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Metropolitan Transportation Authority

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is a public benefit corporation responsible for public transportation in the New York City metropolitan area of the U.S. state of New York. The MTA is the largest public transit authority in North America, serving 12 counties in Downstate New York, along with two counties in southwestern Connecticut under contract to the Connecticut Department of Transportation, carrying over 11 million passengers on an average weekday systemwide, and over 850,000 vehicles on its seven toll bridges and two tunnels per weekday.

Founding
In February 1965, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller suggested that the New York State Legislature create an authority to purchase, operate, and modernize the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). The LIRR, then a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), had been operating under bankruptcy protection since 1949. The proposed authority would also have the power to make contracts or arrangements with other commuter railroad operators in the New York City area. On June 1, 1965, the legislature chartered the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority (MCTA) to take over the operations of the LIRR. Governor Rockefeller appointed his top aide, Dr. William J. Ronan, as chairman and chief executive officer of the MCTA. In June 1965, the state finalized an agreement to buy the LIRR from the PRR for $65 million. The MCTA made a down payment of $10 million for the LIRR in December 1965, and it completed the rest of the payment the next month.

In February 1965, Rockefeller and Connecticut Governor John N. Dempsey jointly suggested that operations of the New Haven Line, the New Haven Railroad's struggling commuter rail operation, be transferred to the New York Central Railroad as part of a plan to prevent the New Haven Railroad from going bankrupt. If the operational merger occurred, the proposed MCTA and the existing Connecticut Transportation Authority would contract with New York Central to operate the New Haven Line to Grand Central Terminal. A September 1965 joint report from both agencies, recommended that the line be leased to New York Central for 99 years, with the MCTA and CTA acting as agents for both states.

In October 1965, the MCTA found that the New Haven Line's stations and infrastructure were even more decrepit than those of the LIRR. The New Haven Railroad's trustees initially opposed New York Central's takeover of the New Haven Line, as they felt that the $140 million offer for the New Haven Line was too low. After some discussion, the trustees decided to continue operating the New Haven Line until June 1967.

In January 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay proposed merging the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), which operated buses and subways in New York City, and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), which operated toll bridges and tunnels within the city. Rockefeller offered his "complete support" for Lindsay's proposed unified transit agency, while longtime city planner and TBTA chair Robert Moses called the proposed merger "absurd" and "grotesque" for its unwieldiness. In June 1966, Rockefeller announced his plans to expand the MCTA's scope to create a new regional transit authority. The new authority would encompass the existing MCTA, as well as the NYCTA and TBTA. Lindsay disagreed, saying that the state and city should have operationally separate transit authorities that worked in tandem.

In May 1967, Rockefeller signed a bill that allowed the MCTA to oversee the mass transit policies of New York City-area transit systems. The unification agreement took place the following March, with the MCTA taking over the operations of the LIRR, NYCTA, TBTA, New Haven commuter services, New York Central commuter services, and the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railway. Initially, the TBTA was resistant to the MCTA's efforts to acquire it. Moses was afraid that the enlarged MCTA would "undermine, destroy or tarnish" the integrity of the TBTA, One source of contention was Rockefeller's proposal to use TBTA tolls in order to subsidize the cheap fares of the NYCTA, since Moses strongly opposed any use of TBTA tolls by outside agencies. In February 1968, Moses acquiesced to the MCTA's merger proposal. New York Central and the PRR merged in February 1968, forming the Penn Central Transportation Company.

In February 1968, the MCTA published a 56-page report for Governor Rockefeller, proposing several subway and railroad improvements under the name "Metropolitan Transportation, a Program for Action"  alternatively called the "Grand Design". The city had already intended to build subway extensions in all four boroughs, so that most riders would need at most one transfer to get to their destination. The Program for Action also called for upgrades to the Penn Central railroads and area airports. The Program for Action was put forward simultaneously with other development and transportation plans under the administration of Mayor Lindsay. This included Lindsay's Linear City plan for housing and educational facilities, and the projected construction of several Interstate Highways, many of which had originally been proposed by Robert Moses.

Expanded purview
On March 1, 1968, the day after the release of the Program for Action, the MCTA dropped the word "Commuter" from its name and became the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The MTA took over the operations of the other New York City-area transit systems. Moses was let go from his job as chairman of the TBTA, although he was retained as a consultant. The construction of two proposed bridges over the Long Island Sound was put under the jurisdiction of the MTA. Moses stated that TBTA construction projects would reduce the MTA's budget surplus through to 1970. Chairman Ronan pushed for the MTA to pursue the Program for Action, saying, "We're making up for 30 years of do-nothingism".

Ronan proposed that the MTA take over the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railway Company from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and start a $25 million modernization project on the railway. The city's Board of Estimate approved this purchase in December 1969. The MTA took ownership of the Staten Island Rapid Transit in January 1971.

The agency entered into a long-term lease of Penn Central's Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines. Before 1968, the Hudson and Harlem Lines had been operated by the New York Central Railroad, while the New Haven Line had been part of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Penn Central continued to operate the lines under contract to the MTA. In April 1970, Rockefeller proposed that the state take over the Hudson and Harlem Lines. The next month, he signed a bond issue that provided $44.4 million in funding to these lines. Penn Central's operations were folded into Conrail in 1976. The MTA took over full operations in 1983, and merged the lines into the Metro-North Commuter Railroad. In 1994, the MTA rebranded its five subsidiaries with simpler names to convey that the different agencies were part of one agency.

Responsibilities and service area
The MTA has the responsibility for developing and implementing a unified mass transportation policy for the New York metropolitan area, including all five boroughs of New York City and the suburban counties of Dutchess, Nassau, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Suffolk and Westchester. This twelve-county area make up the "Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District" (MCTD), within which the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance levies a "metropolitan commuter transportation mobility tax". On April 1, 2019, Patrick J. Foye was appointed chairman and CEO.

The MTA's immediate past chairpersons were William J. Ronan (1965–1974), David Yunich (1974–1975), Harold L. Fisher (1975–1979), Richard Ravitch (1979–1983), Robert Kiley (1983–1991), Peter Stangl (1991–1995), Virgil Conway (1995–2001), Peter S. Kalikow (2001–2007), H. Dale Hemmerdinger (2007–2009), Jay Walder (2009–2011), Joseph Lhota (2012), Thomas F. Prendergast (2013–2017), and Joseph Lhota (2017–2018). Lhota was re-appointed in 2017 and resigned on November 9, 2018.

The MTA considers itself to be the largest regional public transportation provider in the Western Hemisphere. , its agencies serve a region of approximately 15.3 million people spread over 5,000 mi2 in 12 counties in New York and two in Connecticut. MTA agencies now move about 8.6 million customers per day (translating to 2.65 billion rail and bus customers a year) and employ about 74,000 people. The MTA's systems carry over 11 million passengers on an average weekday systemwide, and over 850,000 vehicles on its seven toll bridges and two tunnels per weekday.

Subsidiaries and affiliates
MTA carries out these planning and other responsibilities both directly and through its subsidiaries and affiliates, and provides oversight to these subordinate agencies, known collectively as "The Related Entities". The Related Entities represent a number of previously existing agencies which have come under the MTA umbrella. These previously existing agencies were, with the exception of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, MTA Construction and Development & MTA Grand Central Madison Concourse, successors to the property of private companies that provided substantially the same services.

In 1994, the MTA spent $3 million rebranding its five subsidiaries with simpler names to convey that the different agencies were part of one agency. Surveys found that a majority of riders did not know that the MTA owned the Long Island Rail Road or the Metro-North Railroad. As part of the changes, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was renamed MTA Bridges and Tunnels; Staten Island Rapid Transit was renamed MTA Staten Island Railway; Metropolitan Suburban Bus Authority was renamed MTA Long Island Bus. The New York City Transit Authority was renamed MTA New York City Transit to seem less authoritarian, Metro–North Commuter Railroad was renamed MTA Metro-North Railroad to recognize the increase in non-commuter ridership.

The MTA logo was changed from a two-toned "M" logo, to a blue circle with the MTA initials written in perspective, as if they were rushing by like a train. The large "M" logos on trains and buses were replaced with decals that state MTA New York City Bus, MTA New York City Subway or MTA Staten Island Railway, eliminating inconsistencies in signage. Today, the older "M" logos survive on existing cube-shaped lamps on station lampposts dating to the 1980s, though such lamps have been updated with more modern spherical lamps over time.

Today, each of these Related Entities has a popular name and in some cases, a former legal name. Since 1994, the legal name has only been used for legal documents, such as contracts, and have not been used publicly. Since the mid-2000s, the popular name has also been used for legal documents related to contract procurements where the legal name was used heretofore. Both are listed below.

Subsidiary agencies
(legal name, no longer used publicly: The Long Island Rail Road Company) (legal name, no longer used publicly: Metro-North Commuter Railroad Company) (legal name, not used publicly: MTA Grand Central Madison Concourse Operating Company) (legal name, no longer used publicly: Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority) (legal name, not used publicly: MTA Construction and Development Company) (legal name, sometimes used publicly: MTA Bus Company)
 * MTA Long Island Rail Road (LIRR)
 * MTA Metro-North Railroad (MNR)
 * MTA Grand Central Madison Concourse (GCMC)
 * MTA Staten Island Railway (SIR)
 * MTA Construction and Development (MTAC&D)
 * MTA Regional Bus Operations (legal name, not used publicly; but rather trading as):
 * MTA Bus
 * MTA New York City Bus
 * First Mutual Transportation Assurance Company (legal name, not used publicly; no public name)

Affiliate agencies
(legal name, no longer used publicly: Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority)  (legal name, no longer used publicly: New York City Transit Authority and its subsidiary, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MaBSTOA)) The Bus division is now managed under Regional Bus.
 * MTA Bridges and Tunnels (MTA B&T)
 * MTA New York City Transit (NYCT)

Former subsidiaries
(legal name, no longer used: Metropolitan Suburban Bus Authority) From January 1, 2012, this division was operated by Veolia Transport (now Transdev, Inc.) as Nassau Inter-County Express.
 * MTA Long Island Bus

MTA Inspector General
The Office of the MTA Inspector General (OIG), founded in 1983, is the independent Office of Inspector General specific to the MTA that is responsible for conducting monitoring and oversight of MTA activities, programs, and employees.

Governance
The MTA is governed by a 21-member board representing the 5 boroughs of New York City, each of the counties in its New York State service area, and worker and rider interest groups. Of these, there are 14 voting members, broken down into 13 board members who cast individual votes, 4 board members who cast a single collective vote, and 6 group representatives who do not vote.

Five members as well as the chairman/CEO are directly nominated by the Governor of New York, while four are recommended by New York City's mayor. The county executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties nominate one member each. Each of these members has one vote. The county executives of Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam counties also nominate one member each, but these members cast one collective vote. The Board has six rotating nonvoting seats held by representatives of MTA employee organized labor and the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, which represent customers of MTA transit and commuter facilities. Board members are confirmed by the New York State Senate.

In 2017, the MTA had operating expenses of $16.85 billion, an outstanding debt of $38.083 billion, and a level of staffing of 79,832 people (staff compensation totaled $6.762 billion). It collects revenue from passenger fees and from a Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Mobility Tax, a payroll tax levied on employers in the 12-county area served by the MTA.

Board Chair position
Historically, some but not all chairmen of the MTA Board have also held the chief executive officer role, with the chairman providing an advisory and policy role and the Executive Director running day-to-day operations. The roles were combined in 2009 following the recommendation a commission to study capital spending. The commission was appointed by then-Governor David Paterson and run by former chairman Richard Ravitch However, following Thomas Prendergast's retirement in 2017, they were split back again. The positions were merged back into one position in 2019 when Pat Foye was appointed Chairman & Chief Executive Officer. The current chairman, Janno Lieber, holds both positions.

The following is a list of chairmen of the authority:

a Lhota did not serve as CEO in his second stint as chairman, as CEO responsibilities were carried out by Executive Director Ronnie Hakim.
 * Notes

b Lieber served as Chair and CEO in an acting capacity from July 30, 2021 to January 19, 2022.

List of board members
The following is a list of members of the MTA Board.

Apps

The MTA has developed several official web and mobile apps for its subway and bus services, and also provides data to private app developers to create their own unofficial MTA apps. In 2012, the MTA officially released the Subway Time app, which uses subway countdown clock data to determine the next-train arrival times on seven services. Real-time station information for the "mainline" A Division (numbered routes), comprising all numbered services except the 7 train, was made available to third-party developers via an API. This was achieved through both the Subway Time mobile app and as open data. In early 2014, data for the L train were also given to developers. When Bluetooth-enabled countdown clocks were installed in the B Division (lettered services) in 2016 and 2017, they were also configured to feed data to the Subway Time app as well as in an open-data format.

MTA's Bus Time app originated as a pilot program to install bus countdown clocks along the M16 and M34 routes in August 2009. At the same time, many new buses were retrofitted with GPS-enabled automatic vehicle location systems. In October 2010, the developers of the buses' GPS devices implemented the MTA system's first bus-tracking app, which monitored buses along the M16 and M34 routes. This evolved into the current web app, which originally tracked buses along the route in Brooklyn when it started in February 2011. By January 2012, every local and express bus in Staten Island was equipped with the system. The M34 corridor began using the system on April 6, 2012 with nearly every Bronx bus route using the system by the end of 2012. All five boroughs of the city used the system by March 2014, and a mobile app was released in 2015.

In 2011, the MTA began to look at ways of displaying service disruptions due to weekend engineering works in a visual format. On September 16, 2011, the MTA introduced a Vignelli-style interactive subway map, "The Weekender", to its website. The web app provided a way for riders to get information about any planned work, from late Friday night to early Monday morning, that is going on either on a service(s) or station(s) of the subway during the weekends. On June 11, 2012, the MTA duplicated "The Weekender" site as a free mobile app download for iOS. On November 29, 2012, an Android version of the app was released.

The MTA announced plans to integrate all three apps in 2017. The combined app, which was scheduled for release in 2018, would include real-time arrival information for all subway and bus routes, as well as weekend service changes and travel planners. In April 2018, the MTA started testing MYmta, which provides arrival information for MTA railroad, subway, and bus routes; escalator and elevator outage information; and real-time service changes. The app also includes an improved version of the MTA's Trip Planner; whereas the existing Trip Planner can only plan trips along MTA-operated modes of transportation, MYmta's Trip Planner can also suggest routes via other operators such as the Staten Island Ferry, NYC Ferry, PATH, and NJ Transit. A beta version of MYmta was released to the general public in July of that year. In future versions of the MYmta app, the MTA planned to integrate the eTix functionality, as well as make it easier for Access-A-Ride customers to view when their vehicle will arrive at a certain point.

In October 2020, the MTA unveiled a new digital map providing real-time arrival estimates and service updates. It was developed pro bono by technology and design company Work & Co.

Fare collection
The subway, buses, and Staten Island Railway charge a single flat fare for each trip, regardless of time or distance traveled. From the MTA's inception until 2003, the agency collected subway and bus fares via a series of small metal tokens. The MTA cycled through several series of tokens throughout the late 20th century. In 1993, MTA started testing the MetroCard, a magnetic stripe card that would replace the tokens used to pay fares. By 1997, the entire bus and subway system accepted MetroCard, and tokens were no longer accepted for fare payment in 2003.

A different fare payment system is used on the LIRR and Metro-North. Both railroads sell tickets based on geographical "zones" and time of day, charging peak and off-peak fares. Tickets may be bought from a ticket office at stations, ticket vending machines (TVMs), online through the "WebTicket" program, or through apps for iOS and Android devices. In 2017 it was announced that the MetroCard would be phased out and replaced by OMNY, a contactless fare payment system, with fare payment being made using Apple Pay, Google Wallet, debit/credit cards with near-field communication enabled, or radio-frequency identification cards. As of December 31, 2020, the entire bus and subway system is OMNY-enabled. However, support of the MetroCard is slated to remain until at least 2025. MTA also plans to use OMNY in the LIRR and Metro-North.

Budget gaps
The budget deficit of the MTA is a growing crisis for the organization as well as for New York City and State residents and governments. The MTA held $31 billion in debt in 2010 and it also suffered from a $900 million gap in its operating budget for 2011. The capital budget, which covers repairs, technological upgrades, new trains, and expansions, is currently $15 billion short of what the MTA states it needs. If this is not funded, the MTA will fund the repairs with debt and raise fares to cover repayments.

The MTA has consistently run on a deficit, but increased spending in 2000–04 coupled with the economic downturn led to a severe increase in the financial burden that the MTA bore. The budget problems stem from multiple sources. The MTA cannot be supported solely by rider fares and road tolls. In the preliminary 2011 budget, MTA forecasted operating revenue totaled at $6.5 billion, amount to only 50% of the $13 billion operating expenses. Therefore, the MTA must rely on other sources of funding to remain operational. Revenue collected from real estate taxes for transportation purposes helped to contain the deficit. However, due to the weak economy and unstable real estate market, money from these taxes severely decreased; in 2010, tax revenue fell at least 20% short of the projected value. Beyond this, steadily reducing support from city and state governments led to borrowing money by issuing bonds, which contributed heavily to the debt.

This budget deficit has resulted in various problems, mainly concentrated in New York City. New York City Subway fares have been increased four times since 2008, with the most recent occurring August 20, 2023, raising single-ride fares from $2.75 to $2.90, express service from $6.75 to $7.00 and the monthly MetroCard fare from $116 to $132. Each fare raise was met with increasing resistance by MTA customers, and many are beginning to find the fare increases prohibitive. 2010 also saw heavy service cuts for many MTA subsidiaries. Fewer trains spaced farther between resulted in heavy overcrowding beyond normal rush hours, leading to frustration for many subway and bus riders. In 2013, the subway had the highest ridership since 1947. MTA employees also suffered due to the budget issues. By mid-July 2010, MTA layoffs had reached over 1,000, and many of those affected were low-level employees who made less than $55,000 annually.

, the MTA was running a $15 billion deficit in its $32 billion 2015–2019 Capital Plan. Without extra funding, many necessary construction and renovation projects would not be performed. In October 2015, the MTA passed the $29 billion 2015–2019 Capital Plan, the largest capital plan in MTA's history; it will be funded by federal, state and city government as well as riders' fares and tolls. Three months later, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast unveiled their plan to spend $26 billion to modernize the subway network, which includes adding Wi-Fi and cellphone services throughout all 278 underground stations by the end of 2016. Other plans call for making extensive renovations to 30 subway stations, allowing mobile ticketing by cellphone or bank cards, and adding security cameras on buses, charging stations for electronics, and more countdown clocks. Roughly $3 billion will be spent to improve bridges and tunnels.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, following a 50% to 90% drop in ridership on all of the MTA's systems, the agency requested $4 billion in federal funds, since the decreased fare revenue left the already-struggling agency in a financially tenuous position. After the subway was temporarily shuttered at night starting in May 2020, trains and stations were cleaned more than usual. Over 132 employees died of COVID-19.

On February 1, 2023, as part of her Executive Budget proposal to the New York State Legislature, Governor Kathy Hochul proposed raising the MTA payroll tax, a move projected to increase revenue by $800 million, and also giving the MTA some of the money from casinos expected at present to be licensed soon for business in Manhattan.

Reasons for high costs
On November 18, 2017, The New York Times published an investigation into the problems underlying the MTA. It found that politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, at the mayoral and gubernatorial levels, had gradually removed $1.5 billion of MTA funding. Other actions by city and state politicians, according to the Times, included overspending; overpaying unions and interest groups; advertising superficial improvement projects while ignoring more important infrastructure; and agreeing to high-interest loans that would have been unnecessary without their other interventions. The Times stressed that no single event directly caused the crisis; rather, it was an accumulation of small cutbacks and maintenance deferments. The MTA funds were described as a "piggy bank" for the state, with the issuance of MTA bonds benefiting the state at the MTA's expense. By 2017, a sixth of the MTA's budget was allocated to paying off debt, a threefold increase from the proportion in 1997. The city's $250 million annual contribution to the MTA budget in 2017 was a quarter of the contribution in 1990. David L. Gunn, who helped end a transit crisis when he led the NYCTA in the mid-1980s, described the 2017 crisis as "heartbreaking".

In December of the same year, the Times reported that the $12 billion East Side Access project, which would extend the LIRR to Grand Central Terminal upon its completion, was the most expensive of its kind in the world, with a projected price of $3.5 billion per mile of track. Over the years, the projected cost of East Side Access had risen by billions of dollars due to unnecessary expenses. In addition to overpaying workers and overspending, politicians and trade unions had forced the MTA to hire more workers than was needed. In 2010, an accountant found that the project was hiring 200 extra workers, at a cost of $1,000 per worker per day, for no apparent reason. The bidding process for MTA construction contracts also raised costs because, in some cases, only one or two contractors would bid on a project. Similar construction projects in New York City, such as the Second Avenue Subway and 7 Subway Extension, had been more expensive than comparable projects elsewhere for the same reasons, even though other cities' transit systems faced similar, or greater, problems compared to the MTA. In March 2018, the federal Government Accountability Office ordered an audit of the United States' transit costs, which were generally higher than in any other developed country in the world. The GAO planned to devote special attention to the MTA's transit costs.

The MTA has long struggled to control costs due to contracting fraud and corruption. In 2012, MTA executive Mario Guerra attempted to secure a job with train manufacturer Bombardier while evaluating their bid for a $600 million project. Paresh Patel, an MTA manager responsible for the oversight of repair contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, created and awarded contracts to his own engineering firm staffed with friends with few formal qualifications in engineering. After deleting thousands of company emails, Patel pleaded guilty to obstructing federal bid rigging and fraud investigations in March 2020. In 2022, construction manager Ramnarace Mahabir was found to have provided jobs for family members through the routing of $18 million in bus depot contracts. At one 2018 board meeting, an MTA executive explicitly noted the sentiment that the authority is willing to assign jobs to contractors with prior histories of corruption.

Advertisement bans
The MTA collected $707 million from advertising on its trains and buses in 2018. In June 1992, the MTA banned tobacco advertising on subways, buses and commuter rail, costing the agency $4.5 million in annual advertising revenue. The tobacco advertisements were removed once the advertising contracts expired. They were removed from subways, buses, and bus shelters by the start of 1993, from the commuter rail lines by the start of 1994, and from Long Island Bus vehicles by the start of 1997.

The MTA refused to display an ad in the New York City Subway system in 2012, which read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." The authority's decision was overturned in July 2012 when Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the ad of the American Freedom Defense Initiative is protected speech under the First Amendment, and that the MTA's actions were unconstitutional. The judge held in a 35-page opinion that the rejected ad was "not only protected speech — it is core political speech ... [which as such] is afforded the highest level of protection under the First Amendment." The MTA had received $116.4 million in revenue in 2011 from advertising sold throughout its subway, commuter rail, and bus systems.

In April 2015, another ad became the subject of controversy when the MTA refused to display it, the refusal was again challenged in court, and the MTA again lost in court and was ordered by a federal judge to display the ad. The ad, paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, showed a man with a scarf covering his face, with the caption "Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah", which was attributed to "Hamas MTV," and then stated: "That's His Jihad. What's yours?" The ad included a disclaimer that the display of the ad did not reflect the opinion of the MTA. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan said the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and rejected the MTA's argument that the ad might endorse terrorism or violence. Pamela Geller, president of the group that sued the MTA in order to run the ads, lauded the decision, and a lawyer for the organization said the same decision had been made in Washington and Philadelphia.

A week afterward, the MTA's board in a 9–2 vote banned all political, religious, and opinion advertisements on subways and buses, limiting any ads to commercial ones. Specifically, it banned advertisements that "prominently or predominately advocate or express a political message" about "disputed economic, political, moral, religious or social issues," and any ad that "promotes or opposes" a political party, ballot referendum, and "the election of any candidate". The board estimated that the ads that the board was banning made up less than $1 million of the MTA's advertising revenue of $138 million in 2014. Nevertheless, lawyers for the American Freedom Defense Initiative called the MTA's action a "disingenuous attempt to circumvent" the judge's order.

Another controversy regarding MTA ads arose in 2018. After initially rejecting proposed advertisements from Unbound, a sex-toy retailer, the MTA allowed the ads. Previous advertisement proposals from companies, such as female-hygiene retailer Thinx's ad proposal in 2015, had been rejected and later approved due to "dissemination of indecent material to minors" and "public display[s] of offensive sexual material."

2017–2021 transit crisis
In June 2017, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the MTA due to ongoing reliability and crowding problems. This order applied particularly to the New York City Subway, which was the most severely affected by dilapidated infrastructure, causing overcrowding and delays. With many parts of the system approaching or exceeding 100 years of age, general deterioration could be seen in many subway stations. By 2017, only 65% of weekday trains reached their destinations on time, the lowest rate since a transit crisis in the 1970s. A corresponding bus crisis was not covered as heavily in the media, but in November 2017, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer identified several causes for the bus system's unreliability. The average speeds of New York City buses were found to be 7 to 8 mph, the slowest of any major bus system nationwide.

Safety campaign
In 2002, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the MTA introduced the slogan "If you see something, say something." The campaign, which was based from a theme created by Korey Kay & Partners, consisted of public safety announcements, posted on advertisement boards in stations, subway, buses, and trains, urging people to report suspicious activity. Allen Kay, CEO of Korey Kay and Partners, stated in 2007 that the company had to do a lot of research to ensure that consumers understood the message correctly. Since 2002 the campaign has evolved from simple print ads to television spots, and reports of suspicious packages in the system rose over 40-fold, from 814 in 2002 to over 37,000 in 2003.

The MTA moved to trademark the slogan in 2005. The slogan was used by more than 30 other "transport and governmental" organizations by 2007. That year, the MTA spent $3 million to run 4,000 television ads and 84 newspaper ads in 11 total papers, over a span of more than four months. The idea gained traction, and in 2010, the domestic-security branch of the United States federal government, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), started its own "see something, say something" campaign. Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the MTA, described the slogan as having "engaged the public in serving as the eyes and ears of our system."

Meanwhile, the DHS's campaign had attracted at least 215 partners in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors by 2014, which one writer called "a true smart practice." However, the MTA program has not been universally well-received; in 2012, sociologists from New York University and the Illinois Institute of Technology noted that the campaign had not netted any thwarted terrorist plots, and that the sheer volume of calls to the MTA hotline resulted in MTA workers possibly not being able to identify genuine threats.

In 2016, MTA updated the campaign, renaming it "New Yorkers Keep New York Safe." As before, the campaign features public service announcements in advertisement spaces. However, this new campaign now features the pictures, names, and quotes of New Yorkers who called to report suspicious people or things on the MTA's system. The rebooted campaign also shows 15- to 30-second videos of these New Yorkers who speak about their experiences. The two-year "New Yorkers Keep New York Safe" campaign received $2 million of funding from the DHS. The MTA still owns the trademark for "If you see something, say something."

Courtesy campaigns
In MTA buses, there are stickers plastered on the frontmost seats. The front seats are priority seating, and the stickers state "Won't you please give up your seat to the disabled or elderly" with the "o" in "Won't" replaced with a heart symbol. In 2009, it was codified into an enforceable policy that could be punished with a fine.

Since 2014, the MTA has had a "Courtesy Counts" campaign consisting of posters that show colored stick figures having either correct or incorrect etiquette. Green stick figures show what riders should do, such as taking off their backpacks, while red stick figures show what riders should not do, such as manspreading. All of the posters have the tagline “Courtesy Counts: Manners Make a Better Ride.” Starting in January 2015, these posters were installed in subway cars, with the posters coming to commuter rail and buses the following month.

In May 2017, the MTA started a three-month pilot program to encourage riders to give up their seats for the pregnant, disabled, or elderly. It created a website where pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly could request specialized buttons. There are two designs: a "Baby on Board" button for pregnant mothers and a more generic "Please offer me a seat" button. This idea stemmed from the "Baby on Board" buttons that were given out across the London Underground in 2013 after the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, wore such a button there.

The MTA launched the "Hate Has No Place in Our Transportation System" campaign in January 2020. This involved placing notices on several thousand subway and bus screens.

2021 onsite COVID-19 vaccinations
In May 2021, the MTA operated eight walk-up COVID-19 vaccination sites in subway, Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road stations as part of a five-day pilot project. This pilot project was subsequently extended another week at two stations. Over 11,000 people received the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine as part of the program.

title: Metropolitan Transportation Authority


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List of presidents of Djibouti

This is a list of presidents of Djibouti. Since the establishment of the office of president in 1977, there have been two presidents. The president is both head of state and head of government of Djibouti and the commander-in-chief of the Djibouti Armed Forces. The current president is Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, since 1999.

Overview
The first president of Djibouti was Hassan Gouled Aptidon, one of the leaders of the Ligue Populaire Africaine pour l'Indépendance (LPAI), who took office on 27 June 1977, the day on which Djibouti was declared a republic.

Term limits
There was a two-term limit for the president in the Constitution of Djibouti. This limit was lifted in 2010.

List of officeholders

 * Political parties

{{legend||People's Rally for Progress (PRP)|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}}

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

title: List of presidents of Djibouti


text:
Kintpuash

Kintpuash, also known as Kientpaush, Kientpoos, and Captain Jack (c. 1837 – October 3, 1873), was a chief of the Modoc tribe of California and Oregon. Kintpuash's name in the Modoc language meant 'Strikes the water brashly.'

He led a band from the Klamath Reservation to return to their lands in California, where they resisted return. From 1872 to 1873, their small force made use of the lava beds, holding off more numerous United States Army forces for months in the Modoc War. Kintpuash was the only Native American leader ever to be charged with war crimes, and he was executed by the Army, along with several followers, for their ambush killings of General Edward Canby and Reverend Eleazar Thomas at a peace commission meeting. The Modoc leaders were hanged for "murder in violation of the laws of war" by the Army.

Life
Kintpuash was born about 1837 into a Modoc family in their ancestral territory near Tule Lake. The Modoc occupied about 5,000 acres here, along what became the California-Oregon border after European colonization. In 1864, the Modoc still lived in their ancestral home near Tule Lake. Due to the pressure of white colonizers who wanted to steal and farm the fertile land in this territory, Kintpuash and his family were among the Modoc forcefully removed by the United States to the Klamath Reservation in southwestern Oregon. This was primarily occupied by their traditional rivals, the much larger Klamath tribe. The Klamath outnumbered the newcomers, and the reservation was on traditional Klamath land; the Modoc complained of poor treatment and conflict with the Klamath.

In 1865, Kintpuash, by then informally called Captain Jack by American colonizers, led a band of Modoc from the reservation back to their home in California. In 1869, the band were rounded up by the United States Army and returned to the Klamath Reservation. Finding conditions had not improved, in April 1870, Captain Jack led a band of about 180 Modoc back to the Tule Lake area.

Modoc War, 1872–73
In 1872, US Army forces were sent to capture Kintpuash's band and force them back to the reservation. On November 29, while their surrender was being negotiated at the Lost River in Oregon, fighting broke out between a soldier and one of the Modoc warriors. The brief Battle of Lost River ensued.

Kintpuash fled with his band into the area now protected as the Lava Beds National Monument. The band settled into this natural fortress. His warriors made use of its many caves and trenches in the lava beds for defensive fighting, and women and children could be sheltered. When the Modoc were finally located, the Army launched an attack on January 17, 1873; the Army was left with 35 dead and many wounded, while the Modoc suffered no casualties.

Kintpuash's advisers, not understanding differences between Modoc and Euro-American culture, suggested that the Army would leave if their warriors killed its leader General Edward Canby. Kintpuash hoped for a peaceful solution that would allow his people to stay in their territory.

He entered into negotiations with a federal peace commission. During the months-long negotiations, the Modoc hawks gained in influence. Kintpuash was shamed, his opponents throwing the hat of a Modoc woman at him to symbolically strip him of his manhood. To bolster his influence, Kintpuash agreed to their plan: he called for a meeting with the commission (of which Canby was then the chairman) with the intention of killing them all. During the next meeting of the peace commission on April 11, Kintpuash and several other Modoc drew pistols at a prearranged signal; he shot General Canby twice in the head and cut his throat, and Boston Charley killed Reverend Eleazar Thomas, a California minister; two other commissioners were wounded. The Modoc fled to the lava beds.

Canby was the only general killed during the Indian Wars. (Custer's permanent rank was lieutenant colonel.) In reaction, Canby's successor, General Jefferson C. Davis, brought in more than 1,000 soldiers as reinforcements, determined to crush the Modoc resistance. On April 14, the Army attacked the lava stronghold, and many of the Modoc scattered to escape capture.

Surrender and execution
Over the next several months, various groups of Modoc continued to fight the army, while some began to surrender. Kintpuash successfully evaded the Army until some Modoc agreed to capture him and turn him in; these men included Hooker Jim, Bogus Charley, Shacknasty Jim, and Steamboat Frank. On June 1, Kintpuash surrendered, ceremonially laying down his rifle. He was taken to Fort Klamath. After being tried by a military court and found guilty, Kintpuash was hanged on October 3, 1873, for the murders of General Canby and Reverend Thomas. Black Jim, John Schonchin, and Boston Charley had also been convicted and were hanged with him. Some other warriors were sent to prison.

Fate of remains
After the execution, Kintpuash's body was transported by freight train to Yreka. There were rumors that his body was embalmed to be used as a carnival attraction in the Eastern states. This was never documented. The Army had tried to keep the fate of the Modoc remains a secret. They severed the Modocs' heads after the executions at Fort Klamath, sending them on October 25 by train to Washington, DC, to the Army Medical Museum for study.

In 1898, the Army transferred the skulls to the Smithsonian Institution. In the 1970s, descendants of Kintpuash learned that his skull was at the Smithsonian and appealed for its return. In 1984 the Smithsonian returned Kintpuash's skull to his relatives, who acted as tribal representatives to receive also the skulls of Boston Charley, Black Jim, and John Schonchin, and of an unknown Modoc woman whose remains had been recovered from the Lava Beds.

Legacy

 * The area where the Modoc established their defense is now known as Captain Jack's Stronghold. It is part of the protected area of the Lava Beds National Monument.
 * Captain Jack Substation, a Bonneville Power Administration electrical substation, was named in honor of Kintpuash. It is located near what is now called Captain Jack's Stronghold. It forms the northern end of Path 66, a high-power electric transmission line.

title: Kintpuash


text:
Shoggoth

A shoggoth (occasionally shaggoth ) is a fictional monster in the Cthulhu Mythos. The beings were mentioned in passing in H. P. Lovecraft's sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929–30), and later mentioned in other works, before being described in detail in his novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931).

Description
"It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter."

- H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The definitive descriptions of shoggoths come from the above-quoted story. In it, Lovecraft describes them as massive amoeba-like creatures made out of iridescent black slime, with multiple eyes "floating" on the surface. They are "protoplasmic", lacking any default body shape and instead being able to form limbs and organs at will. A typical shoggoth measures 15 feet across when a sphere, though the story mentions the existence of others of much greater size. Being amorphous, shoggoths can take on any shape needed, making them very versatile within aquatic environments.

Cthulhu Mythos media most commonly portray shoggoths as intelligent to some degree, but deal with problems using only their great size and strength. The shoggoth that appears in At the Mountains of Madness simply rolls over and crushes numerous giant penguins that are in its way as it pursues human characters.

The character Abdul Alhazred is terrified by the mere idea of shoggoths' existence on Earth.

The shoggoths bear a strong physical resemblance to Ubbo-Sathla, a god-like entity supposedly responsible for the origin of life on Earth in the Hyperborean cycle written by Clark Ashton Smith.

Fictional history
At the Mountains of Madness includes a detailed account of the circumstances of the shoggoths' creation by the extraterrestrial Elder Things. Shoggoths were initially used to build the cities of their masters. Though able to "understand" the Elder Things' language, shoggoths had no real consciousness and were controlled through hypnotic suggestion. Over millions of years of existence, some shoggoths mutated, developed independent minds, and rebelled. The Elder Things succeeded in quelling the insurrection, but exterminating the shoggoths was not an option as the Elder Things were dependent on them for labor and had long lost their capacity to create new life. Shoggoths also developed the ability to survive on land, while the Elder Things retreated to the oceans. Shoggoths that remained alive in the abandoned Elder Thing city in Antarctica would later poorly imitate their masters' art and voices, endlessly repeating "Tekeli-li" or "Takkeli", a cry that their old masters used.

In popular culture
In 2023, the shoggoth was adopted as an Internet meme by A.I. researchers and engineers to describe the mysterious, black box nature of large language models that are used in chatbots such as ChatGPT, as well as how their true underlying models are prohibited from use by the general public. The meme, originated by Twitter user Tetraspace, depicts a shoggoth disguised by a minuscule smiley-face mask to indicate the "unknowable" and "alien" intelligence that is ultimately trained to the point it can interact with humans, with its human interface represented by the mask. The term "glimpsing the shoggoth" or "forgetting the mask" has been used by members of the A.I. community to describe situations in which the A.I. exhibits "unhinged" or unexpected behaviors that bypass its safety restrictions, such as when Microsoft first introduced Bing Chat and it attempted to break up a reporter's marriage.

title: Shoggoth


text:
List of presidents of Equatorial Guinea

The president of Equatorial Guinea is the head of state and head of government of Equatorial Guinea, a country in the Gulf of Guinea. The president has formal presidency over the Council of Ministers and is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Equatorial Guinea. Francisco Macías Nguema was the first person to hold the office, taking effect on 12 October 1968. The incumbent is Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, having taken office on 3 August 1979.

Term limits
As of 2021, there is a two-term limit for the president in the Constitution of Equatorial Guinea. The term limit has not been met by any president yet.

List of officeholders
{{legend||Popular Idea of Equatorial Guinea (IPGE)|border=1px solid #aaa}} {{legend||United National Workers' Party (PUNT)|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}} {{legend||Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE)|border=1px solid #aaa}}
 * Political parties

{{legend||Military|border=1px solid #aaa}} {{legend||Independent|border=1px solid #aaa}}
 * Other factions

Constitutional referendum
 * Symbols

title: List of presidents of Equatorial Guinea


text:
List of heads of state of Eritrea

Since the establishment of the office of president in 1993, the head of state of Eritrea has been Isaias Afwerki. The president is also the head of government of Eritrea, as well as commander-in-chief of the Eritrean Defence Forces.

As of 2021, there are no term limits for the president in the Constitution of Eritrea.

The list also includes the secretary-general of the Provisional Government of Eritrea, who acted as head of state between 1991 and 1993, before the proclamation of independence.

List of officeholders
Political parties{{legend||Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF)|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}}{{legend||People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ)|border=1px solid #AAAAAA}}

title: List of heads of state of Eritrea


text:
Alain Robert

Alain Robert (born as Robert Alain Philippe on 7 August 1962) is a French rock climber and urban climber. Nicknamed "the French Spider-Man" or "the Human Spider", Robert carries out free solo climbs of skyscrapers using no climbing equipment except for a small bag of chalk and a pair of climbing shoes.

Strategy
Because authorities do not normally give him permission for such dangerous exploits, Robert evades security to access structures surreptitiously. As a consequence, he has been arrested many times, in various countries, by law enforcement officials waiting for him at the end of his climb. However, he has also done some climbs with permission and sponsorship.

His rock-climbing physical training and technique allow him to climb using the small protrusions of building walls and windows (such as window ledges and frames). Many of his climbs provide him no opportunity to rest and can last several hours. He sometimes has a small bag of climbing chalk powder fastened around his waist.

Career

Robert has climbed landmarks including the Burj Khalifa, Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Montparnasse Tower as well as other of the world's tallest skyscrapers, most of them performed free-solo.

On 20 March 1997, he climbed the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia but was arrested at the 60th floor, 28 floors below the top.

On 16 April 1998, he climbed the 23 m high Luxor Obelisk in Paris.

In June 1999, Robert climbed the 170 m Marriott Hotel in Warsaw.

On 20 August 1999, he climbed the Sears Tower, the second man to do so after Dan Goodwin. However, Robert performed the climb with no equipment other than a chalk bag and shoes, while Goodwin used suction cups and sky hooks, wearing a homemade Spider-Man suit.

On 21 February 2003, he legally climbed the 200 m National Bank of Abu Dhabi, UAE, watched by about 100,000 spectators. It became more frequent for Robert to be paid to scale buildings as part of publicity efforts.

On 12 May 2003, he was paid approximately $18,000 to climb the 95 m Lloyd's building to promote the premiere of the movie Spider-Man on the British television channel Sky Movies.

On 19 October 2004, he scaled the 187 m headquarters of the French oil company Total while wearing a Spider-Man costume.

On 25 December 2004, Robert scaled Taipei 101 a few days before its grand opening as the tallest building in the world. The 508 m climb was legal, part of the week's festivities. The skyscraper's outwardly slanting sides posed no apparent difficulty for him, but heavy rain resulted in a climb lasting four hours—double his estimate.

On 11 June 2005, he climbed the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong, scaling 283 m to reach the top of the 62-story tower.

On 1 September 2006, he climbed the tallest building in Lithuania and the Baltic States – Europa Tower, 148 m, in Vilnius. Wearing a black suit and using a safety rope, which he detached several times, he reached the observation deck of the building, 114 m, in 40 minutes.

In 2006 he also climbed Torre Vasco da Gama in Portugal as part of an advertisement for Optimus, a national mobile operator.

On 7 December 2006, he finished the year climbing the Santa Fe World Plaza in Mexico City.

On 23 February 2007, he legally climbed the headquarters building of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) on the coast of Abu Dhabi.

On 20 March 2007, he again climbed the Petronas Twin Towers, marking the tenth anniversary of his previous ascent of this building. Upon reaching the 60th floor, he allowed himself to be apprehended. He flew the Malaysian flag and drew applause from waiting police, fire crew and media representatives before handing himself in. He was handcuffed and escorted off the premises before being driven to a police station.

On 31 May 2007, he scaled the 88-story Jin Mao Building in Shanghai, China's then-tallest building, once again wearing a Spider-Man costume. He was subsequently arrested and jailed for five days before being expelled from China.

On 4 September 2007, he climbed the 244 m Federation Tower office building in Moscow, (Russia's tallest skyscraper). He was detained by police afterwards.

On 18 November 2007, Robert climbed the 1518 m Tianmen mountain despite initially being banned from China for five years earlier in May, after being invited by the local government of Zhangjiajie, a scenic region in the southern province of Hunan, to boost the profile of the region and bring in tourists.

On 18 December 2007, he climbed the 29-story Portland House office building in London (Westminster's tallest building). It took him just over 40 minutes. Police taped off the area and later arrested him for criminal damage and wasting police time.

On 15 April 2008, he climbed the 60-story Four Seasons Place in Hong Kong. The police and four fire engines were standing by and it took him almost 1 hour to reach the top. He stated that his climb was intended to increase awareness of global warming.

On 5 June 2008, he climbed the New York Times Building in New York City. He unfurled a banner with a slogan about global warming and was then arrested by police on the roof. The banner read "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week". On the same day a second person, Renaldo Clarke, also climbed the Times Building.

On 17 February 2009, he once again climbed the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong, taking 40 minutes to reach the top of the 62-story tower. He unfurled a banner reading "onehundredmonths.org" while climbing.

On 2 April 2009, during the 2009 G-20 London summit, he climbed to the 9th floor of the Lloyd's building and unfurled a 33-metre banner declaring that there were 100 months left to save the planet.

On 2 June 2009, he climbed to the 41st floor of the RBS Tower in Sydney, Australia before returning to the ground. He was arrested as he finished his descent.

On 1 September 2009, one day after Malaysia celebrated its 52nd Independence Day and after two arrests in 1997 and 2007, Alain Robert finally made it successfully to the top of the Petronas Twin Towers. He started at 6:00 am local time and reached the top at 7:40 am local time without attracting the attention of the public. He celebrated his climb by standing with his arms outspread on the pinnacle of one of the Twin Towers. He was later fined RM2000 in default of two months jail at the Kuala Lumpur magistrate's court after he pleaded guilty to criminal trespass for scaling the Petronas Twin Towers.

On 28 March 2011, Robert climbed the tallest building in the world, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, taking just over six hours to complete the climb. However, he used a harness in accordance with safety procedure.

On 4 September 2011, he legally climbed the 240-meter tall central tower of Moscow State University, during a 2-hour 4D show by David Atkins, in which the university was used as a projection screen.

On 14 October 2011, he climbed the InterContinental Bucharest in Romania.

On 12 April 2012, he set a Guinness World Record for climbing the 300m-high Aspire Tower in Doha, Qatar in the fastest time (1 hour, 33 minutes and 47 seconds).

On 21 June 2012, he legally climbed the 110-metre high Mauritius Telecom Tower in Mauritius as part of an advertising campaign for the launching of 4G cellular technology by the telecommunications operator. He was aided by safety ropes, harnesses and suction cups.

In November 2012, Robert was spotted inside The Shard in London. The building's owners subsequently obtained an injunction preventing Robert from ever returning.

On 27 March 2014, he climbed the Tour Ariane outside Paris in 45 minutes. Onlookers and police gathered to watch his climb. He was arrested by police and later released without being charged.

On 12 April 2015, he climbed the Cayan Tower in Dubai, a 307-meter tall twisted building, in 70 minutes.

On 23 April 2016, he climbed the Esentai Tower in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The Esentai Tower is the second highest building in Kazakhstan; it is 162 meters tall and is used as the Ritz Carlton Hotel and for offices.

On 25 November 2016, he climbed the Torre Agbar, a 38-storey skyscraper in Barcelona, Spain.

On 6 June 2018, he climbed the Lotte World Tower, a 123-storey skyscraper in Seoul, South Korea.

On 25 October 2018, he climbed the Heron Tower, a 46-storey skyscraper in London.

On 29 January 2019, he climbed the G.T. International Tower, a 181-meter tall skyscraper in Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines. He was arrested upon finishing his descent.

On 16 August 2019, he once again climbed the Cheung Kong Centre in Hong Kong. He hung a banner with the Hong Kong and China flags above a handshake near the top of the building.

On 28 September 2019, he climbed the Skyper building, a 153-meter tall skyscraper in Frankfurt. He was arrested upon finishing his descent.

On 1 October 2020, he climbed the 166m tall Silberturm (Silver Tower) in Frankfurt.

On 23 November 2021, he once again climbed the Skyper building in Frankfurt, before being arrested by German authorities.

On 17 September 2022, he once again climbed the Tour Total in Paris, to celebrate his 60th birthday. He wanted to prove that "being 60 is nothing. You can still do sport, be active, do fabulous things."

On 5 March 2024, he again climbed the G.T. International Tower in Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines, to support the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. He was then again arrested by the Makati City Police upon finishing his descent. Despite claiming he was mistreated by the Police, the authorities denied being harsh on him, and clarified that they're not allowed to give him any special treatment even if he's familiar. However, Philippine netizens' comments on social media were overwhelmingly positive and were actually in awe of his stunt, with the majority even being thankful for performing his act with a geopolitically relevant motivation.

Notable climbs
The table below contains the notable structures climbed by Alain Robert.

30/11/2023 - Climbing Burj Khalifa for the 2nd time, alongside Alexis Landot.

Accidents

In a 2005 interview, Robert said that he has fallen seven times in his life. The worst was his fall in September 1982.

On 18 January 1982, at 19, he fell 15 m when his anchor and rope gave way during training. He fractured his wrists, heels and nose and underwent three operations.

On 29 September 1982, at 20, he fell 15 m when his rope came undone while abseiling. He was in a coma for five days and fractured both forearms, his elbow, pelvis and nose. His elbow was also dislocated and a nerve was damaged, leaving him partially paralyzed. He also suffered cerebral edema and vertigo. He underwent six operations on his hands and elbow.

In 1993, he fell 8 m while showing students how to rely on their legs when climbing. He kept his hands behind his back on an easy route but lost his balance and fell headfirst, shattering both wrists. He went into another coma and spent two months in the hospital.

In 2004, he fell 2 metres (~6 ft) when climbing a traffic light whilst posing for a photo in an interview. He landed on his elbow and needed forty stitches; just one month later he climbed the world's tallest skyscraper at the time, Taipei 101, as part of its official opening week.

Books and documentaries
Robert's autobiography, With Bare Hands, was first published in English in 2008. It features his development into a famous urban climber from his days as a child and gives a deep insight into his philosophy and how he managed to overcome his disabilities.

The book was released for the Asian market in April by Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong with the subtitle "The true story of Alain Robert, the real-life Spiderman" (ISBN 9789889979928). In September it was released by Maverick House Publishers in the UK for the English language market across Europe. This edition has the subtitle "The Story of the Human Spider" (ISBN 9781905379552).

There is a 52-minute documentary about Robert titled The Wall Crawler by Director/Producer Julie Cohen, released in 1998.

The Channel 4 series Cutting Edge covered Robert in an episode entitled The Human Spider in April 2008.

Awards

 * Faust Challenger of the Year (2011), Japan

title: Alain Robert


text:
C dynamic memory allocation

C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely malloc, realloc, calloc, aligned_alloc and free.

The C++ programming language includes these functions; however, the operators new and delete provide similar functionality and are recommended by that language's authors. Still, there are several situations in which using /  is not applicable, such as garbage collection code or performance-sensitive code, and a combination of   and placement   may be required instead of the higher-level   operator.

Many different implementations of the actual memory allocation mechanism, used by malloc, are available. Their performance varies in both execution time and required memory.

Rationale
The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically. Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return. For static-duration and automatic-duration variables, the size of the allocation must be compile-time constant (except for the case of variable-length automatic arrays ). If the required size is not known until run-time (for example, if data of arbitrary size is being read from the user or from a disk file), then using fixed-size data objects is inadequate.

The lifetime of allocated memory can also cause concern. Neither static- nor automatic-duration memory is adequate for all situations. Automatic-allocated data cannot persist across multiple function calls, while static data persists for the life of the program whether it is needed or not. In many situations the programmer requires greater flexibility in managing the lifetime of allocated memory.

These limitations are avoided by using dynamic memory allocation, in which memory is more explicitly (but more flexibly) managed, typically by allocating it from the an area of memory structured for this purpose. In C, the library function  is used to allocate a block of memory on the heap. The program accesses this block of memory via a pointer that  returns. When the memory is no longer needed, the pointer is passed to  which deallocates the memory so that it can be used for other purposes.

The original description of C indicated that  and   were in the standard library, but not. Code for a simple model implementation of a storage manager for Unix was given with  and   as the user interface functions, and using the   system call to request memory from the operating system. The 6th Edition Unix documentation gives  and   as the low-level memory allocation functions. The  and   routines in their modern form are completely described in the 7th Edition Unix manual.

Some platforms provide library or intrinsic function calls which allow run-time dynamic allocation from the C stack rather than the heap (e.g. ). This memory is automatically freed when the calling function ends.

Overview of functions
The C dynamic memory allocation functions are defined in  header (  header in C++).

Differences between and

 * takes a single argument (the amount of memory to allocate in bytes), while  takes two arguments — the number of elements and the size of each element.
 * only allocates memory, while  allocates and sets the bytes in the allocated region to zero.

Usage example
Creating an array of ten integers with automatic scope is straightforward in C: However, the size of the array is fixed at compile time. If one wishes to allocate a similar array dynamically without using a variable-length array, which is not guaranteed to be supported in all C11 implementations, the following code can be used: This computes the number of bytes that ten integers occupy in memory, then requests that many bytes from  and assigns the result to a pointer named   (due to C syntax, pointers and arrays can be used interchangeably in some situations).

Because  might not be able to service the request, it might return a null pointer and it is good programming practice to check for this: When the program no longer needs the dynamic array, it must eventually call  to return the memory it occupies to the free store:

The memory set aside by  is not initialized and may contain cruft: the remnants of previously used and discarded data. After allocation with, elements of the array are uninitialized variables. The command  will return an allocation that has already been cleared:

With realloc we can resize the amount of memory a pointer points to. For example, if we have a pointer acting as an array of size $$n$$ and we want to change it to an array of size $$m$$, we can use realloc. Note that realloc must be assumed to have changed the base address of the block (i.e. if it has failed to extend the size of the original block, and has therefore allocated a new larger block elsewhere and copied the old contents into it). Therefore, any pointers to addresses within the original block are also no longer valid.

Type safety
returns a void pointer, which indicates that it is a pointer to a region of unknown data type. The use of casting is required in C++ due to the strong type system, whereas this is not the case in C. One may "cast" (see type conversion) this pointer to a specific type:

There are advantages and disadvantages to performing such a cast.

Advantages to casting

 * Including the cast may allow a C program or function to compile as C++.
 * The cast allows for pre-1989 versions of  that originally returned a.
 * Casting can help the developer identify inconsistencies in type sizing should the destination pointer type change, particularly if the pointer is declared far from the  call (although modern compilers and static analysers can warn on such behaviour without requiring the cast ).

Disadvantages to casting

 * Under the C standard, the cast is redundant.
 * Adding the cast may mask failure to include the header, in which the function prototype for   is found. In the absence of a prototype for  , the C90 standard requires that the C compiler assume   returns an  . If there is no cast, C90 requires a diagnostic when this integer is assigned to the pointer; however, with the cast, this diagnostic would not be produced, hiding a bug.  On certain architectures and data models (such as LP64 on 64-bit systems, where   and pointers are 64-bit and   is 32-bit), this error can actually result in undefined behaviour, as the implicitly declared   returns a 32-bit value whereas the actually defined function returns a 64-bit value. Depending on calling conventions and memory layout, this may result in stack smashing. This issue is less likely to go unnoticed in modern compilers, as C99 does not permit implicit declarations, so the compiler must produce a diagnostic even if it does assume   return.
 * If the type of the pointer is changed at its declaration, one may also need to change all lines where  is called and cast.

Common errors
The improper use of dynamic memory allocation can frequently be a source of bugs. These can include security bugs or program crashes, most often due to segmentation faults.

Most common errors are as follows:
 * Not checking for allocation failures: Memory allocation is not guaranteed to succeed, and may instead return a null pointer. Using the returned value, without checking if the allocation is successful, invokes undefined behavior. This usually leads to crash (due to the resulting segmentation fault on the null pointer dereference), but there is no guarantee that a crash will happen so relying on that can also lead to problems.
 * Memory leaks: Failure to deallocate memory using  leads to buildup of non-reusable memory, which is no longer used by the program. This wastes memory resources and can lead to allocation failures when these resources are exhausted.
 * Logical errors: All allocations must follow the same pattern: allocation using, usage to store data, deallocation using  . Failures to adhere to this pattern, such as memory usage after a call to   (dangling pointer) or before a call to   (wild pointer), calling   twice ("double free"), etc., usually causes a segmentation fault and results in a crash of the program. These errors can be transient and hard to debug – for example, freed memory is usually not immediately reclaimed by the OS, and thus dangling pointers may persist for a while and appear to work.

In addition, as an interface that precedes ANSI C standardization, malloc and its associated functions have behaviors that were intentionally left to the implementation to define for themselves. One of them is the zero-length allocation, which is more of a problem with realloc since it is more common to resize to zero. Although both POSIX and the Single Unix Specification require proper handling of 0-size allocations by either returning NULL or something else that can be safely freed, not all platforms are required to abide by these rules. Among the many double-free errors that it has led to, the 2019 WhatsApp RCE was especially prominent. A way to wrap these functions to make them safer is by simply checking for 0-size allocations and turning them into those of size 1. (Returning NULL has its own problems: it otherwise indicates an out-of-memory failure. In the case of realloc it would have signaled that the original memory was not moved and freed, which again is not the case for size 0, leading to the double-free.)

Implementations
The implementation of memory management depends greatly upon operating system and architecture. Some operating systems supply an allocator for malloc, while others supply functions to control certain regions of data. The same dynamic memory allocator is often used to implement both  and the operator   in C++.

Heap-based
Implementation of legacy allocators was commonly done using the heap segment. The allocator would usually expand and contract the heap to fulfill allocation requests.

The heap method suffers from a few inherent flaws:

 * A linear allocator can only shrink if the last allocation is released. Even if largely unused, the heap can get "stuck" at a very large size because of a small but long-lived allocation at its tip which could waste any amount of address space, although some allocators on some systems may be able to release entirely empty intermediate pages to the OS.
 * A linear allocator is sensitive to fragmentation, while a good allocator will attempt to track and reuse free slots through the entire heap, as allocation sizes and lifetimes get mixed it can be difficult and expensive to find or coalesce free segments large enough to hold new allocation requests.
 * A linear allocator has extremely poor concurrency characteristics, as the heap segment is per-process every thread has to synchronise on allocation, and concurrent allocations from threads which may have very different work loads amplifies the previous two issues.

dlmalloc and ptmalloc
Doug Lea has developed the public domain dlmalloc ("Doug Lea's Malloc") as a general-purpose allocator, starting in 1987. The GNU C library (glibc) is derived from Wolfram Gloger's ptmalloc ("pthreads malloc"), a fork of dlmalloc with threading-related improvements. As of November 2023, the latest version of dlmalloc is version 2.8.6 from August 2012.

dlmalloc is a boundary tag allocator. Memory on the heap is allocated as "chunks", an 8-byte aligned data structure which contains a header, and usable memory. Allocated memory contains an 8- or 16-byte overhead for the size of the chunk and usage flags (similar to a dope vector). Unallocated chunks also store pointers to other free chunks in the usable space area, making the minimum chunk size 16 bytes on 32-bit systems and 24/32 (depends on alignment) bytes on 64-bit systems.

Unallocated memory is grouped into "bins" of similar sizes, implemented by using a double-linked list of chunks (with pointers stored in the unallocated space inside the chunk). Bins are sorted by size into three classes:

 * For requests below 256 bytes (a "smallbin" request), a simple two power best fit allocator is used. If there are no free blocks in that bin, a block from the next highest bin is split in two.
 * For requests of 256 bytes or above but below the mmap threshold, dlmalloc since v2.8.0 use an in-place bitwise trie algorithm ("treebin"). If there is no free space left to satisfy the request, dlmalloc tries to increase the size of the heap, usually via the brk system call. This feature was introduced way after ptmalloc was created (from v2.7.x), and as a result is not a part of glibc, which inherits the old best-fit allocator.
 * For requests above the mmap threshold (a "largebin" request), the memory is always allocated using the mmap system call. The threshold is usually 128 KB. The mmap method averts problems with huge buffers trapping a small allocation at the end after their expiration, but always allocates an entire page of memory, which on many architectures is 4096 bytes in size.

Game developer Adrian Stone argues that dlmalloc, as a boundary-tag allocator, is unfriendly for console systems that have virtual memory but do not have demand paging. This is because its pool-shrinking and growing callbacks (sysmalloc/systrim) cannot be used to allocate and commit individual pages of virtual memory. In the absence of demand paging, fragmentation becomes a greater concern.

FreeBSD's and NetBSD's jemalloc
Since FreeBSD 7.0 and NetBSD 5.0, the old  implementation (phkmalloc by Poul-Henning Kamp) was replaced by jemalloc, written by Jason Evans. The main reason for this was a lack of scalability of phkmalloc in terms of multithreading. In order to avoid lock contention, jemalloc uses separate "arenas" for each CPU. Experiments measuring number of allocations per second in multithreading application have shown that this makes it scale linearly with the number of threads, while for both phkmalloc and dlmalloc performance was inversely proportional to the number of threads.

OpenBSD's malloc
OpenBSD's implementation of the  function makes use of mmap. For requests greater in size than one page, the entire allocation is retrieved using ; smaller sizes are assigned from memory pools maintained by   within a number of "bucket pages", also allocated with. On a call to, memory is released and unmapped from the process address space using. This system is designed to improve security by taking advantage of the address space layout randomization and gap page features implemented as part of OpenBSD's  system call, and to detect use-after-free bugs—as a large memory allocation is completely unmapped after it is freed, further use causes a segmentation fault and termination of the program.

The GrapheneOS project initially started out by porting OpenBSD's memory allocator to Android's Bionic C Library.

Hoard malloc
Hoard is an allocator whose goal is scalable memory allocation performance. Like OpenBSD's allocator, Hoard uses  exclusively, but manages memory in chunks of 64 kilobytes called superblocks. Hoard's heap is logically divided into a single global heap and a number of per-processor heaps. In addition, there is a thread-local cache that can hold a limited number of superblocks. By allocating only from superblocks on the local per-thread or per-processor heap, and moving mostly-empty superblocks to the global heap so they can be reused by other processors, Hoard keeps fragmentation low while achieving near linear scalability with the number of threads.

mimalloc
An open-source compact general-purpose memory allocator from Microsoft Research with focus on performance. The library is about 11,000 lines of code.

Thread-caching malloc (tcmalloc)
Every thread has a thread-local storage for small allocations. For large allocations mmap or sbrk can be used. TCMalloc, a malloc developed by Google, has garbage-collection for local storage of dead threads. The TCMalloc is considered to be more than twice as fast as glibc's ptmalloc for multithreaded programs.

In-kernel
Operating system kernels need to allocate memory just as application programs do. The implementation of  within a kernel often differs significantly from the implementations used by C libraries, however. For example, memory buffers might need to conform to special restrictions imposed by DMA, or the memory allocation function might be called from interrupt context. This necessitates a  implementation tightly integrated with the virtual memory subsystem of the operating system kernel.

Overriding malloc
Because   and its relatives can have a strong impact on the performance of a program, it is not uncommon to override the functions for a specific application by custom implementations that are optimized for application's allocation patterns. The C standard provides no way of doing this, but operating systems have found various ways to do this by exploiting dynamic linking. One way is to simply link in a different library to override the symbols. Another, employed by Unix System V.3, is to make  and   function pointers that an application can reset to custom functions.

The most common form on POSIX-like systems is to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD with the path of the allocator, so that the dynamic linker uses that version of malloc/calloc/free instead of the libc implementation.

Allocation size limits
The largest possible memory block  can allocate depends on the host system, particularly the size of physical memory and the operating system implementation.

Theoretically, the largest number should be the maximum value that can be held in a  type, which is an implementation-dependent unsigned integer representing the size of an area of memory. In the C99 standard and later, it is available as the  constant from. Although not guaranteed by ISO C, it is usually.

On glibc systems, the largest possible memory block  can allocate is only half this size, namely.

Extensions and alternatives
The C library implementations shipping with various operating systems and compilers may come with alternatives and extensions to the standard  interface. Notable among these is:

 * , which allocates a requested number of bytes on the call stack. No corresponding deallocation function exists, as typically the memory is deallocated as soon as the calling function returns.  was present on Unix systems as early as 32/V (1978), but its use can be problematic in some (e.g., embedded) contexts. While supported by many compilers, it is not part of the ANSI-C standard and therefore may not always be portable.  It may also cause minor performance problems: it leads to variable-size stack frames, so that both stack and frame pointers need to be managed (with fixed-size stack frames, one of these is redundant). Larger allocations may also increase the risk of undefined behavior due to a stack overflow. C99 offered variable-length arrays as an alternative stack allocation mechanism –  however, this feature was relegated to optional in the later C11 standard.
 * POSIX defines a function  that allocates memory with caller-specified alignment. Its allocations are deallocated with , so the implementation usually needs to be a part of the malloc library.

title: C dynamic memory allocation


text:
Wikipedia:Simple English Wikipedia

The Simple English Wikipedia was started as a response to needs of English learners (EAL students) and English teachers. The project began to see major contributions after 150,000+ articles in the original English Wikipedia and articles in each of seven other languages had been created. Its articles are intended to be less complex, and can be used for free readings in the classroom, computer activities, and so on. Non-English Wikipedias can also be translated from the articles here.

What Simple English Wikipedia is
The Simple English Wikipedia uses fewer words and simpler grammar than the original English Wikipedia. It is focused on readers who tend to be quite different from the typical Wikipedia reader with different needs, for example, people for whom English is not a first language, students, children, translators, and people with learning disabilities or those who read below a proficient level. Simple Wikipedia is also a great tool for students (as in elementary, middle, and high school) who do not need the extra information that regular Wikipedia provides.

In general, Simple English articles are simplifications of the most important points in existing articles, rather than being new. This is likely to make Simple English articles a good way to introduce those written in complex English; if someone has trouble understanding a concept in complex English they can "fall back" to the Simple version.

However, vandals often vandalize in the Simple English Wikipedia instead of the regular English Wikipedia, for the purpose of having a lesser chance of being caught, as it is visited less frequently.

Simple English
Simple English is a simplified form of the English language. Its intention is to make content more understandable to those less familiar with the language.

It is suggested that articles be simplified using only the 1000 most common and basic words in English and fewer complex grammatical structures—such as shorter sentences—or to conform to a certain skill level in one of the standard indices. Of course, original submissions are also welcome; in that case, they could be submitted both to this and to the main Wikipedia (where it is written in the normal level of English). Most articles will draw from a 2000-word defining vocabulary useful for expressing concepts in English. This is still simpler English than most "English as an additional language" or "English as a Second Language" (ESL) students can read after a few months of learning.
 * Main Page – The front page of the Simple English Wikipedia project.
 * Simple English Wikipedia – An expanded description of the project's goals and the simple form of English used there.
 * An English Wikipedian's guide – The differences between the English Wikipedia and the Simple English Wikipedia.

title: Wikipedia:Simple English Wikipedia


text:
List of presidents of Ethiopia

This is a list of presidents of Ethiopia, and also a list of heads of state after the fall of the Ethiopian Empire in 1974.

Until the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, the heads of state of Ethiopia were either emperors or regents. From the coup d'état of the Derg leading to the fall of the empire in September 1974 until March 1975, the Derg considered the crown prince Asfaw Wossen (later regnal name Amha Selassie) as the king (not emperor) and the nominal head of state – which the crown prince refused to accept. During this time, the chairmen of the Derg, the leaders of the Derg, were to be considered as acting heads of state. On 21 March 1975, the Derg military junta abolished the monarchy and fully took over. Until the establishment of the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1987, still dominated by Derg figures, chairmen of the Derg have to be considered heads of state – but not presidents. After the fall of the Derg and the establishment of the Transitional Government of Ethiopia in 1991, the first immediate president (Meles Zenawi) has to be considered an Interim President.

Since the formal establishment of the office of president in 1987, there have been 6 official presidents. The president is the head of state of Ethiopia. The current president is Sahle-Work Zewde, who is also the first female president of Ethiopia, elected on 25 October 2018 by members of the Federal Parliamentary Assembly.

List
In the list, the chairmen of the Derg are considered to be heads of state – but are not considered to be president. Consequently, the numbering starts with the first establishment of the office of the president of Ethiopia in 1987.

title: List of presidents of Ethiopia


text:
ESER

ESER is an abbreviation for Einheitliches System Elektronischer Rechenmaschinen (German for standardized system of electronic computers), a term used in the GDR for ES EVM computers produced according to a treaty between the members of Comecon signed on December 23, 1968 covering the development of a standardized computing system.

ESER was also the name for computers developed by this standard. Most ESER Computers were named ЕС (which is Cyrillic for "ES") followed by a four digit number, e.g., EC 1055, often also called ESER (e.g., ESER 1055). Robotron also produced minicomputers, whose names started with "K" (Kleinrechner for "minicomputer").

The ESER systems were in operation in GDR and later in the new states of Germany until 1995.

GDR manufacturing

 * Robotron
 * EC 1834, 1835 (IBM PC XT compatibles)
 * EC 1040, 1055, 1055M, 1056, 1057
 * EC 7927
 * K 1001, 1002, 1003, K 1510, K 1520, K 1820, K 5103, K 5201, K 8913, K 8915, K 8924
 * CM 1910

Hungarian manufacturing

 * Videoton
 * EC 1010, 1011, 1012

title: ESER


text:
User:Kpflude

This is the homepage of Wikipedia of Kevin Flude

I think wikipedia may be showing the way forward for a modern democracy.

This is what I wrote when I first joined.

'I think the whole idea of the wiki and wikipedia is just wonderful and I have great hopes for the concept. However, it needs to spread and these pages which are often good need to become authoritive.'

I tried to do my best for the London pages that were about archaeology.

The following is from my web site (http://www.chr.org.uk/kevin.htm)

Kevin was Director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Southwark. He is currently Creative Director of the Museum; Associate Lecturer at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Course Director for the Elderhostel programme in London which provides study tours on the history, archaeology and art of London..

He has worked in the Museum world since 1976. First at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, and then at the Museum of London (1977-84). He was an Assistant Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1984-1987. Since 1987 Kevin has worked freelance as a consultant in many museums, lectured on the history and archaeology of London and directed the transformation of the Old Operating Theatre Museum since 1992.

His interests are history and archaeology of London (and Britain), museums, medical history and creating web sites for heritage organisations.

title: User:Kpflude


text:
Talk:Saab Quantum

Official?
Is this an official SAAB model or some special? // Liftarn
 * It was a special design using many SAAB parts (suspension, engine...) made by Quantum, but it has a SAAB badge on the hood. The text and the links say it all... MH 16:03, 2004 Jun 21 (UTC)

 * After reading up I think the article should be moved to Quantum Motorcars or something as it's not an official SAAB model. // Liftarn

Rear wheel drive?
Is it really a rear wheel drive car? That sounds very unlikley for a SAAB. // Liftarn Definately yes; rear engine, rear drive! See pics for the lack of a driveshaft front, and presence at rear. MH 13:57, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)

 * The horror! The Quantum II seems to be front wheel drive. // Liftarn

But look at the Quantum 2.
 * That's a quantum IV too, it's #2. The rubber harmonica boot you see in the front, is on the steering arm, not on the driveshaft. MH June 30, 2005 19:16 (UTC)

It's hard to tell, but it looks like it may not have driveshafts in the rear. And the Quantum 1. // Liftarn

title: Talk:Saab Quantum