The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 31 member states – 29 European and two North American. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the organization implemented the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, D.C., on 4 April 1949. NATO is a collective security system: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The alliance remained in place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and has been involved in military operations in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. The organization's motto is animus in consulendo liber.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012.
Postal codes used in the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies are known as postcodes. They are alphanumeric and were adopted nationally between 11 October 1959 and 1974, having been devised by the General Post Office. A full postcode is known as a "postcode unit" and designates an area with several addresses or a single major delivery point.
The Washington Post, also known as the Post and, informally, WaPo, is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly called Washington or D.C., is the capital city of the United States. The city is located on the east bank of the Potomac River, which forms its southwestern border with Virginia, and borders Maryland to its north and east. The city was named for George Washington, a Founding Father, victorious commanding general of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, and the first president of the United States who is sometimes referred to as "Father of his country"; the district is named for Columbia, the female personification of the nation.
Justin Pierre James Trudeau is a Canadian politician serving as the 23rd and current prime minister of Canada since 2015 and leader of the Liberal Party since 2013. Trudeau is the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history after Joe Clark; he is also the first to be the child of a previous holder of the post, as the eldest son of Pierre Trudeau.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and worked as a civil rights lawyer and university lecturer.
LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused social media platform that works through websites and mobile apps. It was launched on May 5, 2003. It is now owned by Microsoft. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows jobseekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. From 2015 most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. Since December 2016, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. As of March 2023, LinkedIn has more than 900 million registered members from over 200 countries and territories.
HuffPost is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and covers politics, business, entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy eating, young women's interests, and local news featuring columnists. It was created to provide a progressive alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report. The site offers content posted directly on the site as well as user-generated content via video blogging, audio, and photo. In 2012, the website became the first commercially run United States digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize.
YouTube, LLC is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. Accessible worldwide, it was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google and is the second most visited website, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees. It is operated by Reddit Inc., based in San Francisco.
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American technology giant Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 2.96 billion monthly active users, and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Twitter, currently rebranding to X, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc.
4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, music, literature, history, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of which approximately half are from the United States.
Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private. For bloggers, many of the website's features are accessed from a "dashboard" interface. As of March 2023, Tumblr hosts more than 572 million blogs.
The 2012 United States presidential election was the 57th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, were re-elected to a second term. They defeated the Republican ticket of businessman and former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location — via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, United States, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people. Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old, and the other six were adult staff members. Earlier that day, before driving to the school, Lanza fatally shot his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza died by suicide, shooting himself in the head.
