Polyethnicity refers to the close proximity of people from different ethnic backgrounds within a country or other specific geographic region. It also relates to the ability and willingness of individuals to identify themselves with multiple ethnicities. It occurs when multiple ethnicities inhabit a given area, specifically through means of immigration, intermarriage, trade, conquest, and post-war land-divisions. Professor William H. McNeill states in his series of lectures on polyethnicity that it is the societal norm for cultures to be made up of many ethnic groups. This has had many political and social implications on countries and regions. Many, if not all, countries have some level of polyethnicity, with countries like the United States and Canada having large levels and countries like Japan and Poland having relatively small levels (and more specifically, a sense of homogeneity). The amount of polyethnicity prevalent in current society has spurred some arguments against it, which include a belief that it leads to the weakening of each societies strengths, and also a belief that political-ethnic issues in countries with polyethnic populations are better handled with different laws for certain ethnicities.

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A United Nations vehicle patrols the streets of the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. An estimated three million people were affected by the earthquake, with an estimated 280,000 buildings severely damaged or destroyed.

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• ... that, at the age of 89, producer and director Abel Gance viewed a restoration of his French epic silent film Napoléon in Telluride, Colorado?
• ... that British ecologist Arthur Tansley, founder of the British Ecological Society and the journal New Phytologist, introduced the concept of the ecosystem (pictured) in 1935?
• ... that Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, author of The Land and Freshwater Mollusca of India, was an early president of the Malacological Society?

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• 4 July 1963 - Federation of Malaya Red Cross Society received official recognition as an independent national society by the International Committee of the Red Cross
• 14 July 1904 - Incorporation of the Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants
• 22 July 1932 - Establishment of the Turkish Language Association
• 30 July 1982 - Chinese Society Halls on Maui (pictured) placed on the Hawaii State Register of Historic Places

“ At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city. ” — Nathaniel Parker Willis, Necessity for a Promenade Drive

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Lev Chernyi (Russian: Лев Чёрный, IPA: [ˈlʲef ˈt͡ɕɵrnɨj] ^ⓘ; died September 21, 1921) was a Russian anarchist theorist, activist and poet, and a leading figure of the Third Russian Revolution. His early thought was individualist, rejecting anarcho-communism as a threat to individual liberty. In 1917, Chernyi was released from his political imprisonment by the Imperial Russian regime, and swiftly became one of the leading figures in Russian anarchism. After strongly denouncing the new Bolshevik government in various anarchist publications and joining several underground resistance movements, Chernyi was arrested by the Cheka on a charge of counterfeiting and in 1921 was executed without trial. ( Full article...)

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