- published: 29 Jan 2014
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The Persian Gulf (Persian:خلیج فارس Khalīj-e Fārs) is a mediterranean sea in Western Asia. An extension of the Indian Ocean (Gulf of Oman) through the Strait of Hormuz, it lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest. The Shatt al-Arab river delta forms the northwest shoreline.
The Persian Gulf was a battlefield of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers. It is the namesake of the 1991 Gulf War, the largely air- and land-based conflict that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
The gulf has many fishing grounds, extensive coral reefs, and abundant pearl oysters, but its ecology has been damaged by industrialization and oil spills.
The body of water is historically and internationally known as the "Persian Gulf". Some Arab governments refer to it as the "Arabian Gulf" or "The Gulf", but neither term is recognized internationally. The name "Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf)" is used by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Bernard "Bernie" Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician and the junior United States Senator from Vermont. He is a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A Democrat as of 2015, Sanders had been the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, though his caucusing with the Democrats entitled him to committee assignments and at times gave Democrats a majority. Sanders has been the ranking minority member on the Senate Budget Committee since January 2015, and previously served for two years as chair of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.
Sanders was born and raised in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student, he was an active civil rights protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After settling in Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party campaigns for governor and U.S. senator in the early to mid-1970s. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont's most populous city, in 1981, and was reelected three times. In 1990, he was elected to represent Vermont's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1991, Sanders co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He served as a congressman for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2012, he was reelected with 71% of the popular vote. During the 2016 presidential primaries, Sanders became the first self-described democratic socialist and first Jewish American to win a presidential primary of a major party, namely the New Hampshire primary.