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2008
2008 was designated as: *International Year of Languages *International Year of Planet Earth *International Year of the Potato *International Year of Sanitation The Great Recession, a worldwide recession which began in 2007, continued through the entirety of 2008. Events January * January 1 – Cyprus and Malta adopt the euro currency. * January 14 – At 19:04:39 Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, the uncrewed MESSENGER space probe is at its closest approach during its first flyby of the planet Mercury (planet), Mercury. * January 21 **Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a Great Recession in the United States, U.S. Great Recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. **Online activist group Anonymous (hacker group), Anonymous initiates Project Chanology, after a News leak, leaked interview of Tom Cruise by the Church of Scientology is published on YouTube, and the Church of Scientology issued a DMCA takedown, "copyright infringement" claim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Chanology
Project Chanology (also called Operation Chanology) was a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology by members of Anonymous (group), Anonymous, a leaderless Internet-based group. "Chanology" is a portmanteau of "4chan" (the site where the project originated) and "Scientology". The project was started in response to the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove material from a highly publicized interview with Scientology, Scientologist Tom Cruise from the Internet in January 2008. The project was publicly launched in the form of a video posted to YouTube, "Message to Scientology", on January 21, 2008. The video states that Scientology and the Internet, Anonymous views Scientology's actions as Internet censorship, and asserts the group's intent to "expel the church from the Internet". This was followed by distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), and soon after, black faxes, prank calls, and other measures intended to disrupt the Church of Scientolog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
The American subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis. It led to a severe economic recession, with millions becoming unemployed and many businesses going bankrupt. The U.S. government intervened with a series of measures to stabilize the financial system, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The collapse of the United States housing bubble and high interest rates led to unprecedented numbers of borrowers missing mortgage repayments and becoming delinquent. This ultimately led to mass foreclosures and the devaluation of housing-related securities. The housing bubble preceding the crisis was financed with mortgage-backed securities (MBSes) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which initially offered higher interest rates (i.e. better returns) than government securities, along with attractive risk ratin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Recession In The United States
In the United States, the Great Recession was a severe financial crisis combined with a deep recession. While the recession officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, it took many years for the economy to recover to pre-crisis levels of employment and output. This slow recovery was due in part to households and financial institutions paying off debts accumulated in the years preceding the crisis along with restrained government spending following initial stimulus efforts. It followed the bursting of the housing bubble, the housing market correction and subprime mortgage crisis. According to the Department of Labor, roughly 8.7 million jobs (about 7%) were shed from February 2008 to February 2010, and real GDP contracted by 4.2% between Q4 2007 and Q2 2009, making the Great Recession the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The GDP bottom, or trough, was reached in the second quarter of 2009 (marking the technical end of the recession that is defined by "a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Recession
The Great Recession was a period of market decline in economies around the world that occurred from late 2007 to mid-2009.“US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions” United States NBER, or National Bureau of Economic Research, updated March 14, 2023. This government agency dates the Great Recession as starting in December 2007 and bottoming-out in June 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The causes of the Great Recession include a combination of vulnerabilities that developed in the financial system ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the first planet from the Sun. It is a rocky planet with a trace atmosphere. While it is the List of Solar System objects by size, smallest and least massive planet of the Solar System, its surface gravity is slightly higher than that of Mars. The surface of Mercury is similar to Earth's Moon, heavily Impact crater, cratered, with expansive rupes system, generated from thrust faults, and bright ray systems, formed by ejecta. Its largest crater, Caloris Planitia, has a diameter of , which is about one-third the diameter of the planet (). Being the most inferior planet, inferior orbiting planet it appears in Earth's sky, always close to the Sun, either as a "morning star" or an "evening star". It stays most of the time the closest to all other planets and is the planet with the highest delta-v needed to travel to from all other planets of the Solar System. Mercury's sidereal year (88.0 Earth days) and sidereal day (58.65 Earth days) are in a 3:2 ratio. This relation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google Search. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. , videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and , there were approximately 14.8billion videos in total. On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion (equivalent to $ billion in ). Google expanded YouTube's business model of generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by and for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malta
Malta, officially the Republic of Malta, is an island country in Southern Europe located in the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and North Africa. It consists of an archipelago south of Italy, east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The two official languages are Maltese language, Maltese and English language, English. The country's capital is Valletta, which is the smallest capital city in the EU by both area and population. It was also the first World Heritage Site, World Heritage City in Europe to become a European Capital of Culture in 2018. With a population of about 542,000 over an area of , Malta is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, tenth-smallest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population density, ninth-most densely populated. Various sources consider the country to consist of a single urban region, for which it is often described as a city-state. Malta has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, during the Mesolith ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Church Of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of Scientology, which is variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religious movement. The movement has been the subject of a number of controversies, and the Church of Scientology has been described by government inquiries, international parliamentary bodies, scholars and numerous superior court judgements as both a dangerous cult and a manipulative profit-making business. In 1979, several executives of the organization were convicted and imprisoned for multiple offenses by a U.S. Federal Court. The Church of Scientology itself was convicted of fraud by a French court in 2009, a decision upheld by the supreme Court of Cassation in 2013. The German government classifies Scientology as an unconstitutional sect. In France, it has been classified as a dangerous cult. In some countries, it has attained legal rec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anonymous (hacker Group)
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology. Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an " anarchic", digitized "global brain" or " hivemind". Anonymous members (known as ''anons'') can sometimes be distinguished in public by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks in the style portrayed in the graphic novel and film ''V for Vendetta''. Some anons also opt to mask their voices through voice changers or text-to-speech programs. Dozens of people have been arrested for involvement in Anonymous cyberattacks in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, India, and Turkey. Evaluations of the group's actions a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (born July 3, 1962) is an American actor and film producer. Regarded as a Cinema of the United States, Hollywood icon, he has received List of awards and nominations received by Tom Cruise, various accolades, including an Honorary Palme d'Or and three Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards. As of 2018, Tom Cruise filmography, his films have grossed over worldwide, placing him among the List of highest-grossing actors, highest-grossing actors of all time. One of Hollywood's most bankable stars, he is consistently one of the world's List of highest-paid film actors, highest-paid actors. Cruise began acting in the early 1980s and made his breakthrough with leading roles in ''Risky Business'' (1983) and ''Top Gun'' (1986), the latter earning him a reputation as a sex symbol. Critical acclaim came with his roles in the dramas ''The Color of Money'' (1986), ''Rain Man'' (1988), and ''Born on the Fourth of July (film), Born ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyprus
Cyprus (), officially the Republic of Cyprus, is an island country in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Situated in West Asia, its cultural identity and geopolitical orientation are overwhelmingly Southeast European. Cyprus is the List of islands in the Mediterranean, third largest and third most populous island in the Mediterranean, after Sicily and Sardinia. It is located southeast of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and Lebanon, northwest of Israel and Palestine, and north of Egypt. Its capital and largest city is Nicosia. Cyprus hosts the British Overseas Territories, British military bases Akrotiri and Dhekelia, whilst the northeast portion of the island is ''de facto'' governed by the self-declared Northern Cyprus, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is separated from the Republic of Cyprus by the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus, United Nations Buffer Zone. Cyprus was first settled by hunter-gatherers around 13,000 years ago, with farming communities em ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Euro
The euro (currency symbol, symbol: euro sign, €; ISO 4217, currency code: EUR) is the official currency of 20 of the Member state of the European Union, member states of the European Union. This group of states is officially known as the euro area or, more commonly, the eurozone. The euro is divided into 100 1 euro cent coin, euro cents. The currency is also used officially by the institutions of the European Union, by International status and usage of the euro, four European microstates that are not EU members, the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, as well as unilaterally by Montenegro and Kosovo. Outside Europe, a number of special territories of EU members also use the euro as their currency. The euro is used by 350 million people in Europe and additionally, over 200 million people worldwide use currencies pegged to the euro. It is the second-largest reserve currency as well as the second-most traded currency in the world after the United Sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
