CIA World Factbook 2005 Now Available (Wonderful reference)

CIA ^ | 28 April 2005 | CIA

[Cornpone]

The World Factbook 2005 is now available on the Central Intelligence Agency Web site CIA). The World Factbook remains the CIA's most widely disseminated and most popular product, now averaging more than 6 million visits each month. In addition, tens of thousands of government, commercial, academic, and other Web sites link to or replicate the online version of the Factbook.

Although this reference site provides information as of 1 January 2005, it will be updated biweekly throughout the year to provide wide-ranging and hard-to-locate information about the background, geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The nine primary information categories and the 139 subcategories for most entities include geographic coordinates, gross domestic product, number of mobile cellular telephones, natural resources, legal systems, political parties, illicit drugs, mortality rates, and much more. Included among the 271 geographic listings is one for the "World," which incorporates data and other information summarized where possible from the other 270 listings.

The World Factbook 2005 contains six appendices with reference information ranging from abbreviations and descriptions of international organizations and groups to cross-referenced lists of country data codes. The 2005 edition includes 15 reference maps, which are available in both JPEG and PDF formats. Many country maps and flags have been updated to reflect changes and refinements over the past year.

Six new entries have been added to The World Factbook 2005. In the people category, a major infectious diseases field has been added for countries deemed to pose a higher degree of risk for travelers. In the economy category, entries have been included for current account balance, investment (gross fixed), public debt, and reserves of foreign exchange and gold. The transnational issues category has a new refugees and internally displaced persons entry. Revision of some individual country maps, first introduced in the 2001 edition, is continued in this edition.

"Rank Order" pages are available for natural gas production, consumption, exports, imports, and Internet hosts. The "Rank Order" pages enable Web site visitors to select and view data from among 37 data fields in the geography, people, economy, communications, transportation, and military categories. Most of the information is rank-ordered from highest to lowest for all countries where data is available. Individual pages can be readily viewed, and instructions are provided for downloading and saving the data into a database or spreadsheet.

Printed copies of The World Factbook 2005 will be available for purchase in July from the Government Printing Office (http://bookstore.gpo.gov) and the National Technical Information Service (http://www.ntis.gov). Ordering and pricing information for both domestic and international customers will be available on the GPO and NTIS Web sites.

The World Factbook 2005 is available for download in Zip file format for both high-bandwidth users and low-bandwidth users via the "Download This Publication" link on the Factbook home page or directly from World Factbook

[BlessedBeGod]

Use it all the time. It's great!

[End Times Sentinel]

An excellent resource, I use it all the time too.

 

Another good one is: Department of State Consular Warnings (and you thought the state department was good for nothing).  If flipping through a few of these doesn't make you pray to GOD that you live in America nothing will.

 

You definitely want to check this out before taking that vacation to Togo.

 

Owl_Eagle

(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,

 it was probably sarcasm)

[Abcdefg]

Single file download, 32 Meg ZIP file at http://www2.cia.gov/factbook2004.zip

[Abcdefg]

Dwight was a stupid pr*ck.

[Cornpone]

"Another good one is: Department of State Consular Warnings (and you thought the state department was good for nothing). If flipping through a few of these doesn't make you pray to GOD that you live in America nothing will."

Thanks...bookmarked...I particularly like the warning about the US border with our 'friends' to the south.

[unkus]

Generals Eisenhower and Bradley were Politically Correct for their day and used General George Patton and then threw him away. General Patton had plans to either retire or resign from the Army and speak his mind. But, unfortunately, he died of injuries resulting from the car accident.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Generals Eisenhower and Bradley were Politically Correct....

Precursors of Colin Powell.

[Gritty]

Thanks for the great link!