Electronic Disc, an early Telefunken video disc
 * Transferred electron device or Gunn diode
 * TransLattice Elastic Database, a NewSQL database

Transport

 * Teddington railway station, London, National Rail station code

Other uses

 * Thyroid eye disease, aka Graves' ophthalmopathy
 * Tooheys Extra Dry, Australian beer
 * Turtle excluder device, for letting sea turtles escape from fishing-nets

title: TED